Graduation Year
2026
Date of Submission
4-2026
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
International Relations
Reader 1
Aseema Sinha
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between United States foreign policy intervention in Guatemala and the resulting consequences for the economic and human development of Indigenous Mayan communities. Situating U.S. intervention within the historical logic of the Monroe Doctrine, this study argues that the 1954 CIA-backed coup against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán and the subsequent decades of U.S. support for military governance represent not a random Cold War miscalculation, but the application of a durable hemispheric doctrine that consistently subordinated the welfare of marginalized populations to American strategic and corporate interests. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capability approach as an evaluative framework, and employing qualitative case study and discourse analysis methodology, this thesis demonstrates that U.S. intervention systematically deprived Indigenous Guatemalan communities of the freedoms that Sen identifies as constitutive of genuine development. The analysis draws on declassified U.S. government documents, the findings of Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification, and a range of historical and political economy scholarly works to trace the mechanisms through which Monroe Doctrine logic translated into Indigenous dispossession, genocide, and underdevelopment. The thesis concludes that the Guatemalan case provides a critical empirical test of the tension between state-centered realist foreign policy and human-centered development theory, and that a genuinely development-oriented U.S. foreign policy would require a fundamental departure from the interventionist logic the Monroe Doctrine institutionalized.
Recommended Citation
Suttner, Blake, "U.S. Relations in Guatemala: The Aftereffects of the Monroe Doctrine on Human and Economic Development" (2026). CMC Senior Theses. 4059.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/4059
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
