Abstract
From 1980 to 1983, the Maya peoples of central and northern Guatemala experienced a brutal military assault in which hundreds of towns were destroyed, tens of thousands of people killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Ostensibly, such actions were undertaken as part of a counter-insurgency effort designed to protect the integrity of the Guatemalan state. This study argues, however, that the military's motivation for the escalation and indiscriminate attack against the Maya and guerrilla presence arose from an imperative to establish a secure investment climate for the Guatemalan state and investors. The article offers a chronological account of the rapid development of economic projects in the region—related to oil exploration, hydroelectric facilities, mining and infrastructure—by the military-dominated regimes during the 1970s and early 1980s. It then attempts to demonstrate how these projects became of increasingly greater importance to the state over time, thus prompting the violent repression of the Maya and the perceived threat to economic stability in the region.
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