Youth-Led Anti-Corruption Movement in Post-Conflict Guatemala: ‘Weaving the Future’? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2021
This article takes anticorruption activism as a starting point for analyzing how young activists unequally experience the inequalities produced by corruption, as well as the bureaucratic and financial weight of anticorruption and audit culture. Against the back-drop of Guatemala's now-defunct pioneering anticorruption commission, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), we utilize the concept of the anti/corruption continuum to analyze the contradictory positions of young people fighting against and depending on corruption for their economic survival. Gender, age, and class dynamics and young people's economic precarity make clientelism difficult to avoid and often curtail participation in movements for change. While most discussions of the CICIG's work focus on the national level, this is a unique view on how national-level politics reverberated locally in a Mayan community. [Guatemala, corruption, impunity , generation, politics] R e s u m e n Este artículo parte del activismo en contra de la corrupción para analizar cómo ac-tivistas jóvenes experimentan de manera dispareja las desigualdades producidas por la corrupción, así como el peso burocrático y económico de la cultura de la auditoría y la lucha en contra de la corrupción. En el contexto de la vanguardista y ahora disuelta
Civic engagement in extreme times: The remaking of justice among Guatemala’s ‘postwar’ generation
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 2015
In recent years, there has been a dramatic growth in the field of youth civic engagement, although little of this work has been conducted in fragile democracies contending with legacies of war and authoritarianism. This study explores how Guatemalan postwar generation youth develop as civic actors under extreme conditions of violence, social and political distrust, and a dwindling space for public expression. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in rural and urban Guatemala, this study demonstrates how young people’s sense of civic efficacy interacts with their interpretations of historical injustice and the civic messages mediated by teachers, families, peers, and communities. Young people struggle to define and enact appropriate civic action, at times working outside unjust systems as a means of fostering change.
The Movement, the Mine and the Lake: New Forms of Maya Activism in Neoliberal Guatemala
Humanities, 2016
This article explores the social, economic, cultural and political issues bound up in two matters relating to the environment in the Sololá and Lake Atitlán region of the Guatemalan Mayan highlands in 2004-2005: the violent breakup of an anti-mine protest and the various reactions to a tropical storm that threatened the lake ecosystem. It views these events as part of a historical conjuncture and centers them in a larger discussion of Maya political activism, environmentalism and neoliberal development in Guatemala from the 1990s-mid-2010s. It begins with the transition from war to peace in the 1990s, charting how Maya participation in municipal politics soared even as the official Mayan movement waned as the state turned to neoliberalism. Zooming in on municipal development and politics in Sololá in the early 2000s, it then traces at the ground level how a decentralizing, "multicultural" state promoted political participation while at the same time undermining the possibility for that participation to bring about substantive change. The center of the article delves deeper into the conjuncture of the first decade of the new millennium. By mapping events in Sololá against development, agrarian transformation and rural urbanization, it argues that resilient Maya community structures, although unable to stop the exploitative tide, continued to provide local cohesion and advocacy. Activists and everyday citizens became more globally attuned in the 2000s. The article's final section analyzes municipal plans made between 2007 and 2012, arguing that creating and controlling community structures became increasingly important to the state in a time when Guatemala's "outward" global turn was accompanied by an "inward" turn as people confronted spiraling violence in their communities. Critics called young people apolitical, but in 2015, massive demonstrations led to the imprisonment of the nation's president and vice-president, showing that there is a chapter of Guatemala's history of activism yet to be written.
Health and Human Rights, 2009
Social participation has been understood in many different ways, and there are even typologies classifying participation by the degree of a population's control in decision making. Participation can vary from a symbolic act, which does not involve decision making, to processes in which it constitutes the principal tool for redistributing power within a population. This article argues that analyzing social participation from a perspective of power relations requires knowledge of the historical, social, and economic processes that have characterized the social relations in a specific context. Applying such an analysis to Guatemala reveals asymmetrical power relations characterized by a long history of repression and political violence. The armed conflict during the second half of the 20th century had devastating consequences for a large portion of the population as well as the country's social leadership. The ongoing violence resulted in negative psychosocial effects among the population, including mistrust toward institutions and low levels of social and political participation. Although Guatemala made progress in creating spaces for social participation in public policy after signing the Peace Accords in 1996, the country still faces after-effects of the conflict. One important task for the organizations that work in the field of health and the right to health is to help regenerate the social fabric and to rebuild trust between the state and its citizens. Such regeneration involves helping the population gain the skills, knowledge, and information needed in order to participate in and affect formal political processes that are decided and promoted by various public entities, such as the legislative and executive branches, municipal governments, and political parties. This process also applies to other groups that build citizenship through participation, such as neighborhood organizations and school and health committees.
Violence and Political Participation in Northeastern Guatemala
Latin American Perspectives, 2021
Since colonial times, Northeastern Guatemala has been at the crossroads of legal and illegal trade routes used by local elites and foreign investors. Organized crime has always prospered there with the complicity and participation of the local authorities, while the United Fruit Company started its first banana plantations there in 1904. Both rested their capital accumulation on governmentalities mixing disciplinary and sovereign power mechanisms as analyzed by Foucault. In response to the impact of these governmentalities, centered on control and violence, the population has developed a tactical subjectivity that presents obstacles to its political participation and collective mobilization. Desde la época colonial, el noreste de Guatemala ha estado en la encrucijada de las rutas comerciales legales e ilegales utilizadas por las élites locales y los inversionistas extranjeros. Allí, el crimen organizado siempre ha prosperado con la complicidad y la participación de las autoridades l...
New Media & Society, 2011
In May of 2009, a posthumous video surfaced in which prominent lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg blamed Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom for murdering him. The accusations prompted the creation of numerous Facebook pages calling for Colom’s resignation, and for justice for Rosenberg. Using interviews and a content analysis of Facebook comments from the two most-active Facebook groups, this study found that the social network site was used to mobilize an online movement that moved offline. Users’ protest-related and motivational comments, in addition to their use of links and other interactive elements of Facebook, helped organize massive protests demanding justice and an end to violence.
2021. ¡Matria libre y vivir!: Youth Activism and Nicaragua's 2018 Insurrection.
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology , 2021
This article examines how youth subjectivity shaped Nicaragua's 2018 civic insurrection. A generation born after the end of the Sandinista Revolution in 1990 led the uprising, with the support of a broad sector of society. Once cast as apolitical and self-involved, young protestors built insurgent spaces of democratic participation that challenged national political culture and the authoritarian social relations that it produces. Focusing on the university student movement, the authors examine how youth life and youth death at the hands of the state became powerful symbols of resistance. Some activists, particularly young women, even reimagined the nation as a space of self- and mutual care rooted in feminist, ecological, and decolonial consciousness. This ethic of life critiques the heroic martyrdom of the revolutionary past and the militarism, extractivism, and heteropatriarchy of the contemporary state.
This article examines how youth subjectivity shaped Nicaragua's 2018 civic insurrection. A generation born after the end of the Sandinista Revolution in 1990 led the uprising, with the support of a broad sector of society. Once cast as apolitical and self-involved, young protestors built insurgent spaces of democratic participation that challenged national political culture and the authoritarian social relations that it produces. Focusing on the university student movement, the authors examine how youth life and youth death at the hands of the state became powerful symbols of resistance. Some activists, particularly young women, even reimagined the nation as a space of self- and mutual care rooted in feminist, ecological, and decolonial consciousness. This ethic of life critiques the heroic martyrdom of the revolutionary past and the militarism, extractivism, and heteropatriarchy of the contemporary state.