Mayas in Revolution

This presentation will explore the many and complicated connections between activist Mayas in Guatemala and the Ladino-led revolutionary left in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1970s, especially, Maya community leaders led mobilizations all over the highlands to challenge economic, political, and cultural exclusion. As the state tried to stamp out these efforts through targeted violence and repression against organizers, some chose in the mid-1970s to join an armed insurgency that was expanding in the highlands. In February 1980, the Maya-led Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC) and an array of other Maya and ladino organizers publicly proclaimed their collective support for revolution. The presentation will follow these processes as they developed in the 1970s and through the next decade, as Mayas in many different capacities took part in and sought to shape the revolutionary left – some in supportive roles, others as rank-and-file guerrilleros, still others as mid-level leaders. It will trace the efforts of some who initially cooperated with the Ladino-led insurgency, but eventually split from them over questions of ethnic identity, rights, and discrimination. Small numbers even formed separate all-Maya revolutionary groups, voicing distrust for a would-be revolution that prioritized one form of oppression (class) over another (race): “A revolution cannot be selective,” Maya revolutionaries insisted in one famous statement in 1982, “where some forms of oppression are destroyed and others conserved, where some are considered urgent and others deferrable.” Attention both to the possibilities and tensions inherent in broad and multi-ethnic alliances among Guatemalan opposition movements helps us to understand the history of that civil war, and the fraught and unsettled “peace” that has followed it.