Cuban interlude
In April 1960, Guatemala broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba following the rise to power of Fidel Castro. In Guatemala there were serious riots in July and again in November. This month the U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower ordered to ground and air units from the U.S. Navy stationed along the Caribbean coast of Guatemala and Nicaragua to prevent an attack on Cuba, a fact that both countries denounced as imminent, the attack never took place , So that naval units had to withdraw in early December.
Political violence
In March 1963, Ydígoras was deposed by his Defense Minister, Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, who declared a state of emergency and canceled elections to be held in December. He also took strong measures to quell a revolt guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), especially active in Zacapa, despite the harsh repression, the guerrillas continued their activity. The paramilitary groups that are authorized by the Army, murdered hundreds of people during the period of Peralta’s successor, Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro (1966-1970), only exacerbated the situation.
After a campaign marked by violence, Gen. Carlos Arana Osorio was elected president in 1970, four years later was succeeded by General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud Garcia. During the two governments continued political violence, although some decrease was seen in the mid-1970s. However, during that time the country was rocked by two natural disasters, a devastating hurricane (1974) and a violent earthquake (1976), which claimed over 20,000 lives and left more than a million people homeless. Nevertheless, Guatemala’s economy enjoyed a remarkable growth, spurred by rising oil production and high prices of coffee. The resurgence of civil conflict, provoked by the activities of the FAR and the ‘death squads’ paramilitaries, characterized the presidential term of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García, who was elected in 1978.
Coup d’etat
On March 23, 1982, two weeks after the general election as president of Angel Anibal Guevara, a coup d’etat installed in power a military junta headed by General Efraim Rios Montt. In June, Rios Montt dissolved the Board and assumed the presidency, ruling in a dictatorial. After the guerrilla forces that reject a possible amnesty, the activities of paramilitary forces spread throughout the country, perpetrating atrocities among Indians and peasants.
The slow transition to democracy
Rios Montt was deposed from his post on August 8, 1983 after the military coup led by Brigadier Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, who restored civil liberties. The results of the elections in December 1985 led the Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo to the presidency after more than 30 years of military rule. However, Cerezo was unable to suppress drug trafficking and to end abuses of human rights, but progressed attempts to dialogue with the guerrillas, with which agreements were reached in Oslo (Norway) and in El Escorial ( Spain), which allowed the peaceful development of the presidential elections of 1991 which were won by Jorge Serrano Elías, a businessman and evangelical Protestant closely tied to Rios Montt.
A year later, Rigoberta Menchú, Quiche Indian who had fled to Mexico in 1981 to escape persecution of the army and paramilitary groups, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of human rights. In May 1993, President Serrano, supported by the Army, gave a coup that led to the dissolution of Congress and the suspension of the Constitution, but in the absence of domestic support and international protests, a ‘kickback’ addressed by the Constitutional Court forced him to resign.
That same year, Congress chose Ramiro de León Carpio as president of the Republic to complete the period of government. Leon Carpio, who had distinguished for their complaints to the institutional violence, prompted a number of constitutional reforms such as limiting the presidential term to four years, set up negotiations with the guerrilla-grouped at the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) – and supported the creation of a commission to demarcate responsibilities on institutional violence, which resulted in the last three decades more than 100,000 dead and 50,000 missing, also favored the return of thousands of indigenous people displaced by the war, many of whom had taken refuge in Mexico.
In the presidential elections of November 1995 winner was the conservative Álvaro Arzú to the front of the Partido de Avanzada Nacional (PAN). In December 1996, Arzu got the URNG to renounce armed struggle and accept the democratic path as a means to access the government of the country. This event, which marked the end of 36 years of hard fighting, earned him international recognition through the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation (see the Principality of Asturias Foundation), failed in May 1997, which was shared between his government and the URNG.
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