Abstract

What explains the Guatemalan military’s intervention in politics and its eventual take over of the government in 1963? One answer is ideology, and if ideology matters, than it would make sense to look at the education of interventionist officers in Guatemala. To find the link between education and militarism, we spent two months sifting through recently declassified military documents in the Archivo Central de Centroamérica in Guatemala City. The following is a survey of a sample of the documents along with a look into how they address the ideology held by military officers.