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history. During the decade of their rule, newspapers, social groups, unions, peasants, and political parties could organize without fear of repression or murder.72 But this fragile democracy rested on a base of concentrated land ownership and foreign control of land and strategic facilities that was a constant threat to its independence and political freedom, as well as a human disaster. The struggle for unionization and land reform during the democratic decade was motivated in part by a desire to build a mass constituency that would provide an institutional base for democracy.73 Each progressive move by both Arévalo and Arbenz was greeted with fierce hostility by the local oligarchy, the multinational corporate community, and the U.S. government.74 “Communism” was found to be in control, or a threat, from the time trade unions were allowed to organize in 1947, and Arbenz’s modest and effective land reform was the last straw.75 With U.S. initiative, organization, funding, and direct psychological warfare and terror operations, a tiny mercenary army ousted Arbenz and installed an “anti-Communist” regime.

From 1954 to the present day, neither reform nor democracy, let alone radical change, has been possible in Guatemala. The main reason for this is that the forces into whose hands the United States delivered that country in 1954 “bitterly opposed any change that might affect, however slightly, their entrenched position,”76 and they had learned from the 1945–54 lesson that democracy moves inexorably toward reform and threats to privilege in a system of extreme inequality. The very brief interludes of tentative openness after 1954 witnessed the quick emergence of protective organizations of urban workers and the peasantry, strikes, and reformist and radical parties and organizations. As Piero Gleijeses puts it, “in the last months of the Arana period [1970–74], the repression had acquired a more selective character, and on repeated occasions Laugerud [Arana’s successor, 1974–78] refrained from ‘settling’ strikes by force.”77 But the feebleness of the reforms and the awakened hopes and pressures forced a further choice; and “given the nature of the regime,” the wave of terror that followed “was the only logical choice” for the Guatemalan ruling class.78

Another reason for the failures of both reform and democracy has been ongoing U.S. influence. The U.S. establishment found the pluralism and democracy of the years 1945–54 intolerable, and it eventually ended that experiment.79 In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and largescale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the “death squads” and “disappearances” made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The “solution” to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the “counterinsurgency state.”

The special role of the army in the counterinsurgency state gradually elevated its status and power, and eventually gave it the institutional capacity to rule Guatemala. As in many U.S. client states, the military used its power to carve out economic opportunities and to steal, directly