UC San Diego

This thesis examines the role of transnational networks in shaping the goals, strategies, and tactics of the Guatemalan left during the country’s civil war between 1960 and 1996. The thesis presents the argument that transnational networks were fundamental in shaping the positions and strategies of the Guatemalan left via participation in the networks of the internationalist left in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1970s, when global attention was on Central America, guerrilla organizations sought to cultivate material, political, and moral support through solidarity organizations abroad. In the 1980s and 1990s, actors in Guatemala and the Global North mutually influenced each other’s actions, as both sides were attentive to global circumstances and tried to utilize these forces to further their own political interests. The thesis aims to incorporate Guatemalan actors into the scholarship on the transnational left of this period, as well as to center actors and organizations from the Global South in discussions of the solidarity movement with Guatemala. The analysis is based on internationally oriented publications from Guatemalan guerrilla organizations and the institutional materials of solidarity groups in the Global North, in addition to memoirs and correspondence of individuals involved in these networks.