Charles Davidson

This project examines the history of psychological warfare in Guatemala, and explores how Cold War psychology shaped military thinking and international development, reframed local views race and religion, and ultimately conjured an existential struggle for the bodies and minds of a poor, indigenous population. Drawn from a transnational exchange of military thought and expertise, Cold War theories of psychological warfare envisioned a new modality of war, fought for and through the minds of men using an array of mental armaments like brainwashing and mass indoctrination. I argue that these ideas would converge with and reframe local anxieties over race, religion, and development in the techno-scientific language of national security—resulting in a distinctly Guatemalan doctrine of psychological warfare that would conflate development and defense, nutrition and psychology, the body with the mind, the psyche with the soul, and ultimately link “subversion” with indignity itself.