Unthinkable Rebellion and the Praxis of the Possible: Ch'orti' Campesin@ Struggles in Guatemala's Eastern Highlands (original) (raw)
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Journal of Peasant Studies, 2015
Sugarcane and oil palm agribusinesses are in the vanguard of an emergent project of agrarian capitalism in Guatemala, which is defined here as the financialized and flexible agrarian extractivist project. Meanwhile, Maya-Q´eqchi´ residents of the northern lowlands believe that the changes in the labor regime, land relations and the agroecosystem that the expansion of these agribusinesses has brought threaten their subsistence in multiple and unfamiliar ways. Indeed, growing difficulties in dealing with (vital) grievances is leading many, even those who initially welcomed the corporate sugarcane and oil palm plantations, to transform their unrest into a practice of resistance. Elaborating on what is presented here as a multiple politics perspective, this contribution discusses the nature and character of such contemporary political dynamics of agrarian change. The forms, strategies and practices of the two main and most antagonistic repertoires of contention are explored here: the one in ‘defense of territory’ and the one in the promotion of the ‘agrarian extractivist project’. The tensions across and within multiple corporate, state and social actors who are pushing for, resisting, complying with or operating at the most violent margins of the agrarian extractivist project are also examined. By assessing continuities and ruptures between current and previous cycles of contention around the control of land, water and other natural resources, this paper stresses the often forgotten lesson about trajectories of agrarian change not being a story foretold, but the product of multiple and dynamic politics.
Theorizing a third current of Maya politics through the San Jorge land struggle in Guatemala
In response to the highly exclusionary Guatemalan state and the genocide of Mayas during the 1980s, the paradigmatic currents of the Maya Movement have been engaging the state in their struggle for rights. Some have been negotiating from within the Guatemalan government by occupying bureaucratic positions within less powerful state ministries. Other Maya actors press for more favorable socioeconomic policies using social movement tactics. While most literature focuses on the above two currents as a dichotomy, I argue that a third current of Maya politics has the most political potential. One promising example emerged in the course of the land struggle of San Jorge La Laguna (1992-1999). A sector of rural Mayas (mostly poor farmers and teachers) began to look away from the state in their quest for empowerment. They became less concerned with rights granted from a distant state, and prioritized instead practices that reach towards community self-determination and ontological autonomy. This clearly represents a third current of Maya politics grounded in the social fabric of rural Maya communities and their values, social relations, and worldview. This current, which I call Tejido Social (social fabric), is also possibly present in other spaces in Guatemala and likely had existed in prior times but did not pronounce itself publicly until this period. I use Escobar’s theorization of postliberal, postcapitalist politics of relationality to analyze the significance of this third tendency of Maya politics. This study contributes to the theorization of emerging third current / Afro-indigenous movements in the Americas through an ethnographic approach which focuses on political interventions that are lived principles embedded in socio-political practice.
Ungovernable? Indigenous Campesino Resistance to Land Grabbing in Guatemala’s Polochic Valley
Latin American Perspectives, 2018
A decade after buying up large swaths of land in Guatemala's Polochic Valley, the Chabil Utzaj sugarcane plantation was forced to cease operations because of local resistance led by indigenous Q'eqchi' campesinos. Situating the conflict within broader trajectories of agrarian and political change brought about by globalization in Guatemala shows how campesino groups have had to navigate a neoliberal political arena that disciplines their discourses and practices and limits their achievements. Campesinos' success to date has rested on partially subverting neoliberal institutions and prescribed practices, thus making new territories coveted by capital ungovernable and therefore less desirable. While most of the lands previously under sugarcane cultivation are currently occupied by organized campesino groups, their control of those lands is very precarious without property titles. The conflict is not yet over, and its long-term impact on livelihoods and trajectories of agrarian change remains uncertain.
Since the turn of the 21st century, the establishment and subsequent expansion of three (agro)extractive industries-sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining-in the Polochic valley lowlands of northern Guatemala has reduced local indigenous Q'eqchi' campesino (peasant) communities' access to farmland. Over the years, campesino groups and their allies have engaged in various forms of political contestation in "defence of territory". In 2015, Chabil Utzaj, the sugarcane company, ceased operations following a second mass occupation of its plantations. As a result, over 800 campesino households now each have access to around 3.5 ha of farmland. In this dissertation, I employ an extended livelihoods approach consisting of archival research, oral histories, key informant interviews, and household surveys grounded in agrarian political economy to explore how the struggle for defence of territory has contested this latest wave of territorialisation driven by (agro)extractive industries
Good people: revolution, community and conciencia in a Maya-K'iche' village in Guatemala
During Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, the Guatemalan army justified its genocidal violence against Maya Guatemalans on the grounds that Maya were the armed insurgency’s natural constituency. Since the war, advocates for the Maya have made claims on their behalf by claiming Maya have community instead of class consciousness, and thus could not have willingly subscribed to the insurgency’s revolutionary project. This dissertation challenges both representations of the Maya using the case of Chupol, a Maya-K’iche’ village in the township of Chichicastenango that joined the insurgency as a community and collectively suffered the consequences of this decision. I argue that the most important question for people like Chupolenses is not whether they possessed a revolutionary consciousness, but rather how their community, their notions of community membership, and the community’s place in Guatemala were profoundly transformed by this decision, and thus how this decision affects their ability to act politically in the present. Chupolenses, I show, can only be understood and incorporated into the Guatemalan polity as agents if their revolutionary past is taken into account. To recover this past without reproducing the army’s account of it, I trace the genealogy of “conciencia” [consciousness/conscience], which for Chupolenses refers to the God-given faculty of distinguishing bad from good action, as well as to the God-given duty to do good. This entity emerged from within the state’s Cold War implementation of governmental tactics designed to prevent rural Guatemalans from becoming revolutionaries. Relations between the Catholic Church and Indians, however, already traversed Guatemala’s rural area: through the state’s interventions the moral faculty of conciencia came to acquire world-historical significance, paradoxically allowing people like Chupolenses to voice a revolutionary “threat,” in Judith Butler’s terms (1997). But when the Guatemalan state quashed the threat, the claims conciencia enabled about Chupolenses’ place in world history were denied. Chupolenses now argue over what claims conciencia can make in the wake of this infelicity, and thus how to ground the collectivity of “good people” Chupolenses feel their community should be, to create a new future for themselves within Guatemala. This dissertation is based on 23 months of fieldwork in Guatemala.
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2009
This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.
Stateness as Landgrab: A Political History of Maya Dispossession in Guatemala
American Quarterly, 2017
This essay traces the changing forms of indigenous dispossession in Guatemala from colonial times to the present. We show that the stealing of Maya lands is not a historical episode linked to the Spanish invasion but a defining structure of Guatemala’s modern state. Our argument is twofold. First, various logics of colonization are at play. A historical approach illuminates a combination of settler colonial logics that erase indigenous presence and the colonial logic of racialization to control indigenous peoples. Second, the stealing of Maya territories is intrinsic to modern states. We connect colonial archives with contemporary neoliberal policies of extraction to reveal the continuation of colonial logics in Guatemala. Co-authored with Juan Castro
Back to the Future: The Autonomous Indigenous Communities of Petén, Guatemala
Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2020
Abstract: James C. Scott’s (1976) classic work on the Chayanovian logics of peasant economy argued that less important than the amount taken was how little might be left. A similar awareness about the paucity of the “leftovers” (li xeel, in Q’eqchi’ Mayan) has inspired a peasant federation in northern Guatemala to embrace its indigenous identity through scores of village declarations of autonomy. Albeit born from a class-based organizing repertoire, the new political trajectory of this Q’eqchi’ organization still reflects Via Campesina’s broader conceptual umbrella of peasant rights, good living, indigenous spirituality, gender equity, agroecology, and the ancient right to save seed. Drawing from a participatory mapping project, fieldnotes, letters, proposals, social media, texts, and other elusive “grey literature” from seventeen years of allied camaraderie, I describe how they are resuscitating and adapting an oppressive political structure from 16th-century colonial rule into a creative political mechanism to defend their territory from 21st-century neoliberal land grabs. Keywords: Agrarian Studies, Guatemala indigenous communities, indigenous identity, peasant, Petén. Retorno al futuro: las comunidades indígenas autónomas de Petén, Guatemala Resumen: la obra clásica de James C. Scott (1976), sobre la lógica chayanoviana de la economía campesina, argumenta que menos importante que la cantidad tomada es cuán poco puede sobrar. Una consciencia similar sobre la escasez de las “sobras” (li xeel, en maya q’eqchi’) ha inspirado a una federación campesina del norte de Guatemala a celebrar su identidad indígena, mediante decenas de declaraciones de autonomía. Si bien nació de un repertorio de organización basado en la clase, la nueva trayectoria política de esta organización q’eqchi’ aún refleja el amplio marco conceptual de Vía Campesina, que incluye derechos campesinos, buenas condiciones de vida, espiritualidad indígena, igualdad de género, agroecología y el antiguo derecho a almacenar semillas. Partiendo de un proyecto de mapeo participativo, notas de campo, cartas, propuestas, redes sociales, textos y la evasiva “literatura gris” de 17 años de alianza y camaradería, describo cómo están resucitando y adaptando una estructura política opresiva del dominio colonial del siglo XVI, para convertirla en un mecanismo político creativo que busca defender su territorio de la apropiación neoliberal de tierras del siglo XXI. Palabras clave: campesino/a, comunidades indígenas de Guatemala, estudios agrarios, identidad indígena, Petén. De volta para o futuro: as comunidades indígenas autônomas de Petén, Guatemala Resumo: a obra clássica de James C. Scott (1976), sobre a lógica chayanoviana da economia camponesa, argumenta que menos importante do que a quantidade tomada é quando pouco pode sobrar. Uma consciência similar sobre a escassez das “sobras” (li xeel, em maia q’eqchi’) tem inspirado a uma federação camponesa do norte da Guatemala a celebrar sua identidade indígena, mediante dezenas de declarações de autonomia. Embora tenha nascido de um repertório de organização baseado na classe, a nova trajetória política dessa organização q’eqchi’ ainda reflete o amplo referencial conceitual de Via Camponesa, que inclui direitos camponeses, boas condições de vida, espiritualidade indígena, igualdade de gênero, agroecologia e o antigo direito de armazenar sementes. A partir de um projeto de mapeamento participativo, notas de campo, cartas, propostas, redes sociais, textos e a evasiva “literatura cinza” de 17 anos de parceria e camaradagem, descrevo como estão ressuscitando e adaptando a estrutura política opressiva do domínio colonial do século XVI, para convertê-la em um mecanismo político criativo que busca defender seu território da apropriação neoliberal de terras do século XXI. Palavras-chave: camponês/a, comunidades indígenas da Guatemala, estudos agrários, identidade indígena, Petén.
This paper explores the innovative rights-realizing strategies of the Historical Memory Initiative (HMI), a group of indigenous campesinos located in the northern Guatemalan department of El Quiche, as they struggle against the incursion of national and transnational mining, oil and hydroelectric projects on their land. The paper provides a detailed historical analysis of the Guatemalan laws and policies that have had an impact on indigenous organization and community structures. It focuses on a series of geopolitical re-territorialization strategies carried out by the Guatemalan government and military that caused the re-ordering and dislocation of indigenous people, clearing the land for the construction of large-scale neoliberal development projects. The paper examines the neoliberal multicultural discourse that peace-time governments mobilize in order to distract attention away from the final phases of these strategies and their present-day impact on largely indigenous communities. The paper argues that the complex and sophisticated mechanisms that HMI members use to expose the corruption and manipulation taking place at the local and national level undermines this multicultural discourse and is constitutive of an innovative political project. By emphasizing the importance of remembering the violence and dispossession that has led to their present situation, these community members are engaged in a (re)construction of their past and present. They want to ensure that this past continues to inform the socio-political and economic analyses of present-day decision-making processes regarding development and that indigenous people must play an active role.