(See Cover) In Guatemala, a lush, green little country only 1,000 miles from the U.S.. anti-Communist and pro-Communist forces were locked in battle this week. What kind of war was it? Guatemala's Communist-line government called it "aggression" and "invasion," and shrilled accusations against its neighbors, including the U.S. The lightly armed insurgents who moved in over the eastern border from Honduras called themselves the Army of Liberation, took for their motto "God and Honor," and urged all true Guatemalans to join them against the government and its Red friends. The first actual shooting came as insurgent aircraft strafed fuel tanks and airfields and dropped a few homemade bombs. Days later, two infantry task forces of a few hundred men each fumbled their way toward each other in the bush near a sleepy town called Zacapa and opened the ground fighting. The battle picture was obscure, but the government claimed that it had 3,000 men in "a general offensive" against 2,000 rebels along a line north and south of Zacapa.
Neither side had rushed headlong into combat. Both knew that the outcome would almost certainly depend on whether the regular Guatemalan army, some 6,000 strong and not at all Communist, stuck by the government or swung over to the anti-Communist cause. But whether the Guatemalan clash swelled into bitter and prolonged civil bloodshed or petered out in anticlimax and frustration, the issue was nonetheless clearly drawn. Guatemala, in its special way, was a small-scale sequel to Korea and Indo-China. and the world knew it. Even the United Nations Security Council stirred into action; it held its first Sunday emergency meeting since the June 1950 session on Korea.
"Supreme Chief." The invading anti-Communist rebels were mainly Guatemalans who had been driven into exile in recent years. Their leader, emerging from almost total obscurity, was Carlos Castillo Armas, 40, sometime colonel in the Guatemalan army, who had been jailed in Guatemala City in 1950 after an attempted revolt, but tunneled spectacularly out of prison and fled. Living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he made himself a symbol of the exiled right-wing opposition to Guatemala's Communists. He also began quietly collecting arms, money and men.
No one had given his plans for "liberating" Guatemala much chance. But suddenly last week he was calling himself "Supreme Chief of the Movement of National Liberation," and doing his best to look like it. From his Tegucigalpa house, boxes of arms appeared and were loaded into trucks. Soldiers were recruited, and promised pay of $2.50 a day. The force thus swiftly mobilized was uniformed in fresh suntans, and airlifted (in commercial DC-3s, at $400 a flight) to Macuelizo, Copan and Nueva Ocotepeque. Honduran hamlets on the Guatemalan frontier.
The way of the campaign's beginning was certainly unlike any hot-war fighting of recent times. There were no tanks or artillery, and for that matter, no roads for such luxurious military equipment to move on. The army that gathered along the unpatrolled jungle border that first afternoon could have made no sense except against the background of Central America, where history has been made before by a handful of angry men with rusty Mausers and machetes.