GUATEMALA- Guatemala had been wracked by civil wars, coups, rebel movements and CIA interventions since the late 1940s, just as the Cold War heated up. Many Guatemalan army officers, who saw Army service as an escape for poverty, soon saw their command of troops as a way to redress the country's vast disparity in wealth.

The CIA organized a su ccessful coup in 1954 that chucked out a circle of Marxit army officers. Yeah, nasty intervention, but the officers, imbued with Leninist perversion of Marxist to justify terrorism to clamp down a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat" on a single state while awaiting the world revolution - Marx had preached that the communist revolution would spread outward from workers in advanced countries such as Germany and England -didn't plan on holding any more elections if the consolidated power.

Their own incompetence would probably have doomed their revolution, but a lot more people would have been butcheed than the farily bloodless CIA operation killed.

By the late 1970s and early 80s, Maoists professors and students were attempting a new kind of revolution seeking support among the country's large Mayan Indian majority - 70% ot 80% of the population. But no more chivalrous rivalry among officers who had been educated together. The new guerrillas killed every 'class enemy' they encountered, including Indian elders of dozens of villages.

Having lived in Guatemala for three years in the late 70s, I returned for UPI and went into th ehighlands alone, which the Guatemala Army considered a suicide mission. I was the first to report the Army had succeeded in rooting out the guerrillas from the highlands, but receied no credit, as the international media considered the leftist rebels the 'wave of the future.'

This is my absolute favorite of my remaining photos fom my Central American war days. This was a civil patrol organizaed by the army, their variation of the armed village program the U.S. military tried unsuccessfully in Vietnam a deacde earlier. Who knows if it's true, but the village leaders told me - I'm completely fluent in spoken Spanish - that the rebels had decapitated their village elder for refusing to allow the rebels to carry off young villagers as recruits, after which the village, which had hoped to remain neutral in the civil war, went over to the army.

The picture called to mind photos of Geronimo and his braves in their final days of resistance to the Whjte Man's. I don't know why Geronimo resisted. All he had to do is sign a treaty and of course the white men honored every one, "as long as the Sun rises in the East and the rivers run to the seas."

Geronimo, far right, and three of his warriors.

GO ON TO MORE UPI STORIES ON MEXICO BY RICK KIEL