Guatemalan guerillas vow to pursue fight

Press, 29 March 1982, Page 8

Guatemalan guerillas vow to pursue fight

NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Guatemala's main guerrilla groups have vowed to continue their revolutionary war despite the ousting of the hard-line regime of General Romeo Lucas Garcia on Wednesday. Spokesmen for the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, which brings together four Marxist rebel groups, said the coup headed by Brigadier-General Efrain Rios Montt had brought only “a change in the facade” of the regime but promised no fundamental differences.

“Our position is clear,” said Joaquin Ventura, a commander of the group known as the Organisation of People in Arms. “We reaffirm the decision of the people to continue to the fight for the fundamental rights of every

human being—the right to life, to work, to health, to dignity and to education.”

Guatemalan Leftist exiles have expressed concern in private that the popular relief at Lucas’s overthrow' and the promise of future changes would result in a weakening of support for the revolutionary movement. But they also said that any relaxation of official repression would, permit the growth of the Leftist opposition which would in turn radicalise the new military Government towards the Right. Although Leftist guerrillas have been active intermittently in Guatemala for the last 20 years, they grew dramatically in numbers and military strength during the Lucas government. The four

groups are believed to have 6000 men and women in arms and enjoy the support of an important segment of the rural population. Lucas’s strategy of attacking the political base of the guerrillas in the mountain communities of western Guatemala also had the effect of forcing many Indians, who make up over half the country’s 7.5 million population, to' join the rebels. Most of the guerrillas are believed to be Indians.

Over the last three years the guerrillas have moved towards a political alliance with political parties that are non-Marxist and hope for change, unions and Catholic Church groups, whose leaders have been assassinated or forced into hiding or exile by official repression.