Abstract
This thesis is a discursive analysis of the daily Guatemalan newspaper, El Imparcial. It is a cultural study of attitudes toward the illegitimate militarized state, the role of ethnicity and class, and modernization as a shared goal between traditional elites and the burgeoning class of military officers turned economic elites. Based on an examination of hundreds of pages of Guatemalan newspapers, spanning nearly a decade, and housed in special collections in the Latin American Libraries of the University of Florida and Tulane University, the thesis treats topics such as how elites chose to make sense of a rapidly changing and uncertain world. The thesis focuses on three central elements: violence reporting, consumer and political advertising, and reporting of national development. I argue that El Imparcial, as a supposed elite vehicle within the militarized state, presents many contradictory messages for its readers. El Imparcial wavered in its political support for the state as demonstrated by the trends in violence reporting; the paper’s consumer and political ads that sent similar contradictory messages of the state. Conversely, the adverts did send a consistent message of rigid social hierarchies promoted by a limited consumption style. El Imparcial’s coverage of developmental projects reveals the paper’s closest marriage to the militarized state. Development strategies served both civilian elites and the militarized state in mutually self-interested ways. Taken together, these elements reveal a complex cultural artifact with many opportunities for complicit and dissenting voices. It also shows how newspapers contributed to making the perception of violence into an unremarkable quotidian reality and how they encouraged the virulent dehumanization of Native peoples. The thesis shows the necessity of cultural history to explore the complexities of a contested history during a key transitional period in Guatemala’s history, from a state dominated by elites and protected by the military, into a full fledged militarized state where military officers became coequals with traditional elites.
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