Guatemala From 1954 to Current Period

The purpose of this research is to examine the economic, political, and social aspects of Latin America as seen through the experience of Guatemala from 1954 to the current period. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which the experience of Guatemala may be said to express salient characteristics of Latin American reality and then to discuss the main conflicts informing Guatemala's experience in terms of competing and interrelated class interests there and relative to other situations of Latin American history where the same or equivalent components have come into play, with a view toward identifying certain patterns of geopolitical behavior and exploitation on one hand, and the means by which such patterns function as both the foundation and framework for understanding specific events in the Guatemala of 1954 and beyond.

The revolutionary experience of Guatemala can be traced to the hand-in-glove cooperation of entrenched landowning interests in Guatemala and entrenched commercial interests of the American United Fruit Company, which was formed in 1899, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, with a view to exploiting rich agricultural land in Cuba and beyond (Galeano 2:250-1). Some 20 years earlier in Guatemala itself, President Justo Rufino Barrios took over land holdings of the Catholic Church, but the main takeover was of Indian lands for coffee plantations, instituting de facto Indian slavery on the lands while courting industria

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ved direct support in the region from dictatorial regimes of Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Anticommunist rhetoric also appealed to the Catholic Church, traditionally allied with elitist forces in Latin America, whose papal nuncio gave a special blessing to the "ardent patriotism of President Castillo Armas" (Galeano 3:154). Having saved Guatemala from what Galeano takes to have been a nonexistent communist threat and from land reform, Castillo Armas proceeded to outlaw political parties and unions (including strikes, which became a capital crime), and banned or burned all books perceived as revolutionary or communistic (3:157), all with the blessing of the U.S. So in broad political terms may one easily characterize the emergence of a revolutionary impulse in Guatemala, in response to programmatic repression of nationalist impulse on the part of the world's foremost political and economic power, and a rush by ambitious political climbers to position themselves in power in Guatemala. An even more deeply embedded conflict can be seen to have informed Guatemala's political environment in general and the conduct of revolutionary praxis in particular after 1954. That is the special quality of exploitati

Category: Foreign - G