Anything but a story foretold: multiple politics of resistance to the agrarian extractivist project in Guatemala

Abstract

Sugarcane and oil palm agribusinesses are in the vanguard of an emergent project of agrarian capitalism in Guatemala, which is defined here as a financialized and flexible type of agrarian extractivism. Meanwhile, Maya-Q´eqchi´ residents of the northern lowlands believe that the changes in the labor regime, land relations and the agro-ecosystem 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.

Keywords:

• flex crops and commodities
• land relations
• labor regime
• agrarian extractivism
• multiple politics
• frames and repertories of contention
• Guatemala

Acknowledgements

The author is most grateful to the editors of this collection and to the two anonymous reviewers for their meaningful comments. He is also very thankful to Jun Borras, Mindi Schneider, Max Spoor, SiuSue Mark, Ben Mckay, Zoe Brent, María Banos Smith, Tsegaye Moreda Shegro, Daniela Andrade, and Natalia Mamonova for their very helpful comments on earlier versions and/or copy-editing support. Any remaining errors are his own.

Notes

¹Such as mining, oil extraction, commercial tree plantations, carbon trading, hydro-power generation, cattle ranching, high-end tourism and narco-traffic money laundering. All these accumulation projects shape, and are shaped by, increasing economic and logistical corridors, and mushrooming environmental enclosures (Alonso-Fradejas 2012).

²Understood as ‘spatial assemblages of power relations and identity strategies [signifying] the “bottom-up” spatial contexts for identity and cultural difference (or place) more than the “top-down” connections between state and territory’ (Gregory et al. 2009, 745–46).

³Comprising ‘the nested (and sometimes not so nested) hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size’ (Jessop 2007, 104–05).

⁴Broadly understood as a ‘unit of space that has discrete boundaries, shared internal characteristics, and that changes over time and interacts with other similar units’ (Gregory et al. 2009, 539).

⁵This preliminary argument for, and understanding of, an emergent agrarian extractivist project is inspired by the reflection on my empirical research in the Guatemalan countryside since 2003, in the light of two main analytical threads. On one side is the classic agrarian question posed by Marx (1974[1867]) and further developed by Engels (1951[1894]), Kautsky (1988[1899]) and Lenin (1964[1899]), and, particularly, the later discussion by Byres (1991, 1996) and Bernstein (2004, 2006) about the need revisit the classic agrarian question(s) in the socially diverse contexts of the South today. On the other side is the vivid debate on the politics of ‘neo-extractivism’, around mining and hydrocarbon extraction projects in Latin American states with progressive governments (Gudynas 2009; Veltmeyer and Petras 2014; Acosta 2013; Bebbington 2007; Leff 2006; Martínez-Alier 2002, among others). Especially important is the need to contextualize this debate: (1) in contemporary accumulation projects in the realms of biomass in general, and agriculture in particular; and (2) in non-progressive government Latin American states, like Guatemala.

⁶So far, I have approached agrarian extractivism as an accumulation and governmental project, which might or might not coalesce in a distinctive regime of accumulation within capitalism.

⁷Research methods include geographic information system analysis, interviews, participatory observation and a gender-differentiated household survey carried out in October 2010. The survey's sample was stratified by village (significance level 5 percent) and included 294 randomly selected households (586 surveys) in 20 villages of six municipalities within the northern lowlands (see Figure 1).

⁸Understood by Tarrow as ‘less momentous than revolutions, more connected than contingent chains of events’ (2012, 215).

⁹The Q´eqchi´, with an estimated population of more than two million people, is probably (since the last official population census dates back to 2002) the largest of the 22 Mayan peoples in Guatemala.

¹⁰For a fresh review of the colonato regime in Guatemala, see Hurtado (2008).

¹¹During the 36 years of war, and especially under the early 1980s military-led scorched earth policy, there were also 160 massacres in these sub-regions. The 1996 Peace Agreements led to the official end of a conflict which left 200,000 people killed or disappeared. Over 80 percent of the victims were civilian, rural, Maya indigenous people (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999).

¹²This is akin to the mestizo racialized identity elsewhere in Latin America.

¹³Ranging from advantageous to adverse terms and conditions of people's incorporation into an accumulation project (Du Toit 2004, 1003).

¹⁴According to Bernstein, these include all those who ‘have to pursue their reproduction through insecure, oppressive and increasingly “informalised” wage employment and/or a range of likewise precarious small-scale and insecure “informal sector” (“survival”) activity, including farming; in effect, various and complex combinations of employment and self-employment’ (2010, 73).

¹⁵Rios Montt, one of the most influential generals at the time, was convicted by a Guatemalan Court of genocide and crimes against humanity on 10 May 2013. Ten days later, the Constitutional Court reversed the verdict. The case was still open during the writing of this article.

¹⁶See The Declaration of Nyéléni for a definition: http://www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/DeclNyeleni-en.pdf. For a critical discussion on the food sovereignty vision see the three special issues in the Journal of Peasant Studies (41:6 2014), Globalizations (forthcoming 2015) and Third World Quarterly (forthcoming 2015).

¹⁷In Asociación Pro Bienestar en Acción Saaq Aach‘ool Nimla K‘aleba‘al (APROBASANK) workshop in Guatemala City, 26 June 2013.

¹⁸In APROBASANK's workshop in Guatemala City, 26 June 2013, emphasis in original.

¹⁹The official monthly minimum wage in Guatemala was USD 190 in 2007 (Alonso-Fradejas et al. 2011, 45).

²⁰In APROBASANK's workshop in Guatemala City, 26 June 2013.

²¹See Holt-Giménez 2006 for a compelling historicization of this movement in Central America.

²²Ongoing successful examples include the weekly ‘peasant markets’ in Chisec and Raxruhá, where only direct producers can sell their produce.

²³Such as being granted access to communal land resources by the community council, or claiming land legally as an in-kind payment for unobserved wages and labor liabilities as former estate colonos.

²⁴With few exceptions from the environmental justice side, alliances with environmental organizations have been difficult and rare, not to mention those with big international conservation NGOs. On the latter, see Ybarra (2011) and Grandia (2012).

²⁵In other words, they were struggling against the makings of the neoliberal food system at the World Trade Organization and around the negotiations of free trade agreements.

²⁶I am thankful to SiuSue Mark for suggesting this naming.

²⁷They include preachers, teachers, doctors, NGO representatives, community leaders, local radio station announcers, traditional landlords/patrons, ranchers, village mayors, corn traders, civil servants, etc.

²⁸Indeed, the ideological dispute played out by corporate coyotes shapes all kind of decision-making processes, including free prior and informed consent (FPIC) by ‘the community’.

²⁹In all of them, communitarians unanimously rejected different accumulation and development projects ongoing or planned in what they consider their territories.

³⁰It is difficult to give an exact figure because many resisters are attacked in moments and places other than those of direct confrontation. The Social Pastoral of Petén estimated in ‘dozens’ the number of resisters killed in Petén only between 2004 and 2009 (workshop in Petén, November 2009).

Additional information

Alberto Alonso-Fradejas is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Netherlands, a research associate of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and a fellow of the Guatemalan Institute of Agrarian and Rural Studies (IDEAR).