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Greening the Counterinsurgency: The Deceptive Effects of Guatemala's Rural Development Plan of 1970
Author(s) -
Copeland Nicholas
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
development and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.267
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-7660
pISSN - 0012-155X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01783.x
Subject(s) - prosperity , state (computer science) , agrarian society , genocide , political science , government (linguistics) , politics , development plan , economic growth , development economics , political economy , sociology , economics , geography , law , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , algorithm , computer science , agriculture , ecology , biology
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.