ABSTRACT
The Ixcan rain forest was an agricultural frontier where peasants had moved away from the traditional authorities in their hometowns, where the struggle for survival compelled them to work with strangers from other places, and where they were already organized by the Catholic Church. Here the first fifteen Guerrilla Army of the Poor fighters established themselves in 1972, northwest of Uspantan. Letter from Uspantan justice of the peace Salvador Figueroa Montufar to President of National Institute for Agrarian Transformation, accompanied by sketch map locating damages, November 16, 1976. As the campesinos of northern Quiche contemplate their misfortunes, they sometimes refer to soldiers and guerrillas as if they came from the same root. The position of indígenas deteriorated again in the nineteenth century, after Guatemala became a republic. The formative experience for the generation that launched the insurgency in the 1960s and led it into the 1990s was the shock of the Central Intelligence Agency invasion.
