Esquilaches
Esquilaches
Esquilaches (Escuilaches), a secret, antigovernment group of students, primarily from the School of Law of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, who mildly protested Jorge Ubico's anti-Communist massacre of 1934 and his repressive regime. From this group, led by Mario Méndez Montenegro, Hiram Ordóñez, and Manuel Galich, came many of those who in the 1940s organized the resistance to the Ubico regime that led to its downfall in 1944.
Galich says the group was named after Fausto Squillace (Squillach), the early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist, but others have suggested that the group took its name from the 1766 Esquilace Revolt in Spain, a popular uprising in opposition to Bourbon attempts to change local customs and dress habits, especially as proposed by a foreign adviser, the Italian Marquis de Squillace. The group was sometimes compared to earlier Freemason groups in its conspiratorial political role.
See alsoUbico y Castañeda, Jorge .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manuel Galich, Del pánico al ataque (1949; 2d ed. 1977), pp. 41-49.
Additional Bibliography
Dosal, Paul J., and Oscar Guillermo Peláez Almengor. Jorge Ubico (1931–1944): Dictadura, economía y "La tacita de plata". Guatemala: Ediciones CEUR-USAC, 1996.
Holden, Robert H. Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.