Not a Revolution but an Evolution
SARAH FOSS
Human development indicators in Cold War Guatemala were abysmal. In a world increasingly obsessed with defining modernity in statistical terms, underdevelopment was supposedly easy to measure, diagnose, and cure.1 In the 1950s, Guatemala’s numbers told a depressing story. Illiteracy levels were at 71.9 percent of the population, life expectancy was forty years, and only 2.17 percent of the landholders owned an incredible 72.21 percent of all arable land, causing Guatemala’s largely rural population to barely survive using subsistence mono-agriculture on tiny plots.2 Beyond the measures of mass poverty and wealth disparity, Guatemala experienced high levels of political instability; by the 1960s, leftist movements were mounting a guerrilla war against the state.
Guatemalan newspapers regularly discussed the nation’s underdeveloped status, identifying it as a national embarrassment. These articles remarked on the success that other “Third World” countries, such as the Philippines, India, and Pakistan, had experienced in using community development programs to curb instability and combat poverty. Naturally, in these articles, government officials and social scientists recommended a similar trajectory for Guatemala. They argued that through local participation in community development projects, Guatemala would peacefully transition from its underdeveloped status to a fully democratic, capitalist society, experiencing “not a revolution, but an evolution.”3
In this chapter, I suggest that while the Guatemalan political elite sought stability, it desired a stability that ensured their continued rule, even at the expense of democracy and in favor of authoritarianism.4 Looking at Guatemala’s National Program of Community Development, which was officially launched in 1964 and dispatched teams across the country to bring about this evolution, and more importantly, prevent the spread of revolution, the chapter focuses on one of these sites, the community of Tactic, and explores the interplay between project planners’ use of a Third World identity to consolidate power and local actors’ ability to undermine project goals in pursuit of their own interests.
In the early 1950s, U.S. foreign policy took a significant turn toward utilizing covert operations to interfere in other country’s internal affairs, secretly supporting a coup that overthrew Iran’s nationalist government under Mohammad Mossadeq and Guatemala’s socially reformist government under Jacobo Árbenz. U.S. interference in domestic politics throughout the Global South would continue to mark U.S. Third World policy.5 In Guatemala, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collaborated with a Guatemalan military colonel to overthrow the democratically elected government of Árbenz in 1954, due to his alleged ties to international Communism.6 In the immediate aftermath of this coup, the U.S. State Department viewed Guatemala as “a political, social, and economic laboratory.… The success or failure of this experiment by the first country in the world to overthrow the Communist yoke will be a major factor in determining the future course of Latin American affairs.”7 Eager to make Guatemala a success story, the Eisenhower administration poured financial assistance into the country, and later administrations continued to do so through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with a heavy focus on large-scale infrastructure projects such as highways and ports.8
Guatemalan development was intended to showcase the success of First World modernization theory, which positively correlated capitalist economic development with democratic political stability. As such, it would blatantly challenge the centralized rural and urban industrialization that the Soviet Union had effectively demonstrated in other Third World countries, such as Kazakhstan’s Virgin Lands agricultural modernization project, and through economic aid to Chile for projects such as urban housing and deep-sea fishing programs.9 The case of Guatemala thus illustrates the high stakes of the international development game for control over the Third World.10
Recent histories of development tend to focus on the ways that Cold War superpowers utilized development as a means to amass influence over the contested Third World, highlighting the continuities and ruptures in development policies across different political moments and geographical contexts.11 Western modernization theories imbued the Third World with an unquestioned sense of being “a world perceived as both materially and culturally deficient.”12 In so doing, modernization theory actually redefined the concept of the Third World from simply being a recently decolonized and politically nonaligned area to identifying it more broadly as a primordial and backward space in need of the First World’s guidance. Conceived in this way, the Third World was linked to a homogeneous status of underdevelopment, with modernization theory establishing “the most explicit and systematic blueprint ever … for reshaping foreign societies” in a way that “supplied not only a sense of the ‘meaning’ of postwar geopolitical uncertainties, but also an implicit set of directives for how to effect positive change in that dissilient world.”13 Thus, modernization theory created acceptable ways of thinking about and labeling the countries and peoples of the world. Within this broader conception of the Third World, Guatemala, while tied closely with the United States and experimenting with U.S. modernization policies, was unequivocally part of the Third World.
In Guatemala and throughout the Third World more broadly, economic development took various forms, from large-scale infrastructure projects and extensive systems of credit to small loans and community development projects. As the idea of community development gained traction and legitimacy, “a strange pattern … emerged within the foreign aid apparatus.” Adherents of modernization theory “gravitated toward centers of power,” while those more supportive of a localized approach, the communitarians, worked at “the sites of implementation.”14 Therefore, a top-down, national plan of community development, designed to be a one-size-fits-all formula for what modernizers saw as homogeneous, backward, traditional societies, could take on very different meanings and see drastically varied results at the local level. While other studies have considered Guatemala’s history of development from the perspective of cultural change within the context of globalization or in terms of natural resource management and environmental history, I suggest that placing the history of community development in Guatemala within a Third World modernization framework elucidates the ways that international history and local practices shaped one another and connected small Guatemalan Mayan communities to larger trends in Third World development politics.15
As the various layers in this history reveal, the United States heavily invested in securing a foothold in this strategically important Central American nation, viewing Guatemala as the geographic place where the First World could demonstrate the success of its modernization model. Guatemalan political elites used (and abused) their identity as a Third World nation to consolidate their own power, much as local political elites elsewhere in the world did.16 In drawing attention to Guatemala’s underdeveloped status and linking this with the plight of the broader Third World, the political elite presented community development projects as strictly humanitarian endeavors, devoid of political meaning and implication. Community development became an important tool of governance in Cold War Guatemala, which eventually allowed the military to gain complete control of the state. The result was a seemingly paradoxical combination of “democratic” development and dictatorship that took place elsewhere in Latin America, including Bolivia and Brazil.17 In many ways, the modernizing development project helped Guatemalan elite to consolidate tyranny. However, at the same time, this modernizing project met resistance when actually implemented in communities like Tactic, Alta Verapaz. Local actors, the communitarians, who were well aware of international politics, utilized the opportunities top-down development provided to pursue their own goals in their community, not adhering to bipolar geopolitical constraints, but instead crafting an alternative model of development and citizenship.
This chapter proceeds in two sections. First, it situates the history of community development in Tactic, Guatemala, within its national and international historical moments. Second, it considers Guatemala’s Program of Community Development, which had sites in towns throughout rural Guatemala, including Tactic. This section analyzes a single program that experts created with the model of modernization theory in mind, but that local actors implemented according to the community’s wishes, not the central government’s agenda. A brief conclusion revisits the central theme of this chapter, namely how the employment of a Third World identity allowed Guatemalan elites to use development as a tool of governance and how individuals exercised their agency in resisting and challenging this homogenizing vision.
Across the globe, both U.S. and Soviet development experts sought to achieve a “fundamental structural change,” believing that the world order would tilt in their respective favor as more and more underdeveloped nations in the Third World adopted their specific model for this change.18 Both the U.S. and Soviet models of development were based on a universal and linear path toward a defined notion of progress, and both positioned Third World countries at a lower stage. The question was which path these strategically important, resource-rich nations would take.19 In the wake of sweeping decolonization, the newly created nations, in a sense, were considered blank slates for one of the superpowers to inscribe direction and guidance.
Though not part of the post–World War II decolonized world, Guatemala, and much of Latin America, shared commonalities with these nations, as they too struggled to overcome the neoimperialist tendencies of the First World, particularly in terms of economic independence.20 From 1944 to 1954, Guatemala successively elected two democratic governments that pursued an agenda that sought to increase Guatemalan economic and political independence from the United States, most controversially through land reform. Due to the supposed increasing Communist infiltration of the government and the expropriation of United Fruit Company land, a CIA-supported coup, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, overthrew Guatemala’s democratic government in 1954.21
According to the counterrevolutionary regime, Guatemala’s underdeveloped status left it dangerously teetering between two paths to modernity: that of democracy and capitalism, as exhibited by the United States, and that of Communism, as manifested by the Soviet Union. For many Guatemalan elites and the U.S. government, Guatemala had just been “liberated” from the dangerous throes of Communism, but as long as Guatemala remained “underdeveloped,” this threat would not subside. From the U.S. perspective, as well as that of the Guatemalan elites, ordinary Guatemalans’ expectations of accessing more material resources were certainly rising, yet as the brief experiment with reform had demonstrated, if unchecked, Guatemala would drift toward the Left and endanger U.S. and its own national security. Guatemala needed to develop, but in a way that would support a slow evolution, dictated from above, not a more radical revolution that immediately responded to demands from below.22 This model resonated with the United States’ modernization project, and the counterrevolutionary government began closely collaborating with U.S. experts to devise what it believed to be an appropriate, safe strategy for Guatemala’s development.
While other Latin American countries had more flexibility in networking with the Non-Aligned Movement or seeking economic aid from Second World sources, due to the 1954 coup that had “liberated” Guatemala from “Communism,” it was much trickier for Guatemala to pursue that option.23 Vice President Richard Nixon stated in August 1955, “This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one. The whole world is watching to see which does the better job.”24 Determined to prove the validity of the First World path to modernity, the United States was figuratively and literally invested in the success of Guatemala’s modernization. Pouring money and resources into the country, U.S. experts helped to craft the first of Guatemala’s five-year development plans, thus charting the “appropriate” course for Guatemalan development and ensuring that the country fell firmly within the orbit of the First World. With pressure from the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, the economic consulting firm Klein & Saks, which had reportedly “done an ‘outstanding job in Peru,’ ” had representation on Guatemala’s National Economic Planning Council, in order to “act as watch dog to help the new and inexperienced administration avoid making serious blunders in the economic field” and to “get closer to the Guatemalan government.”25
Colonel Castillo Armas, the first counterrevolutionary president, welcomed U.S. aid and informed the population that they must adapt to the structural changes occurring in Guatemala’s economy and society as a result of the development plans. In a presidential speech on 19 July 1957, he cautioned, “Guatemalans must recognize the large changes that are occurring in this country and must incorporate themselves into this new attitude that they have been hoping for, because those who do not understand this will be the failures of tomorrow.” This “new attitude” was precisely his government’s slogan of “Nueva Vida,” which mandated that the modern Guatemalan citizen must have faith in him- or herself, work hard, and capitalize on state provided opportunities to personally improve both spiritually and materially. Most importantly, adopting this new life provided through state development programs was not optional.26
Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957, and his successor, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, also tied development to national security, pointing to the Guatemalan government’s desire to align with the United States. In addition, Ydígoras signaled the reality that without U.S. economic aid, the country’s popular classes could very well turn to Second World sources for guidance. For instance, in 1959, Ydígoras Fuentes wrote one of his annual New Year letters to President Eisenhower, complaining about the fall in international coffee prices. With the loss of nearly $26 million in revenue, the Guatemalan government was unable to improve citizens’ lives and fulfill its promises. Requesting aid from the United States, Ydígoras concluded by writing, “The common enemy, Communism, will not invade us from outside but flourishes among our hungry people. Khrushchev is waiting at the door.”27 Clearly, Ydígoras positioned Guatemala on the side of the First World while also warning that without U.S. aid, Guatemala would quickly fall outside of the First World’s orbit. Here Ydígoras invoked the Third World strategy of nonalignment, demonstrating his willingness to obtain funds for national development from either superpower, although revealing his preference for U.S. sources of aid. Guatemala, like other Third World nations, was up for grabs in the geopolitical game.
Guatemalan political elites had much to gain in adopting the First World’s model of modernization—military and humanitarian aid, international legitimacy, and political backing. They used their Third World nation status to gain access to these important resources, which allowed them to consolidate their power, although not without serious and repeated contestation. Strong nationalist tendencies also forced the political elite to mask this acceptance of the U.S. model and instead justify it based on purely national terms in order to avoid being labeled as simply another stooge of what was popularly perceived to be the United States’ imperialist tendencies. Guatemalan political elites faced an interesting dilemma. To stay in power and quash any political dissidence, this military government desperately needed First World grants and loans, yet they also had to justify their actions in terms of national wellbeing so as to not appear to be completely subservient to First World interests.
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution succeeded and subsequently inaugurated the first Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere. Just over one hundred miles from the U.S. mainland, Cuba immediately changed the importance of Latin America in the Cold War. Just a year later, Guatemala, approximately nine hundred miles away, faced a growing leftist insurgency, presenting the possibility of a second Cuba in the West. On 13 November 1960, a group of young soldiers, disenchanted with the government’s corruption and inability to improve living standards, launched an attack on the Matamoros Barracks in the capital of Guatemala City. Their manifesto explained their justification in rising up against the very institution that they were supposed to serve and their belief that the military should serve the interests of the people writ large, not the state: “We are in the mountains fighting to the death for those who are hungry, for the land that none other than John F. Kennedy is asking to be given to our peasants.”28 While the government successfully stopped this rebellion, those remaining from the rebelling faction founded the Movimiento Rebelde 13 de Noviembre (MR-13) and continued the insurgency in the eastern part of the country.29
In 1963, partly due to President Ydígoras’ inability to quickly end MR-13 activities and also because former revolutionary-era president Juan José Arévalo had announced his candidacy for the upcoming election and was leading in the polls, a military coup overthrew Ydígores Fuentes in his final days as president. Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia assumed the presidency in March 1963.30 A declassified memo from the U.S. embassy in Guatemala on 21 January 1963, explicitly stated that if Arévalo were to return to office, he would “likely serve the Communist purpose well again, turning his country away from friendly relations with the United States, and away from a constructive role in the Alliance for Progress for which he has no apparent understanding or sympathy.”31 Due to the widespread popularity that Arévalo’s reformist politics still enjoyed throughout the country and the guerrilla insurgency, Peralta Azurdia’s regime understood that the large-scale infrastructure projects were not effectively changing the daily lives of Guatemala’s impoverished rural population and as a result failed to convince the majority that the First World modernization development model was the appropriate path for Guatemala.
During the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign, Kennedy released a press statement justifying his proposals for widespread economic development programs in Latin America, writing, “Although the Cold War will not be won in Latin America—it may well be lost there.”32 Adolf Berle, who would become an architect for Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, revealed in his diary in January 1961, that “eight governments may go the way of Cuba in the next six months unless something is done.”33 Recognizing the impact that a First World–oriented Latin America would have on U.S. success, Kennedy’s administration began pouring funds into the region. Significantly, Kennedy’s international development model focused on projects at the community level.34 Thus it is not surprising that his foreign aid program for Latin America, the Alliance for Progress, was supportive of localized development projects, a turn from the previous administration’s emphasis on large-scale infrastructure.
Moreover, many Guatemalans recognized that it would take decades for the expected benefits of the large-scale infrastructure projects to trickle down to Guatemala’s rural masses, so community development projects became the means to efficiently and cost-effectively improve rural life. State plans for community development had begun elsewhere in the Third World in the 1950s, with the intention of being a top-down program that could effectively translate the modernizing goals of the national government into tangible projects and changes in mentalities at the local level. For example, India received the first U.S.-sponsored pilot community development project, setting up a holistic village-level project of agricultural modernization, hygiene campaigns, and infrastructure development in Etawah.35 In 1956, the Philippines inaugurated the Presidential Assistant on Community Development, a national program of community development largely inspired by the Etawah project.36 And in Peru, from 1952 to 1966, the Cornell-Peru Project studied the community of Vicos, an inefficient rural hacienda in the Andes, cultivated by indigenous peasants, in an effort to devise and assess strategies for modernizing Peruvian highland agriculture and addressing the land tenure crisis.37
In 1963, Guatemalan also began advocating for a plan of community development, positioning this model as the means guide the countryside toward support of the governing regime, one strongly aligned with the United States. For example, Guatemalan social scientist Víctor Manuel Navarro published a series of articles about the philosophy of community development, calling this broad project a means to “reconstruct the world,” meaning that over three-fourths of the world, Guatemala included, faced the same principal problems of inadequate housing and clothing, hunger, and illiteracy.38 One remedy for this unacceptable state of “underdevelopment” was for the Guatemalan state, in the words of the Pan-American Union Director of Community Development, to “establish the basis of a strategic plan in America to produce not a revolution but rather an accelerated evolution based upon the conscience and participation of the people.”39 Community development could increase collective economic productivity and facilitate participation as active democratic citizens. Such a project would not come without considerable investment in time and money, but Guatemalan and U.S. policymakers believed it could be a means to transform the mentalities and realities of rural Guatemalans and direct them toward capitalism and democracy. The Program of Community Development (DESCOM) was intended to breathe new life into rural communities, effectively bringing them on board with the state’s modernization program and in so doing, allowing the military to consolidate its rule and power.
In 1964, the Guatemalan government created DESCOM based on recommendations from the 1961 Punta del Este conference. The conference’s charter established the Alliance for Progress, pledging to “accelerate economic and social development” by eradicating illiteracy, improving rural housing, and establishing more public health programs, all with the end goal of strengthening the hemisphere’s democratic institutions.40 Ironically, it was Peralta’s authoritarian military government that created DESCOM; as a result, from its inception, community development in Guatemala had a complicated relationship with democracy.
Under the Secretary for Social Wellbeing, DESCOM started with a monthly budget of nearly $7,500 and one regional center, located in Chimaltenango. By 1966, the program had rapidly expanded, with centers in Chimaltenango, Jalapa, and Zacapa. In the same year, the military allowed elections, believing that their candidate, Colonel Juan de Dios Aguilar de León, would win. In a surprising election that saw the two right-wing parties split the share of the right’s vote, the more progressive party, the Partido Revolucionario, and its candidate, Julio Méndez Montenegro, emerged victorious.41 However, the army prevented congressional ratification of this unexpected result until Méndez Montenegro signed an accord with the military that allowed them to name the Minister of Defense, maintain executive control over the armed forces, and continue, without oversight, the war against the guerrillas.42 Therefore despite having a democratically elected government that proclaimed to be the third government of the revolution, state repression, particularly in eastern departments, escalated, with Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio’s forces killing an estimated 10,000 people between 1967 and 1968.43
Yet rural development initiatives continued, and in 1967, DESCOM had a budget of $1.5 million and had moved directly under the secretary of the presidency.44 During the next ten years, development existed alongside repression in the countryside, even as the military resumed authoritarian rule until 1985. New guerrilla organizations emerged in 1972 and began a second phase of the civil war, shifting the theater westward into the indigenous highlands where the violence eventually reached genocidal levels, killing over 200,000 and displacing 2.3–3 million, the majority being Maya.45 Yet despite the violence, DESCOM’s work continued, as the government perceived this program to be a way to cheaply and efficiently bring economic progress and anti-Communism to the countryside.46
By the 1970s, DESCOM operated throughout the country as the civilian counterpart to the Army’s Civic Action programs, which were development projects in regions of recent guerrilla insurgency. The Guatemalan government adopted the same two-prong approach that President John F. Kennedy had proposed a decade earlier for U.S. foreign policy—namely, that countries adopt long-term economic development plans while in the short term ensuring national security through military strength, if necessary. The United States was prepared to simultaneously offer nations economic loans and military assistance through USAID, and Guatemala took full advantage of this offer.47 Although DESCOM’s program objectives were couched in terms of democratic participation, DESCOM provided a means for the state to extend its presence into the countryside and work to transform the diverse rural indigenous population into predictable, controllable, homogeneous modernized citizens.48
U.S. foreign aid supported development and dictatorship as the Guatemalan elite, particularly the military, used their Third World status to gain funds. In doing so, many Guatemalans believed, these elite lined their own pockets and consolidated their own positions of authority. While direct evidence of corruption does not exist, newspaper articles regularly critiqued the Alliance for Progress and USAID for failing to provide the necessary oversight to ensure proper use of funds. In the words of one congressional representative, the obtained money should go directly to schools, hospitals, and other needs, not to the military government because “it will go to the pockets of the functionaries.”49 In order to contest the messianic messages and promises of improved quality of life that the guerrilla organizations were disseminating in the countryside, the government expanded the activities of DESCOM, believing that community development could prevent rural Guatemalans from joining these leftist movements by changing the mentalities and the material conditions of the population.50
A series of training booklets that the Pan-American Union’s Department for Social Affairs created clearly outline the philosophy of community development and its ability to establish stable, democratic nations. Guatemala was not the only Latin American country to have a comprehensive state-led community development program, as Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Haiti, and Mexico also implemented similar projects.51 The goal was to help populations reach their full human potential as quickly, and as cheaply, as possible.52 For these development practitioners, “full human potential” meant that individuals used their energy effectively and in cooperation with one another to improve infrastructure, pursue capitalist ventures, and gradually acquire wealth. Argentine Professor Ezequiel Ander-Egg, who had advised DESCOM in its nascent stages, explained that Guatemala, like much of the Third World, was experiencing a “revolution of rising expectations.” However, this revolution presented policymakers with two options: “democratic revolution or a bloody and deadly revolution.”53 Community development had the potential to form a political consciousness and an inclination toward informed democratic participation. Otherwise, the population would become the cause of “major conflict and social and political disorganization.”54 DESCOM would effectively combat Communism through “directing mankind toward liberty and toward a better destiny,” as defined by the state, and by the First World.55
While improving infrastructure was certainly a central objective of DESCOM, changing the recipients’ psychology was key. This was not a new idea generated in Guatemala’s community development program; rather, it had been applied elsewhere in the world, reflecting an acceptance of a broader contemporary global conversation about community development.56 For example, in the aftermath of World War II, a film for U.S. troops occupying Japan emphasized this psychological component of development, stating, “These brains, like our brains, can do good or bad things, all depending on the kinds of ideas that are put inside.”57 It was up to the experts to determine which ideas to inscribe upon the recipients of development projects. Thus, Y. C. James Yen’s International Institute for Rural Reconstruction, with programs in the Philippines, Thailand, Ghana, Colombia, and Guatemala, sought to transform local mentalities by helping communities to organize and establish committees to collectively solve local problems in yet another example of this pervasive belief that psychological transformation was a key component of any community development project.
DESCOM ascribed to this dual emphasis of development, believing that practical projects not only would propel a community to a higher stage of development but would also achieve the mental transformations necessary for forging a local democracy. Through inculcating communities with a sense of social responsibility and the tools to effectively organize themselves, DESCOM could “help people to acquire the necessary attitudes, habits, and points of view to effectively and democratically participate in the solution of problems for the local, regional, and national community.”58 Not only this, but communities would gain important self-empowerment after successfully organizing and completing a project. According to MIT economist Wilfred Malenbaum, backwardness was not really “a lack of resources but rather an inability to use them.”59 Though Malenbaum was not specifically referring to the Guatemalan context, when applied to Guatemala, this statement’s underlying philosophy takes on racist tones, coding all indigenous rural regions as needing nonindigenous guidance. Through the intervention and humanitarian efforts of DESCOM, rural Guatemalans could be taken out of this backward condition and, through the patient instruction of urban, white project leaders, learn how to effectively utilize their resources and improve their lives.
Through DESCOM, training materials proclaimed, Guatemala could join other Third World nations on the path to modernity and stable democracy. These pamphlets positioned the project as one guided by the tenets of the United Nations and cited India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador as states with successful community development models. Although several of these turned toward authoritarianism shortly after these materials were published,60 presumably they were listed as models due to their political allegiance with the United States. Even so, any overt political discourse was absent from the pamphlets. Created in the United States, they attempted to strip community development of its political ideology and instead present it as a universal model that could bring peace and prosperity to all parts of the globe. Community development positioned democracy and liberalism as humanitarian and as the natural form that social relations should take, conveniently ignoring the fact that the United States supported nondemocratic governments with substantial amounts of development aid as long as they were anti-Communist. Community development had become the peaceful means to transform the Third World into close allies of the United States.
In 1971, amid the recent and reportedly fraudulent election of Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio and the immediate state of siege that he declared in the country, DESCOM began working in Tactic. The guerrilla insurgency in the east intensified, as did military repression in some rural areas.61 At the same time, the Guatemalan countryside experienced an escalation of development projects. While the military’s Civic Action programs concentrated on the eastern parts of the country, in areas of recent insurgency, DESCOM operated in areas that did not have a significant guerrilla presence, including Alta Verapaz, the department where Tactic is located. On 19 June 1971, members from DESCOM’s Local Center No. 10 met with the municipal leadership and representatives from each of Tactic’s villages to create the Municipal Committee of Programming, the entity tasked with receiving petitions from communities, prioritizing these, and establishing DESCOM’s schedule of projects.62 Project coordinator Emilio Vásquez Robles’s understanding of the relationship between DESCOM and its host communities is worth quoting at length because it underscores the staff’s belief that their work was purely humanitarian and beneficial to the communities:
Everything was coordinated, coordinated in a way that didn’t feel like an impact to the community [punching fist into hand repeatedly as he said this], but rather was a help that they, well, would accept, that the team had arrived there to work, through health, education, and the economy. We were never rejected, we never felt like it was a blow [un golpe; punching fist again], that a strange team had arrived to the community, but rather in the investigations that we did, in the meetings with the leaders, we explained what our work was and that we hadn’t come to alter the community’s way of life but rather had come to bring some help from the government to the community, in order to improve their community, in order to develop their community.63
Through careful coordination, thoughtful preliminary study, and several meetings with local leaders, DESCOM staff worked in these communities and brought, from Vásquez’s perspective, humanitarian help from the central government, which thus extended its reach, for better and for worse, into rural Guatemala.
Because a central goal was to promote integral development and empower communities to utilize their own resources to realize their own improvement, DESCOM leaders organized communities and quickly deferred daily oversight of projects to local committees. Like teams in other parts of the country, Tactic’s DESCOM team consisted of five members: an adult educator, a nurse, a home educator, a social worker, and an agronomist. Based in the municipal center of Tactic, they traveled almost daily to nearby villages to organize locals into Community Improvement Committees. Once formed, these committees presented proposals and project designs for DESCOM to approve and finance. DESCOM operated in Tactic until 1981, when the local center was transferred to Lanquín in northern Alta Verapaz.64
During the decade that DESCOM worked in Tactic, it pursued a variety of projects but focused heavily on developing potable water systems and modernizing agricultural methods. Safe drinking water and a varied diet would improve the nation’s health, and healthier people would have more energy to pursue economic and social activities. Because U.S. foreign policy focused on developing a strong middle class by breaking the feudal relationships so prevalent in rural Latin America, creating a strong class of agricultural entrepreneurs was critical to modernization’s success. Particularly for Guatemala, doing so meant the integration of a majority Maya population that traditionally practiced subsistence agriculture into the national capitalist economy. Improving nutrition was central to achieving this goal and had been a priority of the Guatemalan government for some time. At a 1958 U.S. presidential breakfast where Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had criticized what he perceived to be the poor work ethic of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples, Guatemalan physician Mariano López Herrate retorted, “Mr. Secretary, I respectfully submit that if you had the anemia of most of our Latin American workers you wouldn’t even be at breakfast this morning.”65 This link between nutrition, public health, and economic productivity continued into the 1970s and guided DESCOM activities in infrastructure and agricultural modernization projects.
In April 1972, the village of Chiacal, just outside Tactic’s municipal center, organized an improvement committee with the explicit goal of “realizing distinct activities, of a socio-cultural character for the development of the village so that they can foster a better means of life.”66 For this community, development was simply a way to acquire a higher standard of living. Solving the community’s lack of access to drinking water was the Chiacal committee’s main objective. In 1974, Chiacal’s residents organized work crews to pipe water from a distant spring, located on an estate up the mountain, several kilometers away. The piped water then reached several closed tanks in the village center, replacing the open wells that the community was currently utilizing. These open wells could collect only rainwater, not freshwater, and besides, they were dangerous, as several people had fallen into them and drowned. DESCOM staff negotiated with the estate owner to secure access to this water source and provided the concrete pipes necessary for the project. Community members provided the labor. Decades later, Rogelio Bin Quej, a seventy-two-year-old widowed farmer and the only living member of the local committee, proudly recalled his community’s efforts to solve this problem that for years had plagued their health. For weeks, he said, work crews rotated every eight days so that each person contributed his efforts to the project while still having adequate time to tend to his crops and provide sustenance for his family. Men worked to dig the ditches and place the pipes while women provided food and drink to the workers. In the end, they created a potable water system that was replaced only in the early 2000s with an updated system that piped water to every home. Bin has carefully guarded his diploma of service that DESCOM awarded to him on the project’s completion date, 6 June 1974, which he proudly displays as evidence of his community service.67
As seen in this example, DESCOM worked in Tactic to first organize committees and then acquire the necessary resources to complete practical development projects. Providing safe and accessible drinking water was a central project of DESCOM, as this could significantly reduce disease and allow residents to reallocate the time they typically spent walking to these distant water sources into other activities. However, these projects were about more than piped water. In organizing the committees, DESCOM staff hoped to demonstrate that communities could improve their position through more efficient appropriation of local resources and manpower, thus instilling self-confidence, motivation, and a strong collective work ethic. This model of providing materials and then requiring the community to actually complete the work allowed DESCOM’s team to oversee more projects and extend its reach to additional communities. DESCOM projects geared toward agricultural modernization and crop diversification tell a similar story. Globally, Malthusian fears of overpopulation had combined powerfully with a recognition of insufficient food supplies to generate what is now termed the “Green Revolution,” referring to the efforts of development planners, agronomists, and scientists to figure out ways to feed the world through improved agricultural techniques, modified seeds and crop varieties, and more efficient transportation.68 The Guatemalan peasantry barely survived on subsistence agriculture, with many having to supplement familial earnings with seasonal labor on the coastal plantations that grew Guatemala’s key export crops. Extremely unequal land tenure patterns were the primary explanation for the rural peasantry’s inability to grow enough food for survival. According to the 1964 Guatemalan agrarian census, 87.4 percent of Guatemala’s farms were too small to provide work and food for a peasant family, and these small farms covered only 18.6 percent of Guatemala’s arable land.69 However, land reform presented too political of a solution; instead, development experts focused on agricultural modernization, blaming the peasants’ “traditional” cultivation methods for insufficient harvests.
DESCOM in Tactic adhered to this agricultural diversification and improvement model. Even though the department of Alta Verapaz had one of the highest rates of expropriated territory during Guatemala’s short-lived land reform from 1952 to 1954, at no point was land reform an option for DESCOM, as it would drastically alter the local status quo. Rather, DESCOM proposed technical training in modern cultivation techniques that would theoretically produce higher crop yields. Training materials told DESCOM staff that agriculture could be considered “developed” when farmers were simultaneously completing three economic functions: that of worker, administrator, and capitalist. Understanding the male-led household to be the basic economic unit, the model farmer provided sustenance for his family through his own labor, on his own land. At the same time, his productivity required employees, whom he managed effectively. This agriculture entrepreneur also sold excess produce and actively accumulated wealth, which he used to improve his agricultural ventures and provide opportunities for his dependents.70 Such a model of agricultural modernization would serve to maintain the status quo by not upsetting current land tenure patterns, and at the same time, it would draw the rural peasantry into the national and global capitalist market, an important goal of First World modernization.
Municipal residents remember DESCOM efforts to shape local agrarian practices and attempts to transform them into model farmers. In 1972, DESCOM implemented its village garden and crop diversification programs in Tampó, Pasmolón, and Chiacal, introducing new crops such as carrots, wheat, and cabbage. Social promoters and DESCOM’s home economics instructors taught local women new recipes that used these unfamiliar vegetables in an attempt to improve rural nutrition. Rogelio Bin recalls that during this time, he began growing mandarin tomatoes that he sold at the municipal market, thus increasing his family’s income. Alberto Bin, a shop owner, and Heriberto Isem, a farmer, remember the community garden and the beehives that DESCOM oversaw in Pasmolón, recounting that gardening was part of the school curriculum and students took produce home to their families. DESCOM’s agricultural expert also taught residents alternative cultivation methods, distributed new types of hybrid seeds, and introduced products such as chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. When local residents donated land, DESCOM staff planted experimental fields to demonstrate how modern agricultural practices could provide a higher yield at harvest.71
However, not all attempts at agricultural modernization were quickly accepted or applied. DESCOM staff member Gladys Gamboa recalls that although people received seeds and insecticides for free, they were at times hesitant to abandon cultivation techniques that they had learned from their families. Former mayor Carlos López remembers that although DESCOM recognized and respected the sacredness that Maya culture attributed to corn, their efforts to change agricultural practices had mixed results. DESCOM staff tried to teach farmers to plant their crops in rows rather than digging holes for individual seeds and also tried to encourage farmers to plant crops other than corn and beans. While some farmers did accept these suggestions, others maintained that years of experience had convinced them that their traditional methods were best.72 A farmer in Chiacal said that at first they used the fertilizers that DESCOM provided; however, they quickly realized that these fertilizers, while perhaps increasing their crop yield, were harming the soil, so they abandoned this practice.73 These oral histories convey the importance that tradition held for rural farmers and their hesitation over changing their cultivation patterns.
Recipients of DESCOM projects celebrated the infrastructure development that occurred in their community but at the same time were less inclined to accept “improvements” in sociocultural areas such as agriculture. Residents did not identify the top-down modernization project of the state as the solution to their problems. While grateful for government financing, local residents took a much more communitarian approach, often seeking “development without modernization.”74 Alberto Bin and Heriberto Isem maintained that more serious issues, such as access to land, went unresolved. Development projects, according to these men, were full of corruption and were used as a way of winning votes.75 Tactiqueños were not completely malleable nor were they willing to alter their lives because a government program suggested alternative behaviors. Even though community development, in many ways, helped the military to consolidate their authoritarian rule, it by no means suffocated local agency. Tactiqueños participated in development as far as they wished, but they collectively refused to completely mold their lives into what the Guatemalan state desired. In the process, both the modernizers and the communitarians (re)created their Third World identity as they daily negotiated the complex layers in international development programs.
Throughout the Western Hemisphere, development experts believed in the power of community development. By employing specialists, channeling projects through international institutions, and framing development as strictly a humanitarian endeavor, they attempted to strip it of all its political content. Oral histories of former DESCOM staff confirm this interpretation of development, as these projects are etched in their memories as apolitical, benevolent endeavors that had a positive impact on Tactic. These men and women tirelessly dedicated their careers to a low-paying job, that, to paraphrase one educational promoter, had a daily start time, but did not have a fixed end time.76 They traveled almost daily, often on foot or on horseback, to remote communities with the goal of using their expertise to alleviate the widespread poverty in Guatemala’s countryside. These communitarians, alongside the villagers with whom they worked, challenged the modernizing aspects of the state’s community development program, tailoring it instead to the local context and allowing for some resistance. In short, local practitioners allowed communities to develop largely on their own terms. Local histories of development reveal how participants were not bound by geopolitical constraints. Their Third World identity was a lived experience, as they daily pursued alternative models of development that better resonated with local customs and practices. In this regard, the state’s effort to create a homogenous, modernized citizenry failed.
The program’s planners in Guatemala City justified the need for finances for these programs, as well as the very existence of these projects throughout the countryside, in terms of Guatemala’s economic underdevelopment, which they considered to be a national embarrassment and the responsibility of the state to remedy. By positioning Guatemala as a country in limbo, with dissatisfied masses who would turn toward Communism if that ideology offered them a better material future, Guatemalan political elites made development an issue of national security and by extension, hemispheric security. By making economic development directly related to continued official Guatemalan support of First World politics, they ensured a steady stream of U.S. and international development aid that allowed the government—which for much of DESCOM’s history was a military regime—to consolidate power and maintain an appearance of goodwill in the countryside through what they portrayed as humanitarian efforts.
As part of the broader Third World, Guatemala’s experience with community development informs our understanding of development history and its connections, parallels, and disjunctions across the Global South. The nations of the Third World were those believed to be in need of economic development assistance, and while the Cold War was certainly about military escalation and nuclear proliferation, it also was a struggle for defining development and a model for modernity and modern citizens. Localized histories of development, rooted in administrative buildings in Third World capital cities and in town plazas in the Third World’s countryside, allow us to draw global connections that trace the ways in which both elites and popular classes negotiated the changes that development initiatives brought to their lives.
1. Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 337–38.
2. Sexto Censo de Población, 1950, 39, Archivo General de Centroamérica (hereafter AGCA); Silvia Quick, Guatemala, Country Demographic Profiles (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1977), 6; “Algunos rasgos de la realidad agraria en Guatemala,” Colección Mario Payeras-Yolanda Colóm, Doc. 004, 5, Archivo del Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (hereafter CIRMA).
3. “Da Confianza del Programa de Desarrollo de la Comunidad,” El Imparcial, 31 May 1965.
4. Nick Cullather, Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States–Philippines Relations, 1942–1960 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
5. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122.
6. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, rev., exp. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). In particular, see chapter 10 for a history of the failed attempt by the Arbenz government to buy arms from Czechoslovakia as the United States had refused to sell arms to Guatemala since 1948.
7. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Special Study Mission to Central America on International Organizations and Movements, 84th Congress, 1 Session, rpt. 1155, 1955, 16, quoted in Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 137.
8. See Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, for an excellent historical analysis of U.S. foreign aid and Guatemalan development during the Eisenhower administration.
9. Westad, The Global Cold War, 66–72; “Soviet Experts Assisting Chile: High-Level Mission Arrives to Develop Aid programs,” New York Times, 27 January 1972, http://
10. Westad, The Global Cold War, 396.
11. Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity 6, no. 3 (2015): 429–63; Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity 7, no. 1 (2016): 25–174; Westad, The Global Cold War, 3.
12. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 5.
13. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 4–6; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 5.
14. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 54.
15. John T. Way, The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Douglas Brintnal, Revolt against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala (New York: Gordan and Breach, 1979); Luis Solano, Contextualización histórica de la Franja Transversal del Norte (FTN) (Huehuetenango, Guatemala: CEDFOG, 2012); Edward F. Fischer, Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
16. For one such example, see Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
17. Thomas Field, From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Ruth Leacock, Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961–1969 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990).
18. Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 56. Emphasis in original.
19. Westad, The Global Cold War, 92.
20. See Lars Schoultz, “Providing Benevolent Supervision: Dollar Diplomacy,” in Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapter 11, for an account of U.S. intervention in foreign economic affairs in Latin America.
21. Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
22. Latham argues that this trend characterized the official U.S. stance toward the Third World in The Right Kind of Revolution, 32.
23. Cole Blasier, The Giant’s Rival: The USSR and Latin America, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987; Roger Hamburg, “The Soviet Union and Latin America,” in The Soviet Union and the Developing Nations, ed. Roger E. Kanet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 179–213.
24. Quoted in This Week, 7 August 1955, and cited in James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1989), 425.
25. Streeter, “The Failure of ‘Liberal Developmentalism,’ ” 393; Memorandum of Conversation, Subject: Guatemala: IBRD and Klein & Saks Missions, 24 April 1956, Documentos Desclasificados (hereafter DES), No. 367, CIRMA; Memorandum of Conversation, Subject: Guatemala: Relations between Klein & Saks Mission and American Embassy, 24 April 1956, DES No. 362, CIRMA.
26. Ministerio de Economía, Política económica del gobierno de liberación: Reunión con los sectores de la iniciativa privada (Ministerio de Economía: Guatemala, C.A., 1957), 13, 22.
27. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, 131.
28. “We Are Officers of the Guatemalan Army,” November 13 Rebel Movement, translated by Greg Grandin, in The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Greg Grandin, Deborah T. Levenson, and Elizabeth Oglesby (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 250.
29. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., A Short History of Guatemala (Guatemala: Editorial Laura Lee, 2008), 146.
30. Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
31. Memorandum to Mr. McGeorge Mundy, Subject: “Guatemala,” 21 January 1963, DES, 734, CIRMA.
32. Speech in Tampa, Florida, 18 October 1960, Campaign Speech File, Pre-Presidential papers, John F. Kennedy Library, cited in Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, 14–15.
33. Adolf A. Berle, Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 729, quoted in Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area, 22.
34. The Peace Corps clearly illustrates this localized approach. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 138–44, and Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 109–50, both consider the historical importance of the Peace Corps to U.S. development history, with Immerwahr proposing a more communitarian understanding of this project while Latham maintains that the Peace Corps only helped to fulfill the modernization mission abroad.
35. See chapter 3, “Peasantville” in Immerwahr, Thinking Small, for a discussion of the Etawah project. See also Nicole Sackley, “Village Models: Etawah, India, and the Making and Remaking of Development in the Early Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 4 (2013): 749–78, for a discussion about the transnational processes of attributing various meanings and memories to the Etawah project.
36. See chapter 4, “Grassroots Empire,” in Immerwahr, Thinking Small, for a discussion of the Filipino community development program.
37. Jason Pribilsky, “Indigenismo, Science, and Modernization in the Making of the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 405.
38. Víctor Manuel Navarro, “Filosofía del desarrollo de la comunidad, ideario y principios I,” El Imparcial, 30 December 1963.
39. “Valiosa opinión de Ospina Restrepo sobre desarrollo de la comunidad” El Imparcial, 26 June 1965.
40. José R. Castro, “Desarrollo de la comunidad,” El Imparcial, 6 December 1965; “Declaration of Punta del Este: 17 August 1961, in Inter-American Relations: Collection of Documents, Legislation, Descriptions of Inter-American Organizations, and Other Material Pertaining to Inter-American Affairs, comp. Barry Sklar and Virginia M. Hagen (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), http://
41. Juan José Arévalo, the first president of the Revolution, had belonged to the Partido Revolucionario. Initially Mario Méndez Montenegro, Julio’s brother, was the PR candidate, but when he was mysteriously assassinated, Julio, dean of the law school at the National University, took his place as the candidate.
42. Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus, 448–49.
43. Ian F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2001), 172.
44. “Cuadro comparativo de presupuesto para 1966,” Administrative Records of the Secretaría de Bienestar Social, Paquete 1, Tomo 4, Año 1964–1968, AGCA; Departamento Personal, Planillas de Sueldos, January–June 1965, Archivo de la Secretaría de Bienestar Social (hereafter SBS); Ministerio de Gobernación de Guatemala, Acuerdo Gubernativo de 3 November 1967. The Quetzal was pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar during this time.
45. Megan Bradley, “Forced Migration in Central America and the Caribbean: Cooperation and Challenges,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 666.
46. Dirección de Desarrollo de la Comunidad, 3 años de labor intensiva de la Dirección de Desarrollo de la Comunidad de la Presidencia de la República en beneficio de los habitantes de las comunidades rurales del país (Guatemala, C.A.: September 1981).
47. John F. Kennedy, “Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Transmitting Bill Implementing the Message on Foreign Aid,” 26 May 1961, in John F. Kennedy: 1961; Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 20 to December 31, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Registrar, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1962), 407.
48. This argument follows James C. Scott’s work on legibility in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–3.
49. “Críticas, lo que falta en la práctica,” El Imparcial, 27 August 1963; “Promesas y La Alianza,” El Imparcial, 13 November 1964; “No todo es alabanzas,” El Imparcial, 26 August 1968; “Los silencios de Guatemala,” El Imparcial, 7 January 1966.
50. Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 36–39; Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Acción Cívica (Guatemala, 1962); Mario Payeras, Los días de la selva (La Habana, Cuba: Casa de las Américas, 1980); “Programa de Guatemala considerado el mejor concluido en proyección social,” El Imparcial, 19 June 1965; “Será sede de Desarrollo de la Comunidad,” El Imparcial, 24 November 1964; “Análisis de problemas en lo económico, social, político,” El Imparcial, 28 October 1970.
51. Searches in worldcat.org for these Pan-American Union training booklets revealed that they were published throughout these countries. A couple of newspaper accounts in Guatemala also indicate regional conferences where Latin American countries met to discuss their respective community development programs: “Del discurso del Dr. Restrepo: Desarrollo de la Comunidad; el Gobierno y Pueblo, en Acción,” El Imparcial, 18 June 1965; “Guatemala Encabeza Desarrollo de la Comunidad en América; Constancias en la II Reunión Regional,” El Imparcial, 21 June 1965.
52. Luis Lebret, Desarrollo y civilizaciones, Colección Bienestar Social y Desarrollo de la Comunidad, No. 4 (Guatemala, C.A.: 1964), 9.
53. Ezequiel Ander-Egg, El desarrollo de la comunidad en la planificación y ejecución del desarrollo nacional, Colección Bienestar Social y Desarrollo de la Comunidad, No. 8 (Guatemala, C.A.: 1964), 11–12.
54. Ander-Egg, El desarrollo de la comunidad, 26; Manfred Max-Neef, El desarrollo de la comunidad y la programación nacional de desarrollo, Colección Bienestar Social y Desarrollo de la Comunidad, No. 7 (Guatemala, C.A.: 1964), 33.
55. “Desarrollo de la comunidad estudia el Dr. R.W. Poston,” Prensa Libre, 2 June 1965; “Colaboración mutua en mes,” El Imparcial, 24 February 1966.
56. See chapter 3, “A Continent of Peasants,” in Cullather, The Hungry World.
57. U.S. Army film, 1945, quoted in John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 2000), 215, quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 24.
58. Secretaría de Bienestar Social (hereafter SBS), Programa integral de desarrollo de la comunidad para Guatemala de la Jefatura de Gobierno, Colección Bienestar Social y Desarrollo de la Comunidad, No. 3 (Guatemala, C.A.: 1964), 19.
59. SBS, Programa Integral de Desarrollo, 16.
60. SBS, Programa Integral de Desarrollo, 11–14.
61. Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus, 444.
62. Libros de Actas, No. 8, Acta No. 252, 19 June 1971, Archivo Municipal de Tactic (hereafter AMT).
63. Emilio Vásquez Robles, interview by author, Cobán, Guatemala, 3 September 2016.
64. Gladys Gamboa de Fernández, interview by author, Tactic, Guatemala, 1 September 2016. The informant is not completely certain about this date, but other interviews confirmed that DESCOM’s work diminished in the early 1980s due to the civil war and then ceased after it left in the early 1980s. Municipal records from this decade that could confirm this date no longer exist.
65. “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Schlesinger) to President Kennedy, 10 March 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Vol. 12, American Republics, ed. Edward C. Keefer, Harriet Dashiell Schwar, and W. Taylor Fain III (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), Document 7, https://
66. Libros de Actas, No. 9, Acta 16–72, 13 April 1972, AMT.
67. Rogelio Bin Quej, interview by author, Chiacal, Guatemala, 24 September 2016. In an interview conducted by my research assistant, Aracely Cahuec, with Enrique Tun, in Chiacal, Guatemala, on 17 September 2016, Tun narrated a similar experience in working on this project. Tun and his wife participated directly in the project, and his uncle was on the local committee; “592 Obras realizadas por Desarrollo de la Comunidad,” El Imparcial, 16 April 1975, 5.
68. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World, 8.
69. Shelton H. Davis and Julie Hodson, Witness to Political Violence in Guatemala: The Suppression of a Rural Development Movement (Boston, MA: Oxfam America, 1982), 45, Doc. 2555, Inforpress, CIRMA.
70. Lynn Smith and George Foster, Los aportes de la sociología y de la antropología para el desarrollo de la comunidad, Series Colección Bienestar Social y Desarrollo de la Comunidad (Guatemala, C.A.: 1964), 20–21.
71. Libros de Actas Varias, No. 9, Acta 44 de 17 October 1972, AMT; Gladys Gamboa de Fernández, interview by author; Lesli Magdalena Guzmán, interview by author, Tactic, Guatemala, 1 September 2016; Carlos Salomon López Cantoral, interview by author, Tactic, Guatemala, 2 September 2016; Heriberto Isem, interview by author, Pasmolón, Guatmala, 24 September 2016; Otilia Isem Sierra, interview by author, Tactic, Guatemala, 23 September 2016; Alberto Bin, interview by author, Pasmolón, Guatemala, 24 September 2016; Rogelio Bin Quej, interview by author; María Hercilia Cantoral Hernández, interview by author, Tactic, Guaemala, 24 September 2016.
72. Carlos López Cantoral, interview by author.
73. Enrique Tun, interview by Aracely Cahuec, Chiacal, Guatemala, 17 September 2016.
74. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 58; emphasis added.
75. Heriberto Isem, interview by author; Alberto Bin, interview by author.
76. Ofilia Isem Sierra, interview by author.