Lesson 20

Lesson 20: Guatemalan Reform/Revolution

I. Guatemala's Reform/Revolution

The Mexican Revolution, although never intended for export, had echoes in much of Latin America, and its immediate neighbor to the south, Guatemala, provides us with a good example.

There were certainly enough parallels: Guatemala had been ruled for many years by a caudillo who had favored foreign investors (mainly U.S.). Like Mexico, Guatemala has a large Indigenous population which was kept marginalized from active participation in the economic benefits of Guatemala's export economy. There were also numerous Mestizos, some of whom made up a small but restive middle class.

The old caudillo, General Jorge Ubico, was overthrown in 1944 by a coalition of the middle class, students, and junior military officers who were disgusted with the corruption of the old regime. This coalition was united by a desire for reform and to limit the privileges given to the principal foreign investor, United Fruit Company, which owned much of the banana-producing land in the country.

The first president in Guatemala's Revolution was Juan José Arévalo, a reformist and university professor who derived much of his inspiration from the Mexican model, although the Guatemalan case was never to go to the lengths that the Mexican Revolution did. In light of the Mexican Revolution (and the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions which came later), it almost seems more appropriate to label the Guatemalan case "reform" rather than "revolution".

To break the hold of United Fruit Company and other foreign investors, the Arévalo government set in motion a land reform program which would nationalize unused land and turn it over to landless groups at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid; the owners of the land would be compensated by the government based on the value they had placed on the land for tax purposes. United Fruit had considerable unused land which they argued was needed as a reserve for future expansion and also in case their banana trees came down with disease and had to be replaced. As was typical in such cases, United Fruit had undervalued their land for tax purposes, and stood to take a significant loss if the land reform program went through. The Arévalo regime also proposed social and labor legislation which would have increased taxation and labor costs to large landowners.

Arévalo was succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz, a retired army officer who continued and intensified the Revolution's programs. Arbenz was something of an anomaly, a military man who believed in the need for significant change and who made many enemies within the military as well as the Guatemalan elite.

The United Fruit Company had friends in high places, including the Dulles brothers in the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Dulles at the time was Secretary of State, and Allen was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Company officials lobbied hard, and they persuaded the Eisenhower administration that Arbenz was a dangerous leftist who was threatening U.S. interests in Central America and the Caribbean. The U.S. Government cut off military assistance to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo. In response, Arbenz asked for help from the Soviet bloc and received shipments of arms from Poland.

To the Eisenhower people this was the final provocative act which confirmed their suspicions that the Revolution was becoming a Soviet beachhead in the Hemisphere. The President then authorized the Central Intelligence Agency, supported by the U.S. military, to work with dissident Guatemalan officers to bring down the Arbenz Government. With support from the Somoza regime in Nicaragua the CIA armed a group of exiled Guatemalan military men led by Colonel Castillo Armas, who entered Guatemala at the head of a small group. The Guatemalan army refused to repel the force of exiles, or give weapons to workers and peasants who were willing to fight for Arbenz. Under an intense propaganda and psychological warfare effort (headed by E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame), the Arbenz government collapsed in 1954.

Colonel Castillo Armas was installed as president, and launched a counter-revolution which quickly returned nationalized lands to the United Fruit Company and other large landowners. The Guatemalan attempt at Mexican-style Revolution, or even a more modest reform, was over. Guatemala began a long period of conservative presidents under direct or indirect military influence, a pattern which has continued to this day.

Like the Mexican Revolution, the Guatemalan had an element of cultural nationalism, although it never had a chance to develop fully. As we shall see below, part of this cultural nationalism focused on the Mayan roots of most of Guatemala's population and on the long period when they were under either Spanish or Creole control and exploitation.

II. Art: Surrealism and the Fantastic

In this period Latin American art and literature was strongly influenced by European Surrealism, which was blended with local currents of the fantastic and the imaginatively "real but unreal". Surrealism stressed the world of dreams, of imagination, and of the hidden psychological currents in each person's inner self. These features appealed to many writers and painters in Latin America who saw it as an outlet for their creativity. This emphasis on surrealism and the fantastic was the basis for the "magic realism" which has been so influential in recent years.

In many cases the surrealists drew on local myths and legends as the basis for their exploration of the world of fantasy and psychology. One fruitful source of these myths was pre-Columbian history and the oral traditions still to be found among the Indigenous peoples, especially in the areas of the old Aztec, Maya and Inca empires.

This Surrealist-Indigenous current was also linked to "Indigenismo", which was an attempt by socially conscious writers and painters to focus attention on the Indigenous peoples after over three centuries of cultural neglect by the European-oriented elites. Indigenismo was a major element in the Mexican muralist movement and also shows up in the writings of the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias.

III. Miguel Angel Asturias: Maya Magic and Surrealism

Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1899-1974) was a politically committed writer who used the rich Maya cultural heritage, with its myths and legends, to give a magical and surrealistic touch to his novels and stories. As a boy he had to move from Guatemala City to the countryside because of political problems his father was having with Guatemala's military dictator of the day. Living in a small village among the Maya, he had close contact with them, and they shared with him their oral traditions, especially the Popol Vuh and Chilam Balam.

After obtaining his law degree (with a thesis on the social problems of the Indians), he lived in Paris where he studied Maya ethnography with the best European experts. Working with them, he prepared a Spanish translation of the Popol Vuh. He used his scientific and linguistic research to accumulate the information on the Maya which appears in much of his later work, such as Legends of Guatemala and Men of Corn. In this latter work corn plays a dual role: it provides profits for the foreign exploiters and their upper-class local collaborators in Guatemala, but corn is also the focus of religious ceremonies and

In the Paris of the 1920's Asturias had many contacts with the new intellectual currents then in vogue, especially Surrealism, and this too influenced his later work. He knew André Breton, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, as well as Pablo Picasso.

In 1945 he published his novel Señor Presidente, which is one of the sharpest literary criticisms of Latin American militarism ever written. The Guatemalan reformist presidents Arévalo and Arbenz gave him support and diplomatic posts. But he was forced to go into exile when Arbenz fell, and these circumstances provided him with additional themes: foreign meddling in his country, and the exploitation of the banana workers. Asturias' writings, based on his special blend of scholarly research, imagination and political commitment, won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967; this was the first for a Latin American novelist.

The story which follows, "The Legend of La Tatuana", is from the book Legends of Guatemala, and takes place in a world that is part dreamland, part reality, and part magical universe of Asturias' surrealistic imagination and fantasy.

The Legend of la Tatuana by Miguel Angel Asturias

The Almond Master has a red beard, and he was one of those priests the white men would touch, believing them to be made of gold because of the rich clothes they wore. He knows the secret of the plants that cure all illness, and the vocabulary of obsidian (the stone that talks), and he can read the hieroglyphics of the constellations.

He is the tree that showed up one dawn in the forest where it grows, without it ever having been planted by anyone, as if it had been carried by ghosts. The tree that walks... The tree that counts the years of four hundred days by the moons it has seen, and he has seen many moons, like all trees, and he came, already ancient, from the Place of Abundance.

When the moon of the Owl-Fisherman was full (this was the name of one of the twenty months of the year of four hundred days), the Almond Master divided up his soul between the roads. The roads were four in number, and they went in different directions toward the four distant corners of the sky. The black corner: night of sorcery. The green corner: spring storms. The red corner: Guacamayo, or tropical ecstasy. The white corner: promise of new lands. Four were the roads.

"Little Road, Little Road!..." said a white dove to the White Road, but the White Road did not hear the dove. The dove wanted the road to give up the Master's soul, the soul that cured one of dreams. Doves and children have that disease.

"Little Road, Little Road!..." said a red heart to the Red Road; but the Red Road did not hear the heart. The heart wanted to distract the road so it would forget the Master's soul. Hearts, like thieves, do not return things that are forgotten.

"Little Road, Little Road!..." said a green vine to the Green Road, but the Green Road did not hear the vine. The vine wanted the soul of the Master to recover some of the debt it owed of leaves and shade.

How many moons did the roads spend wandering?

The speediest, the Black Road, the road no one spoke to, stopped in the city, crossed the plaza, and in the merchants' quarter, in exchange for a short rest, he gave the Master's soul to the Merchant of Jewels without price.

It was the hour of the white cats. They wandered from one place to the next. Admiration for the roses! The clouds seemed like clothes on the clothesline of the sky.

When the Master found out what the Black Road had done, he once again took human form, stripping himself of his vegetable form in a creek which bubbled forth under the blushing moon like the almond flower, and he walked to the city.

He reached the valley after a day's travel, in the first hours of the evening, at a time when the flocks were coming in, conversing with the shepherds, who answered his questions with monosyllables, astonished as if seeing an apparition, at his green tunic and his red beard.

In the city he headed west. Men and women surrounded the public fountains. The water sounded like kisses as it filled the jars. And guided by the shadows, in the merchants' quarter he found the part of his soul which the Black Road had sold to the Merchant, who was smoking in a corner, and he offered a hundred bushels of pearls for his soul.

The Merchant smiled at the madness of the Master. A hundred bushels of pearls? No, his jewels had no price.

The Master increased the offer. Merchants always say no until their level is reached. He would give him emeralds, as large as corn ears, by the hundreds of measures, until he would have a lake of emeralds.

The Merchant smiled at the madness of the Master. A lake of emeralds? No, his jewels had no price.

He would give him amulets, deer eyes to call the water, feathers for protection against the tempests, marihuana for his tobacco...

The Merchant said no. His jewels had no price, and besides, why keep talking? He wanted that little piece of soul to trade, in a slave market, for the most beautiful slave he could find.

And it was all useless, useless for the Master to offer and talk, despite all he said, of his desire to recover his soul. Merchants have no heart.

A thread of tobacco smoke separates reality from dreams, black cats from white cats, and the Merchant from the strange buyer, who as the left shook his sandals on the hinge of the door. Dust has curses.

After a year of four hundred days (according to the legend) the Merchant was crossing the roads of the mountains. He was returning from distant lands, accompanied by a slave bought with the soul of the Master, and by the bird in flower, whose beak sought drops of honey in the hyacinths, and by a retinue of thirty mounted servants.

"You have no idea" said the Merchant to the slave, bridling his horse, "how you are going to live in the city! Your house will be a palace and all my servants will be at your orders, and I will be the last servant, if you order it!"

"There" he continued with his face half bathed in sunlight, "everything will be yours. You are a jewel, and I am the Merchant of Jewels without price! You are worth the little piece of a soul which I did not exchange for a lake of emeralds!... Together in a hammock we will watch the sun set and rise, we will do nothing, listening to the stories of a cunning old lady who knows my destiny. My destiny, she says, is in the fingers of a giant hand, and she will know your destiny also, if you ask her for it."

The slave was naked. Over her breasts, down to her legs, wound her black hair wrapped into a single braid, like a snake. The Merchant was dressed in gold, his shoulders warmed by a cloak of goats' wool. He had malaria and he was in love, and to the coldness of his disease was linked the trembling of his heart. And the thirty mounted servants reached his retina like the figures in a dream.

Suddenly, large isolated drops of rain began to spray the road, and he could hear, far off in the distance, on the slopes of the hills, the cries of the shepherds who were gathering up their flocks, fearful of the tempest. The riders stepped up their pace to reach shelter, but they had no time: behind the first large drops, the wind whipped the clouds, bringing violence to the jungle until they reached the valley, and sped down and threw themselves on the wet blankets of haze. The first lightning flashes illuminated the landscape, as if they were the explosions of a mad photographer who was taking snapshots of the storm.

In the midst of the horses which ran with fright, their reins broken, their legs agile, their unruly manes into the wind, and their ears pinned back, the Merchant's horse stumbled, and threw him rolling to the base of a tree. At that instant a bolt of lightning hit the tree, and its roots grabbed him like a hand grabs a stone, and threw him into the abyss.

Meanwhile, the Almond Master, who had stayed lost in the city, wandered through the streets like a madman, scaring the children, picking up trash, and talking to the donkeys, the oxen and the ownerless dogs, who in his eyes formed with mankind a collection of beasts with sad looks.

How many moons did the Roads spend wandering?...

The sun, who was sticking his head out of the white shirt of daylight, was erasing on the door, decorated in gold and silver, the Master's shoulder, and the brown face of she who was a piece of his soul, a jewel that he could not buy with a lake of emeralds.

How many moons did the Roads spend wandering?...

The answer was muffled in the lips of the slave and she stiffened like her teeth. The Master grew silent with the insistence of a mysterious stone. The moon of the Owl-Fisherman was growing full. In silence each washed the other's face with their eyes, like two lovers who have been separated and suddenly find each other.

The scene was disturbed by insolent sounds. They had come to arrest them in the name of God and the king: he for being a warlock, she for being possessed by the devil. Between crosses and swords they took them down to the jail, the Master with the red beard and the green tunic, and the slave with her flesh so firm that it was like gold.

Seven months later, they were condemned to die burned at the stake in the Plaza Mayor. On the eve of the execution, the Master drew near to the slave and with his fingernail he tattooed on her arm a little boat, telling her:

"By means of this tattoo, Tatuana, you will always flee when you find yourself in danger, as you will flee today. My will is that you should be as free as my thoughts; draw this little boat on the wall, on the ground, in the air, anywhere you like, close your eyes, jump in and go..."

"Go, because my thought is stronger than the clay idol strengthened with onion!"

"And my thought is sweeter than the honey of the bees that suck the flower of the suqinay tree"

"And my thought is the one that turns invisible!"

Without losing a second La Tatuana did what the Master said: she drew the boat, she closed her eyes and climbed in, the boat began to move, and she escaped from the prison and from death.

And the next day, the morning of the execution, the constables found in the jail cell a dried tree that had in its branches two or three almond flowers, still pink.