Greening the Counterinsurgency

The Deceptive Effects of Guatemala's Rural Development Plan of 1970

Bibliographic Data

ID3883696
AuthorsNicholas Copeland (0000-0002-4124-6766, Office of the Governor, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume43
Issue4
Pages975-998
Publication date2012-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDevelopment and Change (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0012-155X • E-ISSN: 1467-7660
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01783.x
OpenAlexW2155891843
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited26

This article examines the role of USAID's 1970 Rural Development Plan (RDP) for Guatemala in normalizing US military support for the Guatemalan government despite concerns about excessive state violence in the late 1960s. I argue that the RDP presented a depoliticized vision of Guatemala's agrarian problem and generated optimism that this problem could be resolved through market mechanisms and within the existing social order. Rather than promoting prosperity and stability, the RDP framed state terror as a temporary exception, and helped set the stage for genocide in the 1980s. This highlights complicities between discourses of development and political violence

Agrarian society · Development economics · Development plan · Economic growth · Economics · Genocide · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Sociology · State (computer science) · Cuban History and Society · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Politics and Society in Latin America

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