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ORPA
The Organization of People in Arms or ORPA ( es, Organización del Pueblo en Armas) was a Guatemalan guerrilla organization active in Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War. A split-off from the FAR of the 1960s, ORPA was critical of earlier guerrilla efforts in Guatemala, which they saw as a failure. ORPA focused its efforts primarily in the heavily populated highlands and southern coast, and commanded much support among the Indian populations there. Formation Following the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Guatemala was in a state of crisis. The new government brought to power by the United States suspended constitutional guarantees, jailed thousands of political and labor leaders, and exiled hundreds of others. In the first two months of the Castillo Armas regime, as many as 8,000 peasants were murdered. This repression directly fed the guerrilla movement by cutting off all legal avenues in Guatemalan politics, making armed resistance the only real method of political expressi ...
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Organización Del Pueblo En Armas (emblem)
The Organization of People in Arms or ORPA ( es, Organización del Pueblo en Armas) was a Guatemalan guerrilla organization active in Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War. A split-off from the FAR of the 1960s, ORPA was critical of earlier guerrilla efforts in Guatemala, which they saw as a failure. ORPA focused its efforts primarily in the heavily populated highlands and southern coast, and commanded much support among the Indian populations there. Formation Following the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Guatemala was in a state of crisis. The new government brought to power by the United States suspended constitutional guarantees, jailed thousands of political and labor leaders, and exiled hundreds of others. In the first two months of the Castillo Armas regime, as many as 8,000 peasants were murdered. This repression directly fed the guerrilla movement by cutting off all legal avenues in Guatemalan politics, making armed resistance the only real method of political express ...
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Guatemalan Civil War
The Guatemalan Civil War was a civil war in Guatemala fought from 1960 to 1996 between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups. The government forces have been condemned for committing genocide against the Maya population of Guatemala during the civil war and for widespread human rights violations against civilians. The context of the struggle was based on longstanding issues of unfair land distribution; European-descended residents and foreign companies, such as the American United Fruit Company, had dominated control over much of the land, leading to conflicts with the rural poor. Democratic elections during the Guatemalan Revolution in 1944 and 1951 had brought popular leftist governments to power. A United States-backed coup d'état in 1954 installed the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, who was followed by a series of right-wing military dictators. The Civil War started on 13 November 1960, when a group of left-wing junior military officers ...
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Fernando Romeo Lucas García
General Fernando Romeo Lucas García (4 July 1924 – † 27 May 2006) was the 37th President of Guatemala from July 1, 1978 to March 23, 1982. He was elected as Institutional Democratic Party candidate (with the support of the Revolutionary Party). Elections for his presidency were fraud-ridden. During Lucas García's regime, tensions between the radical left and the government increased. The military started to murder political opponents while counterinsurgency measures further terrorized populations of poor civilians. Franja Transversal del Norte The first settler project in the FTN was in Sebol-Chinajá in Alta Verapaz. Sebol, then regarded as a strategic point and route through Cancuén river, which communicated with Petén through the Usumacinta River on the border with Mexico and the only road that existed was a dirt one built by President Lázaro Chacón in 1928. In 1958, during the government of General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes the Inter-American Development Ba ...
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Guatemala
Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by Honduras; to the southeast by El Salvador and to the south by the Pacific Ocean. With an estimated population of around million, Guatemala is the most populous country in Central America and the 11th most populous country in the Americas. It is a representative democracy with its capital and largest city being Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción, also known as Guatemala City, the most populous city in Central America. The territory of modern Guatemala hosted the core of the Maya civilization, which extended across Mesoamerica. In the 16th century, most of this area was conquered by the Spanish and claimed as part of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Guatemala attained independence in 1821 from Spain and Mexico. In 1823, it became part of the Fe ...
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Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity
The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (in Spanish: ''Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca'', URNG-MAIZ or most commonly URNG) is a Guatemalan political party that started as a guerrilla movement but laid down its arms in 1996 and became a legal political party in 1998 after the peace process which ended the Guatemalan Civil War. Formation Since the CIA-backed coup in 1954, opposition groups were continuously forming in an attempt to fight against the repression that the military and wealthy landowners in Guatemala had created. The UNRG formed as a leftist umbrella organization consisting of four groups: the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) and the National Directing Nucleus of PGT (PGT-NDN). They became the public face of the long-running insurgency against the Guatemalan government throughout the Civil War. The URNG led the leftist opposition in peace negotiations with the con ...
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Guatemalan Party Of Labour
The Guatemalan Labour Party (''Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo'') was a communist party in Guatemala. It existed from 1949 to 1998. It gained prominence during the government of Jacobo Arbenz. It was one of the main forces of opposition to the various regimes that followed Arbenz's overthrow, and later became a constituent of the URNG guerrilla coalition during the later phase of the country's Civil War. First Congress The party, then under the name Communist Party of Guatemala (''Partido Comunista de Guatemala'') held its constituent first congress on 28 September 1949. It was founded by the Guatemalan Democratic Vanguard, which had functioned as a fraction within the ruling Revolutionary Action Party for two years. José Manuel Fortuny had been the leader of VDG, and now became general secretary of PCG. At the time of the congress of the party, its membership stood at 43. An earlier Communist Party of Guatemala had been founded in 1922, but was suppressed in 1932. In Ju ...
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Rodrigo Asturias
Rodrigo Asturias Amado (30 October 1939 – 15 June 2005) was a Guatemalan guerrilla leader and politician. Biography Asturias was born in Guatemala City, the first-born son of Nobel Prize-winning author Miguel Ángel Asturias. He studied law in Chile and travelled extensively through the Southern Cone. He later taught at the University of Chile and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Guatemalan Workers Party (Partido Guatemalteco de los Trabajadores or PGT) guerrilla group. During this time he was arrested, tried, and jailed, after which he spent seven years in exile in Mexico. He returned to Guatemala in 1971 and helped form the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas, ORPA). He fought under the '' nom de guerre'' Gaspar Ilom, which he took from a character in '' Hombres de maíz'', one of his father's novels. When four guerrilla groups, including t ...
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Ejército Guerrillero De Los Pobres
The Guerrilla Army Of The Poor (EGP – ''Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres'') was a Guatemalan leftist guerrilla movement, which commanded significant support among indigenous Maya people during the Guatemalan Civil War. Formation __NOTOC__ In the aftermath of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état a series of leftist insurgencies began in the Guatemalan countryside, against the United States-supported military governments of the country. A prominent guerrilla group among these insurgents was the Rebel Armed Forces (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, FAR). The FAR was largely crushed by a counter-insurgency campaign carried out by the Guatemalan government with the help of the U.S. in the late 1960s. Between 2,800 and 8,000 FAR supporters were killed, and hundreds of leftists in urban areas were kidnapped, assassinated, or disappeared. Those of the FAR's leadership that had survived this campaign came together to form the EGP in Mexico City in the 1970s. These leaders include ...
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Rebel Armed Forces
The Rebel Armed Forces ( es, Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, FAR) was a Guatemalan guerrilla organization established in 1961 and lasting until the peace agreements in 1996. In the late 1960s, the Guatemalan government began a United States-backed counter-insurgency campaign that killed between 2,800 and 8000 FAR supporters in eastern Guatemala. The survivors of this campaign, which devastated the FAR, regrouped in Mexico City in the 1970s, and founded the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), which succeeded in mobilizing tremendous popular support over the next few years. FAR is most significantly known for having killed the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein, in 1968. Also killed that year were two U.S. military advisers, Colonel John Webber and Ernest Munro, although they might have been killed at the command of PGT leader Leonardo Castillo Johnson. In 1970, the group briefly kidnapped Guatemala's foreign minister Alberto Fuentes Mohr, but freed him in exchange for the r ...
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Coup D'état
A coup d'état (; French for 'stroke of state'), also known as a coup or overthrow, is a seizure and removal of a government and its powers. Typically, it is an illegal seizure of power by a political faction, politician, cult, rebel group, military, or a dictator. Many scholars consider a coup successful when the usurpers seize and hold power for at least seven days. Etymology The term comes from French ''coup d'État'', literally meaning a 'stroke of state' or 'blow of state'. In French, the word ''État'' () is capitalized when it denotes a sovereign political entity. Although the concept of a coup d'état has featured in politics since antiquity, the phrase is of relatively recent coinage.Julius Caesar's civil war, 5 January 49 BC. It did not appear within an English text before the 19th century except when used in the translation of a French source, there being no simple phrase in English to convey the contextualized idea of a 'knockout blow to the existing administratio ...
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Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt (; 16 June 1926 – 1 April 2018) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as ''de facto'' President of Guatemala in 1982–83. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership. Ríos Montt was a career army officer. He was director of the Guatemalan military academy and rose to the rank of brigadier general. He was briefly chief of staff of the Guatemalan army in 1973, but was soon forced out of the position over differences with the military high command. He ran for president in the 1974 general election, losing to the official candidate General Kjell Laugerud in an electoral process ...
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Carlos Castillo Armas
Carlos Castillo Armas (; 4 November 191426 July 1957) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who was the 28th president of Guatemala, serving from 1954 to 1957 after taking power in a coup d'état. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement (MLN) party, his authoritarian government was closely allied with the United States. Born to a planter, out of wedlock, Castillo Armas was educated at Guatemala's military academy. A protégé of Colonel Francisco Javier Arana, he joined Arana's forces during the 1944 uprising against President Federico Ponce Vaides. This began the Guatemalan Revolution and the introduction of representative democracy to the country. Castillo Armas joined the General Staff and became director of the military academy. Arana and Castillo Armas opposed the newly elected government of Juan José Arévalo; after Arana's failed 1949 coup, Castillo Armas went into exile in Honduras. Seeking support for another revolt, he came to the atten ...
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