Central American Revolutionary Ties: The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG)

Alberto Martin Alvarez and I are presenting a paper on the relationship among the Central American revolutionary groups between the 1960s and 2000 at next week's XVII Congreso Internacional de AHILA in Berlin Germany. The paper is tentatively titled "Central American Revolutionary Ties: The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG)."

There are a lot of interesting stories involving cooperation between the Guatemalan FAR and the Salvadoran ERP. Joint bank robberies and kidnappings. We still have some more research to conduct as we've mostly interviewed Guatemalans about the topic.

We hope to have it published at some point in English but since the conference is in Spanish, the paper is not as fully developed in either language as we would have hoped. 

Drop me a line if you are heading to AHILA or are in Berlin next week.

In the end, there is still much that we can learn about the relationship among the Central American revolutionary groups. Salvadorans and Nicaraguans traveled to Guatemala to participate in guerrilla training during the 1960s. The Salvadorans and Guatemalans engaged in joint activities in both El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1970s. Like many others from throughout Latin America, Guatemalan and Salvadoran guerrillas traveled to Nicaragua to participate in the downfall of the Somoza regime in 1978 and 1979. In the 1980s, weapons traveled from Cuba and elsewhere through Nicaragua and into the hands of the FMLN and the URNG. It seems that more weapons were smuggled into El Salvador for a variety of reasons, including the belief that the Salvadoran rebels were closer to victory than were the Guatemalans.

Along with the Cubans, the Sandinistas were a key factor in the consolidation of the Guatemalan guerrillas into the URNG in 1982. Cooperation between the Guatemalan guerrillas and those from Nicaragua and from El Salvador does not appear to have been as strong as the cooperation that developed between the FSLN and FMLN. While one factor is obviously distance (the URNG used Mexico as its rearguard, while the FMLN used Nicaragua), there were other factors that help explain the weaker ties between the Guatemalan guerrillas and those from neighboring countries.

Finally, in the 1990s, the URNG saw the peace processes and the transitions to political parties of their neighbors as significantly different from their own, so much so that they had nothing to learn from them. In particular, the FMLN’s political settlement was very vague and the organization was quite fractured in the postwar period. Those were mistakes that the URNG wanted to avoid. 

There’s a great deal about the relations among the three groups that we still do not know but we hope that this paper and, hopefully article when we are done, we help uncover some of the story that is not yet widely known.