Abstract/Summary

Guatemala does not produce much oil at present, nor has it ever. Guatemala’s hydrocarbon potential, however, endured the international community’s interest long prior to the first discoveries of commercially viable oil in the 1970s. A push and pull transpired between Guatemalan exertions of resource sovereignty and American hegemony throughout the twentieth-century and leading up to the liberalisation of Guatemala’s hydrocarbon legislation in 1983. This thesis examines the path to liberalisation, focusing largely on the late 1970s and early 1980s wherein petro-diplomacy became entangled in human rights diplomacy that dominated bilateral relations. American initiatives to procure advantageous access to Guatemalan oil intersected with and altered the trajectory of U.S. human rights and foreign assistance policy, as high-profile American actors like General Vernon Walters and Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson engaged in quid pro quo aid-for-oil diplomacy with the government of Guatemala while the Reagan White House went to great lengths to aid the right-wing Guatemalan government during peak violence in the Guatemalan civil war. Liberalisation was reciprocal, as Reagan’s efforts to aid the right-wing terror eroded human rights institutions and ostensibly liberalised elements of U.S. human rights and foreign assistance policy. Examining petro-diplomacy in the broader context of aid, human rights, and Reagan’s Guatemalan policy reveals much about the nature of inter-American imperialism and casts a long, dark shadow on the legacies of all parties involved. This thesis makes several contributions to the existing scholarship on Guatemalan hydrocarbon development and inter-American critical resource imperialism, and to the scholarship on the Reagan administration’s relationship with human rights, Guatemala, and the Central American Cold War theatre.