Título en inglés.

Abstract

The intention of this article is to demonstrate the importance of defensive and military strategies of the Spanish Crown in the 16th and 17th centuries against the foreign incursion in different regions of the Wider Caribbean. Through the text, you can see that the Habsburgs considered its overseas colonies of the first and second order inside a defensive policy to protect colonial, expansionist and commercial interests. The example of the Kingdom of Guatemala is a presentation, how confronting foreign threats in a region considered by the Royal authorities of the second order, but also as the geopolitical situation of the area influenced of the changes of this defensive policy during the 18th-century. It should be noted that in this work were used the historical sources from the General Archive of the West Indies (Seville, Spain) and the General Archive of Central America (Guatemala, Guatemala), as well as manuscripts of the epoch and the secondary bibliography.