The Anglo–Guatemala–Belize Territorial Dispute: A View from the Belizean Borderlands

Tracing back to the colonial era, Guatemala still claims land that is now Belize and until 1981 was a British colony. This paper casts new light on this diplomatic dispute by centering voices from the Belizean borderlands. In examining moments in which the Belize-Guatemala dispute once again hit the forefront of diplomatic priorities and public discourse, I argue that these top-down conversations resulted from local level events and that nonelite people shaped international diplomacy and statecraft. For example, the dispute triggered diplomatic communications in the 1910s when Mexican revolutionaries were rumored to be smuggling weapons across the Mexico-Belizean border, thus intensifying both British and Guatemalan concerns about internal security. Repeatedly during the mid-century, authorities on both sides detained borderland residents for unauthorized chicle harvesting, milpa cultivation, fishing in national waters, smuggling, and general border crossings. As the Cold War escalated, authorities began to frame these types of quotidian actions as subversive, as alleged guerrilla activities, as examples of Cuban infiltration, or as aggressive provocations. In response, Guatemalans stationed the Kaibil special forces in the region and the British deployed Gurkha troops, thus militarizing the border and causing additional misinterpretations of the transnational lives of borderland communities and causing all sides in the negotiations to become stubbornly entrenched in their stance, leading to a diplomatic impasse that threatened—but ultimately did not thwart—Belizean independence. Together, I use these episodes to examine the undoing of empire and the shaping of international diplomacy from local histories of an understudied borderland.