Writing in Jacobin, Emilie Teresa Smith and Margarita Kenefic, both former militants in the Guatemala’s Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) during the Guatemalan internal armed conflict, talk of César Montes, ‘Central America’s Last Comandante’, who led rebel forces, including the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), against US-backed dictatorships across Central America. They spoke to him while he was detained in Mariscal Zavala prison prior to his subsequent escape.
César Montes founded various guerrilla columns that from the 1960s into the 1990s fought repressive government forces in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. These were localized struggles headed up by ardent citizens fighting for freedom against centuries-long oppression. The United States, fearing an unstoppable wave of communism coming from the south, funded and propped up authoritarian rulers in Latin America, training and arming their militaries, police, and death squads to quash the rebellions at any cost.
Montes underwent rebel training in Cuba and spent time in North Vietnam. He has in his keeping a wristwatch given to him by Fidel Castro. It was Che’s, left in Cuba when he flew east to Angola.
Montes had never been imprisoned in his long career as a rebel, but he was captured in Acapulco, Mexico, in December 2021 in an illegal raid, transported clandestinely back into Guatemala, then rammed into jail after a sham trial. He is the big prize landed by the ineffectual former president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, who had few plans for governance in the four years of his term (2020–24). Giammattei’s government turned a blind eye as all sorts of bandits, from old corrupt military men to newly crowned drug kingpins, engaged in open plunder of the country.
Montes, in contrast, worked for almost twenty-five years, since the signing of peace accords between the insurgent leadership and the Guatemalan government, on creating civilian structures to transform living conditions for rural Guatemalans. He took on this work, he says, when he realized that armed struggle could never “win a war against an enemy that would rather burn the whole country to the ground.”
You can read the full article, with links, here, Central America’s Last Comandante.
Categories: Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Military, Poverty, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
Post comments here