El Comandante

Early this year, before both his house arrest and escape, the two of us — former militantes of Guatemala’s Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) — visited Comandante César in his quarters at the Mariscal Zavala prison on Guatemala’s largest military base. We carried with us Chinese takeout and a notebook full of questions.

César Montes founded various guerrilla columns that from the 1960s into the 1990s fought repressive government forces in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. These were localized struggles headed up by ardent citizens fighting for freedom against centuries-long oppression. The United States, fearing an unstoppable wave of communism coming from the south, funded and propped up authoritarian rulers in Latin America, training and arming their militaries, police, and death squads to quash the rebellions at any cost.

Montes underwent rebel training in Cuba and spent time in North Vietnam. He has in his keeping a wristwatch given to him by Fidel Castro. It was Che’s, left in Cuba when he flew east to Angola.

Montes had never been imprisoned in his long career as a rebel, but he was captured in Acapulco, Mexico, in December 2021 in an illegal raid, transported clandestinely back into Guatemala, then rammed into jail after a sham trial. He is the big prize landed by the ineffectual former president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, who had few plans for governance in the four years of his term (2020–24). Giammattei’s government turned a blind eye as all sorts of bandits, from old corrupt military men to newly crowned drug kingpins, engaged in open plunder of the country.

Montes, in contrast, worked for almost twenty-five years, since the signing of peace accords between the insurgent leadership and the Guatemalan government, on creating civilian structures to transform living conditions for rural Guatemalans. He took on this work, he says, when he realized that armed struggle could never “win a war against an enemy that would rather burn the whole country to the ground.”

Guatemala and El Salvador’s Long Wars

Past the gate we take a breezy walk through the woods, pines pointing high, twisting cypress, sharp-scented eucalyptus shedding its skin. Here on these grounds the detailed plans for horror were worked out by generals and strategists training and sending out troop after troop. A guard takes our ID. We are through.

A narrow alley of shelters, seemingly slapped together, packed in like an encampment, like a slum, winds before us. The men we pass, all prisoners, are nothing but perfectly polite. Strangely, there is not a single guard in sight. No bars; no cells. Do they govern themselves? We lug our heavy bags of takeout until a younger man takes them from us and leads the way.

Montes is surrounded by fellow inmates who in an earlier era would have been enemies: soldiers, police, narcos, but no riffraff — only those of the highest rank. They all call him “Comandante.” If they don’t salute him when he strides by, they pull themselves up a bit straighter out of habit. So do we.

Comandante César ushers us in, up a steep staircase, into his light-filled sitting room and kitchen to a large square table, covered with books and papers. Posters of younger versions of himself and his various departed comrades adorn the walls. Coffee is made. The stories begin. He is the righteous hero of every tale.

Montes never expected to outlive all his comrades, those who died in the jungle or the many more who were disappeared. He was horrified to find himself trapped in jail. In May 2023, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), then president of Mexico, asked Giammattei to pardon Montes, saying he would be welcome to settle in Mexico. (Montes’s father was from the southern state of Chiapas, and he has three children who are Mexican nationals.) The Guatemalan government was unresponsive to this request. So Montes began counting the days: eating well and working out with his Japanese trainer, also a prisoner.

Montes was never our direct commanding officer in the FAR. We entered the war in the late 1980s. By then, he was in the leadership of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador’s civil war. One of us, Margarita, knew him when she was in exile in Nicaragua, where he was supporting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in its war with US-funded counterrevolutionaries.

In 1954, when César was not quite a teenager, Guatemala’s first democratic experiment was destroyed by a CIA-sponsored coup. The US installed a puppet, General Carlos Castillo Armas, who was murdered in internecine strife just three years later.

In 1960, a mutiny erupted within the armed forces led by progressive young army officers disgusted by the Guatemalan government’s complicity with the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. (It had allowed Guatemalan national territory to be used for training of mercenaries.) When the officer insurrection failed to ignite, Captains Luis Turcios Lima and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa launched the Rebel Armed Forces. The national army was swift to strike back, and the long misery of the Guatemalan Civil War began.

During the thirty-six-year war, 250,000 were killed or disappeared, while a million Guatemalans were displaced, a quarter of them into refugee camps in southern Mexico. The 1999 United Nations report Memories of Silence identifies state security forces as being responsible for 93 percent of the violence, describing what occurred in certain areas as genocide perpetrated by the state to wipe out specific Mayan nations entirely.

César Montes, at twenty-one years old, joined the rebel band in its earliest days, in 1962, after getting kicked out of law school. He visited Cuba, where he studied medicine and met Castro, and North Vietnam, where he spoke with US prisoners of war. He also trained alongside Carlos Fonseca, founder of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), and others from El Salvador who would go on to form the FMLN. By the end of 1966, with the death of Turcios Lima in a suspicious car accident, Montes ascended to commander in chief of the FAR.

By May 1970, Yon Sosa was also dead. The Rebel Armed Forces retreated. In 1972, Montes and a dozen comrades slid quietly across the Mexican border into the northern Guatemalan department of Quiché, having formed what would become the country’s strongest rebel group, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). The EGP would provoke the Guatemalan army and recruit thousands of sympathizers among Mayan indigenous communities, dozens of Catholic priests, and hundreds of lay leaders who had been invigorated by liberation theology. (Liberation theology would be the doorway for one of us, Emilie, into radical Christian action.)

In the early 1980s, Montes, following divisions within the EGP, had moved to fighting in the civil war in El Salvador. By 1989, the FMLN rebels were engaged in what they called the “final offensive,” while the Salvadoran army continued to attack “soft targets.”

In November 1989, the army’s elite Atlacatl Battalion broke into the campus of the Central American University, pulling its rector and five professors, all Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter from their beds and murdering them in the rose garden of the residence. World condemnation was swift, and Montes found himself on the team negotiating peace. Accords were signed in 1992 in Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, and the Salvadoran Civil War was over.

Montes’s Capture

Four years later, Guatemala too would end its war, though Montes had no part in the years-long peace talks and makes clear that he never signed anything and never surrendered. One of us, Margarita, says the same; but by 1996 she would return to Guatemala to continue in theater work, often in the highland communities recovering from the war or in the desperate slums of the city. Emilie left the FAR in 1995, returning to her home in Canada where, two years later, inspired by Guatemalan Christian women in the struggle, she would begin studies in seminary.

Back in Guatemala, Montes continued organizing. He worked with displaced farmers, returning refugees, and ex-combatants from both the guerrilla and government forces. Though he grouped these people (mostly men) into battalions and organized them with military-style discipline, there were no arms present. They focused on three things: production, peace building, and dignity. A central pillar of their life together, says Montes, was absolute respect and autonomy for women. There was to be no drinking, drugs, or even smoking in their communities.

While Montes kept one eye on the national situation, he was still connected to wider regional struggles. In 1996, he was visited by the Mexican ambassador to Nicaragua, who had one question: “Are you, Comandante César, the one underneath the black balaclava of the mysterious Comandante Marcos, the public face of the Zapatistas?” Montes laughs. The ambassador — once he verified that Montes wasn’t Marcos — had another question: Would Montes serve as a negotiator between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government? The proposal came with a “fat check,” Montes snorts. Montes was a military strategist. Marcos was a poet and an idealist. A chequesote was no temptation for either man.

We have been hearing stories now for hours. Time for a meal. Margarita organizes the plates, and one by one, pops them into the microwave. Montes continues to deliver story after story over steaming chow mein. He laughs again telling us about how, in El Salvador in the early 1990s, his Soviet girlfriend made a beet borscht to serve to a certain handsome black-haired Venezuelan named Hugo for his birthday dinner. Montes stops laughing, turns serious, and notes how Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Schafik Hándal, of the FMLN, are now all dead. “Castro loved Chavez — like his own son,” he reflects, stirring his noodles, now cold.

After lunch we focus on the story of his entrapment. Montes’s enemies had it in for him, primarily the ultraright business magnate Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, son of a military man. Since 2013, Méndez Ruiz, through his organization the Foundation Against Terrorism, has worked feverishly to overthrow every effort for democratization in Guatemala. Investigations into higher-ranking army officers were stopped in their tracks, and many jurists, journalists, and human rights activists working on anti-corruption cases were silenced, jailed, or driven into exile.

Since 2021, Méndez Ruiz has been included on the “Engel list,” the report to the US Congress identifying the most pernicious corrupt actors in Central America. Méndez Ruiz, who as a youth had been held hostage for two months by militants of Guatemala’s communist party before being released unharmed, holds a specific hatred for Montes.

The 2013 trial against General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s dictator from 1982 to ’83, had enraged Méndez Ruiz. Convicted in a Guatemalan court for genocide against the Maya-Ixil people and crimes against humanity, Rios Montt was sentenced to eighty years in jail. (The ruling was later overturned on a technicality, and he died at home under house arrest while awaiting retrial.) Méndez Ruiz’s father had been the general’s interior minister during the genocide. If activists and jurists could strike so successfully against the old military regime, who would be next? In addition to jurists and journalists, he set his sights on Comandante César.

In September 2019, suspicious military activity was reported in Semuy II, El Estor. Rather than a regular troop movement, the action consisted of nine low-ranking soldiers advancing through the underbrush on little-traversed paths. The community went on high alert. The Turcios Lima Foundation — the NGO that Montes launched in 1997, named after the founder of the FAR — was active in the area, in both alternative production projects and in training for community self-defense.

The valley was long steeped in conflict thanks to its rich nickel deposit that a Canadian mining company exploited before closing down during the war years. In 2006, the mines were slated to reopen. Violence against community members again exploded, with incidents of murder, assault, and gang rape. State and company forces were behind the violence, and they seldom faced serious consequences.

When the dust settled from the 2019 incursion, three soldiers were dead. The villagers claimed they had been defending themselves. Government authorities saw their chance. They declared a state of siege and clamped down with martial law. The public prosecutor’s office accused Montes of being behind the actions.

Montes vigorously denies these accusations, saying he had had no recent contact with the community members and could prove that he had not been anywhere near the area — which has no cell phone reception — and did not order any actions. (He also said, somewhat unhelpfully, that if he had engaged in action, there would have been more than three soldiers dead.) In an added layer of confusion, five days after the killing of the soldiers, a community member, Agustín Chub, was found strangled to death. State authorities say that he was the one who pulled the trigger that killed the soldiers, and that he had taken his own life.

After escaping the ambush set for him, Montes left Guatemala, first slipping into El Salvador and then into Mexico, where he declared himself in political exile and began negotiations with the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance. He received support from his friend, the writer and publisher Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and expected to set himself up as a political adviser. But in Acapulco, in October 2020, Montes was grabbed by a rogue Mexican police unit. He was taken in handcuffs to Mexico City, then flown to Tapachula on the Mexico-Guatemala border and handed over to Guatemalan authorities.

On March 29, 2022, Montes was found guilty along with seven other community members from Semuy II, including women leaders Rosa Ich Xi, Olivia Mucú, and Angelina Coy Choc. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison.

Méndez Ruiz and others, like then president Alejandro Giammattei and Ríos Montt’s daughter, the conservative presidential candidate Zury Ríos, took to social media to express their delight. Their archenemy had been put away for life.

The Battle Over Guatemala’s Past

Montes was jailed for the same reason dozens of jurists and intellectuals are in exile and others, like newspaperman Rubén Zamora, were imprisoned. These leaders are foundational figures in the battle over the narrative of what actually happened in recent Guatemalan history. Was the civil war — according to left-wing analysis — the story of a fiery band of idealists along with their indigenous allies (who in the end bore the devastating brunt of the violent backlash) battling centuries-long despotic oppression, or — in the view of the Right — the fight of a small band of their heroic military men who stood up to defend the nation’s honor against a pack of communist desperados?

Until June 2023, it seemed as if the right-wing narrative was locked in, as Méndez Ruiz and his cronies muscled themselves into ever greater prominence. But in the Guatemalan election on June 21, 2023, and the runoff on August 20, something shocking happened: an anti-corruption crusader, Bernardo Arévalo, son of one of the first democratically elected presidents to hold office in Guatemala before the CIA-sponsored coup, won fair and square. His party, Movimiento Semilla, had snuck through the back door. The right-wing bloc hadn’t bothered to disqualify or ban Arévalo or his party — they were too small to worry about.

So on January 14, 2024, Bernardo Arévalo took office, despite desperate efforts by the Right, led by an ever more frantic Méndez Ruiz, to undermine and delegitimize the elections.

What made Arévalo’s success possible was an unprecedented uprising of the united indigenous Maya communities. They shut down the country for the entire month of October in a general strike. Then in a laser-focused action, they occupied the streets around the offices of corrupt attorney general Consuelo Porras and her henchmen for 105 days. The Mayan nations and their rotating set of leaders were clear: they were not there to support Arévalo or Semilla in particular but to uphold the democratic process. After all their losses, the wars, their lack of access to state representation, the Mayan nations were unbeatable when they exercised their power.

The Battle for Guatemala’s Future

When we take our leave, our old commander hands us each a T-shirt with his photo on the front. Three days later, we will go to the Central Plaza to watch Arévalo’s 4 a.m. victory speech after a last-gasp nine-hour delay orchestrated by his enemies.

We knew that Arévalo’s victory would not mean the immediate release of prisoners of conscience. Almost a year later, Guatemala’s forever enemies — corrupt economic elites and their semi-visible allies — still hold the country hostage. They are as furious, slippery, and dangerous as ever.

After Montes’s surprise release to house arrest in October, then the immediate rescinding of that order, and then his surreptitious disappearance from the hands of authorities, it’s impossible to tell how this story will end. To some a hero, to others a villain, and in his own mind never a victim, Montes has what he most desires: the ability to decide until the end his own fate as Central America’s last comandante.