Land control-grabbing in Guatemala: the political economy of contemporary agrarian change

Abstract

Domestic and international capital controlling Guatemala's sugarcane and oil palm industries are deploying a dual investment strategy in the context of global financial, energy, food and environmental crises. They allocate current booming revenues to high-cost, long-term investments and they open and adapt new territories for cultivation. Under a new “extractivist governmentality”, corporate land grabs aim to control land and natural resources as well as land-based wealth and the labour that produces it. Land ownership is being (re)concentrated and social relations reshaped: compensation to dispossessed indigenous peasants for their land is insufficient to boost non-farm livelihoods or to regain access to land. This paper describes efforts to institutionalise and legitimise this project, as well as the ongoing resistance to it.

Les capitaux nationaux et internationaux qui contrôlent les industries guatémaltèques de la canne à sucre et de l'huile de palme déploient une double stratégie dans le présent contexte de crise mondiale financière, énergétique, alimentaire et environnementale : ils consacrent leurs bénéfices croissants à des investissements coûteux dans une perspective à long terme et ils ouvrent de nouveaux territoires à la mise en culture. Selon cette nouvelle « gouvernementalité extractive », l'accaparement des terres par les grandes entreprises vise au contrôle du sol, des ressources naturelles, des richesses agricoles ainsi que du travail qui les produit. La propriété foncière est ainsi en voie de re-concentration et les rapports sociaux refaçonnés. Les compensations versées aux paysans indigènes dépossédés de leurs terres sont insuffisantes pour stimuler des revenus non agricoles ou pour leur permettre d'acquérir de nouvelles terres. Cet article décrit les efforts visant à institutionnaliser et à légitimer cette tendance ainsi que la résistance qu'elle suscite.

Résumé Les capitaux nationaux et internationaux qui contrôlent les industries guatémaltèques de la canne à sucre et de l'huile de palme déploient une double stratégie dans le présent contexte de crise mondiale financière, énergétique, alimentaire et environnementale : ils consacrent leurs bénéfices croissants à des investissements coûteux dans une perspective à long terme et ils ouvrent de nouveaux territoires à la mise en culture. Selon cette nouvelle « gouvernementalité extractive », l'accaparement des terres par les grandes entreprises vise au contrôle du sol, des ressources naturelles, des richesses agricoles ainsi que du travail qui les produit. La propriété foncière est ainsi en voie de re-concentration et les rapports sociaux refaçonnés. Les compensations versées aux paysans indigènes dépossédés de leurs terres sont insuffisantes pour stimuler des revenus non agricoles ou pour leur permettre d'acquérir de nouvelles terres. Cet article décrit les efforts visant à institutionnaliser et à légitimer cette tendance ainsi que la résistance qu'elle suscite.

Keywords:

• Guatemala
• land control-grabbing
• extractivist governmentality
• indigenous dispossession

Notes

These are crops having “multiple uses (food, feed, fuel, industrial material) that can be easily and flexibly inter-changed” (Borras et al. 2012), for example, soybean, sugarcane and oil palm.

For agriculture, tourism, mining, oil extraction, infrastructure mega-projects, timber, cattle and, not unimportantly, to launder money from drug trafficking.

“An ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has population as its target, political economy as its principal form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical means” (Foucault 1979, 20).

In 2010, 70 per cent of total production of both sugar and crude palm oil and 90 per cent of total production of ethanol were exported.

In fact, Guatemala is the leading ethanol exporter to the EU, under preferential trade concessions (GSP and GSP+).

Guatemala has an estimated 2011 population of nearly 14 million (INE 2002). It includes 24 peoples: 22 Maya, the Xinka, the Garifuna, and the Ladinos (INE 2002), which include all the population whose identity is neither indigenous peoples nor Creole (the latter claiming to be direct European descendants).

Among the most relevant are the Dominican Republic–Central America–US Free Trade Agreement (DR–CAFTA), the EU-Central America Association Agreement, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of the US, the EU's Renewable Energy Directive, the 2020 Central American Sustainable Energy Strategy and the 2008–2017 Central American Common Agricultural Policy.

While the rural poverty headcount ratio reaches 70 per cent (ICEFI-UNICEF 2011, 20), income inequality as measured by the Gini index peaked at 53.7 per cent in 2006 (INE 2006) and undernourishment afflicts 65.9 per cent of the indigenous-rural population (ICEFI-UNICEF 2011).

The Gini coefficient regarding land distribution rose from 0.83 in 1960 to 0.84 in 2003 (Mingorría and Gamboa 2010, 6), meaning that by 2003, at the onset of the recent rush for land, 78 per cent of the arable land was already controlled by 8 per cent of the landholders (INE 2003). On the performance of the MALR in Guatemala (see Garoz and Gauster 2002; Garoz, Alonso-Fradejas, and Gauster 2005; Gauster and Isakson 2007).

See http://www.iadb.org/en/news/news-releases/2009-01-16/idb-backs-150-million-regional-financing-facility-for-sugar-and-bioenergy,5102.html.

The six municipalities have a population of more than half a million, of which 49 per cent is female, 77 per cent rural and 90 per cent indigenous (mainly Maya-Q'eqchi') (INE 2012).

The survey used a sample stratified by municipality (significance level 5 %) and was conducted in 294 randomly-selected households from 20 hamlets in the six aforementioned municipalities. Interviews were held in Maya-Q'eqchi' language with both female and male heads of household (where available) and always separately to achieve higher confidentiality: female interviewers interviewed 294 women and male interviewers interviewed 292 men.

Methodological issues and concrete methods can be further explored in Alonso-Fradejas, Alonzo, and Dürr (2008) and in Alonso-Fradejas, Caal Hub, and Miranda Chinchilla (2011).

The Maya-Q'eqchi' is one of the largest and arguably most traditional of the 22 Maya peoples in Guatemala. It is worth noting that there were important migration waves of Q'eqchi' people to the Northern Lowlands from the highlands of the Alta Verapaz Department during the nineteenth century (Grandia 2009).

However, during the 36 years of armed conflict, and especially under the early military-led scorched earth policy of the 1980s, 160 massacres were also carried out across the Northern Lowlands. The 1996 Peace Agreements officially put an end to a conflict which resulted in 200,000 people dead or missing. Over 80 per cent of the victims were civilian, rural, Maya people (CEH 1999).

It is these classes of capital and political elites that later gave rise to landed narcos and drug barons.

They are part of the Guatemalan System of Protected Areas (SIGAP), which, since 1989, encompasses 31 per cent of the national territory.

Geo-referenced data are not available for the sugarcane-related land use changes but field observations over the last six years point to the trend of food crop substitution by new sugarcane plantations also.

Stated on the website of Oil Palm Growers Guild of Guatemala, www.grepalma.org (accessed 19 April 2012; author's translations, emphasis added).

This also occurred in Guatemala's Southern Pacific Coast region (see Carrera and Carrera Campos 2011, 20).

Statement by the Director of the governmental Oil Palm Programme, formerly an engineer of the one and only contracting oil palm agribusiness of the scheme. Interview in Guatemala City, 21 September 2009. The Oil Palm Programme is currently under the responsibility of Guatemala's Ministry of Agriculture. Paradoxically, since the funds were diverted from the governmental Maize Support Programme, the Oil Palm Programme was included under the 2008–2011 National Food Security Strategy.

Agribusinesses only buy land that has been properly updated in the General Property Registry and with no labour (bondage) liabilities. It has been common then for (the often more overtly violent) cattle ranchers to buy the land first, deal with these legal issues and then resell it to a flex crop agribusiness at a higher price.

Opposition at the household level is far more difficult for women to deal with because they have usually addressed it individually. Nonetheless, they have also performed intrepid actions at household level like hiding the land title away from their partners.

Indebtedness can result from a chronic inability of the peasant household to meet the payments associated with credit financing from farming activities, or, for example, from unexpected medical expenses.

Such classes comprise 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” (Bernstein 2009, 73).

Beyond the Colombian engineers employed by the oil palm agribusinesses, other private actors from Colombia were reported to be operating, together with Guatemalans, in the Northern Lowlands (especially in the department of Petén) to pressure peasant families and communities to accept the land deals (Alonso-Fradejas, Alonzo, and Dürr 2008; Hurtado 2008).

Because of the compaction suffered from the entanglement of the horizontally-growing roots of the palm and their high demand for nutrients, it is very expensive and time-demanding to restore the soils after the palms have grown too tall for the fruit bunches to be harvested, a growth period of some 25 years.

Interviewed foremen from various oil palm agribusinesses, quoted in Alonso-Fradejas, Caal Hub, and Miranda Chinchilla (2011, 155).

Oil Palm Growers Guild of Guatemala, www.grepalma.org (accessed on 19 April 2012; author's translations, emphasis added).