Monday, November 5, 2012

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency From U.S. to Guatemala

" This is maybe an understatement. Certainly Guatemala has entered, if vaguely, into the erudition of criticism of Cold contend policies; an apt summary of what close people "know" about the events at that place might be that the CIA overthrew a government there at the behest of the United harvesting Comp either.

In The CIA in Guatemala, Immerman presents a more complex and unsmooth story, but one that broadly supports this folklore interpretation. Indeed, he is quite frank in saying that he came to the question in the primal 1970s with an outlook shaped by the Vietnam-era antiwar movement (Immerman, 1982, p. ix). none the less, he presents an analysis of the 1954 coup and its surrounding context from what whitethorn be called a radical perspective, arguing that the inter put to workion of interior(a) Guatemalan social and political dynamics with U.S. Cold War policies--intermixed with an underlying stratum of racism--led the U.S. to intervene forcefully to eliminate a reformist government and ensure the continued dominance of a narrow ruling elite.

Immerman identifies the ultimate tumescesprings of the Guatemalan crisis, quite reasonably, as lying within Guatemala itself. It was an ancient heart sphere of the Maya civilization, and the descendents of the Maya have for the most partition never been assimilated into the Spanish-derived culture of Latin America. As a consequence, racial and cultural lines are more sharply drawn in Guatemala than in most Latin A


Gaddis, J. L. (1982). Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American home(a) Security Policy. New York: Oxford.

The development of Guatemalan society and economic science proceeded along lines not unlike those found elsewhere in Central America. The best farmland, the latifundios, was in the hands of a very small elite class of landowners. Most of their agricultural attention was provided by Indians, who were not permanent peasant residents on the land they worked, but alternated between subsistance farming in the highlands and wage poke on the latifundios.

merican societies. Instead of a complex gradation of status, there is a sharp demarcation between ladinos (i.e.
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, Latinos), the Spanish-speaking depute of the population which includes the elite, and the non-Spanish-speaking Indians. As will be suggested below, while Immerman is well aware of this rift across Guatemalan society, he perhaps fails to take its implications fully into account in his analysis.

In the ordinal century, the so-called Liberal movement opened Guatemala to contrary development, on the theory that this policy would bring development capital into Guatemala, and in conclusion produce what modern development theory calls a "takeoff." The work was instead to produce a strong element of foreign dependency, and it is in this role that the United Fruit Company entered the picture.

As a general principle, moreover, we should perhap view with great skepticism any suggestion that a political figure was dispatched by separate members of his own faction for the sake of a provocation. This is an ever-popular theme in political thrillers, and popular among conspiracy theorists (e.g., the belief now legitimate in far-right circles that the U.S. government blew up the federal construct in Oklahoma City in order to justify suppression of private militias). The suggestion paints those accused of such an act as exceptionally treacherous, sinister, and cynical. However, this
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