Hoy Nos Vemos Obligados de Asilarnos: Asylum and Refuge in (Post)Revolutionary Guatemala

In June 1954, a CIA-backed counter-revolutionary force marched into Guatemala and overthrew President Jacobo Arbenz, ending Guatemala’s ten-year “Democratic Spring” and ultimately throwing the country into four decades of civil war and genocide. In the more immediate term, thousands of Arbenz supporters and other leftists took refuge from counterrevolutionary violence in sovereign embassies in Guatemala City. Among them was Ester de Urrutia, a housewife and leader of the pro-Revolutionary women’s group Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca (AFG) who took refuge alongside her husband and four of her adult children in the Argentine embassy. Inside the embassy, de Urrutia met and conversed with fellow-asylum seeker Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was eventually granted safe passage to Mexico, where he would meet Fidel Castro and other Cuban exiles. Other exiles-in-limbo in the embassy included Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, an author of Arbenz’s signature land reform project, and Raul Sierra Franco, who served as a minister in Arbenz’s government. Ultimately, almost 200 people sheltered inside the Argentine embassy for several months, sharing cramped quarters as the world outside the embassy walls irrevocably transformed.

Drawing on the personal papers of Ester de Urrutia and other documentation produced inside the Argentine embassy in 1954, this paper explores the liminal space of exile-in-progress. It explores the political and quotidian problems and discussions that consumed the months before the exiles scattered to their new homes, from the organization of belongings to communications with loved ones and comrades who remained on the outside. This paper gives us insight not only into the complex decision to take refuge but also the ongoing political tensions and debates in the months immediately following the fall of the Arbenz government. This presentation takes a micro-history perspective to the early Cold War and the personal and political decisions to become exiles in 1954.