Cold War Cartographies: Geographic Expertise in the Guatemalan Civil War, 1960–96

Shortly after coming to power in 1982, Guatemalan President Efrain Ríos Montt militarized Guatemala’s National Geography Institute (IGN). Responding to rumours that Guatemalan geographers employed by the IGN supplied maps to insurgent forces, Montt’s takeover propelled many Guatemalan geographers into exile, while those who remained found themselves under strict military surveillance. This paper examines the history of geographic expertise, knowledges, and technologies during the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996). After World War II, when the US government sought to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America, its agencies recognised the need for detailed knowledge of local conditions. Crucial to these efforts were accurate maps. Beginning in 1946, the US Army Map Service operated a free geographical surveying, cartographical drawing, and map reproduction school at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal zone. Known as the Inter-America Geodetic Survey (IAGS), the school trained thousands of military and civilian personnel from across Latin America, including many Guatemalan civilians and military officers, who formed the foundation of the IGN.

This paper examines this history through the life stories of the urban, middle-class professionals who were employed by the IGN. While trained in Fort Clayton by the IAGS, Guatemalan geographers, and the knowledges they produced, were also shaped by encounters in the countryside, dense transnational networks, and ultimately, military surveillance. By tracing the production of geographic knowledges in Guatemala, this paper asks how geographic knowledges not only circulated transnationally among ‘polycentric networks’ forming a ‘creative interplay’ between centres and peripheries, but were also subject to state efforts to regulate, possess, and guard these new knowledges as state secrets.