Faith, the State, and Development in Guatemala during the 1970s

Following the United States sponsored-overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the United States sought to transform Guatemala into a “showcase for democracy” by pouring economic and military aid into the country.  The Government of Guatemala (GOG) shared little interest in promoting the kinds of social development programs among the country’s poor that became the focal point of US development policy after the creation of the Inter-American Development Bank and the introduction of the Alliance for Progress and the United States Agency for International Development.  The Catholic Church and mainline Protestant churches had been engaged in development initiatives in Guatemala’s rural indigenous highland communities since the 1940s.  They seemed to offer an alternative to the GOG. In the 1960s, US government channeled aid to these programs, but religious groups exercised autonomy transforming religious aid projects and indigenous Maya promoters into competitors with the Guatemalan state and US assistance projects.  This process of religious-secular development, divergence, and division was especially evident in programs of public health, cooperatives, and colonization projects initiated in the late 1960s whose religiously-influenced development during the era leading to Guatemala’s 36 year armed conflict is the subject of this paper.