Burning of the Spanish Embassy

The Burning of the Spanish Embassy (sometimes called the Spanish Embassy Massacre or the Spanish Embassy Fire) refers to the peaceful occupation of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on January 31st, 1980, by indigenous peasants of the Committee for Peasant Unity and their allies and the subsequent police raid that resulted in a fire which destroyed the embassy and left 36 people dead. The incident has been called "the defining event" of the Guatemalan Civil War. Spain terminated diplomatic relations with Guatemala as a result.

In January 1980 a group of K'iche' and Ixil peasant farmers, recruited for a march to Guatemala City to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants in Uspantán, in Quiché department, by elements of the Guatemalan Army. The peasants were organized, guided and joined by members of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee of Peasant Unity) and a radical student organization known as the Robin García Revolutionary Student Front, groups associated with the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor). The protesters were denied a hearing in Congress and their legal adviser was assassinated. On January 28, they briefly took over two radio stations.

At 11:05 in the morning on January 31, 1980, the peasants, joined by workers and students, entered the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City. According to police reports, some of the demonstrators were armed with machetes, pistols and Molotov cocktails.

Spain was considered sympathetic to the indigenous cause, especially after the Guatemalan Army came to be suspected in the murder of Spanish priests in the indigenous regions. Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López who had visited the Ixil and Kiche regions in the previous weeks, was holding a meeting with former vice president of Guatemala Eduardo Cáceres Lenhoff and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Adolfo Molina Orantes and Lawyer Mario Aguirre Godoy, when the group entered the embassy. The protesters announced that they had come to peacefully occupy the embassy and that they would hold a press conference at noon. They presented the ambassador with a letter that read in part, "We ... direct ourselves to you because we know you are honorable people who will tell the truth about the criminal repression suffered by the peasants of Guatemala." In 1978 an occupation of the Swiss Embassy by factory workers in a labour dispute had ended with a peaceful resolution.

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