Defending Territory, Challenging Neoliberalism in Postwar Guatemala: Peaceful Resistance La Puya

• Author: Patrick Illmer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221124540
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221124540

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 71–88

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221124540

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

71

Defending Territory, Challenging Neoliberalism

in Postwar Guatemala

Peaceful Resistance La Puya

by

Patrick Illmer

Beyond the more spontaneous and reactive urban mass protests against corruption, the

most sustained and explicit challenge to neoliberal policies in postwar Guatemala has been

advanced by rural communities. As the case of Peaceful Resistance La Puya and its oppo-

sition to a mining project indicates, this form of agency has gone beyond indigenous ter-

ritories to localized resistances in areas of mixed or primarily ladino population. A key

factor in explaining the persistence of this process of defense of territory is the emphasis

its members put on preserving the strong horizontal features of their locally rooted mobi-

lizing structure. This has reinforced their antagonistic position toward the promoters of

the mining project while encouraging the appropriation of the struggle among community

members.

Más allá de las masivas protestas urbanas de índole más espontáneo y reactivo contra

la corrupción, el desafío más sostenido y explícito a las políticas neoliberales en la

Guatemala de la posguerra ha sido aquel promovido por las comunidades rurales. Como

indica el caso de Resistencia Pacífica La Puya y su oposición a un proyecto minero, esta

forma de agencia ha trascendido los territorios indígenas para dar lugar a resistencias

localizadas en áreas de población mixta o principalmente ladina. Un factor clave para

explicar la persistencia de esta defensa del territorio es el énfasis que sus miembros ponen

en preservar las fuertes características horizontales de su estructura de movilización,

arraigada localmente. Esto ha reforzado su posición antagónica hacia los promotores del

proyecto minero al tiempo que fomenta la apropiación de la lucha por miembros de la

comunidad.

Keywords: Mining, Neoliberalism, Resistance, Mobilizing structure, Guatemala

Two decades after the signing of the peace accords, a number of changes

have taken place in Guatemala’s landscape of collective action, one of them

being the urban mass protests against corruption involving high-ranking gov-

ernment officials of recent years. However, while capturing a large amount of

public attention, these have remained irregular outbursts of dissent in reaction

to specific legislation or corruption scandals without generating a tangible or

continuous organizational structure. At the same time, over the past decade

Patrick Illmer is a lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Studies of the Universidad

Nacional Autónoma de México. This article was developed in the course of a postdoctoral fellow-

ship at the university’s Center for Latin American Studies funded by DGAPA-UNAM. The author

thanks the issue editors and reviewers for their very helpful comments.

1124540LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221124540Latin American PerspectivesIllmer/CHALLENGING NEOLIBERALISM IN POSTWAR GUATEMALA

research-article2022

72 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

rural communities have advanced a much more sustained challenge to neolib-

eral policies. As successive governments and business elites have promoted the

extraction of natural resources, local networks based on the everyday experi-

ences of community members have persistently resisted these interests. This

rural collective action has emerged against the backdrop of a broadening of

political spaces for contestation under Guatemala’s formally democratic post-

war regimes. The state continues to resort to repressive tactics, and different

elite factions have largely managed to shield access to political power from

subaltern groups. However, violent crackdowns by security or paramilitary

forces have become less frequent, while business elites have increasingly taken

advantage of their influence over judges and state prosecutors to resort to legal

tactics for criminalizing and wearing out groups opposing their interests.

The majority of the licenses targeting natural resources in postwar Guatemala

were initially granted in areas populated primarily by indigenous people. This

meant that the first expressions of resistance to these projects emerged among

indigenous communities and often captured the attention of analysts and aca-

demics (Holden and Jacobson, 2008; Yagenova and García, 2009; Urkidi, 2011;

Rasch, 2012). However, the collective organizing has gone beyond indigenous

territories, and in recent years some of the most sustained opposition has sur-

faced in areas with a mixed or predominantly ladino population, among them

the case of Resistencia Pacífica La Puya (Peaceful Resistance La Puya). This

article offers a detailed account of this collective organizing in the municipali-

ties of San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, where community members

have articulated a relentless resistance to a mining project. I will highlight how

they have exploited the above-mentioned openings for contestation of state-

driven policies in postwar Guatemala while developing particular organiza-

tional features that have enabled them to persist in their resistance over the past

seven years.

I will argue that the sustained character of Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s

agency—which led to the suspension of a key mining license in 2016—has been

made possible primarily by key features of their mobilizing structure, “the col-

lective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and

engage in collective action” (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1996: 3). Within its

networked organizational structure, it has avoided the emergence of vertical

leadership, insisting on horizontality and collective decision making to frame

the interactions among its members. In doing so, it has implicitly inverted pre-

vailing patterns of political culture and ways of structuring political interac-

tions by creating the “delicate balance” in its organizational model that Tarrow

(1998: 137) identified as a central challenge for collective organizing. It has been

effective in combining a robust formal organization for structuring antagonistic

relations with nonhierarchical connections that leave space for the contextually

rooted local units. These horizontal characteristics represent a shift from previ-

ous generations of revolutionary or democratic agency in Guatemala. Instead

of supplanting or isolating certain ethnic or religious identities among the pop-

ulation, Peaceful Resistance La Puya has shown that local cultural and demo-

graphic complexity can nurture its political interactions and encourage

collective appropriation of the organizational process.