Fernando Cajas
If there is an important date in the social construction of Guatemala, it is October 20, 1944. It is not October 12, when the Spanish celebrate “race” day and thus mark the discovery of America. The concept of race is no longer used because it is considered biologically incoherent and socially impertinent. Nor is it September 15, 1821 where the independence of a few Creoles from the Spanish crown is celebrated. Less celebrated is the so-called liberal revolution of Justo Rufino Barrios, who ceded a large part of our territory to Mexico and laid the foundations for ill-gotten wealth, as well as legislation that forced rural Guatemalans to work as slaves on farms. the privileged.
There is no more important date for Guatemala than October 20, 1944. The October Revolution was born and grew with the university and social protest against Manuel Estrada Cabrera and later against Jorge Ubico, tyrant presidents at the service of the oligarchy. feudalist of a banana country that was taking its first steps in the search for democracy. The country was not industrial, it was a quasi-feudal agricultural country. Thus, the transformation of the revolution focused on modernizing productive systems and bringing this feudalism to an emerging capitalism. Start, then; an agrarian reform with the aim of providing land to peasants. There was, at that time, an intention to build a more modern country through incipient democracy without touching the interests of the large landowners and the emerging Guatemalan monopolistic elite. The foundations are laid to expand the middle class, more owners of small plots, more wage earners, more economic agents of this emerging capitalism.
Politically, the revolution of October 1944 advanced a State interested in social security, began with the protection of workers’ rights, re-considered education at all levels with a revolutionary model in federation-type schools with a pedagogy innovative student-centered program and an intense teacher training program. In the first government of the revolution, that of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, the number of teacher contracts increased by 50% and the number of rural schools doubled. The salaries of teachers were also significantly improved. The University of San Carlos de Guatemala is refounded and its national and autonomous character is created.
In summary, our country was born into democratic life on October 20, 1944. A sense of nation began to be built that should have been built in the liberal revolution of 1871 with the concept of the Nation-State, but then the State was for a few. and the Nation was only a term that did not respect the social differences of different ethnic and cultural groups. The Revolution of 1944 is really our first step to democracy. However, the global context played a bad trick on us.
By 1950, the world was experiencing what is called the Cold War, a tension between the United States and the former Russia, this was a tension between capitalism and communism. With the nationalization of certain companies, such as the United Fruit Company, a communist threat was perceived in Guatemala. So, any transformation for social improvements in the countries of the Western Hemisphere was seen as a step towards communism. The State Department orchestrated a lethal blow to the government of Jacobo Arbez and produced the counter-revolution that led the country to a bloody civil war that left 200,000 dead.
Thus we arrived at the end of the last century with the Peace Agreements that no one respects, with a legal system that builds the strange methodology of nomination commissions that delegates to universities the election of high courts, comptroller general and other positions to create the vicious circle. to cover themselves with the same jacket, with a political party law that ensures that politicians are recycled and give their positions to their cronies, family members and financiers. Along with this, the last three decades there has been an intense process of privatization of public affairs at all levels as a product of the co-option of the State by a group of businessmen who learned to live off corruption. To this we must add the emergence of a new group of businessmen who are increasingly taking more power, the narcos and coyotes who must be integrated into the CACIF.
We are in an economic, political and cultural crisis. We have not been able to build a State that responds to the people who demand change. The request for the resignation of the attorney general is only the tip of the spear of the real request: a government that works, that reduces malnutrition, that provides access to basic services, drinking water, electricity, health, education, decent work, housing, passable roads, in short a government that governs for the people and not for a small group of privileged people who overnight have a farm in Antigua Guatemala, latest model cars, helicopter transportation and an entire entourage to protect them.
The crisis is born from the caciferous economic model that has protected, hidden and allowed corruption. In fact, the political system protects the Guatemalan oligarchs who distort the justice system in their favor, this is to continue living off the State whose ideologues defend neoliberalism, a political system that only left poverty. As if it were a pendulum it seems that we return to the same challenges of the revolution of ’44:
- Build a more modern country
- Consolidate democracy
- Expand the middle class
- Change the economic model
We are not going to achieve this if we continue to insist on having the same exploitative economic system that plants bananas and exports bananas, that always grows mangoes and exports mangoes, that sows poverty and exports migrants. We must learn to transform raw materials into something of more value, we must learn to give value to our work.
Our poverty is political, economic and cultural. Our crisis is too. This social movement of October 2023 calls us to rebuild a country through the genuine work of all Guatemalans. This will not be able to be done without respect, without breaking useless dichotomies such as Indian-Ladino, urban-rural, left-right, chairos-fachos, that takes us nowhere. What will take us out of underdevelopment is to create a vision of a multi-ethnic, multicultural country capable of transforming raw materials into valuable, material, cultural and technological products. Create Value Chains in our production processes.
We cannot continue to live by selling vegetables to El Salvador, flowers to the United States, sugar to the world, bananas everywhere, coffee to Europe, no. We must rethink a new economic system that requires qualified labor and we must associate them with the pile of useless universities, especially we must break the monopoly of the public university, so that they begin to work in creating relevant, technical, non-technocratic education systems that makes use of the best science and technology available for the design of plants, to give space to Guatemalan inventors, technological innovators, real entrepreneurs who do not hide in the privileges of the government in power, but who really develop companies.
The revolution of October 1944 has a pending task and it can be done by the revolution of October 2023. We cannot go back and kill each other again so that a small group can get rich, no. We must create conditions of dialogue not only to send the pseudo prosecutor Porras to hell but mainly to lay the foundations for a real country, not only a beautiful landscape, but a decent workplace for everyone, that is what this social movement is about. October. Either it is now or it will never be Guatemala.
