Introduction
The Guatemalan peace accords, signed in 1996, ended an internal war that lasted 36 years and claimed over 250,000 lives. Over 80 per cent of the victims were Mayas, members of Guatemala's indigenous majority population and racial underclass who had endured one of the longest and most brutal counter-insurgencies in modern history. The accords ended the fighting and heralded the construction of a multi-ethnic democracy. However, corrupt authoritarian parties have dominated most national elections, derailing reformist efforts and implementing neoliberal economic reforms that have resulted in continuing poverty in the indigenous western highlands.Footnote 1 Authoritarian politics have succeeded with significant support from indigenous Guatemalans, who have largely avoided progressive movements.Footnote 2 This included a strong following for the ex-dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt in his 2003 presidential campaign.Footnote 3 His ‘born again’ evangelical, pro-Mayan, populist rhetoric contrasted starkly with his indictment for genocide in the indigenous highlands in the 1980s. In 2007, indigenous support helped centre-leftist Álvaro Colom and his Unidad Nacional de Esperanza (National Unity of Hope, UNE) defeat the authoritarian ex-general Otto Pérez Molina. Colom's bland, neoliberal-friendly ‘peace and hope’ rhetoric studiously sidestepped vocal indigenous opposition to mining.Footnote 4 In those elections, the Nobel Laureate and indigenous rights advocate Rigoberta Menchú received only 3 per cent of the vote in her historic candidacy. As I write, Pérez Molina seems poised to win the 2011 elections with substantial indigenous support.
This essay examines how Guatemalan Mayas have deviated from the trend among many poor and indigenous groups in Latin America who have backed progressive social movements and challenged neoliberal regimes, such as in Bolivia and Ecuador.Footnote 5 I specifically explore support for the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front, FRG) in the Mayan Mam-majority municipality of San Pedro Necta in 2003. There are various explanations for indigenous support for the FRG. Some attribute Ríos Montt's popularity to a persistent indigenous rejection of the Left, human rights, the peace process and the Pan-Mayan movement.Footnote 6 Others describe a reorganisation of indigenous sensibilities by evangelical Christianity.Footnote 7 Many fault the continued effects of state terror.Footnote 8 New research emphasises the resonance of development, authoritarianism and multicultural populism with indigenous aspirations.Footnote 9 San Pedro is an interesting site from which to explore these questions. There, a cohesive, modernising, party-focused indigenous movement splintered after a decade of running the municipal government, creating the conditions for an FRG victory in 2003. I relate these processes to the ways in which indigenous sampedranos experience and inhabit the limits of neoliberal multicultural democracy.Footnote 10
The first part of the paper analyses transformations in indigenous sampedrano imaginaries in response to changing regimes of governance since the 1940s. The second describes ‘radical pessimism’, a recurring pattern of post-war political imaginaries, and examines its salience for local politics. I demonstrate that while most sampedranos shared radical desires, continued violence and stalled reforms generated pessimism about progressive parties and social movements and combined with clientelist favouritism to help rationalise increasingly self-interested and divisive forms of participation in party politics, including support for Ríos Montt. Pessimism was an uneven and contested effect of counter-insurgency governance, not an enduring aspect of ‘Mayan’ psychology. By demonstrating how political divisions and authoritarian alignments in San Pedro were rooted in affective disempowerment rather than different conceptions of social justice, I highlight the continued corrosive effects of political violence on Guatemalan democracy. I offer these comments not as the definitive or final word on San Pedro or Guatemala, but to further discussions about the possibilities and limits for constructing indigenous autonomy in Mayan communities.Footnote 11
Counter-Insurgency and Political Imaginaries
Governance refers to the political regulation of conduct carried out in the name of the well-being of the population – defending, enhancing and extending life and freedom.Footnote 12 The Guatemalan counter-insurgency sought to eradicate the guerrilla presence in Mayan communities through extreme violence, social militarisation, official truth and development.Footnote 13 Governance aims to create manageable subjects by reorganising political imaginaries and affective states.Footnote 14 Dilip Gaonkar describes social imaginaries as ‘ways of understanding the social that become social entities themselves, mediating social life.’Footnote 15 Instead of transcendent meanings, political imaginaries are embedded modalities of conceptualisation: shared and habitual forms of knowledge, such as narratives, discourses, representations, fantasies, key concepts and common-sense understandings, which comprise our spontaneous view of how the world of politics really is and how it should be. These imaginaries are interwoven with embodied feelings and emotions. While often not explicitly formulated or directly apprehended, they constitute life worlds and form the conditions of possibility for political agency.
Schemes of governance often fail to produce their desired effects. Governance generates powerful feelings of grief, denial, anger, disempowerment and longing which infuse processes of memory and forgetting, healing and suffering, and resistance, producing new narratives and identities.Footnote 16 Subaltern political desires, forms of social life and modes of collective action ‘shape the political and regulatory practices that constitute … the state’.Footnote 17 Ethnography is uniquely situated to grasp the nuanced outcomes of governance and the de-centred production of ‘states’ and state order at the post-colonial margins.Footnote 18 In this essay I explore the effects of different modes of governance on how indigenous sampedranos imagined themselves as a collective subject; their visions of social justice and well-being; how they imagined and felt the ‘state’ as a unified and intentional entity; and how they conceptualised and enacted the possibilities and limits of collective political agency.Footnote 19
Charles Hale views contemporary Mayan politics as a response to ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, a new regime of power that combines authoritarian and multicultural methods to create sanctioned forms of indigenous agency compatible with neoliberal economic policies.Footnote 20 In this understanding, state agents and institutions distinguish between good and bad indigenous political groups. ‘Good’ groups, ones that pursue non-confrontational tactics through official brokers, obtain limited resources and recognition. ‘Radical’ groups, autonomous organisations espousing strident criticisms of neoliberalism or demanding significant resources, encounter exclusion and repression. Through partial inclusion, ‘good’ groups risk losing their radical edge. However, Hale does not fully describe how neoliberal multicultural governance operates on the ground, how indigenous actors inhabit ‘permitted’ spaces, or how these experiences reconfigure political agency.
Diane Nelson draws attention to the effects of counter-insurgency – attempts to transform ‘knowledge, soul, hearts, minds and capacities for action’ – on the forms of life in post-war Mayan communities.Footnote 21 She examines the discourses and practices of engaño (trickery, deceit; sb'ubil in Mam) that indigenous Guatemalans commonly levelled at the state, the Left, the Mayan movement and even themselves in the post-war milieu. Strategic assumptions of identity, including forced complicity with repression, were crucial to wartime and post-war survival, responses to a duplicitous state that simultaneously committed violence and provided new avenues for empowerment. Unlike Hale, Nelson sees state-provided resources as ‘small victories’ in ongoing struggles, rather than effective governance.Footnote 22 While it is surely misguided to reject protections of life by agents representing ‘the state’ as masks for repression, or to regard the strategic adoption of ‘sanctioned’ identities as inauthentic or false consciousness, certainly indigenous Guatemalans do not perceive all forms of ‘state’ assistance or assumptions of identity as equally valid – strategically, ethically or ontologically.
Discourses and practices of engaño were also rampant in post-war San Pedro, and vexing for an anthropologist committed to producing useful political analysis. The most pervasive manifestation of engaño I encountered involved discourses and practices of interés personal (personal interest; o'kx te teq'a taj in Mam), an ethnographic fact of immense concern in San Pedro and throughout post-war Guatemala.Footnote 23 In this essay I show how radical pessimism both normalised and problematised a politics of interés personal which revolved around clientelist, conservative political parties that were the primary source of multicultural populist discourses and were widely imagined as coterminous with ‘the state’. I also examine the political desires and emerging forms of politics that exceeded these limited democratic spaces.
Fieldwork in San Pedro Necta
The municipality of San Pedro Necta is in the rural north-western department of Huehuetenango, located in the Cuchumatanes mountains about 30 kilometres south-east of the Mexican border. Some 75 per cent of San Pedro's approximately 29,000 residents are indigenous Mayan Mam speakers, and the remaining 25 per cent are non-indigenous and monolingual Spanish-speaking ladinos. San Pedro is famous for excellent coffee, and is home to several large coffee fincas (plantations); it also boasts a small state hospital. Nevertheless, nearly 90 per cent of all sampedranos live in poverty – 44 per cent in extreme poverty – and the illiteracy rate is 53 per cent.Footnote 24 Poverty and illiteracy are more concentrated in the indigenous population. While most ladinos are also poor, ladinos are much more likely to be wealthy, educated and professionally employed. Whereas most ladinos live in San Pedro's urban centre, most indigenous sampedranos live in 54 surrounding aldeas (villages), practising a mix of subsistence farming, cash cropping and day labour. A growing number of indigenous men and women are educated to high school or college level, and some work as teachers, merchants and professionals. Animosity between the two groups, while not totalising, is endemic, with deep historical roots. A significant percentage of indigenous youth migrated to the United States in the 1990s seeking employment.
Arriving shortly after the November 2003 elections, I lived in San Pedro until December 2004, making return visits in 2005, 2006 and 2009, and during the 2011 electoral cycle. I conducted several dozen interviews and oral histories, as well as engaging in hundreds of informal conversations during many months of participant observation. I also lived for six months in Los Altenses, a village that was part of the most influential post-violence indigenous political coalition of the 1990s but which had swung to the FRG in 2003. Being a gringo with an advanced degree afforded me access to both the indigenous and ladino communities. My prior work with Asociación Ceiba, a Left-aligned NGO, lent me credibility but probably gave me an aura of radicalism. My inability to understand more than basic phrases in Mam significantly limited my participation, but I had numerous in-depth conversations and interviews in Spanish, worked with translators on multiple occasions and developed a rapport with many influential political leaders. Most adult male villagers, many females and almost all politically influential individuals spoke fluent Spanish, and many generously translated their conversations in Mam. The male bias in my dataset reflects my emphasis on influential political leaders, most of whom were men. These methods allowed me to look beyond campaign rhetoric in order to obtain a better understanding of the interplay between deeply held feelings and perceptions and forms of political agency. My research questions were shaped in collaboration with local activists and members of indigenous political organisations, who hoped that my findings might deepen insight into the roots of the divisions and the appeal of the FRG. With the exception of elected officials and people connected to well-known events, I have changed the names of individuals and villages and altered minor details in order to protect my informants.
Indigenous Politics in San Pedro Necta, 1944–2004
Democracy and agrarian reform
Elderly indigenous sampedranos, both men and women, described their childhoods as a time of slavery when they were treated ‘like animals’. Under Jorge Ubico, dictator of Guatemala between 1931 and 1944, vagrancy laws and debt systems forced them to work on coastal plantations and in various national infrastructure projects for paltry wages under miserable conditions. Local ladinos also demanded free labour and stole many families’ lands. Few indigenous sampedranos believed they could change their situation, and villagers presented a subservient face outwardly. Community identification and unity were strong, built as they were on kinship, reciprocity, shared language, costumbre (traditional religion) and shared experiences of dispossession, exploitation and violence.Footnote 25
Guatemala's ‘Democratic Revolution’, from 1944 to 1954, transformed highland life dramatically. José Arévalo, the first president of the revolution, ended vagrancy laws and legalised union organisation.Footnote 26 San Pedro, like most of the highlands, was polarised between mostly indigenous supporters of reform and planter-class ladinos who opposed it. Elected president in 1951, Jacobo Arbenz continued Arévalo's policies and passed a sweeping land reform law that aimed to redistribute uncultivated holdings from large plantations. A 77-year-old male villager recalled these events:
I remember when Juan José Arévalo said, ‘Here is democracy’. In the sessions, all the indigenous men went in their kapishay [traditional dress]. They spoke about the democratic law. They were forming community leaders. The ladinos from the pueblo were very anti-communist. Juan José Arévalo ended forced labour. The law of Ubico was finished. All of us went to vote for Arévalo. There was a party when he entered [the presidency]. We would say ‘¡Viva Juan Arévalo!’ in those days and we would call each other compañero. I also remember Arbenz. The pay on the coast went up to 50 centavos, then to 80 with beans and tortilla included. He ordered that a truck would come to take people to the coast. We took off the mecapal [tumpline]. The people were happy because there was no longer trouble [molestia].
Although San Pedro's fincas were too small to fall under the land reform law, the revolution transformed local politics by introducing new forms of organising, notions of citizenship and hopes for a brighter future. This ended when a CIA-sponsored coup removed Arbenz in 1954 and installed a military government which disbanded unions, reversed land reform and ended democracy in the name of anti-communism. The same villager remembered that:
When Arbenz was gone, many people went to prison, [including] Juan Vásquez [a local agrarian leader]. I was a mayor [clerk, municipal assistant; miyool in Mam], like an alcalde auxiliar [auxiliary mayor], at that time. We went by night to take people, the group leaders in the villages. We took rope to tie them up. We didn't like it, but we were obligated as mayores. There was a jail in the town, the size of a house, full of people.Footnote 27
In San Pedro, mayores were obliged to donate labour to ladinos in the municipio. Glad that forced labour was abolished, indigenous sampedranos reluctantly resumed a subordinate role. An indigenous man and former agrarian leader, Pedro Morales, was elected mayor in 1966, but his power was limited.
Developmentalism and electoral politics in the 1970s
The horizons for indigenous activism in San Pedro expanded in the 1970s. Catholic Action, a programme initiated in 1948, aimed to restore Catholic orthodoxy and promote anti-communism but also promoted modernisation and formed indigenous leaders.Footnote 28 Local Maryknoll priests condemned costumbre and alcohol in the name of indigenous advancement and development. A sacristan, Arturo Ramírez, led a largely successful ‘revolt’ against costumbre and the cofradía (civil–religious hierarchy).Footnote 29 These events alienated traditionalists, but also decreased community subordination to ladinos. After 1968 Catholic Action programmes in San Pedro merged with liberation theology, a movement based on a reading of the New Testament as a condemnation of political oppression and with a focus on working with the poor to pursue social justice.Footnote 30 Around this time, Pedro Morales and Francisco Domingo, a bilingual educator, squared off with the ladino alcalde to bring about a successful end to the mayor labour arrangement. In 1974 Ramírez won the mayoral elections with the centre-left Frente de Oposición Nacional (National Opposition Front), but local ladinos prevented him from taking office. Beyond electoral politics, the García brothers – Jacinto, a tailor, and Alfonso, a teacher – both of whom were Catholic Action participants, led a fight to reclaim communal land from the ladino alcalde (mayor), who was trying to sell it.
The revolutionary crucible
Politics in San Pedro from 1975 until about 1983 cannot be understood outside the context of the guerrilla movement. The Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor, EGP) arrived in northern Huehuetenango and Quiche in 1972, and began organisation and concientización (consciousness-raising) among Ixiles in the remote Ixcán jungle. In secret meetings its members promised the settlers land reform, democracy, and victory through armed struggle. As word of the revolution spread through the highlands, the guerrillas recruited combatants and prepared communities for war. In Huehuetenango they focused their energies on the municipalities of Colotenango, San Pedro's neighbour, and Ixtahuacán, with great success.Footnote 31
EGP militants were well received by many indigenous leaders and catechists in San Pedro, probably with tacit support from local Maryknoll priests. Many sampedranos were receptive to the guerrilla message, especially Catholic Action participants, who saw a close fit with Catholic teachings. A community leader in his late fifties told me that he joined because he saw the guerrillas as a continuation of ‘la lucha de los pobres’ (‘the struggle of the poor’) that his father had told him about. Many viewed revolutionary goals as coterminous with their own struggles against ladino racism. Villagers worked secretly as lookouts and messengers, helped to dig hideouts, and provided food and shelter. The EGP was soon followed by the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms, ORPA), a group more focused on military operations than concientización. Although it is impossible to gauge precise levels of local involvement, and still dangerous to implicate individuals, many villagers, including former guerrilla leaders, sympathisers and detractors, told me that almost all of the villages were at least partially organised, and many were organised completely. One middle-aged ladino from a remote village described the entire finca zone as ‘territorio libre’ (‘free territory’), where the guerrillas operated openly. Support was strongest among Catholics, but many evangelicals and traditionalists also joined. Many supporters joined with the Comité Unidad Campesina (Peasant Unity Committee, CUC), an indigenous-led peasant organisation linked to the guerrillas. There was also a high level of spontaneous support for the guerrillas. A former local leader of ORPA, Anastasio, recalled asking the advice of the ex-alcalde, Pedro Morales, about the guerrillas:
We want to get ahead in a legal way [Anastasio said to him]. But it is illegal for those governing now. What can we do? We want to arm ourselves. [Morales replied:] ‘You won't be able to. We already passed that stage. We did it. But we didn't win. We wanted it, but we proved it's impossible. What they're going to do is kidnap some of you. That's 100 per cent certain. Here in San Pedro Necta you still don't know. You're ignorant. You want to fly, but it's going to be difficult; you're going to be kidnapped. There's going to be war.’ But we were already way ahead in the process.
Indigenous responses to the guerrillas were not unequivocal. Many opposed the use of violence and feared its consequences. Some evangelical villagers cited scripture, especially Romans 13: 1, which reads ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’ (King James Version), to denounce the revolution. Military commissioners, villagers who collaborated with the army and contratistas (labour contractors) sided with the army, as did some wealthier villagers who worried that the guerrillas would take their land. Even many staunch supporters disliked the guerrillas’ frequent use of threats and violence to silence dissenters, their destruction of lamp posts and bridges, and their internal ethnic hierarchies. Competition between the EGP and ORPA also dampened enthusiasm. One prominent village leader remembered his frustration that ‘There was competition between them [the guerrillas] also, and that gave us doubts about deciding which group to go with. If they were fighting with each other, we did not feel secure with them. We helped, but kept our distance.’ Of course, the space between involvement and non-involvement was filled with levels of internal gradation.
Despite these contradictions, the guerrillas’ presence transformed existing beliefs about power and agency. Greg Grandin argues that democratic movements in twentieth-century Latin America ‘allowed many to experience the world not in its illusionary static present, but as evolving, as susceptible to change through action’.Footnote 32 He identifies an ‘insurgent individualism … deeply rooted in the institutions and experiences of mass radical politics’.Footnote 33 In his assessment:
Mid-twentieth century democracy [in Latin America] offered a venue in which individuality and solidarity could be imagined as existing in a sustaining relationship to one another through collective politics directed at the state to demand justice.Footnote 34
This captures the zeitgeist in San Pedro, where revolutionary organisation was galvanised by a modernising indigenous leadership whose individual reputations were forged through collective struggles for empowerment. That the revolution amplified local conceptions of agency and energised local struggles became evident in the intensification of the García brothers’ fight to protect public lands.
Furthermore, this heightened sense of agency significantly altered local perceptions about the viability of elections as an avenue for effecting meaningful change. Since 1954 national political parties had been relevant for indigenous activists primarily for their effect on local ethnic politics, not for their ability to bring national reforms. In 1978, for the first time since Arbenz, local and national struggles converged, at least momentarily, on the ballot box. Most indigenous sampedranos supported the presidential campaign of Manuel Colom Argueta, the popular ex-mayor of Guatemala City, who founded the Frente Unido de la Revolución (United Front of the Revolution, FUR) and was a strong defender of labour rights and land reform. The FUR mayoral candidate in San Pedro was Jacinto Garcia, whose campaign focused publicly on the recuperation of communal lands but was also suffused with revolutionary meanings. Any local hopes invested in these candidates disintegrated with the assassination of Colom Argueta just prior to the elections and the subsequent collapse of the FUR. Jacinto García withdrew, and General Romeo Lucas won the fraudulent presidential elections.
By 1980, intensified death-squad violence under Romeo Lucas drove many communities to the guerrillas for defence. There were several major guerrilla actions in San Pedro, including a shoot-out in the marketplace that left three guerrillas dead, the execution of a local finquero and the burning of the municipal building. Through radio, newspapers and rumours, sampedranos heard about guerrilla attacks on army convoys and bridges, the assassination of two local finqueros, national peasant strikes and the Nicaraguan revolution. Support for the guerrillas seemed overwhelming, and the government's days appeared to be numbered.
Violence and militarisation
After taking power through a coup in March 1982, General Ríos Montt announced an amnesty and started a ‘scorched earth’ campaign. Although he vowed that ‘good’ Mayas would be spared, in practice entire villages were targeted for cruel massacres that made no distinction between civilians and combatants.Footnote 35 The army committed dozens of massacres in Huehuetenango in 1982–3, killing and displacing thousands. In addition, Ríos Montt ordered all male villagers aged between 16 and 60 to join the PAC. Villagers who refused to patrol were doused with cold water, beaten or imprisoned. Some were tortured and killed. Round-the-clock patrols instilled panoptic control, pressed fear into even the smallest crevices of daily life, and dragged the civilian population deeper into the conflict.Footnote 36 The army also established permanent deployments in every highland town and continued the terror.
The UN Truth Commission documents several massacres, extrajudicial executions and cases of torture and rape in San Pedro, all happening after Ríos Montt took power.Footnote 37 Many sampedranos believe, and the pattern of violence suggests, that some ladinos denounced indigenous leaders to the army as guerrillas. Alfonso García's widow, Marina, described what happened to her husband and his brother:
They [local ladinos] got mad at Alfonso and Jacinto. They went to the zona [military zone] and denounced them as guerrillas. Then the soldiers came to kidnap them, and they took them to the barracks here below. We knew where they were, and we heard the screams. The soldiers tortured them, and they almost ripped his head off, cut out his tongue, and cut pieces from his arms. They wanted more names of people in the organisation. He was still alive when the car left with him; we saw the blood gushing out. They threw him in the Selegua river at the bottom [of the mountain]. We went to look but we didn't find his body. We only found his thumb, and his shirt. That was very hard. We suffered a lot. Afterwards, the army started to grab people without restraint [agarrar gente parejo], taking them out of the aldeas and to the zona.
After the murder of the García brothers, Arturo Ramírez and Francisco Domingo were forcibly disappeared, and there were many other murders and rights violations that were never reported in the truth commissions. Dozens of people told me how the army forced residents who owned trucks to take turns carrying bodies down the mountain to be dumped in the Selegua river. Although local violence was terrible, several sampedranos told me they felt lucky to have avoided the more horrific atrocities suffered by many nearby municipios. At that time nearly all sampedranos hated and feared Ríos Montt, blaming him for the violence and for establishing the patrols.
State violence replaced indigenous sampedranos’ excitement about making a new future with terror. One middle-aged Mayan woman, widely rumoured to have participated in guerrilla actions but now an ardent FRG supporter, told me: ‘The guerrillas said a good thing, that they were going to struggle for the poor. But where? How? What happened? The army came to kill and they couldn't defend [the villages].’ After the formation of the patrols, guerrilla supporters fell in line and denied prior allegiances. Villagers bonded together in silence. Some continued to sympathise with the guerrillas while others enthusiastically assumed army-enforced identities, but everyone became complicit with the counter-insurgency. The army routinely lectured villagers that the guerrillas had endangered them and had got what they deserved, that the revolution was a babosada (stupidity) that never had a chance, and that the guerrillas were not widely supported. It also warned that democracy and human rights would ‘bring consequences’. Military ‘truth’ saturated public and even private discussions.
Democracy, peace and multiculturalism
Around 1984, the army shifted its discourse – it began to criticise its own violent excesses and promote community development, though it continued to blame the guerrillas for endangering communities.Footnote 38 The strategic objective was to produce a ‘sanctioned Mayan’ who was anti-guerrilla, pro-army and nationalist.Footnote 39 In San Pedro, village-level political organisations re-emerged in the mid-1980s with the moderate goal of electing an indigenous alcalde. They also appropriated the civil patrol infrastructure in order to unite villagers in the pursuit of development projects.Footnote 40 Despite their dislike of military control and violence, many community members came to appreciate the unity that the patrols brought to the village. One former village patrol leader said of the patrols, ‘If there was a meeting, everyone would come, immediately. We were united in those days, working for the community’.
Amidst mounting international criticism and a weakened economy, Guatemala ratified a democratic constitution in 1985 and held free elections in 1986. Local politics took on a heightened significance after 1988, when alcaldes began to administer development revenues generated by the decentralisation of 8 per cent of the state budget. In the late 1980s the conservative oligarchic Partido de Avanzada Nacional (National Advancement Party, PAN) offered electoral positions and development funds to indigenous leaders on the condition that their organisations avoid linkages with reformist groups. In her work in Chupol in Quiche, Carlota McAllister argues that counter-insurgency violence placed indigenous chupolenses, former guerrilla supporters, in a double bind. Because fighting for the rights they believed they deserved as ‘good people’ would constitute a virtual guarantee of state violence, they limited their politics to the community, pursuing ethnic over class politics.Footnote 41 Similarly, indigenous sampedranos, although profoundly influenced by the guerrillas, opted to pursue collective ethnic objectives through the state and authoritarian parties, and disavowed radical politics.
As in other highland towns, through incorporation into political parties, indigenous candidates shifted municipal power to the indigenous majority. This was not easy. In 1986 ladino candidates successfully smeared Pedro Ramírez, the first post-war indigenous mayoral candidate, representing the PAN, as a guerrilla. After losing local elections in 1991, an indigenous schoolteacher, Natanael Aguilar, representing the centre-right Movimiento de Acción y Solidaridad (Solidarity Action Movement, MAS), rode to victory in 1993 on a campaign to redirect development resources from the ladino town centre to the villages.
The 1996 peace accords ended the fighting, disbanded the civil patrols, closed military garrisons, recognised indigenous rights, called for civilian control of the army, established a truth commission, promised funds for land redistribution and development, and legalised leftist parties and social movements. Two major truth commissions promoted a critical perspective on Guatemalan society, highlighting the history of political repression, staggering inequality and racial exclusion that had led to the insurgency. They also detailed how the counter-insurgency was fuelled by racism and concluded that the army had committed genocide. Almost all indigenous sampedranos over the age of 15 told me that life was ‘much better’ since the accords, attributing their improved situation to peace, human rights, the end of the patrols, and new development projects.
Many problems remain, however. While a historic advance, the accords avoided the issue of land reform and granted impunity for many war criminals, among other limitations.Footnote 42 They were also never fully implemented. Persistent poverty has exacerbated wartime devastation, giving rise to unprecedented gang violence and criminality.Footnote 43 Additionally, free trade agreements have brought a wave of unpopular and environmentally threatening mining concessions. Although some state violence has been ‘outsourced’ to private groups, state and para-state violence continues selectively and publicly to target groups and individuals whose actions challenge state or corporate authority.Footnote 44 In 1998 Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death days after issuing a report for the Guatemalan Archdiocese's project on historical memory. Leftists, union organisers, land activists, anti-mining activists, teachers’ organisations, members of confrontational Mayanist organisations and individuals engaged in public memory work are regularly threatened and killed, and voices in the mass media routinely equate organised peasants with criminals.Footnote 45 In 2004 the Berger administration violently displaced landless peasants occupying the finca Nueva Linda, and in 2005 it attacked anti-free-trade protestors around the country, including opening fire on a protest in Colotenango. The Colom regime has continued violent displacements, ignored the results of community consultas (referenda) regarding mining mandated by Article 6 of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, and repressed anti-mining protests.Footnote 46 Pérez Molina prescribes a hard-line, ‘mano dura’ approach to delinquency alongside incessant reports of state involvement with organised crime and narcotrafficking.Footnote 47
Post-accords politics
Divisions in San Pedro's indigenous organisation began when Antulio Morales wrested control from Natanael Aguilar and won the 1995 and 1999 mayoral elections. His term in office between 1996 and 2003 coincided with the ‘peace dividend’ of state and non-state development projects and state decentralisation, events that further increased the material stakes of town politics and the power of the alcaldes. During two consecutive terms with the PAN, Antulio Morales and his team resignified citizenship by challenging ladino authority and demonstrating the indigenous capacity to govern. Morales established numerous projects in rural villages and earned a reputation as an astute politician. While most saw him as the legitimate leader of the local indigenous movement, he was widely criticised as self-interested and corrupt, even by many close friends. In 2003 Morales joined the progressive Centro de Acción Social (Centre of Social Action, CASA) party, led by Rigoberto Quemé, the former indigenous alcalde of Quetzaltenango. Morales told me that he liked CASA because it was an indigenous party that gave him a shot at a congressional seat. When Quemé withdrew his candidacy, CASA folded, and Morales joined the Alternativa Nueva Nación (New Nation Alternative, ANN), a leftist party allied with CASA. He lost badly, however.
The FRG, led locally by Mariano Díaz, an indigenous man in his early forties, won local elections in 2003. Díaz had established a reputation as a development broker working for an international development agency, DECOPAZ, especially after the programme was politicised by the FRG government of 1999–2003. Local opinions on Díaz diverged wildly. His official image was as a successful small business owner, an evangelical and a former teacher who had travelled to the United States. His critics saw him as ‘two-faced’.Footnote 48 They said he was an idiot who knew little of local political struggles and had only purchased a high school diploma, that he was an asaltante (assailant, thief), that he had never lived in the United States, that he was not really Christian, and that he was corrupt and opportunistic. The FRG presidential candidate, Ríos Montt, also had ‘two faces’. Díaz and his affiliates extolled Ríos Montt's strength and virtue, depicting him as a defender of poor indigenous farmers and crediting him for ending the violence while blaming the massacres on General Lucas. Many others, including the Catholic Church, criticised Ríos Montt as a mass murderer and decried his party for being a group of corrupt, anti-democratic, militaristic narcotraficantes.
In the 2003 mayoral elections Díaz won 2,265 out of 7,495 votes in San Pedro, while Morales’ candidate was placed seventh. Ríos Montt won the first-round election for president, but with only 1,994 votes. Morales’ supporters were baffled as to why so many of their neighbours, especially those who had previously supported the guerrillas and hated Ríos Montt, voted for the FRG. Several elements defined Díaz's strategy. Díaz and his crew made the rounds of needy communities, making flamboyant speeches and extravagant development promises. One former candidate said that ‘In Guatemala, he who lies the most, wins.’ Díaz recorded the names of villagers who had promised their votes on a laptop computer. He proclaimed that, unlike Morales, he would not politicise development funds, while not so secretly offering projects specifically to supporters, many of whom had felt ignored by Morales. Díaz also played up his evangelical religion and campaigned with a local evangelical woman who was a faith healer. Although estimating percentages is impossible, Díaz had both Catholic and Protestant supporters. In addition, he railed against ladinos, sometimes saying in Mam that ‘they’ would not get a single development project if he was elected. Interestingly, Díaz offered leadership positions to individuals who were respected but felt excluded from leadership in the Morales coalition.Footnote 49 Díaz's campaign got a big last-minute boost from Ríos Montt's promise to compensate former members of the PAC with US$ 640 each. Díaz politicised the payment, paying only FRG supporters, including many who had never patrolled, and this was a move that seriously angered all non-FRG villagers. When Ríos Montt tried to make a campaign visit, some 600 non-FRG, ex-PAC members prevented his helicopter from landing.Footnote 50
Post-election rumours claimed that FRG supporters were tricked by Díaz's false promises about development projects.Footnote 51 Many villagers seethed when projects never materialised and Díaz's corruption became manifest. More generally, almost everyone involved in party politics was accused of being motivated by interés personal. Everyone ‘knew’ that everyone involved in party politics was corrupt. Engaño seemed driven by interés. If FRG supporters were tricked, many said, it was fitting because they were also scheming, like supporters of any party, to get something for themselves. Many individuals privately discussed with me their self-interested motives, even as they accused their neighbours of interés. Significantly, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, URNG), the newly legal revolutionary party, which never offered projects, appeared exempt from these accusations. URNG members lamented that everyone who supported the ‘parties of the rich’ had ‘sold themselves’ (‘se vendieron’).
Leftist parties and social movements have a moderate presence in San Pedro. Despite never offering projects, the URNG won over 700 votes in 2003, placing it third. Some sampedranos were also involved in the CUC, the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (National Coordination of Guatemalan Widows, CONAVIGUA, a victims’ rights organisation), and Asociación CEIBA, a leftist NGO with projects in several villages. These groups had a far smaller presence in San Pedro than in Colotenango and Ixtahuacán, but were nonetheless visible.
Radical Imaginaries and Pessimistic Politics
Against what conceptual and affective backdrop, then, did a politics of interés, mutual engaño and ‘selling out’ become simultaneously intelligible as a serious problem and normalised? San Pedro is not known for its revolutionary past, and in my interviews indigenous sampedranos usually emphatically denied any prior sympathy for, much less ‘involvement’ in, the guerrilla movement; generally they blamed both the guerrillas and the army for the violence, saying that ‘the two groups were responsible’. However, I eventually learned that many middle-aged and older indigenous sampedranos had initially adopted this ‘two armies’ discourse out of fear, not conviction. In private settings many older villagers maintained a mixed view of the guerrillas. They liked their objectives, but criticised their methods. Most were still afraid to participate in open and public discussions about the past, creating a ‘public amnesia’ about past struggles, especially among the younger generation.
Interestingly, in the less coercive post-war milieu, some former indigenous guerrilla detractors appeared to be reappraising the historical role of the guerrillas. Eugenio was an evangelical and a village leader of the civil patrols. His uncle was a military commissioner who was murdered, his family believed, by the guerrillas. In 2004 he told me, ‘I used to think they [the guerrillas] were bad, but now I think that they did something good.’ His newfound respect was due to the peace accords. Many villagers also expressed a mixed view of the patrols, deeply resenting the work and the threats but appreciating the patrols’ benefits for community unity. Widespread involvement in the ex-PAC compensation movement was based far less in an affirmation of the paramilitary's anti-guerrilla mission, the movement's official stance, than in the sense of having earned it and having been promised the payment by the government.
In addition, I found that radical sentiments were widely shared among local villagers, with little regard for party or religious affiliation, age, gender, economic status or even prior feelings about the guerrillas. Radical views infused everyday talk. I heard several villagers from different backgrounds and parties bemoan ‘los ricos’ (‘the rich’) who keep poor Mayas ‘under their boots’. One middle-aged male village leader commented that ‘The people from CACIF [the Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras, (Coordinating Committee for Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations), a national consortium of industry leaders] are very clever about tricking the people’. On one occasion I was drinking a Gallo beer with a few male members of a Mayan family who supported the FRG in 2003 but had once upon a time supported the guerrillas. One of them told me to peel the label off my beer, explaining that replacing the labels ‘gives a job to the poor’. In addition, the vast majority of indigenous sampedranos expressed strong support for the accords, human rights, democracy, the truth commissions, indigenous rights and even land reform.Footnote 52 Most well-informed indigenous sampedranos also opposed recent free trade agreements, and nearly everyone condemned mining. And, as other observers of Mayan communities have described, distrust for the state and powerful interests provided fertile background assumptions for conspiracy theories.Footnote 53 Radical common sense, at least crucial parts of it, was alive and well in San Pedro, despite decades of repression aimed at stamping it out. While such seemingly typical liberal progressive ideas may not seem radical, they count as such in the context of Guatemala's apartheid-like, post-genocidal society. Most ladinos did not share these radical leanings, however, and neither did a handful of former Mayan military commissioners.
What explains the apparent disjuncture between deeply held beliefs and political practices, especially after the opening of new political spaces? I encountered striking levels of pessimism in my interviews. The situation in San Pedro resembled McAllister's description of the town of Chupol.Footnote 54 McAllister affirms the commitment of Mayan chupolenses to revolutionary agency, and argues that an experience of collective defeat inhibits their affirmation of their prior political agency and limits their politics in the present. Although indigenous sampedranos were less organised with the guerrillas than the chupolenses, many also regarded post-war politics in the light of revolutionary defeat. Democracy was implicitly apprehended as excluding revolutionary goals. Feelings of anger towards the state were thoroughly enmeshed with profound feelings of powerlessness and pessimism regarding the possibilities for urgently needed reform.
Anastasio Chávez, a high-ranking member of José Antulio's organisation, expressed strong frustrations about the limits of multicultural democracy. Anastasio was a catechist, a lay preacher, from a relatively well-off indigenous family. Enrolled in weekend high school classes in 2004, he had read about the truth commission findings, which he summarised in the following way:
They want to fix Guatemala, but with each attempt, it is sinking deeper. When a child is born, they already owe money to the United States. They are never going to be able to pay it. Have you heard of the Bishop Juan Gerardi? He published a book about the violence. It's called Nunca más [Never Again]. What does that mean? It means that Guatemala is never, never, never going to change. The diputados [members of Congress] want to raise their salaries, and what do they do? They don't do anything. And then they killed Gerardi, for being in favour of the poor. There's never a government that worries about the people. Here there's a hospital but there isn't any medicine. They prescribe [medicine] but you have to go buy it, and there's no money. And there are many towns where there isn't even a hospital. Only the Church helps with the hospital here. That's why the government in Guatemala is atrasado [backward].
Anastasio was disgusted and hopeless. Nunca más was the report of the Catholic Church's truth commission, and was originally intended to be a renunciation of the violence, an unequivocal resolution never to permit genocide to happen again, in Guatemala or anywhere else. I was speechless when I heard a Mayan political leader who had recently taken a course on the subject twist the intended meaning into an affirmation of the inevitability of oppressive government. Several village leaders repeated this interpretation.
Anastasio was certain that the state does not care about justice, especially for poor people. The hospital without medicine is proof of official disregard for local well-being. He cited as additional evidence the brutal murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, massacres that happened after the accords and other unpunished crimes. Although he disavowed the guerrillas for their violence, he agreed with their goals and turned to social movements for ‘honest’ news. Yet he saw no alternative to the status quo; he instead participated in political parties that he loathed, hoping to make a small difference locally if possible, but more likely, he admitted, for personal gain.
The year 2009 saw a series of national anti-mining protests in Guatemala. In July popular organisations planned roadblocks nationwide. Two weeks prior to this I watched as the primarily indigenous crowd in San Pedro's Sunday market listened intently to members of the URNG who were perched atop the municipal building with a megaphone, criticising mining and urging sampedranos to join a local protest the following week. They were going to close down the highway at the entrance to the town. Several people whom I asked afterwards said they planned to attend. This was unsurprising given that sampedranos had unanimously rejected mining in a 2007 community consulta, as had towns throughout the region.Footnote 55 When the protest date arrived, however, only core URNG members showed up. I ran into Anastasio again soon afterwards, and asked him why he did not participate. He explained, ‘It's already decided; we can't stop it’, and rehearsed the defeated interpretation of Nunca más. Anastasio's sister, a local women's leader named Herlinda, explained: ‘We don't go because we are afraid of getting shot, like what happened at Naranjales.’ Naranjales is a bridge in Colotenango on the Inter-American Highway, and the site of many protests. In 2005 the national police attacked anti-free-trade protestors at Naranjales, wounding over a dozen people and killing one man. For Herlinda, violence created an opposition between self-preservation and desire for social justice.
Pedro Lázaro was a community leader from Los Altenses and a key FRG backer. A man in his early sixties, Pedro was illiterate and relatively less well-off than many of his neighbours. Pedro and his extended family were guerrilla supporters in the 1980s, but had vehemently denied it ever since. Pedro joined the FRG primarily out of frustration that Morales’ favouritism network had excluded his family. In one interview, conducted in mid-2004, Pedro contextualised his current politics in light of his prior experiences and beliefs. For him, the motivation for war was:
Pedro: Always for rights. Before, when my father was here, an indigenous person couldn't speak, and couldn't organise in a group. They couldn't talk about their rights. For that reason, they [the guerrillas] were intelligent people who formed a group. The organisation came from another country, and little by little the people organised. Many died for that reason. When there is a strong group, it's like a beehive – strong. The guerrilla movement was almost the entire town and the villages also. That's why it began, and now, not a lot, but there is a little peace. There's peace. The guerrillas won that right. Many died. But the Bible says that there will be victory with blood.
NC: Was there a time when the people were against human rights?
Pedro: Ah. Yes. But that changed with the peace accords.
NC: Many people don't have any confidence in political parties. Do you think that there are political parties that are in favour of the people?
Pedro: Yes, the URNG party. That's the guerrilla party.
NC: But you're in a different party.
Pedro: I have always worked for the parties for the poor. But they never win. Even good guerrilla leaders change parties; it's always for personal interest.
NC: So you were struggling before, but now you want to win?
Pedro: Look, I'm illiterate. Ever since my childhood I have never known regular pay. I worked from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. for 40 centavos every day. Really suffering! When I got married, I worked for two months on the coast in a plantation. In two months I barely saved 20 quetzales [US$ 2.50]. I was malnourished, my shirt was ripped and my pants were ruined. That is the life of an indio, of a peasant. Now I am saving the money I make helping the party.
NC: What changes do you think would be necessary in the government of Guatemala?
Pedro: When the government are in their campaign, they tell us that Guatemala is going to have change. Only in their campaign. When they get into power, they leave it to one side. That's what I think. The change that needs to be made is never going to arrive. Why? Well, right now, the day labourers are making 20 quetzales each day. And what's happening right now? The price of fertiliser just went up to 150 quetzales [US$ 20]. Right now, the people feel very much like slaves. And because only those rich, well, those businessmen … every day they're moving up. The poor get poorer every day … To change the government? That's difficult. He is in his power. Now there are a lot of organisations. Many go to protest in front of the president's house. But he, what pain does it give him? He is there in his power, just listening. He never makes good.
NC: So, you don't think that changing the government is possible?
Pedro: It's impossible.
This strong FRG supporter, a party leader, saw the FRG as an anti-poor party. Pedro described human rights and the guerrillas as continuous with indigenous desire, but he believed that the changes needed to satisfy that desire would never materialise because collective indigenous and popular agency was almost completely ineffective. Pedro imagined the state as an agent with clear intentionality: the pure calculated self-interest of a dishonest man who was indifferent to protest. Pedro stopped supporting leftist parties and social movements because they never prevailed, and joined the FRG out of personal interest. Pedro was painfully aware that Ríos Montt was a mass murderer, and that voting for him ran counter to peace, justice and democracy, but he believed those struggles were already lost.
Bleak options motivated many villagers to withdraw from politics. Marina was a highly educated Mayan woman who played a prominent role in Morales’ coalition. When I asked if she ever thought about running for alcalde, she replied, ‘Why? So people could call me a thief?’ Felipe Gutiérrez is a teacher in his late thirties whose father ran as part of the FRG ticket in 2003. After emphasising that the people had strongly supported the guerrillas’ fight against discrimination, he explained why he thought people who had participated in the guerrilla movement had turned against it, and then to the FRG:
NC: Were there people supporting with heart?
Felipe: Almost everyone was in favour. Some have the pride, the older ones. But when we talk about the present … 1982 and after were tremendously hard. The people closed themselves up.
Every person had to think [about] who they were going to support [during the campaign]. They say that it is true that Ríos Montt killed people in 82, but that the war can't come back again. It's not so easy for the war to come back again. So, it's OK to join the FRG.
NC: Many people say that Ríos Montt didn't have anything to do with the violence – that it was Lucas García.
Felipe: I imagine it was Ríos Montt who killed the people. I know the history. He gave the order in the [military] zone. The soldiers were under the order. I didn't vote for him. I told my father clearly, ‘I'm not going to vote for Ríos Montt. For Mariano Díaz, yes.’ I marked a ‘null’ for that reason, because I didn't agree.
Felipe recounted how people closed up after the guerrilla movement was defeated, and how pride turned to shame for many supporters. He sadly recalled local debates that turned on the fact that, although everyone knew Ríos Montt was a murderer, voting for him was unlikely to make the war return. Repulsed by Ríos Montt, Felipe voted null, even though Ríos Montt's victory would help his father's party. This was a vote of conscience, a mix of heartbreak and principle that showed respect for what Felipe thinks the ritual should mean – a choice of what is right over personal interest. But another limit is the futility of voting for the URNG, an action so irrelevant as not to require explicit rejection. Mayan sampedranos were not afraid to support radical parties, but most did not see the point. In their perspective, the Left still had nice ideas, but was unlikely to win elections or change the country. Not only were organising and protest seen as ineffective, but they could even bring violence.
One major turning point in this imaginary was 1982, when violence demolished revolutionary dreams. Afterwards, while indigenous sampedranos viewed the state as a vital source of empowerment, development, recognition and protection, most also saw it as willing and able to destroy indigenous life, willing to enforce or transgress the law to defend the interests of capital and a racist social order.Footnote 56 Against this imaginary backdrop, many saw ‘new’ violence as continuous with counter-insurgency terror, and as marking similar limits on democracy. This imaginary replaced the angry and empowered revolutionary subject position with that of the victim, who is also enraged, but frustrated in relation to the state. Within this imaginary, electoral politics for most sampedranos was divorced from ideology and instead focused on the allocation of resources, mainly development projects. Campaign rhetoric aside, almost no one with whom I spoke, including party higher-ups, explained their support for authoritarian parties in terms of agreement with their plans for government. The perspectives of my sampedrano friends counter the notions, widely held by the Left, that Mayas have been tricked by populist rhetoric, or that they have selfishly sold their votes and their futures for short-term or personal gains. Self-interested politics have become rational relative to the absence of faith in meaningful alternatives.
Kay Warren suggests that ‘Mayas involved in cultural revitalisation were not pursuing their politics through the formal government and party system because of the cynical manipulation of Mayan communities in the past.’Footnote 57 Perhaps this explains regional abstention rates of around 40 per cent, and the large number of null votes.Footnote 58 Felipe's null vote was a silent protest against the limits of neoliberal multicultural democracy. While many indigenous sampedranos avoided party politics altogether, and many reformist-minded Mayas drew the line at voting for Ríos Montt, many others saw such principled stances as unaffordable luxuries. The latter group usually cited concrete, immediate, community or personal benefits, usually development projects, as their reason for party affiliation, and changed parties frequently, seeking those most likely to win and deliver. The common shorthand for parties, ‘symbols’, underscored their meaninglessness. Individuals with leadership ambitions joined whatever party offered them the best opportunities. Only URNG members expressed ideological loyalty.
Jonathan Fox defines ‘authoritarian clientelism’ as an undemocratic arrangement involving an exchange of political subordination for resources, backed up by violence.Footnote 59 Rather than simple co-optation, however, Fox demonstrates how indigenous social movements in Mexico that occupied clientelist spaces eventually won ‘organizational autonomy’, the right to pursue their goals without restrictions.Footnote 60 Javier Auyero goes further, rejecting the ‘prefabricated and stigmatizing images of the exchange of votes for favors’.Footnote 61 He shows how, rather than undermining community, Peronist clientelism in Buenos Aires gained legitimacy through long-standing affective links to Perón and its connection to ‘informal networks of reciprocal help’ that provided access to resources otherwise unavailable through the neoliberal state.Footnote 62
Many anthropologists also see Mayan engagement with the ‘state’ as benign or even positive. Although McAllister argues that chupolenses rejected the state, she suggests that ‘When the demand is for something as unproblematic as a water project, or a Better Stoves project, engaging the government does not raise too many conflicts with Chupolenses’ sense of themselves as good people.’Footnote 63 Similarly, Stener Ekern describes how the Alcaldía Indígena (Indigenous Mayoralty) in Totonicapán maintained autonomy and community cohesion in a domain defined against ladinos and the ‘dirty’ world of electoral politics.Footnote 64 In Nentón, Huehuetenango, Finn Stepputat found permissive attitudes towards grassroots Mayan organisational autonomy by state institutions in the mid-1990s.Footnote 65 Diane Nelson suggests that pragmatic optimism about new possibilities for empowerment led many former leftists to join the FRG: ‘Those who are lashing in to these state-related identities are challenging “old” assumptions about the world and power. These assumed identifications challenge the old divide of the war years between the good popular movement and the enemy state.’Footnote 66 Elisabet Rasch highlights a more mixed outcome, showing how the rise of the indigenous Xel-Jú party in Quetzaltenango transformed conceptions of citizenship according to indigenous principles but also reinforced hierarchies among indigenous communities.Footnote 67 In San Pedro, the pursuit of indigenous politics through party politics undermined community cohesion and autonomy.
Pragmatic optimism guided indigenous sampedrano activists’ relationship to major political parties in the early 1990s, with hopefulness peaking in the project-flush years after the accords. By the end of Morales’ second term in 2003, however, the local indigenous movement had become fractured. What happened? Party politics entailed unforeseen threats to community relationships. Development projects helped individuals and groups but often turned conciencia against itself, pitting personal, familial and community needs for limited yet vital resources against each other. Rampant favouritism and corruption led to divisions over even small projects and non-governmental assistance. Moreover, tight relationships between political parties, contractors and local brokers combined with lax oversight to subvert the independence, community orientation and authority of village development committees, and the newly established law on Consejos del Desarrollo Municipal y Comunitario (Councils of Municipal and Community Development, COMUDE), which was passed to increase transparency and participation in the planning of development projects. The COMUDE, which officially determined the development process, was routinely co-opted by parties or ignored by alcaldes who wanted to monopolise development funds. While San Pedro's Alcaldía Indígena still addresses many village-level disputes between individuals, it has no control over development planning or the COMUDE and lacks the ability to resolve disputes over development projects or politics, the roots of the worst community divisions. Party divisions also prevent the Alcaldía Indígena from exercising authority at the municipal level.
There were never enough projects for everyone. Rather than strengthening existing reciprocal help networks in villages, the pursuit of scarce development projects and personalised assistance through myriad political parties fostered multiple, antagonistic village self-help networks. Villages in San Pedro were divided into as many as 14 political parties because each party represented a particular sub-sectoral or extended family's play for resources. As this cycle escalated, many groups previously excluded from patronage turned to the FRG, often despite serious misgivings. A middle-aged evangelical Mayan woman angrily explained that she joined the FRG because of Morales’ favouritism:
They have said that [one family] is poor and doesn't want to work. For that reason [Morales] only gave viviendas [houses] to his good friends … who already had them. There were others with plastic [walls] and ranchitos [stick houses] who signed up and didn't receive anything. Those should go to the most in need, everyone parejo [equally]. There are auxiliares and mayores who are supposed to advise us about projects. But they do not advise about food [assistance], medicines or animal vaccinations. While we don't know anything, their chickens are already vaccinated. We call him ‘Chep chuch’ [‘Chepe the dog’, meaning ‘greedy’] because he grabs everything for himself.
Like many, this interviewee argued that projects should be distributed based on need, not party affiliation. Díaz only continued the established process, while breaking many campaign promises.
By 2003, self-interest was understood as a near-inevitable consequence of political involvement, and, for many, as the only reason to participate, creating a Guatemalan version of what Jean François Bayart describes in Africa as a ‘politics of the belly’.Footnote 68 Most alliances with right-wing parties, and especially the FRG, were characterised by pessimism, interés and bitter divisions, not an uncritical acceptance of populist rhetoric or a calculated ‘struggle from within’. With reformist avenues closed and needs pressing, political contestation turned inward. The triumph of self-interest over community cohesion was made possible not only by the clientelist response to indigenous sampedranos’ demands for development by a swarm of political parties, but in the way these offerings fell far short of meeting collective needs in the context of violence-induced pessimism that dampened hope for alternatives.
This disheartening scenario bears out Hale's concerns about the neutralising potential of neoliberal multiculturalism for indigenous politics.Footnote 69 The situation is neither guaranteed nor all-encompassing, however. Simultaneous promises both to enhance and to destroy indigenous life emanating from groups acting in the name of the state create ambiguity about the limits of democracy, opening up spaces for contestation. Growing dissatisfaction with the political system is evident in frustration with favouritism, corruption, false promises and continued poverty, and nowhere more so than in community consultas that denounce mining. Although most do not, many sampedranos courageously engage in non-sanctioned forms of political action outside party politics. In addition to the anti-mining movement, the teachers’ movement, which involves many young sampedranos, is another example of a movement that prioritises collective over individual interests. The teachers have gone on strike several times over salaries between 2009 and 2011, and while not completely autonomous, they have increasingly joined forces with progressive groups in civil society.Footnote 70 It remains to be seen if these movements will become platforms for broader progressive coalitions with the potential to expand the field of political contestation and open spaces for community autonomy, or will be absorbed by the atomising party system.
Conclusion: Disfigured Democracy
If genocidal violence aimed to convince Mayas to accept as inevitable the suffering and humiliation of poverty and social exclusion, the flip side of the dominant social order of racial and class privilege, it was a resounding success. However, attention to political imaginaries and affect reveals that attempts to create a ‘sanctioned Mayan’ with an apolitical, pro-state consciousness were unsuccessful in San Pedro. Political parties, acting in the name of the state and associated with it in the popular imagination, enacted multicultural governance through their offerings of development projects and political positions to indigenous political organisations. This brought many Mayan sampedranos into a domesticated democratic sphere, which they successfully resignified, but violence still constricted their agency to that space, and neither the ‘state’ nor ‘neoliberal’ policies achieved legitimacy.
Mayan sampedranos’ radical desires were thwarted by a belief in a hostile and omnipotent state. This forces us to reconsider the importance of political violence in Guatemalan democracy, and in other post-colonial states with legacies of violence. Voices in the Guatemalan media justify state violence against social movements as necessary to preserve the rule of law.Footnote 71 But local interpretative inclinations and affective dispositions suggest that supposedly neutral, yet targeted, attempts to enforce the law reproduce the spectre of the state as an immovable force in the imaginations of many Guatemalans, and trigger memories of past violence. This imagined predatory state is the conceptual backdrop against which current violence is interpreted, allowing the re-inscription of previously understood limits in the post-accords period. Legal violence bleeds into forms of violence that surpass the limits of the law, like the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi. The continued threat of intervention generates an affective force field marking the line beyond which collective action must not tread, establishing the limits of the politically possible.
Few Mayan indigenous sampedranos remotely believe in the power of the vote as a means to exercise meaningful collective agency in pursuit of the common good. Most understand that democracy implicitly excludes collective agitation for radical reforms that challenge the interests of national and multinational capital. Many believe that a vote for radical reform, while permitted, is wasted, and view protests as both useless and risky. This pervasive sense of defeat combined with stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism to help rationalise self-interested and divisive political party affiliations. Bitter fights for access to scarce and vital resources through political affiliations have left communities divided, exhausted and demoralised, to such an extent that many came to see the FRG as an appropriate vehicle for the pursuit of resources.
Affective disempowerment, pessimism, self-interest and division constitute Mayan sampedrano experiences of neoliberal democracy. Feelings of powerlessness, while often durable, cannot be frozen in place; they require constant reinforcement, restatements of the law against actions that exceed the dominant order.Footnote 72 Regular acts of violence are necessary to reproduce the Guatemalan social order, reaffirming the ‘state's’ totality, intentionality and brutality in the minds of those who might otherwise oppose it. Rather than reflecting a pre-existing reality, this common-sense knowledge of defeat produces the state and justifies self-interested politics and avoidance of social movements, maintaining politics as usual.
The situation in San Pedro is unstable and contested, however. Villagers increasingly demand that individuals and institutions acting in the name of the ‘state’ provide them with an acceptable form of existence. State violence, social protest, official concessions and elections all constitute negotiations of what counts as acceptable. And, although violence is a lynchpin of Guatemalan society, each use of violence risks generating refusals of previously acceptable uses of force. While this refusal has been muted in San Pedro, the younger generation of indigenous activists, not having experienced extreme violence at first hand, will likely develop an understanding of acceptable political limits distinct from that of their parents. Radical desires bubble beneath the surface of a Guatemalan democracy founded on their exclusion. While many of these desires suffocate in pessimism and self-interested politics, this could change in unpredictable ways. Anger and frustration can be articulated to activism as well as conformism, and aimed at a variety of targets. Powerful indigenous and popular social movements throughout Latin America demonstrate that Guatemala's apartheid-like social order is vulnerable to an electoral coup backed by a widely supported non-violent social movement.
In the late 1970s, feelings of collective empowerment compelled many indigenous sampedranos to support struggles for social and racial justice at the local and national levels. Many indigenous sampedranos continue to share this vision, but stand divided by self-interest in the democratic terrain. This politics of self-interest does not reflect ‘normal’ democratic dissent, or human nature, but the bitter legacy of repression and partial inclusion. It is one way in which neoliberal multicultural governance is lived. This essay has highlighted common aspirations amidst governmentally imposed pessimism and divisionism in hopes of promoting dialogue about contradictions in neoliberal democracy and the possibilities of renewing collective indigenous political agency.
