Pentecostal Theology and Counterinsurgency in Guatemala, 1982-83

Results slides for my William W. and Ida W. Taylor Faculty-Mentored Research Fellowship project on the role of Pentecostalism in Guatemala during the regime of Efraín Ríos Montt, a neopentecostal dictator who oversaw the bloodiest period of Guatemala's decades-long counterinsurgency war. Through archival research in the Benson Latin American Collection at UT-Austin and an investigation of the secondary literature, I concluded that the Pentecostal theological concepts of spiritual warfare, dominionism, and divinely ordained state power allowed Ríos Montt and his supporters in Guatemala to wed sincere belief with violent state action, sacralizing the destruction of Mayan culture in the name of national salvation.