Disasters as Crisis Triggers for Critical Junctures? The 1976 Guatemala Case

I finally got around to reading Disasters as Crisis Triggers for Critical Junctures? The 1976 Guatemala Case by Vincent T. Gawronski and Richard Stuart Olson. The article was published in Latin American Politics and Society earlier this year. They argue that the 1976 earthquake which killed approximately 25,000 was followed by a high degree of community organizing in the weeks and months following the quake to tend to the needs of the survivors. The military was somewhat divided as to how to respond to the mobilization given that there was also guerrilla organizing going on simultaneously. Eventually those officers who supported a brute force response won out over those who preferred a more moderate response.

In the case of Guatemala, the 1976 earthquake disaster clearly triggered an unprecedented amount of community self-organizing, particularly in indigenous areas, that the leadership of the Guatemalan national security state perceived as a crisis, especially when some of that self-organizing began linking to ongoing as well as new antigovernment movements and guerrilla organizations. The sense of crisis in the Guatemalan national security state was then exacerbated by intramilitary rifts in the Laugerud presidency over how to respond: moderately (a combination of development and reconstruction projects and targeted repression) or extremely (full-scale repression - the "100 percenter" solution).

The eventual choice, reflecting a victory of the 100 percenters in the Laugerud government, was to engage in full-scale repression, which also explains why Laugerud appeared to be one person in 1974-76 and another person in 1977-78. Thus internal victory by the 100 percenters then led to the installation of the ferociously repressive governments o Garcia (1978-1982) and Rios Montt (1982-83). The legacy of that postearthquake 1977-1978 internal shift and the choice to pursue full-scale, and substantially blind, repression became a Guatemala nationally traumatized by polarization, fear, violence, genocide, and forced exile. That legacy, sadly, still influences present-day Guatemala 36 years later, and it bespeaks the need for much more focused research on Guatemalan intramilitary decisionmaking, then and now.

It is an interesting paper. I think that the authors could have better addressed other political (guerrilla strengthening), economic (growth, oil crisis,), and international (Nicaraguan revolution) factors that contributed to the increase in mobilization and violence in the late 1970s. And, while the authors call for more comparative studies on natural disasters and critical junctures, they lost quite an opportunity to do so themselves by introducing comparisons to Nicaragua's 1972 and El Salvador's 1986 earthquakes.