SOC421H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Armed Forces Of Guatemala, Body Politic, Reform Government Of New Zealand
Chapter 1: Death and politics
• To remember is to feel a knife tear into you
• from 1980 to 1996, when over 100,000 primarily unarmed people died violently in
massacres
• the 1996 Peace Accords that formally stopped the thirty-six-year war be- tween
the Guatemalan military and revolutionary groups over Guatemala’s destiny b
• the Accords mandated constitutional amendments to rede ne Guatemala as a
multicultural nation, limit the army’s mission, resettle displaced peoples, allow
civil society groups, and reform the judicial system.
• the 1954 coup that overthrew a democratic government
• After decades of struggle against what was widely perceived as an immoral
political economy, the chance for an immediate alternative was vanquished.
• Political violence in the second half of twentieth-century Guatemala was higher
than any other country
• Normal Guatemalan State Violence 1954-1980
• Guatemala was politically globalized on a grand scale in June 1954, when, in full
anticommunist armor, the United States allied with Guatemalan elites to end the
country’s attempt at a democratic reformist gov’t based on electoral politics, civil
liberties and national capitalism
• In the years that followed the famous 1954 coup, a symbol of Cold War politics
everywhere, the United States and the Guatemalan military and political and
economic elite developed a system of rule consisting of electoral politics
supported by a liberal constitution that guaranteed civil liberties and of constant
state terrorism.
• the United States showcased Guatemala as a model of its foreign policy of
promoting democracy, poured in investments that furthered manufacturing and
large-scale capitalist agriculture, and collaborated with the Guatema- lan state to
build an extensive system of terror based on thousands of informants and on death
squads that brought so-called subversives into secret centers and slowly tortured
them to death in the tens of thousands
• In the months following it, many 1944–54 government offcials and supporters
were charged and often shot or imprisoned for “subversion” under anticommunist
legislation
• The death squads weren’t just there to murder people, instead they tortured them and
made sure they were in pain
• One difference is that these slow tortures were not part of the sort of public
spectacular to which Foucault refers.
• Even though the torture was done in secret, but almost everyone knew about it
o Due to the marks on the bodies that were found later
• this was national political rule, not a concentration camp, not a strategy to
exterminate a group from the body politic, but a strategy to control the entire body
politic
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