Secret Anti-Communist Army
Anticommunist terrorist organization
The Secret Anti-Communist Army (Spanish: Ejército Secreto Anticomunista, ESA) was a front organization that operated in Guatemala and El Salvador during the Guatemalan Civil War. Like other earlier organizations, such as the MANO and the CADEG, the ESA existed as a front for a covert program of selective assassination by the Guatemalan security services. The first documentation of it came from the New York Times on 4 August 1977.
The ESA made its existence more widely known during the upheaval caused by the September 1978 bus fare strikes in Guatemala City. On 18 October 1978, the ESA authored the first of a series of public bulletins containing "death lists" of persons which the organization considered to be "communists". It claimed to be independent, but was coordinated and staffed by members of the military and security services and was allegedly run by Colonel German Chupina Barahona, Director General of the National Police (PN) from 1978 to 1982. Often, the lists of targets were provided by the Minister of the Interior, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz.
History
High profile incidents officially attributed to the ESA peaked in Guatemala between 1978 and 1980, and were first directed at academics who were openly involved in progressive politics. One of these cases included the assassination of the President of the Association of University Students (AEU), Oliverio Castaneda de Leon on 20 October 1978, who was submachine-gunned by unknown men approximately one block from the Presidential Palace in Guatemala City, with no intervention from nearby, and heavily armed Policia Nacional. Castenada's name had appeared among others on an ESA death-list bulletin issued two days earlier.
“Secret Anti-Communist Army” enters the record as anticommunist terrorist organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Secret, Anti-Communist and Army can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Secret Anti-Communist Army” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Secret, Anti-Communist and Army provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20980336. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1978, 1982 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Secret Anti-Communist Army” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.