UCLA

My dissertation explores the historical and ideological origins of Central America’s communist parties, specifically in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, from 1920-1940. I chose this period precisely because it preludes the revolutionary war period of the late twentieth century in Central America (1960-1996), which has received an exceptional amount of attention from contemporary scholars. Through archival research, my dissertation makes three central arguments. First, I argue that both communism and fascism were ideological and political responses to the dual crisis of agrarian capitalism and liberal nation-building in Central America, albeit on opposing sides of the political spectrum. While Central American communists sought to carry out an agrarian socialist revolution, fascist sympathizers sought to consolidate state power for a growing predominantly Ladino and Mestizo upper- and middle-class capitalist elite by utilizing state terror and military violence. Second, I argue that Central America’s first communist parties began developing in the 1920s and 1930s as a direct response to the imminent threat and rise of Central American fascism, which scapegoated communists and working-class people, specifically Indigenous and Black communities, as well as women and migrant laborers, as enemies of the state, and manifested in the form of state-sponsored mass extrajudicial killings, including, but not limited to genocide and ethnocide. Third, I argue that Central American communist parties were inherently transnational, meaning that they functioned beyond the scope of each independent Central American nation-state and worked closely with other Latin American revolutionary movements, especially in Mexico and Cuba, thus upholding a practice of internationalism in their struggle against fascism, capitalism, and imperialism.