¡Viva el 20 de Octubre!

Today Guatemala celebrates el Día de la Revolución..."Day of the Revolution".

On October 20, 1944 a coalition of democratic force in Guatemala overthrew the government of General Frederico Ponce, the front man for a cruel dictator named General Jorge Ubico Castañeda.

Democratic elections were subsequently held, and Doctor Juan José Arévelo Bermeja was elected the first President of the Revolution, ushering in ten years of peace and progress known as "The Springtime of Democracy".

Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the second President of the Revolution, was overthrown in 1954 by a CIA-backed coup because his land reform efforts affected powerful U.S. agricultural interests.

Guatemala was then thrown into nearly four decades of military dictatorships, massacres, and civil war.

The following article shows how the brutal end to the October Revolution still impacts current events today.

Guatemalans wary of military aid
By Jill Replogle
Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Panabaj, Guatemala – Two graveyards are nearly all that is left of this Maya Indian village in the highlands - and they frame locals' views of the Guatemalan military.

Authorities declared an entire hillside a graveyard last week when they gave up the search for dozens of poor villagers buried in a mudslide triggered by hurricane Stan's rains. The other cemetary, whose gravestones stick out of the mud, contains the bodies of 13 locals killed in a 1990 massacre perpetrated by the Guatemalan army.

This and numerous other abuses committed here during the country's 36-year long armed conflict has left locals with an acute distrust for government security forces. So they were wary when troops showed up after the mudslides to offer assistance to the victims.

People are scared because of what the army did here in the past," said Manuel Sisay Sapalu, former mayor of Santiago Atitlán, the municipality that includes Panabaj.

A UN-sponsored truth commission found the army responsible for 85% of human rights violations committed during the country's bloody civil war. More than 200,000 people were killed in the war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a repressive military state backed by the US. The vast majority of the victims were poor and indigenous.

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Tags: Guatemala, Revolution, October