In this project, I will be exploring Guatemalan conflict within the last century. Specifically, I will be examining the role of race, as it is an area of study within the conflicts that I believe are critically important, as well as understudied. In this project, I examined sources from key US agencies as well as sources from Latin America to construct an understanding of the conflict. In selecting my sources, I’ve pulled much from The National Security Archive, which has been a leader in securing information from the recent civil war. I argue that categorizations of race were constructed and used to support some of the actions that lead to one of the worst humanitarian crises in Latin American history.