Guatemala: 20th Century Developments

A popular uprising known as the October Revolution overthrew the long-standing dictatorship of Jorge Ubico in 1944, ushering in a decade of democratic reform under presidents Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz. Árbenz's government pursued an ambitious land redistribution program that transferred unused land from large estates, including holdings of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, to landless peasants.

Árbenz's reforms drew opposition from domestic elites and the United States, and in 1954 a CIA-backed military operation forced him from power, installing a series of military and military-aligned governments. Political repression and social inequality fueled the rise of leftist guerrilla movements, and by 1960 Guatemala had entered a civil war between the state and insurgent groups drawing support from indigenous Maya communities and rural peasants.

The conflict, one of the longest and deadliest in Latin America's Cold War history, intensified through the 1970s and reached its most brutal phase in the early 1980s under General Efraín Ríos Montt, whose counterinsurgency campaigns included massacres and scorched-earth tactics against Maya villages. A United Nations-backed truth commission later found that more than 200,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared over the course of the war, the vast majority Indigenous Maya. Peace accords signed by the government and the guerrilla umbrella group URNG in December 1996 formally ended the 36-year conflict.