La red que crece: Platform Politics and Social Struggle in Neoliberal Guatemala

• Author: Eric Sippert
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221128536
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221128536

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 107–123

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221128536

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

107

La red que crece

Platform Politics and Social Struggle in

Neoliberal Guatemala

by

Eric Sippert

Free-trade policies have opened the Guatemalan economy to international forces and

sparked massive internal and international migration, creating new forms of social strug-

gle produced by and engaging with these processes. A review of the 2008 advent of a

grassroots organization in Western Highland Guatemala involved in binational United

States–Guatemalan fair trade and migrant and solidarity organizing uses the concept of

the platform instead of the network to highlight continuities and ruptures between past

and present struggles. This perspective disrupts the vertical/horizontal dichotomy in

social movement studies and sheds light on the effects of technological change on grass-

roots resistance to neoliberalism.

Las políticas de libre comercio han abierto la economía guatemalteca a las pujanzas

internacionales y provocado una migración masiva tanto interna como internacional, cre-

ando nuevas formas de lucha social producidas por y comprometidas con estos procesos.

Este repaso del advenimiento, en 2008, de una organización de base en las Tierras Altas

Occidentales de Guatemala involucrada en promover el comercio justo binacional entre

Estados Unidos y Guatemala, así como la organización migrante y los nexos de solidari-

dad, utiliza el concepto de la plataforma en lugar de la red para resaltar las continuidades

y rupturas entre luchas pasadas y presentes. Esta perspectiva irrumpe en la dicotomía

vertical/horizontal subyacente a los estudios de movimientos sociales y nos brinda una

perspectiva sobre los efectos del cambio tecnológico en las resistencias de base al neolibe-

ralismo.

Keywords: Guatemala, Networks, Platforms, Grassroots mobilization, Resistance

Those engaged in social struggle in Guatemala today face a very different

world from that of the revolutionaries of the second half of the twentieth cen-

tury, one reshaped by free-trade agreements, continued violence, weak post-

war democracy, and massive migration. Neoliberal policies and migration

have created new sociopolitical formations and subjectivities that alter and are

altered by flows of commodities and migratory flows. The new organizational

Eric Sippert is a graduate of the political science Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts

Amherst. He is grateful for the support and assistance of many friends and colleagues working to

build el sueño guatemalteco. He thanks his advisers, Sonia Alvarez, Regine Spector, and Millie

Thayer, for their mentorship, those who provided feedback on earlier drafts at the Midwest

Political Science Association and the Eastern Michigan University Political Science Department,

and the reviewers of Latin American Perspectives.

1128536LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221128536Sippert/PLATFORM POLITICS IN NEOLIBERAL GUATEMALA

research-article2022

108 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

forms and repertoires of contention produced by this interplay of power and

resistance call for the development of novel analytical concepts for interpret-

ing—and changing—this reality. In this article I use the concept of the plat-

form—an organizational form that allows users to create and share content and

connect with others—to highlight continuities and ruptures between past and

present movements. Examining the organizational identity of Desarrollo

Sostenible para Guatemala (Sustainable Development for Guatemala—

DESGUA), a grassroots organization located in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, as

a platform, I show how it brings together a wide range of disparate actors and

sets the stage for action while not predetermining outcomes. While thoroughly

embedded in and produced by neoliberal commodity flows, platforms like

DESGUA offer glimpses of new forms and sites of collective organizing and

survival in the face of neoliberal-induced violence.

Platforms are proliferating globally. Understanding their practices at a local

level, their interactions (or lack thereof) with states, and their relationships with

neoliberalism is germane to the study of social struggle in the twenty-first cen-

tury both in Central America and beyond. While much of the literature on

contemporary and historical Guatemala focuses on either rural areas or

Guatemala City, this research, based in Quetzaltenango, bridges the Guatemala

City/rural Guatemala divide. The rapidly growing city, crisscrossed by migra-

tion, both domestic and international, is a space between the two and between

the local and the global. Platforms are difficult to pin down. We use them every

day, often without realizing that they are there. They connect individuals and

groups across time and space and provide the infrastructure for that connec-

tion. And although they do not predetermine the outcomes of those connec-

tions, they do influence them. DESGUA’s café/social center, for example, acts

as a physical platform, a meeting place that connects actors including returned

migrants, former combatants, fair-trade producers, artists, activists, entrepre-

neurs, tourists, students, and delegations, among others. While a network is

simply a group of connected entities, a platform is a system for the exchange or

sharing of user-generated content. Platforms build on existing networks and

create new ones. Platform politics can be described as a type of contentious

collective action located somewhere between “weapons of the weak” and for-

mal social movements (Scott, 1985; Tarrow, 2011).

This article begins with an overview of the literature on network(ed) social

movements and how studies of platforms build on and move past them both

theoretically and in practice. Platforms are not necessarily new actors, but iden-

tifying them in the study of social movements provides a new perspective.

Next it recounts the history of DESGUA as an example of a platform in this

field. Emerging from fair-trade and migrant movements in the United States

and influenced by revolutionary struggles in Guatemala and Mexico, DESGUA

was part of a second postwar phase of social struggle once the promises of the

peace accords, the Guatemalan electoral left, and migration to the United States

had been found lacking. A closer examination of the types of actors that use

DESGUA and the types of exchanges that take place there clarifies the political,

social, and cultural effects of a platform, and this allows for situating DESGUA

in the Guatemalan political landscape. While not directly attacking neoliberal-

ism, a platform like DESGUA offers the possibility of creating alternative