Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, a Guatemalan guerrilla leader, was killed by Mexican soldiers in Chiapas in May 1970. His death dealt a decisive death blow to one of Guatemala’s most prominent guerrilla movements of the 1960s and exposed a transnational, civilian and military, counterinsurgent project. In Guatemala, his death prefigured the end of the country’s first revolutionary cycle, and beginning of higher levels of political violence. In Latin America, it signaled the expansion of transnational networks of surveillance and repression, and an intensification of cold war terror.
Arturo Taracena Arriola’s latest book, Yon Sosa. Historia del MR-13 en Guatemala y México, tackles the social and political history of this transnational corridor of insurgency and counterinsurgency. As the region’s governments—both military and civilian—became increasingly anti-democratic in the 1960s, militant groups on the left vigorously debated, in discourse and action, new projects of liberation. Guatemala was, as Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1967, “the face, clumsily masked, of all Latin America; the face that exhibits the suffering and hope” of a continent. In this milieu, the November 13 Revolutionary Movement, or MR-13, led by Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, was the flagbearer of the country’s popular democratizing impulse.
Guatemala was, as Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1967, ‘the face, clumsily masked, of all Latin America; the face that exhibits the suffering and hope’ of a continent.
Taracena’s two-part book provides a deep look into the group’s internal strategies, tactics, actions, and politics that produced new forms of resistance and new visions of liberation in the face of mounting state-led repression in the sixties. The first part of the book is a historical analysis of Yon Sosa’s life and the MR-13’s trajectory; the second part is a compilation of previously hard-to-find texts authored by Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, along with contextual notes.
The MR-13 were the first Guatemalan guerilla movement to form after the U.S.-backed counterrevolution that overthrew democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. It began as an army revolt in 1960, in which army officials attempted to instigate a wider rebellion against the military government of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. After the revolt’s failure, the future leaders of the MR-13 fled to Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico to shore up support for an eventual return to Guatemala. As Taracena demonstrates through detailed analysis, by 1962 the rebels returned and began a process of unification and conscientization. Early in this process, the MR-13 defined itself as a national-democratic guerrilla movement fighting against domestic authoritarianism and U.S. imperialism. In the years that followed, the movement formulated a critique against the liberal institutions it initially tried to overtake, and called for socialist liberation as the only solution out of capitalist dependency.
Central to Taracena’s narrative of the movement is the life of Yon Sosa, who became the organic leader of the MR-13. Yon Sosa’s identity—the son of a Chinese merchant and a ladinized Guatemalan—and reputation facilitated relations with the movement’s peasant and Indigenous base. Throughout the 1960s, Yon Sosa and the MR-13 became protagonists in national politics and controversies, left-wing breakthroughs and break-ups, and hemispheric debates over the nature of anti-capitalist and guerrilla struggle. Sifting through a wide array of sources, Taracena takes the reader through these polemics and illuminates how debates over tactics, strategies, and vocabulary, both within the MR-13 as well as among Guatemalan left organizations, reverberated nationally and hemispherically. What results is a book that challenges a common, pessimistic reading of Guatemalan history that portrays the left, insurgency, and democracy itself as destined to fail, in past as in present.
What made the MR-13 stand out in the panorama of the Guatemalan armed left was its open declaration, in 1964, of fighting for a Socialist Revolution.
What made the MR-13 stand out in the panorama of the Guatemalan armed left was its open declaration, in 1964, of fighting for a Socialist Revolution. Such a program distinguished it from the PGT, Guatemala’s communist party, which had a stance closer to that taken by the USSR. The PGT advocated for revolution through stages in which guerrilla fighting was but one of many tools to build nationalist pressure for a democratic opening. They advocated for a wide coalition of workers, peasants, and the bourgeoisie that, once in power, could enact an orthodox development program toward socialism. In contrast, by 1964, the MR-13 declared it was neither fighting for an electoral victory nor seeking alliances with bourgeois sectors; rather its fight was to instill a government of and for peasants and workers. This base, the MR-13 maintained, contained the elements for a novel path out of exploitation and into socialism.
The movement’s tactics also differed from the FAR, Guatemala’s other main guerrilla movement at the time, which splintered away from the MR-13 by early 1965. While the MR-13 enacted the Leninist strategy of dual power—where the formation of both local governing committees and militias would create the conditions for internal governance and external defense—the FAR considered the tactic too risky amid increasing repression. The difference in tactics had to do, in part, with differences in geography. The MR-13’s main theater of operations was the rural department of Izabal and its surrounding areas. The fact that Sosa was born and grew up there made him a trusted figure. The FAR, on the other hand, focused their operations in the Guatemalan capital, the nerve center of the state’s repressive apparatus. In Guatemala City, the alienation of urban life produced by constant states of siege and perpetual military and police presence, closed off avenues toward deeper and longer-lasting networks of support. Taracena explores these and other disagreements between the MR-13, the FAR, and the PGT not as static ideological differences, but as fluctuating disagreements whose terms changed in the heat of battle.
The MR-13 also stood out for its integration of members of the Mexican Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PORt), a polemical party among the Latin American armed left, into its leadership. The MR-13’s ideology, though largely unstated, was latent in its military and organizing actions. PORt leaders like Adolfo Gilly, Francisco Amado Granados, and Arturo Caballero nudged MR-13 leaders toward verbalizing the movement’s ideological program. Indeed, as founder and editor of Revolución Socialista, the MR-13’s publication, Amado Granados fine-tuned the group’s ideas, articulated its stance on other militant groups in Guatemala and Latin America, and placed the MR-13 among the vanguard of hemispheric militancy. Simultaneously, PORt members helped construct a transnational corridor of personnel, weapons, and funds that flowed to the MR13.
The involvement of so many non-Guatemalans in the MR-13, however, left it open to the criticism that the group espoused alien interests. It was not only the FAR and PGT who made this point. Fidel Castro, though he was supportive of guerrilla struggle writ large, agreed. He, like the FAR and PGT, worried about CIA infiltration into the movement. During his closing speech at the First Tricontinental Conference in 1966, Castro characterized Yon Sosa as “patriotic” but worried that he was easily manipulable since he was “ignorant of complex political issues and of the history of revolutionary thought.” Castro’s closing speech signaled Cuba’s shift to materially support the FAR in place of the MR-13.
The accusations waged against Yon Sosa and his movement of outsider infiltration and manipulation—a key subject of the book—have turned him into a Caliban figure, noble but reckless, in national memory. Taracena, through a meticulous comparative analysis of sources, pushes back against the idea that MR-13’s ideas were wholly imported or inorganic. Instead, he details how the group developed a robust internal base—made up of peasants, students, workers, army leaders, and intellectuals—which informed the texture of the movement’s politics, tactics, and strategies. The positions developed by the movement created a foundation, taken up in the decades that followed, for powerful grassroots visions of democracy, justice, and equality. In this sense, Taracena’s book is a clear vindication of Yon Sosa and the MR-13.
It is in making his case that Taracena creates new ways of thinking about social, political, Central American, and Cold War history.
It is in making his case that Taracena creates new ways of thinking about social, political, Central American, and Cold War history. The array of intelligence documents—from the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala—memoirs, testimonies, periodicals, and interviews produce a fine-grained historical perspective that is doubly impressive given that his subject is an organization whose safety hinged on staying out of the historical register. Few others could have written this book: Taracena’s archival sources are the accumulation of a life’s work as a historian; his interviews and oral histories are a testament to his own participation in Guatemalan militancy.
Taracena’s deep familiarity with Guatemala’s history and historiography makes it at times appear as if the book were solely geared toward an audience of experts. Nevertheless, as Guatemala is a country enmeshed in a prolonged war over historical memory—fought over the material meanings of “liberty” and “democracy”—the book provides critical insights into the elements animating those debates, demonstrating throughout how action and ideology mutually informed each other.
The MR-13 and other leftist groups fought against the imposition of narrow and unequal definitions of democracy and liberty. Their horizons, while varied, were oriented towards a widening of social liberties and the establishment of democracies that could, among other things, finally undo the nation’s deep-seated racial and class segregation. Throughout their struggle, Yon Sosa and the MR-13 projected their goals to Latin America and the world, generating new ways to think about anti-capitalist resistance and more equal futures. That fight was theirs then, and it is ours now.
Javier Porras Madero is a PhD candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. His research focuses on the formation of the Mexico-Guatemala border across the twentieth century.