Dr Julie Gibbings is the Principal Investigator on this research project, examining the history of geographic knowledge and technologies during the Latin American Cold War in Guatemala. Image After World War II, the US government recognised the need for uniform grids to guide long-range missiles and for detailed knowledge of local conditions. Beginning in 1946, the United States Army Map Service created the Inter-American Geodetic Survey to support Latin American national mapping efforts. By 1952, the IAGS was operating a free geographical surveying, cartographical drawing, and map reproduction school at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. The school trained thousands of military and civilian personnel from across Latin America until it closed in 1992. IAGS-associated geographical knowledge and technology was never more important than within Guatemala’s bloody civil war (1960-1996). Eager to take advantage of US support for more accurate maps, Guatemala signed a treaty with the US for IAGS-related mapping within two months of the programme’s launch in 1946. By 1962, Guatemala’s National Geography Institute (IGN) enabled the large-scale development programs designed to eliminate the social bases of the revolution including the building of roads, hydro-electric dams, and mines. In the 1970s, however, as guerrilla forces operating in the countryside gained momentum, the military sought more effective control over geographic knowledges to pursue its counterinsurgency aims. In 1972, the US military general responsible for Central America noted that the Inter-American Geodetic Survey (IAGS) provided essential information for assessment of guerrilla activity, which was taking place where “geographic knowledge was the weakest.” These efforts to build strategic geographical knowledge reached a crescendo in the early 1980s, when the Guatemalan military sought to control the countryside through exclusive control over maps, the construction of model villages, the patrol of movement, and ultimately a massive scorched-earth campaign that raised over 600 villages. As an integral part of the state’s counter-insurgency campaign, the IGN was transferred to the Ministry of Defense in 1982, where it remained until state institutions were demilitarised in 1998. The Commission for Historical Truth and Memory illustrated that the worst episodes of state-sponsored violence occurred in areas with mining operations and hydro-electric dams. Guatemalan guerrillas, as well as people displaced by war, also generated geographical knowledge when they sought to navigate familiar and unfamiliar territories and to build political futures beyond the view of the state. Guerrillas and displaced peoples navigated space through Indigenous and local knowledges of landscapes that were laden with social meanings, historical memories, and embodied other-than-human beings, such as mountain spirits. In the aftermath of war, Guatemalan artists continue to reflect upon the geographies of the war through art that merges critique with memory struggles over the tragic pasts. This research project seeks to reveal how geographic knowledges shaped the contours of insurgency, counter-insurgency, and development in one of the most pivotal countries in the Latin American Cold War. Drawing on novel visual methodologies and collaborations with Guatemalan artists, this research will reveal how geographic knowledges and technologies – scientific, insurgent, and Indigenous –shaped a crucial and neglected theatre of the Cold War. Through a major international network, this research will also seek to create a new subfield of Cold War cartography. This project will result in an art exhibit, a historical GIS map, a scholarly monograph, co-authored articles, and an edited volume Dr Julie Gibbings' staff profile This article was published on 2024-08-01
