Eduardo Galeano Photograph Collection on César Montes

Collection

Identifier: MSH/LAT 0123

Staff Only
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Scope and Contents

The Eduardo Galeano Photograph Collection on César Montes comprises four folders of materials relating to Eduardo Galeano’s article “With Guatemala’s Guerrillas” published in Ramparts in September of 1967. The collection contains images of César Montes and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa from an interview between Galeano and Montes in 1966. Additionally, a copy of Ramparts is included in the collection. Formats of the photographs include negatives, copied contact sheets, black and white photographs, and colored photographs.

Dates

Creation: 1966-1967

Creator

Galeano, Eduardo (Eduardo Germán María Hughes), 1940-2015 (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright status for collection materials is unknown. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Biographical / Historical

Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) was a journalist and political activist born in Montevideo, Uruguay on September 3, 1940. As a teen, he began publishing political comics in the socialist publication El Sol. Galeano became a journalist for them and, by age 20, was the managing director of Marcha, a leftist weekly publication in Uruguay.

In the 1960s, he also began publishing books analyzing the ongoing political movements. Galeano published Guatemala: Occupied Country in 1969, where he documented Guatemala’s relationship with the U.S. and its efforts to suppress reform movements, noting particularly the coup against President Jacobo Árbenz. It was during his research that he met with and interviewed César Montes.

Galeano fled Uruguay in 1973 following a military coup and his imprisonment. He first went to Argentina before fleeing again, this time to Spain, following the Videla regime’s military coup in 1976. In 1985, Galeano returned to Montevideo, Uruguay and remained there until his death on April 13, 2015.

Biographical / Historical

Julio César Macías, known as César Montes, (1942-) is an activist and former guerilla fighter born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala in 1942. Montes spent much of the early 1960s working to restore rights to the Guatemalan people following the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. In 1962, he joined the Rebel Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, FAR), a Guatemalan guerilla group started by Luis Turcios Limas and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa. By 1966, he was promoted to Commander-in-Chief, following the murder of Turcios Limas.

The FAR lost many members during this time through the Guatemalan state’s counter-insurgency campaign, which was supported by the United States. Survivors who reunited in Mexico City formed the Guerilla Army of the Poor (Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres, EGP). In 1972, Montes led a group of EGP members across the border back into Guatemala where they reestablished their movement. In the 1980s, he also turned his attention to organizing armed resistance in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Following the end of these three wars, Montes continued his work in Guatemala to help displaced groups and establish a new un-armed faction that centered on curating peace.

Montes was arrested in October 2020 in connection with the deaths of three Guatemalan soldiers during a military incursion into an Indigenous community in El Estor, Guatemala. He was found guilty on March 29, 2022 and sentenced to 175 years in prison. In October 2024, he was briefly released and placed on house arrest before the order was overturned. However, Montes, who maintained his innocence, escaped authorities before he could be interned, and as of 2025still has not been found.