The Guatemalan Labor Party was formally founded in 1952.  In this same year, the party was declared a legal entity by the Guatemalan government.  Prior to 1952, the organization had existed illegally as the Communist Party of Guatemala.  In many ways, the legalization of the Guatemalan Labor Party, also known by its Spanish acronym PGT, was the flashpoint that started a 36-year insurgency movement in Guatemala.  <P> In 1951, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman took over as the Guatemalan president.  Arbenz was known to have communist sympathies and even met secretly with communists in 1951 to discuss plans for his agrarian policy.  The United States nervously tracked Arbenz's connections with communists, specifically the Guatemalan Labor Party.  Meanwhile, domestic and foreign landowners pushed back against Arbenz's enacted agrarian reforms.  Meanwhile in 1953, the Guatemalan government expropriated 234,000 acres from the United Fruit Company, a corporation owned by U.S. interests.  In 1954, a U.S.-backed coup led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas successfully ousted President Arbenz.  The U.S. justified its intervention as a necessary response to the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.

The Guatemalan Labor Party would remain central to Guatemala's 36-year insurgency from beginning to end.  The Guatemalan Labor Party, no longer a legal political party, joined other guerilla organizations committed to the terrorism of government and business properties and people.  In 1982, the Guatemalan Labor Party merged with three other leftist guerrilla insurgent groups to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG).  After 1982, these four groups continued their attacks as one entity.  Guatemala's 36-year insurgency finally ended on December 29, 1996. Peace negotiations with all major insurgent groups were concluded, and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) put down its arms and re-formed itself as a legal political party.

Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG)