The Hard Fight for Democracy
This week of October 20th 2025 marks the 81st anniversary of Guatemala’s first true democratic revolution. Led by an emerging middle-class composed of teachers, students and labor organizers, this revolution toppled a long-standing military regime in the country and ushered in a 10-year period of progressive reforms that would come to be known as the Democratic Spring. One of the first of its kind in Latin America, this democratic experiment would go on to inspire other revolutionary movements throughout the continent—famously, a young Che Guevara would come to Guatemala during this period and see hope for a true and long-lasting democracy in the region.
Yet how drastically the situation changed only a few months after Guevara wrote these words. Threatened by the progressive land reforms of president Jacobo Arbenz, the CIA—in close collaboration with the Boston-based United Fruit Company—launched its coup to take the overwhelmingly popular president out of power and re-instate the oppressive military dictatorship. Thus began a period of intense political persecution, all but eliminating the organized working class and stifling a growing political consciousness throughout the country to protect the interests of capital.
“Este es un país donde uno puede dilatar los pulmones y henchirlos de democracia.”
Here is a country where you can expand your lungs and fill them with democracy
–Che Guevara in Guatemala City, 1954
The United States, and eventually Israel as a proxy, then guided Guatemala’s military regime through a 36 year-long civil war that systematically targeted not only the revolutionary guerilla movement, but also the indigenous Mayan communities of the country. According to scholar Elizabeth Oglesby, the United States turned Guatemala into its own “laboratory of repression,” using the civil war as grounds to experiment their most effective methods for population control.[1] These included secret police forces, military-backed civilian patrols, forced removals, massacres, and the disappearance of thousands of people targeted for politic action. The tactics used, in particular against these indigenous communities, proved genocidal.
The scars of this frightening history remain everywhere in the country: in the rural villages left abandoned or burned to the ground by the military; in the iron bars and barbed wire that line every house in the city; most of all, in the silence held by victims and their families for whom reconciliation is impossible. While the most intense period of violence may have passed for now, it is frightening to see the steady resurgence of this unchecked state violence both here in Guatemala and in the United States today.
The New Movement and its Political Prisoners
This October also marks the second anniversary of the 2023 paro nacional indefinido, or the national indefinite strike: a mass uprising of the Guatemalan people demanding their democratic rights and confronting the corrupt officials who have reasserted their control over the country. The scale of this protest had not been seen since the civil war–an era in which speaking out so directly against the government could result in death.
Yet unlike the democratic revolution of 1944, it was now indigenous peoples who led the country in resistance. They successfully achieved their immediate goal of inaugurating the progressive president Bernardo Arevalo into office; though more importantly, perhaps, they demonstrated a level of organizing and coordination that strategically advanced the people’s struggle to more autonomous and powerful communities. Other movements, especially those in the global north, might do well to take note.
Nonetheless, the country remains corrupted by a political class that holds the country hostage. Since October of 2023, the Attorney General’s office has persecuted numerous leaders of these protests, many of whom are now incarcerated alongside student activists and independent journalists who have been critical of the state. The already faulty legal protections for such freedom of speech and protest, so hard-fought by generations of activists in the country, has all but fallen through completely.
The current moment demands much of those fighting against injustice, and the integrity of these hard-fought democratic institutions remains to be seen. If you are interested in joining a mutual aid effort specifically for these affected communities, please reach out to me directly.
[1] “Ten Years of Spring and Beyond” in the Guatemala Reader p. 199, ed. Greg Gandin, Deborah T. Levenson and Elizabeth Oglesby.