The politics of history and memory in any society are determined by the relations of forces between hegemonic master narratives, defiant counter-memories, and silent majorities whose historical experience is rarely articulated in public. Based on Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, as well as postcolonial critique, this article explains historico-political processes through a specified reading of hegemony theory. Two common, though by no means unambiguous, terms are reloaded with specific definitions: politics of history as the political agency directed at the establishment of specific representations of the past, and memory cultures as the structural frameworks for these politics. This approach sheds light on the relationship between official and group-specific politics of history within defined memory cultures: the possibly conflictual interaction between those who interpret certain events, inscribe them into a historical canon and thus make them points of historical reference, and those who are the carriers, consumers, reproducers, but also challengers of this history.

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Este artículo analiza la historia de la guerra civil de Guatemala, tomando sus conflictos internos armados e intelectuales en contextos centroamericanos, hemisféricos y globales como la base material de la posterior memoria histórica de este periodo, igual de transnacional y también un campo de protagonismo político historizable. Primero, los actores revolucionarios y contrarrevolucionarios son analizados a la luz de sus vínculos transnacionales con redes, entornos discursivos y estrategias de poder que trascienden las fronteras de cada Estado nación y de la región en estudio. Además, la constelación global de la descolonización y la Guerra Fría prestan el trasfondo estructural ante el cual se desarrollaron los actores y las estrategias específicas y contingentes -un contexto amplio de contactos y transferencias que contribuyen a definir las decisiones y alternativas tácticas de cada actor-. Este contexto produjo no solo historias cruzadas, sino también memorias cruzadas. Estas últimas en un doble sentido: por un lado, las historias representadas en las narraciones sobre los antagónicos guatemaltecos y centroamericanos reflejan acontecimientos determinados por constelaciones transnacionales, y, por otro lado, estas narraciones en sí mismas han sido construidas en espacios discursivos transnacionales.Palabras clave: Guatemala; Centroamérica; Guerra Fría; historia cruzada; historia intelectual transnacional; memoria histórica. AbstractThis essay looks at the history of Guatemala's civil war, its internal armed and intellectual conflicts in their Centralamerican, hemispheric and global contexts, understanding them as the transnational material basis of the equally transnational historical memory of this period, itself a historicizable field of political agency. First, the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary actors are analyzed in the light of their transnational entwinements in networks, discursive environments and power strategies beyond the borders of each nation state and of the region itself. The global constallation of decolonization and the Cold War provides the structural backdrop against which these specific contingent strategies and actors develop, a larger context of contacts and transfers co-defining each actors decisions and range of tactical choices. This context produced not only historias cruzadas, but also memorias cruzadas -in double sense: one the one hand, the histories represented in the narratives about Guatemalan and Central American antagonisms reflect transnationally determined occurences; on the other, these narratives have themselves been constructed in transnational discursive spaces.

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