Between 1975 and 1983, Guatemala’s hydrocarbon development became deeply entangled with state-led violence during the country’s civil war. The United States' efforts to secure favorable access to Guatemalan oil intersected with—and in some cases redirected—the trajectory of U.S. foreign assistance and human rights policy. In the first book on U.S.-Guatemalan hydrocarbon relations, Richard M. Balzano exposes the arms-for-aid diplomacy and duplicity in the Reagan administration, who actively supported the Guatemalan government as they inflicted violence on their own citizens. US-Guatemalan Petro-Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century makes several original contributions to the existing scholarship on Guatemalan energy development and inter-American resource imperialism. Balzano challenges the notion that Guatemala was a peripheral concern in Reagan’s Cold War strategy in Central America, arguing instead that it played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. regional policy.
The first history of Guatemalan oil in the English language, characterized by a diplomatic push and pull between Guatemalan resource sovereignty and U.S. hegemony.
