Regarding development: governing Indian advancement in revolutionary Guatemala

Abstract

Market rationality was promoted in Guatemala’s indigenous communities in the 1970s through agrarian modernization programmes as part of a Cold War counterinsurgency strategy. Why did rural villagers adopt these forms and to what effect? Using oral history interviews conducted in the town of San Pedro Necta, this paper compares local development brokers’ narratives of the DIGESA programme with village level perceptions and reactions. In order to deepen understandings of how governing assemblages gain traction in postcolonial contexts, I draw on theories that view development as a governing assemblage that operates by inciting a will to improve and as an entanglement between heterogeneous social worlds, and bring these into dialogue with theories about strategic subaltern appropriations of development. I then critically examine these perspectives in light of events in San Pedro. I describe how indigenous villagers adopted assimilationist market-oriented development as an alternative to racism, poverty and authoritarianism, and how this produced contradictory effects on grassroots political imaginaries, organizational practices and community solidarity. I argue that ‘Indian advancement’ wove together local empowerment with the formation of market subjectivities and the privatization of politics and social life.

Keywords:

• development
• governmentality
• counterinsurgency
• indigenous
• Guatemala
• Cold War
• DIGESA.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank two anonymous reviewers at Economy and Society for their valuable suggestions. I am most grateful to the people of San Pedro Necta for patiently sharing their insights. Any errors are my sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. DIGESA was preceded by the much smaller Indigenous Economy Formation Center, which was launched in the 1950s to show peasants how these inputs worked on demonstration plots.

2. After 1986, DIGESA collaborated extensively with innovative ‘on farm’ research and technology transfer initiatives spearheaded by the independent Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (ICTA) (Ortiz et al., 1991).

3. Guatemalan nationalism was unique in Latin America in that it rejected mestizaje and retained a bi-racial ideology of white supremacy.

4. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Copeland

Nicholas Copeland studied Social Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. His book manuscript is titled Lost in transition: Mayan experiences of democracy in post-revolutionary Guatemala. He also wrote (with Christine Labuski) The world of Wal-Mart: Discounting the American dream (Routledge, 2013). His current research examines transformations in discourses and practices of development in Guatemala.