Central American WIs don't usually attract a lot of responses. But what the heck.
URNG: Guatemala's leftist revolutionary movement, active from ~1980 to the early '90s. Had the country in something close to civil war for a while, but never did succeed in overthrowing the government.
So what if they had?
OTL, URNG was an umbrella organization over several anti-government groups, some Communist, some not. When URNG formed, one of these groups (I misremember which, but I think it was the artist-writers-students one) suggested that URNG should reach out to the Indians. After all, they were roughly half of the country's population! And they tended to be strongly (if passively) anti-government.
The motion was rejected. There seem to have been a couple of reasons. One, most of the URNG groups were leftists, and partook of the standard Central American leftist anti-clericalism. Since most of the Indians were devout, if not exactly orthodox, reaching out to the Indians would have meant coming to an accomodation with the Church. (1) And that wasn't too popular.
Two, with the exception of the peasant group, most of the URNG groups were members of the fair-skinned elite. Despite their numbers, the Indians had always been politically meaningless as far as this group was concerned. That was true even in the golden age of Guatemalan democracy, under Arevalo and Arbenz, and it was still true a generation later. So they just didn't see the point.
The result of this was that the Indians got caught in the middle, despised and murdered by both sides. (Much more by the government's death squads, to be sure.) (2) Despite occasional flourishes of rhetoric, by and large URNG never treated the Indians as much more than beasts of burden and rather stupid neutrals. The Indians, in turn, never viewed URNG with anything more than very limited enthusiasm, as the lesser of two evils rather than a positive good. (I'm simplifying a complex reality, but that's basically what it boiled down to.)
So the Indians got the worst of both worlds, brutally punished for a revolution that they had little part in. Meanwhile URNG, cut off from Mao's "sea of the people", was never quite able to topple the government, though they did give it conniption fits for a while.
So, the WI: URNG reaches out to the Indians, and seeks to transform itself into a broad-based indigenous revolutionary movement. This is a stretch, but not I think impossible.
Further, then: that this gives URNG enough extra strength to overthrow the government. Given the initial premise, I think this one's not too hard.
There's even a window of oppurtunity. The Carter administration cut off all aid to Guatemala in 1977, citing gross human rights abuses. The Reagan administration started it up again in 1981. But there were a few years when the military government was on its own. And OTL, despite all the killing, the government never did whip URNG; the best they could do was achieve a peace of mutual exhaustion and a UN-backed settlement in the 1990s.
(Of course, URNG wasn't formally founded until 1982. But the various groups had been moving towards cooperation for years before that, and there was some sort of proto-URNG in the '60s. So I guess the POD is an *URNG that forms a few years earlier /and/ includes the Indians.)
So. Suppose we have an *URNG victory in, ohhh, 1981 -- before renewed US aid can really begin to take effect. It doesn't take much to overthrow a Guatemalan government. (3) And goodness knows Lucas Garcia wasn't popular. He was hated by the left, by the far right, and by the people generally. It's possible the military wouldn't even fight for him. They overthrew him OTL, replacing him with Rios Montt.
So now we have not one, but two left-wing governments in 1980s Central America. Guatemala's won't be as Communist as Nicaragua's, but it's questionable whether the Reagan administration will make this distinction. (4) Should produce an interesting ramping up of the paranoid rhetoric; Guatemala is only /fourteen/ hours by car from Texas!
The *URNG government is going to be explicitly pro-Indian, which is something like a first in the region. That alone should produce interesting knock-ons. Then there are the effects on Mexico...
Of course, like Nicaragua, *URNG Guatemala comes with an instant counterrevolutionary guerrilla movement. Which is going to be a lot more widespread and popular than Nicaragua's Contras. Rios Montt was always pretty popular; and the Ladino-Indian split ran painfully deep. An "Indian" government would be widely and immediately unpopular among quite a lot of the population.
This one could go a number of ways, some of them interesting, some of them... really unpleasant.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
(1) One of several peculiarities of the Guatemalan conflict is that the Church, instead of being associated with reaction and authority, was seen as something like a neutral third party.
2) The government did either 80% or 93% of the killings, depending on whether you believe the Church's study or the UN's.
(3) Five coups in the last 50 years, and that's not counting 1954.
(4) Though perhaps not impossible. Believe it or not, there were a couple of hot-pink Latin American and Caribbean governments in the 1980s that suffered nothing worse than the occasional diplomatic snub. Cheddi Jaggan, anyone?
URNG: Guatemala's leftist revolutionary movement, active from ~1980 to the early '90s. Had the country in something close to civil war for a while, but never did succeed in overthrowing the government.
So what if they had?
OTL, URNG was an umbrella organization over several anti-government groups, some Communist, some not. When URNG formed, one of these groups (I misremember which, but I think it was the artist-writers-students one) suggested that URNG should reach out to the Indians. After all, they were roughly half of the country's population! And they tended to be strongly (if passively) anti-government.
The motion was rejected. There seem to have been a couple of reasons. One, most of the URNG groups were leftists, and partook of the standard Central American leftist anti-clericalism. Since most of the Indians were devout, if not exactly orthodox, reaching out to the Indians would have meant coming to an accomodation with the Church. (1) And that wasn't too popular.
Two, with the exception of the peasant group, most of the URNG groups were members of the fair-skinned elite. Despite their numbers, the Indians had always been politically meaningless as far as this group was concerned. That was true even in the golden age of Guatemalan democracy, under Arevalo and Arbenz, and it was still true a generation later. So they just didn't see the point.
The result of this was that the Indians got caught in the middle, despised and murdered by both sides. (Much more by the government's death squads, to be sure.) (2) Despite occasional flourishes of rhetoric, by and large URNG never treated the Indians as much more than beasts of burden and rather stupid neutrals. The Indians, in turn, never viewed URNG with anything more than very limited enthusiasm, as the lesser of two evils rather than a positive good. (I'm simplifying a complex reality, but that's basically what it boiled down to.)
So the Indians got the worst of both worlds, brutally punished for a revolution that they had little part in. Meanwhile URNG, cut off from Mao's "sea of the people", was never quite able to topple the government, though they did give it conniption fits for a while.
So, the WI: URNG reaches out to the Indians, and seeks to transform itself into a broad-based indigenous revolutionary movement. This is a stretch, but not I think impossible.
Further, then: that this gives URNG enough extra strength to overthrow the government. Given the initial premise, I think this one's not too hard.
There's even a window of oppurtunity. The Carter administration cut off all aid to Guatemala in 1977, citing gross human rights abuses. The Reagan administration started it up again in 1981. But there were a few years when the military government was on its own. And OTL, despite all the killing, the government never did whip URNG; the best they could do was achieve a peace of mutual exhaustion and a UN-backed settlement in the 1990s.
(Of course, URNG wasn't formally founded until 1982. But the various groups had been moving towards cooperation for years before that, and there was some sort of proto-URNG in the '60s. So I guess the POD is an *URNG that forms a few years earlier /and/ includes the Indians.)
So. Suppose we have an *URNG victory in, ohhh, 1981 -- before renewed US aid can really begin to take effect. It doesn't take much to overthrow a Guatemalan government. (3) And goodness knows Lucas Garcia wasn't popular. He was hated by the left, by the far right, and by the people generally. It's possible the military wouldn't even fight for him. They overthrew him OTL, replacing him with Rios Montt.
So now we have not one, but two left-wing governments in 1980s Central America. Guatemala's won't be as Communist as Nicaragua's, but it's questionable whether the Reagan administration will make this distinction. (4) Should produce an interesting ramping up of the paranoid rhetoric; Guatemala is only /fourteen/ hours by car from Texas!
The *URNG government is going to be explicitly pro-Indian, which is something like a first in the region. That alone should produce interesting knock-ons. Then there are the effects on Mexico...
Of course, like Nicaragua, *URNG Guatemala comes with an instant counterrevolutionary guerrilla movement. Which is going to be a lot more widespread and popular than Nicaragua's Contras. Rios Montt was always pretty popular; and the Ladino-Indian split ran painfully deep. An "Indian" government would be widely and immediately unpopular among quite a lot of the population.
This one could go a number of ways, some of them interesting, some of them... really unpleasant.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
(1) One of several peculiarities of the Guatemalan conflict is that the Church, instead of being associated with reaction and authority, was seen as something like a neutral third party.
2) The government did either 80% or 93% of the killings, depending on whether you believe the Church's study or the UN's.
(3) Five coups in the last 50 years, and that's not counting 1954.
(4) Though perhaps not impossible. Believe it or not, there were a couple of hot-pink Latin American and Caribbean governments in the 1980s that suffered nothing worse than the occasional diplomatic snub. Cheddi Jaggan, anyone?