Civil Wars in Guatemala and Tajikistan: Causes and Recovery

Introduction: The Logic of Civil War

It is estimated that between 1900 and 1967, there were 526 civil wars fought throughout the world. Today, there are literally dozens of wars ongoing around the globe, and dozens more that have ended in recent years, such as the civil war in Guatemala and the civil war in Tajikistan.

Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian writer, captured the inner logic of such conflicts in a short story about a Sicilian man dragooned into fighting on Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War. Sciascia writes:

Theoretical Framework: Inequality, Distribution, and Conflict

"A civil war is not a stupid thing, like a war between nations... A civil war is something more logical, a man starts shooting for the people and the things he loves, for the things he wants and against the people he hates; and no one makes a mistake about choosing which side to be on... Despite its atrocities, a civil war is a kind of hora de la verdad, a moment of truth."

This quotation expresses the view that civil war is not simply an outbreak of irrational hysteria based on some immutable and fixed "ethnic" antipathy, but is rather a perfectly sensible venting of feelings that cannot be contained by normal peacetime relations. Civil war, in this sense, is fundamentally class-based — about the uneven distribution of income, wealth, and political power.

According to Christopher Cramer, most literature concerning civil wars has highlighted the role of political instability in the relationship between growth and inequality. Although there are interlinkages between distribution, conflict, and growth, these interlinkages are complex and cannot be read off or predicted from any convincing repeated empirical relationship between variables that are often laden with too much unclear meaning. Cramer takes the title of his article, "Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Exploring Growth, Distribution and Conflict Linkages," from the Sciascia story described above.

For Sciascia, civil war is "a moment of truth," for it exposes and brings to the surface a conflict that is otherwise only latent and hidden from view. While some see war as the continuation of politics by other means, others suggest that war is the continuation of political economy by particular means.

This view contrasts greatly with typical perceptions of civil war in developing countries, where wars used to be understood in terms of "proxy" Cold War ideological contests but more recently have been seen in terms of some primordial anarchy. This argument may be one aspect of the larger claim that "political and economic progress are not tied together in any easy, straightforward, functional way."

Cramer argues that the idea that inequality leads to instability or conflict, and that this conflict has exclusively negative effects on growth, merely oversimplifies the true relationships and the nature of their interaction, and can actually be misleading. He points to clear counter-examples, such as India, which has over a long period combined highly unequal distribution of income and power with relative political stability. Moreover, to the extent that political instability in India has risen in recent times, it is not clearly associated, at an aggregate level, with a decline in investment or growth.

Cramer believes that maldistribution is not always necessary and is hardly sufficient to provoke extreme instability. Where it is significant in the emergence of conflict, it is most likely combined with low growth and sharp economic crisis before the war, and with other factors — including the political economy of identity relations — that themselves will not neatly fit into a quantifiable variable. Furthermore, where distributional issues are significant, this does not mean that anyone can predict some cut-off point beyond which a given Gini coefficient will be associated with a certain degree or form of instability or the outbreak of civil war.

Generally, civil war is messier than the clear notion of conflict between classes; however, the idea of civil war as an hora de la verdad — a moment of truth — is certainly useful. The political economy of civil war in the least developed countries may confirm the notion that "in periods of transition or crisis, generative structures, previously opaque, become more visible." From a long-run perspective, conflict as a "moment of truth" is what gives it a potentially cathartic effect, yet this perspective is lacking among the ultra-pessimists of cost-of-war analyses.

The Guatemalan Civil War: Origins and Violence

Cramer stresses a need for caution in the international application of supposedly equalizing and stabilizing policies in the interests of political stability, peace, and growth. The appropriate policies are likely to be specific to each country, and rather than hoping growth will arise from a prior condition of equality, policies should focus on growth more urgently on a basis of inclusion — primarily through employment — rather than the difficult-to-achieve redistribution of assets.

After more than thirty-six years, the internal conflict in Guatemala formally ended in 1996 with the signing of the Peace Accords. Since then, some 200,000 paramilitary troops have been disbanded, approximately 3,000 guerrillas have been demobilized and resettled, and former combatants are now being integrated into Guatemalan political and economic life. Although there has been some progress, many of the Peace Accord commitments remain unfulfilled, and there are still enormous problems of poverty — particularly in rural areas — as well as issues of participation, credit, and economic opportunity.

Guatemala is a democratic republic with separation of powers and a centralized national administration. Its 1985 Constitution provides for the election by universal suffrage of a one-term president and a unicameral congress. In January 2000, Alfonso Portillo of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) took office as president following a free and fair December 1999 run-off election. The FRG maintained its majority with 63 seats in the 113-member Congress. Despite pledges, the Portillo administration and Congress took only limited steps to implement the 1996 Peace Accords concluded with the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrillas.

More than half of Guatemalans are descendants of the indigenous Maya. Westernized Mayans and mestizos — those of mixed European and indigenous ancestry — are known as Ladinos. Although urbanization is accelerating, most of Guatemala's population is rural and predominantly Roman Catholic, while Protestantism is practiced by an estimated forty percent and traditional Mayan religions by about one percent. Although indigenous Guatemalans outnumber the westernized Ladino community, historically they have been dominated by the Ladinos and excluded from the mainstream of social, economic, and political activity. The Maya are regarded with disdain by the Ladino community, and reports of discrimination against their religious practices must be seen in the context of widespread Ladino rejection of indigenous culture. As a result, the Maya were caught in the middle of one of the bloodiest revolutions in Central American history and were at the very center of revolutionary action from the beginning of the conflict.

The Guatemalan Civil War broke out after a military coup overthrew the democratic government of President Arbenz in 1954, and military leaders — backed by the United States government — took control of the country. In opposition, a revolutionary guerrilla group formed in the eastern part of the country, composed of young army officers and proletarian Ladinos. The Guatemalan military, aided by the United States, suppressed this resistance, resulting in approximately 10,000 deaths, including students, union leaders, and peasants.

By the late 1970s, guerrilla movements began reemerging. The two most important were the Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA). The stronghold for guerrilla activity was in the remote wilderness of the Maya heartland, and as a result, the Guatemalan army targeted many of these areas, adopting a program of genocidal tactics against indigenous communities. The Maya were subjected to the army's "scorched-earth policy," in which hundreds of people were massacred and their houses burned. From 1978 to 1985, over 75,000 people were killed — many of them women and children — and more than 400 villages were destroyed. Over one million people fled to other regions of Guatemala and to countries such as Mexico, the United States, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Today, human rights organizations estimate conservatively that more than 100,000 people were murdered, 40,000 disappeared, and over 440 rural villages were destroyed.

Rampant human rights abuses by the Guatemalan army and government, supported by powerful business and landowning interests, caused communist-led guerrillas to begin an active political war of terror in 1961, blocking social, agrarian, and economic reforms. During the late 1960s, rightist groups were using the same terrorist tactics as the communists to attack the government, which had slowly begun to implement programs to improve the lives of Indian peasants. In 1968, communist guerrillas killed two U.S. embassy military attachés and the U.S. ambassador. By 1970, leftist dissidents — aided by rightist dissidents — were creating widespread fear and turmoil through violence and murder. In 1970, leftist terrorists kidnapped and killed the West German ambassador when the government rejected their demands for $700,000 in ransom and the release of twenty-five political prisoners.

In 1978, General Romeo Lucas García became president and, according to reports, ordered the deaths of approximately 5,000 persons, including 76 political leaders of the opposition. García's brutal and corrupt regime resulted in the United States cutting off military aid, and by 1982, dissident army officers seized power, ending his regime. Two military coups occurred in 1983, and in 1984 a constituent assembly was elected to draft a new constitution. In 1986, civilian rule returned to Guatemala with the election of President Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, followed five years later by President Jorge Serrano Elías. In 1993, Serrano's attempt to suspend constitutional rights led to his removal by military, business, and political leaders. A temporary cease-fire with guerrillas later restored some sense of democracy and led to a peace agreement on December 29, 1996, signed by four top leftist rebel leaders and government representatives.

Although the peace accord was signed, debate over land issues continues, with agrarian reform serving as the focal point for both sides — the Maya and the Ladino plantation owners. Plantation owners are often better equipped academically and financially, and have access to more sophisticated legal tactics to acquire land, often with governmental support. The majority of Mayans, by contrast, do not speak Spanish and are frequently illiterate, which complicates their efforts to defend their land claims.

Since the 1990s, solidarity among Maya tribes has increased and resulted in an expansion of political activity among indigenous peoples. Although they have not been able to gain much ground on political issues, they have increased their ability to negotiate with the government over cultural matters such as language, education, tradition, and religion. Mayanidad — practiced for hundreds of years among the Maya — began as an officially recognized political movement in 1991 in conjunction with President Cerezo's departure from office. Perhaps the greatest threat to the movement concerns the power struggle among native leaders. There is much that needs to be done to resolve the socially based conflict; however, Mayan solidarity and political activism continue to grow and foster the hope that one day the Maya will be allowed to live according to the traditions of their ancestors.