“El Principal Enemigo Nacional”: Revolutionary Guatemala's Response to Allied Policy toward German Presence in Latin America (1944–1952)

Abstract

This article examines the migration and expropriation policies of Guatemala's revolutionary governments toward Germans present in the country during the postwar years and the start of the Cold War. It reconstructs the challenges around the domestic and international articulations of their strategy. Revolutionary governments’ concerted efforts to confiscate valuable land and condition the return of German-Guatemalans classified as ‘dangerous’ can be interpreted as part of a cohesive plan to regain control of strategic domestic resources for future redistribution. It also reflects financial policies that have both electoral and financial purposes. The article is built around newly available judicial, legislative, and consular (France) Guatemalan sources, along with personal letters from Guatemala's top politicians, and complemented by Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, British, and US diplomatic documents. In methodological terms, this article shows the importance of articulating long-term processes, here the nineteenth-century German presence in Guatemala, in the context of historical junctures such as the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It also draws attention to the importance of analyzing events on domestic, regional and global scales to understand foreign policy-making. This article enriches an already complex set of global, regional, and domestic interactions of the postwar period, as well as the role of Guatemala during that time.