Nation-building in the land of eternal counter-insurgency: Guatemala and the contradictions of the alliance for progress

This article will examine the consequences of US-sponsored development assistance programmes in Guatemala during the 1960s, the so-called Alliance for Progress decade. Recently declassified and unclassified State Department records reveal that the US Agency for International Development (usaid) mission in Guatemala helped organise numerous co-operatives, community leadership programmes and modernisation projects that empowered disenfranchised Mayan Indians and poor Ladinos (mestizos or persons of mixed European and indigenous ancestry). At the same time, the John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson administrations assisted the Guatemalan government in creating a repressive counter-insurgency programme whose victims included not just communist guerrillas but also members of popular movements who had been mobilised by usaid. Washington resolved the contradiction by abandoning ‘soft development’ programmes in favour of a military build-up that eventually resulted in the deaths of more than 200 000 Guatemalans.