Poisonous Exports: Pesticides, Peasants, and Conservation Paradigms in Guatemala

• Author: Liza Grandia
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221124535
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221124535

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 124–152

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221124535

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

124

Poisonous Exports

Pesticides, Peasants, and Conservation

Paradigms in Guatemala

by

Liza Grandia

U.S. intervention in Guatemala’s agricultural autonomy over the past 80 years has

been a toxic blend of commission and omission. From the Green Revolution on, the United

States has exported both harmful pesticides and ideological frameworks to persuade indig-

enous and other locally rooted small farmers to abandon traditional, chemical-free agricul-

ture. Although U.S.-funded programs suggested that with proper labor protocols

agrochemicals can be applied without harm on export plantations, there are no conditions

for "safe use" under real-life conditions for small subsistence farmers, many of whom live

in close proximity to protected areas. Transnational biodiversity conservation organiza-

tions have remained oddly silent on this issue, and indigenous and peasant movements

have not yet mobilized against pesticides because of a paucity of information about their

dangers and the “slow” violence of their impacts on health. To decolonize agriculture and

conservation will require a more inclusive environmentalism aligned with peasant move-

ments that take seriously the real conditions of risk and vulnerability in the majority-

Maya Guatemalan countryside.

La intervención estadounidense en la autonomía agrícola de Guatemala en los últimos

80 años ha sido una mezcla tóxica de comisiones y omisiones. A partir de la Revolución

Verde en adelante, Estados Unidos ha exportado tanto pesticidas dañinos como marcos

ideológicos para persuadir a los pequeños agricultores indígenas y otros agricultores con

arraigo local de abandonar la agricultura tradicional y libre de químicos. Aunque los

programas financiados por Estados Unidos sugirieron que, siguiendo los protocolos labo-

rales adecuados, no había peligro en utilizar agroquímicos en las plantaciones de expor-

tación, no existen condiciones para su “uso seguro” en contextos de la vida real tal y como

atañe a los pequeños agricultores de subsistencia, muchos de quienes viven muy cerca de

áreas protegidas. Las organizaciones transnacionales de conservación de la biodiversidad

han permanecido extrañamente silenciosas respecto al tema, y los movimientos indígenas

y campesinos aún no se han movilizado contra los pesticidas debido a la poca información

sobre sus peligros, así como la “lenta” violencia de sus impactos en la salud. Una descolo-

nización de la agricultura y la conservación requerirá de un ambientalismo más inclusivo

y alineado con los movimientos campesinos; uno que tome en cuenta las condiciones reales

de riesgo y vulnerabilidad en el campo guatemalteco, con su población mayoritariamente

maya.

Keywords: Pesticides, Petén, Guatemala, Biodiversity conservation, Green Revolution,

USAID

Liza Grandia is an associate professor of Native American Studies at the University of California,

Davis, where she directs the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas.

1124535LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221124535Grandia/Pesticides and peasants in guatemala

research-article2022

Grandia/PESTICIDES AND PEASANTS IN GUATEMALA 125

At a 2001 USAID-funded conference about biodiversity conservation, sus-

tainable development, and rural economy in the northern Guatemalan low-

lands, the agenda brimmed with papers on protected areas, forest management,

and land use planning. I admittedly was also planning dissertation research on

those tired themes but had decided to do something more original for my con-

ference paper. Through World Health Organization and U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency databases, I traced the regulatory status of pesticides being

used in Petén and found that at least two-thirds were banned or restricted in

Europe and North America. Observing the shocked faces in the panel room, the

organizers extended my 15-minute paper into a full lunch-hour Q&A. I vividly

remember the lifelong and widely respected agricultural extension agent

Alberto Contreras’s asking, “Why are the gringos poisoning us?” and then a

clarion question that stayed with me, “Why don't we know this?”

This article is, in some sense, an extended answer to Alberto's two pointed

questions. For profit and power, the United States intoxicated Guatemala as a

pawn in Cold War geopolitics. To secure Guatemala’s dependency on trade, it

began peddling pesticides at midcentury through various channels, including

the United Fruit Company, malaria control projects, the cotton and coffee

industry, Protestant missionaries, U.S. drug enforcement, Mediterranean fruit

fly control (see Copeland, 2014, for a riveting ethnographic account of rumors

about overflights), and a growing number of Green Revolution projects

financed by U.S. foreign aid. Then in the 1970s, USAID dramatically acceler-

ated the spread of pesticides—many of them banned in the United States—

through programs to incentivize small-scale production of nontraditional

exports like broccoli, berries, and snow peas. Not until muckraking journalists

in the 1980s reported a series of scandals about pesticide residues on produce

imports from Guatemala (Dowie, 1979; Roosevelt, 1983; Weir and Schapiro,

1981) did the U.S. government finally launch training programs for pesticides

exported by U.S. agribusiness corporations. Although USAID programs said

that highland Maya agricultural workers could somehow apply agrochemicals

to export crops without harm, I will show (and illustrate with gruesome ethno-

graphic examples) that, once the Pandora's box of pesticides was opened, small

farmers throughout the country began experimenting with them with little to

no training or information about safety precautions and potential health harms.

Pesticides were not the only poisonous export financed by USAID. Perhaps

more pernicious was its underwriting a dogmatic transnational conservation

ideology prioritizing the abstract value of biodiversity over other varieties of

environmentalism with/by/for indigenous and grassroots communities

(Guha, 1997). As a volunteer (1992–1995) and then renegade employee (1997–

1999) turned disenchanted critic (2002–on) of Conservation International's pro-

gram in Guatemala's northernmost department, Petén, I was a frontline witness

over three decades to the way USAID and other allied donors dumped more

than US$100 million in the northern lowlands for nonprofit projects that

emphasized parks over people. I also accompanied one local organization,

ProPetén, through a bitter paradigm dispute and divorce from Conservation

International in 2003–2004. To this day, ProPetén is the only conservation orga-

nization in the region that has creatively engaged in pesticides education and

alternatives through a radio soap opera, a talk show with an agronomist, farmer