THE LAST COLONIAL MASSACRE

By GREG GRANDIN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30690-2

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................xiPreface to the Updated Edition: A New Enlightenment......................................................xixPreface to the First Edition.............................................................................xxvA Note on Interviews and Archives........................................................................1INTRODUCTION: The Last Colonial Massacre.................................................................19CHAPTER ONE: A Seditious Life............................................................................47CHAPTER TWO: An Uncorrupted Life.........................................................................73CHAPTER THREE: Unfinished Lives..........................................................................105CHAPTER FOUR: Clandestine Lives..........................................................................133CHAPTER FIVE: An Unsettled Life..........................................................................169CONCLUSION: Children of Abel: The Cold War as Revolution and Counterrevolution...........................199Acknowledgments..........................................................................................201Appendix: List of the Dead from Operación Limpieza and the Panzós Massacre.....................203Glossary.................................................................................................207Notes....................................................................................................283Bibliography.............................................................................................303Afterword: An Interview with Naomi Klein.................................................................311

Chapter One

A Seditious Life

He is mysterious in the smallest of things. Jean-Paul Sartre

Although we are cautioned against reading history backward, against taking a certain event as inevitable in light of previous occurrences, it would violate the historical imagination not to think of José Angel Icó's life as anticipating, even generating, the hopes and fears that would overrun Latin America during the Cold War. Icó died on November 15, 1950, the day after Jacobo Arbenz was officially declared the winner of Guatemala's presidential elections. His nephew remembers that Icó "stayed alive to see Arbenz take power; he campaigned for him from his sickbed." That he perhaps held death long enough at bay to witness Arbenz's victory testifies to the inseparable union of Icó's life and his politics: "He was married to politics," says his niece, and, in a way, he spent most of his adult life waiting for Arbenz.

Icó was born in 1875 in Chitaña, a small village of about thirty families a few kilometers outside the town of San Pedro Carchá, in the highland department of Alta Verapaz, to peasant parents privileged enough to be spared the worst of what coffee had wrought. Dominga Coc Delgado gave birth to José Angel, the third of five children, in August at an especially bountiful moment. It was the beginning of the corn harvest in the year that her husband, Tomás Icó, along with other men in the village, gained title to over a thousand acres of land. Icó inherited part of his father's land and as late as 1925 had registered as the owner of a farm on which over eighty Q'eqchi's worked. Little is known of his political initiation. "He was going to be a priest," says a family member too young to have met him, "but then he found politics." Despite this remembered worldly conversion, politics for Icó remained an enchanted vocation. An avid churchgoer, he lit votive candles to guide politicians to act justly and paid for masses to celebrate momentous events, such as national elections and the convocation of the 1945 constitutional assembly. Icó also was a curandero, a healer, who performed Mayan ceremonies to treat the ill. Or at least he tried. "I don't know if he had much luck curing anybody," says his great-nephew Alfredo Cucul, who is now an Evangelical Christian living in Guatemala City, with a bit of urban, protestant skepticism. With the help of his secretary, who drafted his petitions, Icó read national newspapers "religiously," a kind of secular prayer that set his life in the world. Stories that equated Guatemalan plantations with Nazi concentration camps helped Icó to imagine a world catholic politics in which events in Europe were as immediate as events the next town over. Many also remember him as a quisache—a kind of unofficial paralegal who guided Q'eqchi's through Guatemala's tortuous bureaucracy—despite being only barely literate himself.

As a folk lawyer and a folk doctor, Icó created a far-flung network of contacts that linked the Q'eqchi' countryside with national reformers and politicians. His political activism has left enduring myths: it is said that the dictator Jorge Ubico repeatedly visited Icó at his home, that Guatemala's first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, invited him to stay in the national palace, and that Jacobo Arbenz paid for his funeral. Alfredo Cucul recalls being told by his mother that Icó in his youth was a "great friend of the Germans," who dominated local coffee production: "He would have lunch and drinks with los Dieseldorff, before they became enemies." Asked what initially kindled Icó's political ire, Cucul first speculated that perhaps it was a reaction to having Germans or Ladinos take his land, but then corrected himself to say his uncle lost his property only after he became politically active, as a result of having to raise money for his endless legal battles. Aside from a brief appearance in a 1913 dispute involving forced labor, it was not until 1920, the beginning of a decade of political reform, that Icó emerged as a regional leader.

By any standard, Icó led a seditious life, refusing to bow before custom or convention or to withdraw from controversy. Against great odds, Icó overcame illiteracy, racism, violence, illness, and prison. From 1920 until his death in 1950, he led successive assaults against forced labor, discrimination, and land expropriation. Over the course of four decades, Icó drew on the ideals of liberalism, citizenship, and nationalism to undermine the exploitative foundations on which Guatemala's coffee economy was built. He earned both the hatred and the fear of local planters and government officials, who associated his infectious threat with his core being, claiming that his "absurd advice ... maliciously inculcated" in Indians "the idea of unlimited freedom." Yet this equation of the personal with the political did not prevent Icó's opponents from linking his challenge to a larger peril to their prerogatives. In 1920, two years before Guatemala would have a Communist Party and decades before such a party would have influence in the countryside, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, one of Guatemala's largest planters just back from a trip to revolutionary Germany, complained to government officials of Icó's "Bolshewista [sic] promises" to divide plantations among Indians and to drive all foreigners out of Alta Verapaz. If he was not expelled from the department, Dieseldorff warned, Icó's perpetual agitation would cause great damage to the nation's coffee production.

Dieseldorff had a well-deserved reputation for foresightedness, but his opinion of Icó was particularly prescient. From 1950 to the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, Icó's great-nephew Alfredo Cucul, whom Icó "raised as a son," carried on his uncle's work. He took over Icó's peasant union and, in 1951, joined Guatemala's newly reconstituted Communist Party, the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo, the pgt. For four years, Cucul played a number of critical roles as Q'eqchi's tried to make good on the promise held out by the Arbenz government. Like his uncle, he was an advocate, an agitator, and an educator. From 1952 to Arbenz's fall in 1954, Cucul organized dozens of communities to claim national and private land under Guatemala's Agrarian Reform. Nor did Icó's legacy end with Arbenz's political demise. Throughout their political careers, Icó's and Cucul's influence extended throughout much of the Q'eqchi' diaspora, north to the Petén, east down the Polochic Valley to Senahú and Cahabón, as well as south to the Achí town of Rabinal. Following 1954, successive agrarian organizers built on their political work. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the pgt, forced to operate clandestinely after 1954, drew its strongest rural support in some of the areas organized by Icó and Cucul.

From the nationalism of the 1920s to the social democratic hope of the postwar years, from the passing of the old left to the arrival of the new, politics gave many of Guatemala's most disenfranchised a way to make their lives more bearable in a society that was increasingly intolerable. In the decades leading up to World War II, Guatemalan liberal nationalism produced contradictory effects. On the one hand, the strengthening of a repressive state in which nearly all institutions were put toward enforcing labor discipline greatly circumscribed the ability of peasants to avoid the exactions of Guatemala's growing coffee economy. On the other hand, such a constriction forced a more direct engagement with the state, including its offer of equality and national fulfillment. The hypocrisy of Guatemala's coffee liberals—who could manage to exalt freedom and equality to justify the reinstitution of colonial forced labor laws—led not to the rejection of such ideals but to an increased emphasis on liberalism's emancipating potential. The extremity of exploitation under the coffee regime, its routine experiences of subjection, vulnerability, and powerlessness, led many to rely on the rhetorical protections afforded by universal and unalienable notions of justice. Increasingly, demands on the state were no longer primarily voiced through appeals to God, king, and father. Starting in the late nineteenth century, an emergent political fluency produced generations of indigenous leaders such as Icó, who worked through national ideologies and institutions to enrich this triptych with a language of rights, citizenship, and nationalism. Just as claims to abstract liberties are most formidable when they are used to express concrete grievances, the power of Icó's brand of insurgent individuality was that it remained rooted in and was energized by more embedded, community-based identities, relations, and ideas of reciprocity. Historians will continue to debate the degree to which liberal nationalism, either bureaucratically or ideologically, reached into the Mayan countryside, yet Icó was but one of many who called on the nation to live up to its promise.

By the time Icó had turned twenty-five in 1900, coffee had worked on Alta Verapaz like a drug, not so much destroying the old world as distorting its defining features—the raw material of land, labor, and lives transformed to meet the needs of a new export economy. In the Pacific coffee piedmont indigenous workers had to be imported from the western highlands, but in Alta Verapaz coffee literally enveloped Q'eqchi's. Starting in Cobán, capital of Alta Verapaz, and in Icó's hometown of Carchá, dispossession came fast. As late as the 1860s, all of Verapaz's Q'eqchi' municipalities were run by councils made up of village elders. By the end of the century, Ladinos and foreigners had taken over most of the department's municipal governments, retaining a handful of Q'eqchi's to help oversee the town's indigenous population. Into the 1860s, corn plots, or milpas, defined the Verapaz landscape. By 1879 over two million coffee trees had been planted. Armed with new liberal property laws, Ladinos and foreigners gobbled up tracts of land ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand acres, turning free villages into plantation property. Some planters, such as Icó's primary foe, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, acquired upward of one hundred thousand acres scattered through Cobán and Carchá. In 1870, the vast majority of Q'eqchi's in Verapaz resided in dispersed free villages. By 1921, close to 40 percent (57,405) of the total population of Alta Verapaz (148,425) lived on plantations as resident peons, or mozos colonos, exchanging their labor for the right to live and plant, either because they contracted with the owner or because their village was incorporated into a newly created farm.

Also unlike the coffee-producing zone of the Pacific slopes, Alta Verapaz was dominated by foreigners, mostly Germans. By 1900, German individuals and corporations produced two-thirds of all of Alta Verapaz's coffee trade, while four German firms controlled 80 percent of the department's export. They had turned Cobán, which just a few decades previously had few foreigners or Ladinos, into a thriving "imperial city." New Orleans gas lamps illuminated its streets, while a chamber orchestra played at weekly waltzes in its main plaza. By the 1920s, stores carried luxury items not expected in such a remote area: "automobiles, gasoline, oils, electric light plants, in fact, almost anything one could pay for could be ordered through the German trading houses." German immigrants bypassed Guatemala City and traveled from the Caribbean directly to Alta Verapaz, where they registered with Cobán's German consulate rather than with Guatemalan authorities. Post–World War I German immigrants, more nationally German than their predecessors, came to dominate city government, importing a new kind of politics. Following 1933, the Ortsgruppe held weekly meetings, celebrated Nazi holidays, and held rallies and parades "with impunity." Swastikas hung from municipal buildings and flew above German plantations, marks were as common a currency as Guatemalan quetzals, and the local movie house played German films—A Trip to Beautiful Germany and Far from the Land of Our Ancestors—made to warm the hearts of expatriates.

Yet in important ways, the spread of coffee was less abrupt than this description suggests. New legislation allowed some, such as Icó's father, to gain title to land long in their use. And with their chapels, weekly markets, scattered houses, and yearly feasts, there was often little to distinguish a plantation community from a free village. Only about 15 percent of any plantation was cultivated with coffee trees, the rest set aside for forest, pasture, water, and the plots of its resident workers, who were left free to tend their milpas around the seasonal needs of coffee. Plantation residence exempted Q'eqchi's from sundry taxes and military conscription, while money earned from cash advances from planters helped subsidize family and community life in a new cash economy.

But things were different. Q'eqchi's attachment to their land was now governed not by the bonds of everyday life and the needs of survival but by the vicissitudes of a global market, the caprices of a predatory state, and the ties of the law. Great investments of time and money put into obtaining titles could rapidly be lost to corrupt government agents or in public auctions. In 1890, after paying for the surveying and appraising of 580 acres, 123 Q'eqchi's lost their land to Erwin Dieseldorff, who outbid them in a public auction. Not only did they not get their property but in the process they were also transformed into Dieseldorff's peons. Finally, even when Q'eqchi's successfully received title, the need for cash in an increasingly brutish market economy often led them to sell, or mortgage and then lose, their newly probated land. In 1888, ninety-seven Alta Verapaz Mayans owned farms large enough to be considered fincas, or plantations. In 1930, the number dropped to nine. By 1949, there were none.

The simultaneous growth of the state and spread of coffee capitalism caught Q'eqchi's in a pincer movement. On the one hand, an expanding government bureaucracy put all of its local expressions—department prefects, police, military, jails, telephones, telegraphs, roads, judges, and mayors—to the task of ensuring a labor force for coffee planters. Taxes, military conscription, obligations to provide free or undercompensated labor on public works, and vagrancy laws—including the 1934 decree that mandated that all men without an "adequate profession" or in legal possession of land were required to work between 100 and 150 days on a coffee finca—pushed Q'eqchi's onto the plantation. Once there, they found themselves utterly dependent on the will and disposition of the planter, in a "wild zone" of private sovereignty. Plantations had their own jails, stockades, and whipping posts, and planters fought any attempt by the state to intervene in their labor relations or to use their workers on public projects.

Far from creating a juridical fiction of individualism or obscuring the "invisible threads" that bound workers to employers, Guatemalan liberalism institutionalized the collective nature of exploitation. In order to cut down on paperwork, planters often ran labor contracts collectively. Consent, the autonomous self 's foundational premise, could be collective: in 1898 over twenty-five hundred Q'eqchi' men gathered in front of the plantation house at Plantation Chijolóm in Carchá and listened as an interpreter read the terms of the contract, after which they issued a joint "H'us" (Q'eqchi' for "yes") and formalized the agreement with their thumbprints. Or it could be nonexistent: in 1903 a group of Q'eqchi's complained that "it is well known that they make these contracts ... without the obligados being present. We don't even know Spanish.... They force these books on us that are used only to throw us in jail for fraud. They write in them as they like and sign the contract for us." Four-year contracts stipulated salaries and labor expectations. Workers could not leave the plantation without permission or contract with other planters; if they fled, the owner had the right to confiscate crops and apply profits from their sale to expenses incurred in their capture. Trouble-some workers could be evicted; peons who had not paid off their debt by the time their contracts expired were prohibited from leaving the farm. Peasants had to carry books that recorded debts, days worked, and army service. Some planters prohibited their workers from growing commercial crops for the local market. Children inherited the debt of their parents, catching generation after generation in bondage. Land, life, and labor were literally, and legally, inextricable, as this 1922 advertisement in an Alta Verapaz newspaper testifies: "¡Mozos! ¡Mozos! ¡Mozos! I am selling my Plantation Sacsaminí. It has 5,000 acres and many mozos colonos who will travel to work on other plantations."

(Continues...)

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