[originally published on Patreon March 18, 2024]

A brief parenthetical before continuing with the story of the Guatemalan genocide, I decided to do an episode just for me (and the like three other Mormon listeners) about the Mormon church in Guatemala, though I think this will still be instructive. 

The history begins with a Mormon named John Forres O’Donnal who was hired to the US Department of Agriculture’s new agency, the Office of Rubber Plant Investigations and sent to Guatemala and more or less developed Guatemala's rubber industry for US strategic purposes. More or less downstream from that, Mormonism began to flow as a consequence of his presence in the country. Church leaders visited and US missionaries began to arrive in the 1950s after the 1954 coup.

A former Mormon missionary who learned Mayan languages went back to BYU and worked on creating the Cakchiquel Basic Course through funding via a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare; this was published in 1969, and then expanded and republished in 1977. It is very likely that this program also received NSA funding as discussed in the Puzzle Palace by James Bamford. In turn, this facility with Mayan languages would have been used during the Guatemalan Civil War for counterinsurgency purposes.

Then, I tell the story of Cordell Andersen, a biological warfare doctor from a family with a