20th Century Guatemalan History

This essay recounts the occupation of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala in 1980 by an indigenous delegation and its urban allies and the subsequent assault by security forces which ended with a fire that killed 37 people trapped inside.  It explains why the event unfolded as it did by fleshing out the operative political context constraining and informing people’s actions and striving to understand the changing logic behind the Guatemalan military regime’s decisions between 1978-1981.  It then traces the tragedy’s afterlife, charting how this contentious memory was fought over during the next thirty years and how it was transformed into an emblematic battleground for explaining and processing the violence of Guatemala’s civil war and mobilized in battles over the country’s political future.

Enrique Gomez Carrillo (1873 – 1927), Guatemalan writer, poet and journalist, visited Russia at the height of First Russian Revolution (1905 – 1907). In his travel notes, he wrote down a few Russian words for which he didn’t find a translation nor an equivalent, transliterating them from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet. Among them, we find, apart from the expected adoptions like “mujik” and “pope”, some exotics like “kvas”, “troika” or “nagaikas”, as well as such unique realities of Russian political life as “samooupralvenic”, “mir”, “semski sobor”, “semtvo”, which would always make the journalist plunge into sophisticated reasoning. The researcher’s task is to explain the reasons that made E. Gomez Carrillo leave them without any translation.

De gepaste houding ten opzichte van het beladen verleden vormt één van de grote politieke vraagstukken van onze tijd.  In deze paper wordt het belang van culturele context bij transitional justice onderzocht en dit specifiek voor het verwerkingsproces van het Intern Gewapend Conflict in Guatemala (1960-1998).

This article connects two of Dewey's generic traits of existence—stability and pre-cariousness—to four elements specified in his preface to Democracy and Education (democracy, evolution, industrialization and the experimental method) and one element specified in his preface to How We Think (childhood). It argues that Dewey's metaphysics of stability and precariousness is implicit in his philosophy of education and provides a unifying aspect to his philosophy of education that is relevant to the modern world. The article then briefly looks at whether Dewey developed a metaphysics at all and concludes that Dewey did indeed develop a metaphysics—a new metaphysics of human experience—which needs to be further analysed in relation to various aspects of his philosophy of education. Richard Rorty, negatively, claims that John Dewey's metaphysics, especially as expounded in his work Experience and Nature follows a mistaken path by referring to generic traits of existence. 1 The best thing in that work, according to Rorty, is its negative function. It exposes the pseudo-nature of philosophical problems and the consequent need to slough off the dualistic presuppositions of such pseudo-problems. On the other hand, Dewey, when he offered what he considered being something positive in that work metaphysically through the generic traits of existence , confused the causal process of believing something and the justification of that belief. Dewey's metaphysics of the generic traits of existence, on such a reading , has no real function to perform. A similar disparagement of Dewey's metaphysics is found in Richard Gale's article, which derides Dewey's metaphysics by arguing that Dewey had a Humpty-Dumpty theory of metaphysics, designed to prevent the separation of the world into discrete particles that would, if left in isolation, never be unified again. 2 On such a reading, Dewey's metaphysics merely functioned to underscore his latent Hegelianism. Instead of arguing against such views by extensively considering Dewey's metaphysics (as does, for example, Raymond Boisvert), 3 the essay will argue indi

This essay addresses the disruption in the historical memorialization of Juan José Arévalo caused by the 2010 revelations about the secret U.S. Public Health Service-led “syphilis” experiments in Guatemala, 1946-1948, by retracing the inter-American campaigns in Guatemala against another disease, lost in historical memory, onchocerciasis. Arévalo set public health on his modernist agenda, and deployed the era’s progressive rhetoric, colored (or confused) by his own “spiritual socialism,” --and instrumental disregard for that rhetoric to achieve what he could. He also drew on long-standing inter-American networks coordinated by U.S. officials, academic, medical, indigenista and philanthropic actors that intertwined with military, commercial and other security interests. The work on onchocerciasis, in particular, created U.S.-Guatemalan collegialities, reciprocities, dependencies and international biomedical prestige for Guatemala, which directly and indirectly informed the handling of the STD human experimentation.
Our research shows how, in a complex, fast-moving public health context, arévalista aspirations overlapped with the promise of the postwar era (including major wartime medical advances such as eradicating typhus), the security pressures of the incipient Cold War, re-racializings of but also anti-racist challenges to prewar positivisms, blame and assimilation policies concerning negros, indígenas and blancos.

De gepaste houding ten opzichte van een beladen verleden is één van de grote politieke vraagstukken van onze tijd. In dit werk werd getracht een reconstructie en ontleding van het actuele  debat rond geschiedenis en herinnering in naoorlogs Guatemala weer te geven. Als onderdeel van dat debat onderzocht deze scriptie in haar hoofddoelstelling hoe verschillende actoren binnen de samenleving naar de geschiedenis kijken en haar betekenis toekennen. De focus lag daarbij vooral op het intern gewapend conflict (1960-1998). Een centrale thematiek was het spanningsveld tussen het ‘orde bevestigende’ en kritische of emancipatorische potentieel van geschiedenis. Daarnaast werd er  in de scriptie hoofdzakelijk aandacht geschonken aan tijdsregimes en historiciteitspolitiek.