Por la Patria y la Revolución: Sifting through Guatemalan Military Archival Materials

Abstract

What explains the Guatemalan military\u27s intervention in politics and its eventual take over of the government in 1963? One answer is ideology, and if ideology matters, then it would make sense to look at the education of interventionist officers in Guatemala. To find the link between education and militarism, I spent two months sifting through declassified military documents in Guatemala. This poster presentation describes my biggest challenges and key finds as I dug through military academy documents, piecing together the fragments and shards of relevant information. Focused on the years immediately before and after the 1944 Revolution, the documents revealed a highly centralized institution in which every minute detail of the Guatemalan military academy had to be reported. While the Revolution did little to change that, I was able to piece together evidence of an ideological shift in terms of how officers perceived their institution and their role in Guatemalan national development