ABSTRACT
Guatemala has been ruled by a succession of military strongmen throughout most of its history. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, reformist president Juan Jose Arevalo and his successor, Col. Jacobo Arbenz, broke conservative tradition by mobilizing the Guatemalan popular sector into new political organizations supportive of fundamental socioeconomic change. By 1952 Arbenz had merged most of the parties in his electoral coalition into a single official organization, the party of the Guatemalan Revolution. The Guatemalan officer corps continued to rule behind the facade of electoral democracy during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Guatemalan business community therefore provisionally supported the return to civilian government in hopes of improving the economy and of increasing its influence at the expense of the army. The vast majority of Guatemalan political parties are personalist electoral vehicles that possess neither permanent organizational structures nor coherent strategies for governing.
