Guatemala 1944-1954: The Army, the Communist Party, and the Fall of Arbenz | ARIS Case Study

Guatemala spent ten years between two revolutions. The 1944 uprising that ended General Jorge Ubico's dictatorship brought reformist governments under Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The 1954 crisis ended with a conservative colonel in the National Palace. When Carlos Castillo Armas and his "Liberation Army" crossed the border in June 1954, the Guatemalan Army stood aside, and its own General Staff demanded Arbenz's resignation.

This episode examines Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Guatemala 1944-1954, first published by the Special Operations Research Office in 1964 and reissued by USASOC through the ARIS series with Johns Hopkins APL. The study takes an unusual angle for the series. Its central subject is the indigenous military and how officer corps politics shaped the rise and collapse of Communist influence in a developing state.

In this episode:

• The fall of Ubico and the junta of Francisco Arana, Jacobo Arbenz, and Jorge Toriello
• How the Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT) gained leverage through urban and rural labor, the 1952 agrarian reform, and government administration, using a small cadre to control large organizations
• Nationalism, the United Fruit Company, and the political power of anti-US sentiment
• Factionalism in the officer corps, the assassination of Arana, and the purges that followed
• The 1952 US arms embargo and the 1954 Soviet Bloc arms shipment
• Why Arbenz's order to arm a 5,000-man people's militia unified the army against him
• The aftermath: Castillo Armas, the outlawing of the PGT, and the party's clandestine rebuilding through 1963
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Guatemala is a case study in how a host nation military's institutional interests decide which way it breaks under pressure.

Most accounts of revolutionary war follow a straight line: a political movement organizes, its armed wing wins, and the new society gets built afterward. This episode examines a case where all three happened at once.

Based on an essay by Moe Gyo for The Resistance Hub, it traces how the Kurdish movement associated with the PKK moved away from the goal of an independent state toward democratic confederalism, and how that shift opened space for women to organize on their own terms. The Women's Protection Units, the YPJ, were founded in northern Syria in 2013. They had to build command, discipline, training and logistics like any fighting force, while also trying to change the patriarchal relations that military institutions tend to reproduce.

The episode covers:
• The move from national liberation to democratic confederalism, and why it changed what the movement had to become
• Jineolojî, the "science of women," and its role in shaping political identity
• The constant tension between military command and democratic participation
• How combat tests organizations, individuals, the wider movement and the institutions it defends
• The Battle of Kobane, where survival under Islamic State assault depended on coalition airpower and reinforcements, and where military effectiveness and political transformation developed side by side
• A recursive model of revolution: the movement shapes the organization, the organization shapes its members, and their practice reshapes the movement

These organizations have changed since the period the essay covers. The PKK announced its dissolution in May 2025, and the Syrian Democratic Forces announced theirs in August 2026. Context and sources are in the full article.

Ever wonder how a resistance movement actually works? How ordinary people, outgunned and outnumbered, manage to organize, survive, and push back against a much stronger power?

In about seven minutes, this episode breaks it all down. We pull from ARIS, a well-known research series that studied resistance and insurgent movements across the last century, and boil it down to the parts that matter. You will learn the three pieces every movement needs: the people behind the scenes who run things and keep it organized, the everyday supporters who provide food, shelter, and cover, and the fighters out front. We also get into why some movements win people over and last for years while others fall apart fast.

No background needed. Just a clear, quick look at how resistance really happens, from the researchers who spent decades studying it.