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Practices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay opens with one of hundreds of massacres carried out in the early 1980s in Guatemala by agents of the military state. The killing was meant to depopulate the Rio Negro valley to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Like much of the violence of the 36-year conflict, it was low-tech and carried out by civil patrollers, which is perhaps why the Guatemalan civil war was considered a "low intensity conflict" by US Army definitions: "below conventional war... employing political, economic, informational, and military instruments." I suggest that these instruments encompass what many anthropologists call culture. While beginning with a moment of spectacular violence, the essay then traces the mundane, everyday political and economic embeddings of militarism into Guatemalan social institutions, life, conditions of possibility, meaning systems, and abilities to affect and be affected. A history of the present, it traces the paramilitarization of the army/government in the 1960s and 1970s via the development of death squads and other clandestine bodies and illicit networks that shape state functioning today. Yet it also explores the intensities of countercultures of militarism, the networks that have forced perpetrator accountability, reparations, and state recognition of Mayan peoples and their rights to defend their territories from accumulation by dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article analyzes the counterinsurgency war of the military-backed government of Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s which led to the death of tens of thousands of people and the forced displacement of millions from the northern highlands of the country. It describes the assistance provided by U.S., Canadian and Mexican solidarity and humanitarian aid groups to the Guatemalan refugees who fled to Mexico. It also examines the groups' use of refugee women as political objects in raising funds.

How does repression influence overt, collective challenges directed against political authority? To date, answers to this question have been inconclusive. This article argues that recent works inadequately address the topic because the focus has been on repression’s impact on local civilians, with less consideration of dissident organizations. The author develops an organizational theory of challenger development and specifies predictions for how repression’s effects on dissent are contingent upon the types of organizational behaviors targeted for coercion. The analysis employs original, microlevel data collected from previously confidential Guatemalan National Police records to assess the effects of repression during the years 1975 to 1985. Results show that the effects of repression are more complex than previously imagined. When repression targets the clandestine activities necessary to develop and sustain dissident organizations, such as holding meetings, training participants, and campaigning for funds, dissent declines significantly But when repression is directed at ongoing, overt, collective challenges, it motivates a backlash that escalates dissent. Implications are drawn for how political order and conflict are understood and studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text contains two parts. The most important one is the second, where a transcription is made of a selection of the last confidential report sent by Chilean Ambassador Federico Klein Reidel to his Ministry of Foreign Affairs before leaving his diplomatic post in Guatemala after the coup d’etat that overthrew Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in June 1954. Six decades after those events took place, this document —which has not been published up to the present— remains outstanding. Especially noteworthy, among other aspects, is the informed content and full force of the interpretations stamped within it by this diplomat. At the end, the text is accompanied by a brief presentation by its author and a description of the circumstances under which it was conceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies how the Costa Rican media informed about the coup d’état against the Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and the reports they used to make it. It analyses the international discourses the media published about the causes of the coup and how the political actors who participated in Arbenz’s overthrowing. This paper also goes deep into the effects of that coup in Costa Rican political actors who opposed José Figueres Ferrer (1953-1958) and how that event propelled an invasion to Costa Rica in January of 1955. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the 1976 Guatemala earthquake disaster as a possible crisis trigger, in a relatively strict application of the critical juncture analytical approach. It expands to include the broader question of what conditions might cause disasters to trigger crises that open critical junctures for nation-states. The research concludes that the 1976 Guatemala disaster led to a high degree of community self-organizing and alliance-building across Guatemala, which the Guatemalan national security state at that time perceived as a fundamental crisis requiring a response. This reaction generated significant debate and policy conflict within the state; the resulting decision was massively repressive violence, with legacies that continue to this day. Another conclusion is that strictly applied, critical juncture analysis can untangle often very complicated disaster postimpact emergency, recovery, and reconstruction situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of USAID's 1970 Rural Development Plan (RDP) for Guatemala in normalizing US military support for the Guatemalan government despite concerns about excessive state violence in the late 1960s. I argue that the RDP presented a depoliticized vision of Guatemala's agrarian problem and generated optimism that this problem could be resolved through market mechanisms and within the existing social order. Rather than promoting prosperity and stability, the RDP framed state terror as a temporary exception, and helped set the stage for genocide in the 1980s. This highlights complicities between discourses of development and political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the evolution of the political left in Guatemala from the coup d'état that ousted Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in 1954 to the 2003 Guatemalan elections. It explains that, during this time, the left split into a guerrilla faction and the communist Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, but then united under the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) in the 1980s. It notes that, despite winning the right to political participation after negotiating an end to its long-standing conflict with the Government of Guatemala in 1996, the URNG and the Guatemalan left have enjoyed limited electoral success.

The article discusses the archaeology of the city of Guatemala (Guatemala) and the relationship between the modernization of the city and the protection of its historical and cultural patrimony. The author considers the urbanization policy during the governments of Juan José Arévalo (1945-1951) and Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954) and discusses the establishment during this period of various institutions for cultural and historical preservation including the Instituto de Antropología e Historia (IDAEH) and the Instituto Indigenista Nacional (IIN). He also discusses the urban archaeological research carried out at the Kaminaljuyú site from 1945 to 1954.

The present article summarizes a line of work whose axis is the study of the exile of the deposed president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, between 1954 and 1971. Taken out of his position after a military coup d'état caused by a persistent hidden intervention of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the former leader lived a stormy journey that accidentally began and finished in Mexico. This lapse of the life of Arbenz has been barely studied by the investigators who have dedicated their biggest efforts to try to clarify the circumstances that motivated his government's end. However, documents recently declassified by the CIA reveal how this agency followed him sturdily, allowing us to learn about an entire persistent strategy whose consequences are still felt in Guatemala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the period of revolution in Guatemala called the Década Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Decade) from 1944 to 1954. The author emphasizes the proper role of historical methodology and historians, who should strive to understand and explain what took place in a given time period. He also cautions against making sweeping generalizations and comparisons between events with only marginal similarities, such as the overthrow of the Guatemalan government by Manuel Estrada Cabrera in 1898 and fall of the Guatemalan government under President Jorge Ubico in 1944, the latter of which triggered the Década Revolucionaria.

Presents a study that analyzed the U.S. effort to build a showcase for democracy in Guatemala following the U.S.-engineered regime change in 1954, based on declassified U.S. government documents. Examination of several key U.S. objectives; Definition of democratic showcase building; Elimination of the communist threat.

Presents the essay `The Peace Accords: An End and a Beginning.'

Analyzes military-dominated politics through the study of political decision-making during Guatemala's Military Government of 1963-1966. Classification of political elites on the basis of specific decisions made during the Military Government; Control tactics and 'elite etiquette' adopted by the political elite; Efforts made to modify interest-group politics through nationalization of National Coffee Association.

The article analyzes the control techniques employed by the Guatemalan military elite during the military government of 1963-1966. The norms and procedures characteristic of the military's control efforts reflect the interaction of tradition, ideology and perspective of the existing situation. Significantly, the control procedures employed by the military government followed the example established by the preceding military-dominated regime of the post-1954 era. The control techniques of the military government in 1963 demonstrate a synthesis of repression and paternalism. But unlike its predecessors, the military government did not dissipate its limited resources by attempting to repress all opposition or to meet the demands of all sectors of the society. The beneficiaries of the government's spending programs were Guatemala's economic notables, industrialists, retailers, financiers and planters. The ability of the Armed Forces to control Guatemalan politics rests on two conditions, the political resources possessed by the military and the cleavage within Guatemalan society.