SUMMARY
ORPA (Organización revolucionaria del pueblo en armas, or Revolultionary Organization of Armed People) was an armed group active in the Guatemalan intrastate conflict over government. In 1960, Guatemala experience a failed coup by left-wing elements within the Guatemalan armed forces against President Ydigoras Fuentes, a general who had come to power in 1958. The failed coup nevertheless led to the emergence of the MR-13 (Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre, Revolutionary Movement November 13), a leftist guerilla movement. In 1962, MR-13 joined forces with a communist political party called Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT, or Guatemalan Party of Labor) to create the FAR I rebel organization. During the 1960s and 1970s, various leftist movements claiming to represent Guatemala’s indigenous Maya and Ladino – a group of Hispanic origins that speak Spanish - peasant populations engaged the Guatemalan government in a protracted insurgency. It was in this context that ORPA emerged. ORPA was a Marxist group that sought to overthrow the Government of Guatemala via a revolutionary struggle.
ORPA was formed in 1972 as a faction of dissidents broke away from FAR I. Allegedly, the split was caused by a disagreement over the appropriate revolutionary strategy to be used, and over to what extent Guatemala’s Maya population should be included in the revolutionary struggle. ORPA favored a strategy where a strong support base was created among the Maya; the group claimed that the “pueblo natural” (indigenous population) should be the driving force of the revolution, not the proletariat. Much like other leftist groups in Guatemala, ORPA’s leadership was mainly comprised of “nonindigenous” Ladinos; what set the group apart from others was thus its aim to involve the Maya in their struggle. It should however be noted that indigenous elements within the group still claimed that the Ladinos were prejudiced against them, and Maya-Ladino tensions led to a split within the group in 1979 as the Maya-dominated Movimiento Revolucionario Popular-Ixim (MRP-Ixim) was created. Given ORPA’s focus on building a strong support base, it did not initiate its armed activities until 1979.
Rodrigo Asurias Amado – who later adopted “Gaspar Ilom” as his nom de guerre - led ORPA, and was one of the group’s principal founders. No figures regarding ORPA’s cadre strength was available. ORPA was primarily active in the rural departments of Sololá, San Marcos, and Quezaltenango, which are situated in a mountainous area bordering Guatemala’s “coffee zone”. The group also established presence in the capital Guatemala City around 1974. Unlike other Guatemalan armed groups, ORPA maintained a clear divide between its military organization and its supporting social- and community-level support structures. Consequently, government repression and attacks against civilian populations suspected of supporting ORPA was less arbitrary and smaller in scale than those directed against other groups; in general, the Guatemalan conflict was characterized by widespread atrocities against civilians.
ORPA had close connections to EGP, another Guatemalan armed group active at the time; the two groups engaged in direct cooperation on some occasions. No clear evidence of external support to ORPA was available, but some sources indicated that it was “sponsored” by Cuba: however, no details regarding the nature of this alleged “sponsorship” was available.
In February 1982, ORPA merged with FAR I, FAR II, and EGP to create URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity); after this, ORPA ceased to exist as an independent actor in UCDP data.
