“God Doesn't Like the Revolution”: The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954

Abstract

“God Doesn’t Like the Revolution”The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954 Patricia Harms (bio) Conciudadanos católicos: nuestra libertad de conciencia está en peligro y nuestra Iglesia y sus representantes están gravemente amenazados (Fellow Catholic citizens: our liberty of conscience is in danger and our church and its representatives are gravely threatened). Concha Estéves, “Energica protesta del pueblo catolico,” October 1953 Vayamos a la campaña contra el comunismo en nombre de Dios y con Dios, pero jamás, guíados por mesquinos intereses políticos. . . . Todo católico debe luchar contra el comunismo por su misma condición de católico (Let us take our campaign against communism in the name of God and with God, but never guided by petty political interests. . . . Every Catholic should struggle against communism as a Catholic). Mariano Rossell y Arellano, “Carta Pastoral sobre los avances del comunismo en Guatemala,” April 1954 In the year following the election of Jacobo Arbenz conservative opposition to the Guatemalan revolution reached a critical juncture. On the afternoon of July 11, 1951, a labor dispute between the director of a state-run orphanage and its employees erupted into violence. Hundreds of women from the central market in Guatemala City led the crowd of several thousand protesting the dismissal of the employees, some of whom were members of the Catholic order the Sisters of Charity. The two-day conflict around the orphanage, the Centro Educativo Asistencial, resulted in the deaths of at least four people and injuries to over seventy others, many of whom had been innocent bystanders. All constitutional guarantees were suspended for the next thirty days in order to restore social order in the capital city. As instigators of the event the market women were catapulted onto the national stage as the unlikely leaders of an [End Page 111] antirevolutionary movement that represented those anxious to preserve the economic monopoly of the elite landowners, a strong patriarchal society, and the strength of conservative political parties. Despite the tremendous popularity of the revolutionary era, spanning the presidencies of Juan José Arévalo, 1944–50, and Jacobo Arbenz, 1950–54, strident opposition to the revolution’s economic policies and social reforms quickly emerged from strategically significant groups. Members of the military launched more than thirty coup d’etat attempts against the government of Juan José Arévalo, despite its moderate nationalist tenor and modest economic reforms. As a highly respected military colonel Jacobo Arbenz received less opposition from the military. His economic reforms and working relationship with the Guatemalan communist party, however, drew frequent and increasingly violent demonstrations from the fervently anticommunist university students and the market women. Their antirevolutionary rhetoric only grew more caustic following his highly controversial and popular land reform implemented in 1952. Poor and predominantly illiterate, the women who worked in the central market surrounding the National Cathedral emerged as the most enduring image of this multifaceted antirevolutionary social movement. Sought out by university students and political parties for their emphatic anticommunism, the market women initiated and participated in countless street protests following the July incident at the orphanage. They became indelibly linked with the mounting political opposition against the Arbenz government and symbolically represented a larger antirevolutionary opposition composed of conservative political parties, university students, and the elite land-owning class. However, they were most closely linked with the Guatemalan Catholic Church and its archbishop, Mariano Rossell y Arellano. Under Rossell y Arellano’s leadership, the Catholic Church supported political and social opposition to Guatemala’s democratically elected revolutionary governments in several covert and overt directions. Scholarship has focused extensively on the church’s covert collusion with the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, which is credited with the June 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. The overt associations the church successfully created with urban Guatemalan women, who have generally been credited as an influential force in the antirevolutionary campaign, however, has not been examined.1 The church sought out women to support its antirevolutionary campaign in two specific ways. Although reluctant to acknowledge female suffrage granted to literate women in 1945, the archbishop wrote frequent pastoral letters urging Guatemalan women...