Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres
| Guerrilla Army of the Poor | |
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Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres Participant in Guatemalan Civil War |
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Logo of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres
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| Active | 19 January 1972 – 15 February 1997 |
| Ideology |
Marxist–Leninism Communism |
| Leaders | Rolando Morán |
| Area of operations | Guatemala |
| Part of | URNG |
| Allies | CUC, PGT, MR-13, ORPA, FAR |
| Opponents | Armed Forces of Guatemala |
The Guerrilla Army Of The Poor (EGP – Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres) was a Guatemalan leftist guerrilla movement, which commanded a lot of support among the indigenous Mayan people during the Guatemalan Civil War. The EGP one of the four organizations comprising the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG – Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca) that negotiated and signed the peace accords in Guatemala with the government and the Army of Guatemala.
In the aftermath of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, a series of leftist insurgencies began in the Guatemalan countryside, against the United States supported military governments of the country. A prominent guerrilla group among these insurgents was the Rebel Armed Forces (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, FAR). The FAR was largely crushed by a counter-insurgency campaign carried out by the Guatemalan government with the help of the U.S. in the late 1960s. Between 2800 and 8000 FAR supporters were killed, and hundreds of leftists in urban areas were kidnapped, assassinated, or disappeared. Those of the FAR's leadership that had survived this campaign came together to form the EGP in Mexico City in the 1970s. These included Ricardo Ramírez (whose nom de guerre was Rolando Morán) and Julio César Macías (known as César Montes), both Ladinos, and a number of indigenous Mayan leaders.
The new group had several ideological differences from the FAR. The FAR had based its ideology on the foco theory of Che Guevara. Several of the new EGP felt that it had not sufficiently taken into account the racial discrimination experienced by the indigenous Mayan people in Guatemala, and that this had limited their support. The EGP drew inspiration from the success of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army in resisting U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. They saw parallels between Guatemala and Vietnam, in that both countries were largely agrarian, were seeing a struggle between capitalism and communism, and were seeing heavy intervention from the U.S. to protect its economic interests. As a result, the EGP decided to include civilians in their projects more actively, and to make non-combatants a part of a revolutionary movement. The EGP saw their role as incorporating the issues civilians were concerned about, but also "instructing" them in their political beliefs.
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Wikipedia