As a matter of scholarship, civil wars lack the extensive breadth and volume of study that interstate conflict enjoys in international relations. This is especially surprising considering the remarkable longevity and death toll associated with intrastate wars. The Republic of Guatemala, a post-colonial representative democracy, is the most populous Central American country; incidentally, this nation of sixteen and a half million people have been wrought with the military and socio-political disputes provoked by the ethnic and socio-economic status of its citizens. The resulting civil war had been one of the most deadly and enduring military contests on the American continent. The fighting between the government and rebel groups lasted over …show more content…
Barbara Walter applies James Fearon’s bargaining theory to intrastate conflict. The information asymmetries and commitment problems present in interstate wars are even more pronounced in intrastate war (Walter 2009:244); accordingly, the new Guatemalan government lacked information about the military and economic capacity of the rebels and was uncertain about the peasant’s resolve. Neither side had sufficient knowledge about the capability or willpower of the other; therefore, the rebels lacked information about the true capacity of the military government, the resolve of the different heads of state, or the willingness of the United States to sustain monetary support for an unstable regime, As the military initiated several campaigns of one-sided violence against its citizens, the commitment problems of the Republic would have been heightened for rebel groups considering negotiations. In that climate, opposition groups would be even more inclined to suppress or distort their private information to evade reprisal. Land ownership may have also been a source of indivisibility for both sides of the conflict. The state’s revenue stream was agriculturally based; thus, it would have been disinclined to relinquish or redistribute any private land, territory or other properties that it controlled. In summation, the …show more content…
Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (2006) would use an identity-based argument to explain the inordinate length of the Guatemalan Civil War. Western colonization had created multiple civilizations in the same geographic space. The rebel leftists were mostly from native tribes that were indigenous to the land. Altogether, the tribesmen spoke 27 native tongues, 22 of which were Mayan. They worshiped traditional gods, and when the became oppressed by the west, the people summarily embraced the Marxist Leninist ideologies of communist Soviet Union. The military aligned with the existing power structure, the Criollos (upper-class and ethnically of Spanish descent) and Ladinos (middle-class mixed-blood Mestizos) that had wealth, spoke a homogenous tongue, Spanish, and partnered with the United States. The civil war could essentially be framed as a clash of civilizations: US vs. USSR, capitalism vs. communism, Caucasian vs. Mayan, each of the identity-affiliated elements compounds the complexity and duration of the combat; comparatively, Stuart Kauffman’s identity-based hypothesis highlights security dilemmas and the influence of “symbolic politics”. He ascribes the continued escalation of military conflict to three preconditions: “(1) a mythology justifying hostility between or among ethnic groups; (2) fears on the part of one or more ethnic groups that their existence is threatened; and (3) political opportunities to