In November 1970, Guatemala declared a nationwide State of Siege for the last time. General Carlos Arana Osorio was governing, and the country had spent nearly a decade immersed in an internal armed conflict that had evolved from rural insurgency into urban political violence.
That year was marked by events that shook the State: the kidnapping of Alberto Fuentes Mohr, former Minister of Finance, and the assassination of the German ambassador, Karl von Spreti, a crime that deepened the diplomatic isolation Guatemala was already facing. Added to this context was the arms embargo imposed by the United States following the 1968 assassination of John Gordon Mein, the designated ambassador of that country, which occurred on Reforma Avenue at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR).
It was the first time a U.S. diplomat on mission had been assassinated in Guatemala and one of the few cases—barely six—of U.S. ambassadors killed while in service. By November 1970, that accumulation of violence and international pressure led the State to a situation its own authorities described as a national emergency.
That was the last time, until now, that Guatemala declared a nationwide State of Siege. What followed beginning in 1971 is particularly revealing. During the remainder of the internal armed conflict and the democratic transition after 1985, the Guatemalan State avoided resorting again to that extreme measure, opting instead for more limited legal mechanisms—states of alarm, prevention, and exception—applied territorially. Even military plans of the 1980s, such as Victoria 82 or Firmeza 83, operated under schemes of territorial exception and not under total legal paralysis of the State.
That logic remained after the democratic transition. With the 1985 Constitution and the beginning of civilian governments in 1986, the State of Siege became a strictly exceptional instrument. When it was used, it was in a targeted manner and with limited objectives. In 2010, during the government of Álvaro Colom, a State of Siege was decreed in Alta Verapaz to confront the Los Zetas structure, then deeply rooted in the north of the country. Years later, under Otto Pérez Molina, the same occurred in Jalapa and Santa Rosa.
Even in recent years, already in the postwar period, states of exception decreed by civilian governments were limited to specific municipalities and for brief periods, as occurred in Nahualá and Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán. For nearly four decades, that was the rule: exception as a scalpel, not a hammer.
The contrast with the present is eloquent. The country has regressed half a century in its legal response. The method of exception is the same; the nature of the adversary no longer is. In 1970 the State responded to an ideological insurgency seeking political power; today it faces a criminal insurgency of a transactional nature, interested in capturing territories, institutions, and illegal rents.
That mutation did not occur suddenly or in isolation. Three symptoms show us the sequence and connection of the erosion in the margins of State response that led to the decision to impose a nationwide State of Siege.
The first symptom manifested in the prison system crisis. In October 2025, a massive prison escape occurred from the Fraijanes II detention center, a facility conceived as a maximum-security prison. To find a precedent for an escape of this magnitude from a high-security installation, one must go back more than two decades, to El Infiernito in 2001. The difference is substantial: that escape occurred in a precarious prison system; Fraijanes II was designed precisely to prevent it. The gravity lies not only in the number of escaped inmates, but in what it reveals: the loss of State control even where authority should be absolute.
The second symptom was even more delicate. In November 2025, the theft of high-caliber weaponry from military installations in the north of the country was confirmed. Historically, the theft of weapons for the Army’s exclusive use had been associated with contexts of internal war or attacks against isolated detachments. There are no recent precedents of a looting of high-caliber weaponry—including grenade launchers—from an active military base. The implication is grave: when the State cannot guarantee custody of its own means of coercion, the legitimate monopoly of force ceases to be a premise and becomes an aspiration.
The third symptom became visible in January 2026. Coordinated attacks against agents of the National Civil Police, simultaneously executed in different parts of the country, marked a breaking point. To find episodes with more than fifteen police casualties in a single time cycle, it is necessary to go back to the internal armed conflict. The difference today is qualitative: the violence was not concentrated in one point, but deployed territorially, as a demonstration of the capacity to publicly and simultaneously challenge the State’s presence.
These episodes describe a rupture of the principle of authority and a cumulative process of institutional wear: the State does not collapse; it erodes. The first erosion is deterrence: for years, the rational calculation of crime assumed that the cost of challenging the State outweighed any benefit. When that equation reverses, authority ceases to be credible. The second erosion is intelligence. A State that does not anticipate does not govern; it reacts. Without effective intelligence, exceptionality replaces foresight. The third erosion is the most delicate: institutional capture. When criminal actors operate within State structures, the problem ceases to be external. At that point, the criminal no longer confronts the State; he rents it, penetrates it, or neutralizes it from within. Violence ceases to be ideological and becomes transactional.
Regional experience offers clear warnings. In El Salvador, a regime of exception conceived as a temporary response to criminal violence has lasted for more than three years. In Ecuador, in less than five years, prison deterioration, narcotrafficking penetration, and the loss of territorial control led to the declaration of an “internal armed conflict” in 2024.
In contexts of institutional erosion, the outcome is decided by the functioning of checks and balances. Institutions such as the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the Constitutional Court, the Public Ministry, and the Office of the Comptroller General of Accounts are not technical bodies isolated from the security problem. They are the last barrier between a functional State and a structure where violence, illicit money, and institutional capture converge. The electoral supercycle of the Courts is occurring today in the shadow of this exception.
States of exception may contain episodes of violence; they cannot defeat deeply rooted criminal systems. That task requires judicial systems capable of investigating, prosecuting, and sanctioning without interference. When force replaces the rule of law, the republic begins to govern itself through emergencies.
Guatemala is not condemned. Recent history demonstrates that the country knew how to confront a prolonged internal war without turning exception into the rule. That experience should serve today as a historical reference. The State of Siege may be a legitimate instrument against real threats, but it cannot become a habitual form of government. Civil society must not allow the noise of operations to hide the silence with which the courts are negotiated in nomination commissions.
Democracies do not usually die through abrupt coups, but through the normalization of extraordinary measures that, over time, empty ordinary rules of their content. Venezuela and Nicaragua are examples of authoritarian regimes that consolidated gradually from formal democratic processes. Bolivia shows a different, but equally illustrative trajectory: a democracy eroded by recurrent exceptionality, judicial capture, and the confusion between legality and power.
The question facing Guatemala is not whether it can contain violence today, but whether it is willing to preserve the institutional foundations that will allow it to defeat it tomorrow. Celebrating nearly four decades of democracy under a regime of exception would not be a historical achievement; it would be a warning that other countries in the region have already experienced.
Ramiro Bolaños, PhD. / President of the Center for Thought and Action: Factoría Libertatis.
