Exiles and political migrants at BUAP. Interview with Carlos Figueroa Ibarra

Abstract

Your family went into exile in Mexico after the coup against Árbenz in 1954 and returned to Guatemala in 1958, while you came back to study Sociology at UNAM in 1970. Were you aware then that repression, the dirty war and exile could become a fate a few years later? Absolutely. Very early in my life I was aware that I was growing up in a family that was not normal in a Guatemala ruled by a fierce military dictatorship. My early childhood was spent in Mexico City, because my father, Carlos Alberto Figueroa Castro, had had to flee Guatemala when the government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was overthrown in 1954. We returned to Guatemala from exile in Mexico in 1958. I was six years old. From then on my life began to take a turn of which I only became fully aware some time later.