Between June 1983 and September 1989, only 2 percent of the asylum petitions filed by Guatemalans with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were approved; during that same period, the overall approval rate for all nationalities seeking asylum in the United States ranged between 20 percent and 39 percent (Reasonable Fear, p. 19).
The situation has immediate historical roots almost half a century long. In 1954 the American government sponsored the overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, ushering in military rule that, with some exceptions, continued to control the country into the late 1980s, even while a democratically elected president was nominally in power. The Americans had originally supported the Guatemalan army in the hopes of staving off the spread of communism through Cuba and nearby Nicaragua, a goal to which the Reagan administration stuck for most of the 1980s. In the mid-1970s, however, the political alliances in Guatemala shifted decisively. The government became more oppressive toward the poor, the Indians, the intelligentsia. American support for the Guatemalan military nevertheless remained in place, despite copious evidence that the human rights record of the Guatemalan government was appalling.
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