When a famine is looming, the health care system is collapsing, the economy is on the edge of implosion, the justice system does not work, and the levels of corruption and social violence are astounding, it would be wrong to speak of a new crisis. This is a permanent state of crisis. So it is with the small Central American state of Guatemala, the original banana republic.
The history of Guatemala, and especially of its indigenous Mayan communities, from the time of the invasion by the Spanish conquistadores to the present day, is one of social exclusion, slavery, poverty and numerous attempts at genocide. Poor Ladinos do not fare much better. In Guatemala, the fusion and continuing reproduction of hierarchies of class and race are everywhere apparent.
The invasion and colonisation by the Spanish from the 16th to early 19th centuries laid the foundations for the ongoing crisis that is Guatemala. The Spanish saw Guatemala as a large quarry from which they extracted riches and shipped them back to Europe. When Independence came in 1821, the emerging ruling elites continued the colonial traditions of theft, racial hatred and military rule.
Although there have been moves in Guatemalan history — especially in the mid-20th century — to break from these traditions, they were soundly squashed by the emerging regional power in the area, the United States. The United Fruit Company, which in the 1950s and '60s owned around 70 per cent of arable land in Guatemala, still wields immense influence under a new name. If US corporations do not like what is happening in Guatemala, it will be stopped. They are willing to arm, support and train for genocide in order to defend their interests.
I write this article in a hotel in Nebaj, Quiche province, in the western highlands of Guatemala. It is part of the Ixil triangle, which is made up of the towns of Nebaj, Chojul and Cotzal. In the early 1980s there were some 200 massacres in this small mountainous area; 16,000 Mayans died; the population dropped by 23 per cent.
The architects of the policy were Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efrain Rios Montt. They and their officers were all trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where they learned the counter-insurgency techniques they put into practice.
A military campaign called Frijoles y Fusiles (Beans and Guns), gave villagers food. In