'They Are the Poor, Crying Out For Justice' The U.S. Catholic Left and U.S. Guatemalan Relations, 1976-1985

摘要

This dissertation examines the ways that politically and socially liberal Catholic clergy, missioners, and laity in the United States, which historians have referred to as the U.S. Catholic Left, understood the political and human rights crises that informed the trajectory of U.S.-Guatemalan relations between 1976 and 1985. Scholars of U.S.-Guatemalan relations have underemphasized the importance of the U.S. Catholic Left, and Catholicism in general, in their scholarship. They typically have focused attention on the Dwight Eisenhower administration's authorization of the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in June 1954. While Arbenz's overthrow was undoubtedly a pivotal moment in Guatemalan history and bilateral relations, diplomatic scholars have devoted less attention to the events that followed. To address this deficiency, this dissertation uses papal encyclicals, Catholic and secular newspaper articles and editorials, homilies, and oral histories with clergy, lay missioners, and catechists to highlight the ways that the U.S. Catholic Left defined human rights, interacted with Guatemalan Catholics, and helped bring Guatemala's human rights abuses to global attention during the 1970s and 1980s. It also utilizes records from multiple federal agencies in the United States and Guatemala, published and unpublished State Department cables and telegrams, private correspondence, and Congressional testimonies to show how government officials in Guatemala and the United States responded to the U.S. Catholic Left's human rights activism during this exceptionally violent period in Guatemalan history. This approach foregrounds how transnational non-state actors -- in this case, the U.S. Catholic Left -- influenced interstate relations and foreign policy formation during the Cold War.