The Indian Question at Liberty’s Limits

Only two years after dreaming up their ten-year plan for national change, Manuel Galich and other gadfly students from the public Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) found themselves rebuilding the government from the very seats of power they had recently disparaged. Universal suffrage was the key issue for the student-statesmen in the Constitutional Assembly. This paper argues that race, region, and fraternity weighed heavily on the Constitutional Assembly’s discussion of suffrage and considers how these differences prefigured fissures in understandings of democracy that later thwarted the revolutionary project. Indigeneity, rurality, and illiteracy were deeply entwined in mid-century Guatemala, especially among those empowered to extend suffrage. The revolutionary junta, the Law Students’ Association, and, at first, the Association of University Students (AEU) opposed extending the right to vote for illiterate citizens and women because they were “feudal remainders,” scarcely modern citizens, and ineligible for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Because they were likely to be duped by politicians, restricting the vote of illiterate citizens helped to secure the nation for democracy and protect it against fascism. Alternately, the majority of the Constitutional Assembly, much of the general public, and, later, the AEU countered that limited suffrage “foreclose[d] and annul[ed] the human character of our laborers… who have given sufficient proof of their patriotism and civility.” Still, they favored an open ballot while illiterate citizens were taught civic literacy alongside reading and writing. As the suffrage debate developed, it expanded to draw members of the public, journalists, and every political party into a broad dialogue over citizenship and the social contract. While articulated in local terms, this debate clearly resonated with larger ideological debates that seized much of the world after World War II. Here, I argue that the suffrage debate revealed the limits of liberty in revolutionary Guatemala.