Carlos Arana Osorio
Carlos Arana Osorio was president of Guatemala from 1970 to 1974, the colonel who had run the counter-insurgency in Zacapa in 1966 and 1967 and was called the jackal of Zacapa for it, elected on the promise that if it was necessary to turn the country into a cemetery to pacify it he would not hesitate. That is the sentence the country remembers him by. His four years were the first in which the state's killing moved from the eastern hills to the capital's streets. He was born in Barberena, a Chorrillos-trained officer, the commander of the Zacapa military zone whom Méndez Montenegro's pact had let loose. He was the ambassador to Nicaragua after the campaign, from where Somoza's friendship and the right's parties, the MLN of the coup of 1954 and the army's own, made him their candidate in 1970, elected with forty-three per cent on a turnout of half. The state of siege of November 1970 lasted a year. The capital was under curfew, the university raided, the lawyers, the students, the union leaders and the left's politicians taken from the streets by men in unmarked cars, perhaps seven thousand dead in the first three years by the count of the church's later report. The FAR and the new guerrilla of the Ixcán, the EGP, driven underground and into the highlands where the next war would be fought. There was the Ojo por Ojo squad that the army's intelligence ran against the capital's left. The rest was the money. There were the nickel concession at El Estor to the Canadians, and the Franja Transversal del Norte, the strip of land along the northern frontier that the officers gave themselves in estates, which was where the generals' fortunes began and where the war of the 1980s would be fought against the peasants they had displaced. There were the oil, the tourism and the Central American market, and the election of 1974, which his defence minister Laugerud lost to Ríos Montt, then a general of the Christian Democrats, and was declared to have won. He handed over in July 1974. He was a senator, an ambassador and a rancher. He died in Guatemala City in December 2003, at eighty-five, untried. He was the president whose promise the state kept for twenty years.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2003 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, general, politician
