You completely misunderstand what went on in Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s. I lived and worked there at the very tail end of the civil war from 1987-1990. So I saw a little of it. But I also spent many many evenings sitting around with Guatemalan friends. One of my older co-worker volunteers married a retired Guatemalan history professor and their house always had a collection of interesting folks, other academics, students, etc. And I learned just a tremendous amount about the history of that country from the people who lived it.
First with respect to weapons. When I was there the communist guerrillas were actually indirectly supplied by the US government. If you saw solders in fatigues and they were carrying US-made M16 rifles you knew they were guerrillas. At that time the Reagan Administration was pouring arms into Honduras to support the Nicaraguan Contras who did very little to actually fight against the Sandanistas but did do a lot of drug running and arms smuggling to Guatemala. So they were a big supplier to the Guatemalan rebels. The US was also pouring arms into the right wing dictatorship across the southern border in El Salvador and lots of those arms were sold by corrupt El Salvador army officers and smuggled into Guatemala.
By contrast, the Guatemalan Army used Israeli-made Galil rifles which are distinctive because they had a folding metal stock. In 1980 the Guatemalan Army firebombed the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to try to get at some community activists (labeled rebels) who were hiding out there. 37 people died including Spanish diplomats and the incident was such an atrocity that the Reagan Administration was forced to cut off arms to Guatemala. You can read the whole story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_o ... _Guatemala After that, Israel came to Guatemala's rescue and built an armaments factory in Guatemala to manufacture weapons for the Guatemalan military and given US support for Israel, it was really a convenient back-door way for the US government to continue supporting the military dictatorship in Guatemala. Israel and Guatemala have always been very tight because Guatemala was the deciding vote at the UN in favor of establishing the state of Israel in 1947.
As for the war itself. It is completely incorrect to view 36 years of civil war as any sort of success by the rebels. If the rebels had not existed then the military would have had to invent them to justify their hold on power. The military never wanted or tried to actually win the war. The rebels provided a convenient excuse for the military to maintain dictatorial control over the country and extract endless profit. Guatemala was a country with a small colonial aristocratic landowning elite that owned most of the productive coffee, sugarcane, and banana plantations around the country (sugarcane and and bananas in the lower elevation coastal areas and coffee in the higher-elevation areas). And of course a vast poor peasant population who worked the fields or lived in more marginal highland areas that were too steep or marginal for large scale profitable agriculture. There was also a very small mostly white-ish middle class from where the army officer corps came. No kid from the rich aristocracy ever went into the army. They would pop up to the US to study in American universities then return to Guatemala to take over the family businesses. So the army was mostly poor-ish or middle class Ladino (non-Indian) officer corps with an enlisted force that was mostly indigenous Mayan peasants who were brutally and forcibly conscripted (whole other story).
What the officer corps of the army discovered was that the civil war was a tremendous opportunity to gain wealth since they were not part of the aristocracy. So from the 1970s into the 1980s they waged campaigns of terror across northern Guatemala and drove out hundreds of thousands of peasants, burned hundreds of villages, killed tens of thousands or more peasants in countless massacres, and then corruptly seized much of the land for themselves to create vast estates. They also operated like the mafia, collecting protection money from rich landowners and so forth. The war was a way for the army officer corps to enormously enrich themselves and operate as feudal lords in the rural countryside. The very LAST thing they wanted was some sort of peace agreement to bring the fun times to and end and usher in civilian government and civilian oversight over military affairs. At that time the army even established a "Banco de Ejercito" where they stored their ill-gotten gains.
When a peace agreement finally came in the 1990s and civilian rule was restored, the army turned to drug smuggling to keep up profits. The army would use remote rural roads as temporary airstrips where they would use army tanker trucks to refuel Colombian cartel cargo planes in route for North America. And instead of cash they often took drugs in exchange, which fueled a massive drug problem in Guatemala which was saturated by cocaine and other drugs in the 1990s.
The very worst of the bunch were the military "auxiliaries" who were mostly retired army officers who would drive around in Toyota pickups with armed men sitting in the back basically acting as paid assassins (death squads) who would assassinate anyone who got crosswise with the oligarchy in exchange for a bag of cash. So community activists, labor leaders, etc. Even priests who were too concerned about the poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassina ... _Guatemala They would be kidnapped at night and found days later in a ditch on some rural highway with plastic bags over their heads and either tortured or burned. They even had favorite places to dump bodies on out-of-the-way rural highways. They also were the draft board. Local army commanders would have conscription quotas and they would hire military auxiliaries to show up in rural towns right at dusk with trucks and lots of armed men (not soldiers, but ex-soldiers in jeans and cowboy hats) who would round up hundreds of kids at gunpoint from soccer fields and such and haul them back to the local military base. I watched it happen several times from my front door. Kids who resisted would get clubbed or shot. The next day there would be a stream of mothers up to the military base bearing ID papers, birth certificates, etc. to prove that their kid was really only 16, or that they already had 3 sons in the army and so were exempt. And maybe half their "catch" would be released but the remainder would be sent to boot camp.
That is what happens when you have a civil war. Evil men with guns on both sides take power. Would that happen in the US? Not in the same way. History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. I would expect the more likely scenario in the event of a serious armed rebellion in the US would be a VAST increase in the government security apparatus across the parts of the us experiencing conflict. Endless check points, military occupation of towns, etc. If you have ever driven past immigration checkpoints near the US border, expect that sort of thing everywhere in the US which was how it was in Guatemala. Driving across the country meant endless military checkpoints. But it would also mean a military "deep state" encroaching into vast areas of civilian life. Endless investigations by men with guns, endless data mining. And endless repression in ways large and small. Basically a new McCarthyism. And once you build that sort of security apparatus it is exceedingly difficult to unwind it all. Visit any country with a rebel movement and you see the same thing. Colombia, the Basque region of Spain a decade ago, Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Sri Lanka during that civil war, etc. Watch the movie Sicario for a picture of the sort of nameless security state that would be unleased on the US in the event of any sort of real armed rebellion. That was just nameless government agencies fighting the drug war on the border.
So no, I have no sense of humor at all about any sort of "Cabela Cavalry" or dingbats with guns who have the absurd fantasy that they are going to use their 2nd Amendment rights to stand up to the government. That either ends up in a fiery end like David Koresh, or it makes everyone else's lives miserable for as long as it lasts. But what it won't ever mean is overthrow of a government as vast, capable, and sophisticated as the US government.
The only sort of positive change that has ever happened in this country has come democratically and incrementally. Outside of emancipation that is, which came at a horrible violent cost.
That was probably way off topic and but it does go to the issue of 2nd Amendment rights and guns, which is what this larger thread is about.
