Encounters with the Guerrilla

On the plane down to Guatemala I sat next to a man with cropped hair and an oxford shirt. My single serving friend had grown up in eastern Guatemala, worked as a Jesuit priest in the highlands and Mexico, studied in Boston, and now taught in San Diego. He gave me his card and I ended up sleeping at a house he was in the process of turning into a dormitory for people connected with his movement. He also introduced me to some one he had known growing up, some one who had seen his life take a different course.

The commandante told me “When they ask why I became a guerrilla I say. If not for the coup in ’54 I would have become a Mormon priest, if not from the suppression of the officer’s revolt in ’68 I would have become a doctor.” These events galvanized him, as the execution of the nihilists in Russia galvanized Emma Goldman, or the haymarket affair in Chicago created a new generation of US revolutionaries. So the Commandante fought alongside peasants in the mud with guns in the jungle, trying to win land for landless peasants. When the peace accords were signed, he put down his guns. The struggle continued, but in an environment more open to political change, he chaned his way of fighting.

The day I met him, he was signing an agreement to get the land he had begun fighting for so long ago. His lawyers had achieved what his soldiers had not, and the men who signed up with him had had their faith rewarded with title to land. Now he, like some former Marxists in the US, seems to have become a neo-liberal. Now he shakes his head at the peasants, like some I knew, who are hesitant to get on board with development plans for a revolutionary new neo-liberal economy based on agricultural exports from US-model large collectivized farms which the professors at the University say is the solution. I suspect in the 60s he shook his head at peasants hesitant to get on board with plans for a revolution and communist economy (probably involving Soviet model large collectivized farms) which the students at the University said was the solution. But whatever he thinks of those who didn’t join up with his program, after three decades he delivered the goods for those who did.


My uncle has spent much of his life working with Wycliffe, an organization named after a man very nearly burnt at the stake for translating the bible into the language of the common people so they could decide for themselves what it meant rather than depending on the educated priests who had learned Latin. A friend of mine once commented: “Muslims say ‘we have taught these people Arabic so they can read the Qu’ran in the original.’ Christians say ‘We have translated the Bible so they can read it in their own language.’” But prior to the Reformation, Christendom often showed as little interest in Barbarian languages and cultures as the present-day Umma. And it was unarmed prophets like Wycliffe who helped change how the faith community related to its component cultures. Organizations like Wycliffe catch a lot of flack from secular leftists who see missionaries as cultural imperialists allied to the conservative business class.

My uncle introduced me to a team of Bible translators working in Guatemala. The wife was from the US, the husband was a Mexican of Zapotec Indian ancestry. They were not big fans of godless communism. The critiqued one of the leading icons of the Guatemalan left. At the same time talking about what they had witnessed on the small Guatemalan town where they had lived since the eighties they said “It sometimes seemed the government policies were designed to drive people to join the guerillas.”

The husband also told a story that stayed with me. He had business to do in a nearby village but was warned not to travel. “Those guerrillas are crazy and will kill you.” Sure enough, along a deserted road, a guerrilla stopped his car, rifle in hand.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re a human being, just like me.”
The guerrilla waved him through.
The missionary called what protected his life in that situation God. A materialist might use a different name. But the missionary’s faith in the Galilean, like the peasants’ faith in the Commandante was more than superstition, it was a way of speaking about something which motivated action in the real world and achieved real-world results.

One woman I met in Guatemala remarked on how her Guatemalan husband’s father and her own, had remarkably similar ideas about child-rearing and the importance of family. However the Guatemalan father was a Marxist guerrilla and the US father a Republican businessman. It reminded me that Karl Marx justified the elimination of private property in Europe on the grounds that so few people had access to it, but pointed out elsewhere that access to private property might forestall revolution in the United States. In the US the diffusion of private property, education, voting rights, and access to credit meant that a majority of those interested in improving the lot of their family and community become Republicans or Reagan Democrats to preserve their economic enfranchisement. In the very different socioeconomic environment of Central America in the 1960s lack of access to those same things led people with the same aspirations to communism to obtain economic enfranchisement.

Latin America had Simon Bolivar, it’s George Washington. But it never had it’s Andrew Jackson, or its Homestead Act. The founders of the US hoped that land (expropriated from native Americans) could serve as a means to give new immigrants a stake in the system and serve as a bulwark against revolution. Access to land granted in the Homestead Act and its successors ensured, as Karl Marx and the founders of the United States foresaw, that the US did not develop a European proletariat and at least in the North, never had a feudal peasant class. Access to land meant that in a small way, US conservatism included not just a conservatism of repression, but also a conservatism of cooptation. Through homesteading, home ownership, or the GI bill, they sought to give the laboring class some reason to identify with the dominant system—something in common with the wealthy. In Guatemala, some people I met had begun their lives as serfs, forced to work without pay for large landowners. In some cases peasants were even forbidden from planting corn for their own use, to prevent them from becoming in any way independent of the landowners. Barriers of blood, language overlapped with economic barriers.

In the 1950s Guatemala attempted to implement its own variation on the homestead act, granting peasants the right to small pieces of property from unused land. However while the homestead act granted people in the US “unused” land taken from powerless Native Americans, the Guatemalan plan took unused land from the much better connected United Fruit Company. Here as elsewhere US business interests were allied with feudal landowning interests who fell back on a conservatism of repression, with tragic results in 1954.


I traveled a little with the Commandante. He went to speak at the castle where Guatemalan military is headquartered—helping to design a training program for soldiers in the army he had fought against before the peace accords. (For the record many guerrilla leaders had trained in the same facility, switching sides when the time of revolution arrived). He seemed to take pride in the fact that he was the only former commandante allowed to travel in the US after September 11. He attributed this to the fact that he had never killed or kidnapped US army personnel. It did not sound like a deliberate policy, but apparently both he and Washington had kept track. As some one who had sent men to their deaths, he was probably noticed how the Pentagon felt about the men they sent to their deaths. He also seemed proud of his links to regimes opposed to Yankee foreign policy. He met with the powerful at the military headquarters. He also met with a group of poor peasants who wanted his help to resolve a property dispute.

It was interesting to me—comparing perspective of a man who fought with guns, and then put down his weapons when the war was over—to people who fight by saying nasty things—and have not put down their weapons. When I thought about the land he won for his soldiers, I thought to myself “We remembered our boys, the Commandante remembered his boys.” The culture of an NGO is different from the culture of a soldier's camp. No one ever says “yes, sir” no one ever says “hasta siempre, commandante.”

The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party at the Department of Agriculture. He was invited because of his success obtaining land for the peasants he had taken up arms for three decades earlier. Several more bourgeois people seemed very tickled to be talking to the famous Commandante. My Jesuit friend had warned me that I should not be put off by his way of being a Latin American man with women. Later on he was joined by his current girlfriend, whom he described as being from a higher social class than people he usually knew. They danced and he motioned to me to dance with his girlfriends young but very pretty daughter. Later we all had tacos at a roadside stand opposite a gas station