This dissertation examines the history of Guatemalan officer professionalization beginning with the Liberal Revolution of 1871 and ending with 1954, the year a CIA-supported military coup ended Guatemala's ten-year experiment with sweeping political and social reforms. Throughout this period, the Escuela Politecnica served as the primary if not lone educational center for officer training. Therefore, the majority of the narrative focuses on the daily operations of this school and the factors that influenced changes in the academy's curriculum. However, beyond offering an institutional history of the Escuela Politecnica, this dissertation traces the gradual development of a professionalized officer corps. Despite the founding of the Escuela Politecnica in 1873, the waxing and waning of various political administrations' commitment to military professionalization, as well as the deliberate manipulation of the Guatemalan Army by unscrupulous chief executives, repeatedly frustrated officers' rising expectations. Not until the October Revolution of 1944 did leaders make a concerted effort to professionalize the entire officer corps and do away with the practice of commissioning officers directly from civilian life. More importantly, in an effort to ensure the revolution's success, leaders placated officers' interest in limiting the ability of presidents to control the military's internal operations or manipulate the Army for personal gain. Although this goal paralleled society's interest in preventing future dictatorships, the institutional autonomy granted to the military had the unforeseen consequence of allowing an increasingly professionalized officer corps to dominate Guatemalan politics once the reform fervor lessened and the fear of international communism began to rise. Thus, although officer professionalization facilitated the Guatemalan military's institutional dominance of the political apparatus following the 1954 coup, the militarization of Guatemalan society occurred not because the military had been professionalized, but because it had been raised above politics / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25218 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Contributors | Keberlein, Douglas Robert (Author), MacLachlan, Colin M (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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