“Development Is the New Name for Peace”: Transnational Community Development Projects and Citizenship in Cold War Guatemala

In the twentieth century, Guatemalan and U.S. development experts identified community development projects as a means to stabilize and modernize the countryside. Particularly after the election of social democrat Juan José Arévalo in 1944, national and international actors have worked to alleviate the rampant poverty and malnutrition, especially in rural Guatemala.  Yet the regions that self-identified humanitarians pinpointed as underdeveloped were largely indigenous, presenting a unique set of cultural behaviors and practices that challenged western development ideas. With the increased politicization of the Cold War and intensified leftist guerrilla insurgencies in Guatemala, development projects also became viewed as a “peaceful” means to maintain the status quo and prevent revolution.  Additionally, they served as a way for the state to fashion an acceptable version of the modern indigenous citizen, thus rendering any other expressions of indigeneity as a challenge to the state. 

This paper compares two transnational community development projects that were implemented in Guatemala between 1956-1976, the Plan de Mejoramiento Integral in Tactic, Alta Verapaz (PMIT) and the Programa de Desarrollo de la Comunidad (PDC).  These projects were directed and led by Guatemalan social workers, Catholic priests, U.S. missionaries and linguists, Guatemalan and foreign anthropologists, USAID officials and Peace Corp volunteers, and local citizens. While the earlier project, the PMIT, allowed for some local autonomy, by the mid-1960s, the state viewed the potential for Communist infiltration into community organizations as a threat and thus greatly inhibited the agency of local communities in pursuing development on their own terms.  Instead, community development programs became a means to control, monitor, and prevent Communist infiltration in the Guatemalan countryside. I argue that indigenous identity and activism were both affected by and challenged the state’s modernizing efforts, and this history reveals how Guatemalans understood high politics and used them to pursue their own interests.