Statecrafting through political violence can take a variety of forms. In Guatemala, a democracy was “born” out of the womb of a counterinsurgency campaign in 1982 that killed an estimated 75,000, razed a proclaimed 440 villages, and displaced over one million refugees. “To achieve democracy, the country first needed to be at peace” (General Gramajo, interview; 1995: 193). By tracing the military’s ascendance to power by way of state violence through the eyes of Guatemalan officers themselves, this book serves as a window onto the internal workings and thinking of the most powerful, least researched, and least understood institution in...

Historically, specific threats have caused the Guatemalan military to defend itself increasingly as a corporate entity. These threats include attempts to establish a civilian militia, a failed coup attempt by officers, some of whom proceeded to establish a guerrilla movement, and the near success of that guerrilla insurgency some twenty years later. With each crisis, the military’s role in public affairs “has changed steadily, and the change has been in one direction. While it has broadened its position in society at large, it has consistently consolidated its mechanisms and bases of control” (Adams 1970: 277).

In a series of crises,...

After the 23 March 1982 coup, the Guatemalan army combined civilmilitary activity, focusing 30 percent of the effort toward killing and 70 percent of the effort toward providing food and shelter to the survivors—first referred to as Beans and Bullets and later as “Shelter, Work and Food.” Additionally, it implemented a five-part strategy that included: (1) an increase in the number of soldiers by a call-up of reserve forces and by forced recruitment of captured indigenous men for soldiering as well as for paramilitary civil patrolling, (2) a campaign of pacification that initially concentrated troops for intensified “killing zone”...

To elucidate the military’s forceful social, economic, and physical reordering of indigenous life in the “well-massacred”¹ highlands, this chapter will focus on the institutionalization of civil-military strategy through Poles of Development and Inter-Institutional Coordinators and the immersion of counterinsurgency within the military’s constitutional project. El proyecto politico-militar penetrated civil society on all levels.

Once the Victory ’82 OPPLAN had been completed “earlier than expected” in December 1982, leaving behind a swathe of death and economic destruction in the northwest highlands, the army began to organize the relocation of a portion of the estimated 250,000 (50,000 families) to 1 million displaced,...

Nowhere else in Latin America has an army managed to mobilize and divide an indigenous population against itself to such an extent — even to the point of forcing victims to become accomplices and kill one another. The creation and utilization of special companies of Indian soldiers and Civil Patrols by the army — linchpins for the 30/70 formula in which security was linked to development as a way of controlling and separating the population from the guerrilla — did just that.

With the 1982 coup, the new regime recognized how the mobilization of indigenous former soldiers and former guerrilla irregulars (especially in...

For most Guatemalan officers, the “secret weapon” and strength of the Guatemalan military since 1982 lies with its Civil Affairs and Local Development companies. Civil Affairs demands the participation of the local population in local development projects and security apparatuses, including the Civil Patrols in the 1980s, and the alias-PACs, Committees of Peace and Development in the 1990s. Unlike the older U.S.-sponsored strategy of Civic Action, in which military units worked to improve the military’s image on a piecemeal basis, Civil Affairs entails a more permanent involvement by the military in the organization of local action “to promote and improve...

Law, like ideology, serves a belief system and interests about the proper order of things. Within an activist state, decrees, prohibitions and obligations between the individual and the state — between “the governed and the governors,” as Colonel-lawyer Girón Tánchez repeated in interviews — impose an exclusive worldview. Law sets categories and prescriptions that order reality as to what the world should be and what is considered inside and outside the law. Just as law can be used to reform institutions to provide justice, it can just, as easily be used to invent institutions that oppress. As anthropologist E. A. Hoebel has...

This chapter is about the doctrinal and operational aspects of army institutions dedicated to espionage, abduction, torture, and assassination in clandestine cells on military bases, in subbasements of the National Police headquarters, and (when these were sealed off) in private houses. As the self-proclaimed “granddaddy” of military intelligence, former Defense Minister Gramajo has admitted, “The G-2 gathers an enormous amount of information [but] the army isn’t to blame for all the violations. Some are carried out by Intelligence for personal reasons or drugs. Assassination [in Guatemala] is a means of resolving conflict. We still have some bad habits. It depends...

An analysis of a civil-military equation of power must also consider the civilian president’s attitudes toward the military, the opposition, and intelligence operations. It also must evaluate the extent to which the president is able to command military obedience regarding intelligence and police operations, military promotions, military participation in the cabinet, arid military accountability in the judicial system as the formal commander in chief of the armed forces. Stepan’s measure of military accountability comes in the form of two questions: “Do the military accept that the president, subject to appropriate legislative approval, is the sole legitimate source of commands concerning...

Successful or not, coups d’état, golpes de estado, because of their subversive character often provide outsiders a rare glimpse into the subterranean world of internal ideological debates and deep divisions within secretive and guarded institutions. While appearing to be monolithic, perfected, and in some ways invincible, the two major coup attempts (and two minor ones during this same period) staged by Guatemalan officers calling themselves the Oficiales de la Montaña (Officers of the Mountain) on 11 May 1988 and 9 May 1989, revealed serious fissures and distrust within the armed forces underscoring the vulnerability of a politico-military project riddled with...

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the first stage of el proyecto polilico-militar was pacification by way of massacre; the second stage was restructuring the process by way of party politics and elections. The third stage under-way during the “25-year transition” is to reconstitute civilian society by way of education, persuasion, and long-term crisis management of conflict that includes selective repression and killing. One comes to particularly appreciate the extensiveness of the military’s project when institutionalist officers enthuse in a number of interviews, “We are planning the State in all of its ramifications!” Several long quotes have been...

After decades of naked military rule, the Guatemalan military have crafted a unique Counterinsurgent Constitutional State in which State violence has been reincarnated as democracy. Not intended to be transformative, but only “eminently transitional,” el proyecto politico-miltiar, which arose from the March 1982 coup, reconfigured the bureaucracy of the State for a “cogovernance” of military and civilians alike, leaving unchanged the structures of military autonomy and power. Counterinsurgency structures are incorporated into the very heart of the State. The genius of this politico-military project is twofold: contrary to the assumption that civilian rule entails the military’s “return to the barracks,”...