Day Thirty-Three, Antigua

Prof. Virginia Burnett

Wednesday morning I had pancakes for the first time in two or three weeks and they were delicious! Anyways, in history class we looked at the Ten Years of Spring. We started with the 1945 Free Election of Juan Jose Arevalo and his Spiritual Socialism. We then discussed the first somewhat smooth transition of power in a free election from Arevalo to Jacobo Arbenz. Our focus was on the Arbenz presidency and his eventual overthrow. During his presidency, Arbenz focused on creating a nationalistic government; formed peasant leuges in the countryside, supported organized labor, and put forth land reforms. The land reforms were Arbenz's eventual downfall. He required landowners to turn over their unused arable land to the government to be given to farmers who would use the land. The landowners were only required to turn over land they had not used for over five years and they were given government bonds for the value of the lands claimed on taxes. The US United Fruit Company owned 42% of the arable land in Guatemala, so they were very highly effected by the reforms. The CIA claimed Arbenz was a communist because of the reforms and they started a terror campaign against Arbenz by training dissidents for invasion. The code name for the campaign was PBSUCCESS. At the end of the class we watched a video on the communist accusations against Arbenz by the US with interviews and footage from the time.

In religion class we started class with a presentation on Chachales, traditional religious and political necklaces from Guatemala. We then started looking closer at Liberation Theology. We looked at two archbishops of Guatemala; Mariano Rossell y Arellano and Mario Casariego. We learned about Arellano's "kidnapping" Guatemala's "black Christ" as a statement against the government regime. We discussed Catholic Action and its goals to bring Catholicism back around to its "traditional" form. Mario Casariego was Archbishop of Guatemala from 1964-1983; quite a time in Guatemala's history. We learned about the formation of CEG: Bishops' council more inclined to social justice that the Archbishop. In the 1960s the CEG increased social justice involvement by mobilizing health and education projects, agricultural extension and colonization and cooperatives in the Ixcan area. This led to a discussion of "The Melville Affair" in 1967, which was the first of many more occurrences of foreign church representatives who supported the rebels in Guatemala. We then started to touch on the 1970s resurgence of guerrilla organizations and the formation of the CUC by members of the Catholic action, which we will be going over more in future classes, as well as La Violencia from 1978-1983. We looked at "El Calvario de la Iglesia Catolica" 1978-1983: the deaths of 34 church leaders and 500+ catequistas, as well as Bishop Juan Gerardi closing down the Diocese of El Quiche in June of 1980.

After class I worked on the first page of my creative project; the long count coloring book. I had Spanish at 3 and we focused on terms for "this, that, and the other thing," as I like to describe it; este-esta, ese-esa, aquel-aqeulla and there plural forms. Spanish was fun even though we talked about our exam on the 5th and our presentation to the school at the end of the program. In the evening I focused working on my map project and managed to finish tracing the figures on the map, though I have a lot more work when it comes to coloring it in.