Ungovernable? Indigenous Campesino Resistance to Land Grabbing in Guatemala’s Polochic Valley

• Author: Lazar Konforti
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18813565
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 89–106

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18813565

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

89

Ungovernable?

Indigenous Campesino Resistance to Land Grabbing in

Guatemala’s Polochic Valley

by

Lazar Konforti

A decade after buying up large swaths of land in Guatemala’s Polochic Valley, the

Chabil Utzaj sugarcane plantation was forced to cease operations because of local resis-

tance led by indigenous Q’eqchi’ campesinos. Situating the conflict within broader trajec-

tories of agrarian and political change brought about by globalization in Guatemala shows

how campesino groups have had to navigate a neoliberal political arena that disciplines

their discourses and practices and limits their achievements. Campesinos’ success to date

has rested on partially subverting neoliberal institutions and prescribed practices, thus

making new territories coveted by capital ungovernable and therefore less desirable. While

most of the lands previously under sugarcane cultivation are currently occupied by orga-

nized campesino groups, their control of those lands is very precarious without property

titles. The conflict is not yet over, and its long-term impact on livelihoods and trajectories

of agrarian change remains uncertain.

Una década después de comprar grandes franjas de tierra en el Valle Polochic de

Guatemala, la plantación de caña de azúcar Chabil Utzaj se vio obligada a cesar sus

operaciones debido a la resistencia local liderada por los campesinos indígenas Q’eqchi.

Situar el conflicto dentro de trayectorias más amplias de cambios agrarios y políticos

provocados por la globalización en Guatemala muestra cómo los grupos campesinos han

tenido que navegar por una arena política neoliberal que disciplina sus discursos y prác-

ticas y limita sus logros. El éxito de campesinos hasta la fecha se ha basado en subvertir

parcialmente las instituciones neoliberales y las prácticas prohibidas, haciendo que los

nuevos territorios codiciados por el capital sean ingobernables y, por lo tanto, menos dese-

ables. Si bien la mayoría de las tierras anteriormente cultivadas con caña de azúcar están

actualmente ocupadas por grupos campesinos organizados, su control de esas tierras es

muy precario sin títulos de propiedad. El conflicto aún no ha terminado, y su impacto a

largo plazo en la manera de ganarse la vida y las trayectorias del cambio agrario sigue

siendo incierto.

Keywords: Agrarian change, Peasant studies, Neoliberalism, Market-led agrarian

reform, Q’eqchi’

Lazar Konforti is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the

University of Toronto. He is deeply indebted to the organizations and communities that wel-

comed him and shared their stories and grateful to the LAP reviewers for valuable feedback.

Because of the sensitive subject matter and the ongoing nature of the Polochic conflict, all infor-

mants have been kept strictly anonymous. The research was made possible by the Joseph-Armand

Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.

813565LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18813565Latin American PerspectivesKonforti / Resistance To Land Grabbing In Guatemala

research-article2018

90 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

On March 15, 2011, Guatemalan federal police and military forces sur-

rounded the community of Miralvalle, near Panzós, in the heart of the fertile

Polochic Valley in northeastern Guatemala. Accompanied by the company’s

private security guards and a group of armed men in civilian clothes, the

authorities were there to execute an eviction order issued at the behest of Chabil

Utzaj, a sugar mill and plantation that had acquired the lands Miralvalle stood

on. By the time the tear gas had cleared, Antonio Beb lay dead and 105 indig-

enous Q’eqchi’1 families found themselves homeless. Over the next three days,

a dozen additional communities, approximately 800 households in all, were

evicted from the lands they had occupied, their makeshift homes demolished,

and their crops uprooted (OACNUDH, 2013; UDEFEGUA, 2011). The 2011

evictions were the high point of an ongoing conflict between Chabil Utzaj and

local indigenous Q’eqchi’ campesinos.2 By mid-2016, however, continued resis-

tance had caused the company to cease operations, allowing campesinos to

gain tentative control of several thousand hectares of land formerly under sug-

arcane cultivation.

Chabil Utzaj’s foray into the Polochic Valley has been called a “land grab”

(see, for example, Bassett, 2016; Haddok, 2012; Vidal, 2012). Brought to global

attention by the international nongovernmental organization (NGO) GRAIN

(2008), land grabbing is the capturing of control of land by capital in response

to new drivers specific to the current global economic conjuncture—converg-

ing food, fuel, environmental, and financial crises on the one hand and growing

demand from new hubs of global capital in Asia and the Middle East on the

other (Borras and Franco, 2013; Borras et al., 2012; White et al., 2012). The land-

grab literature3 has recently focused some attention on assessing the varied

“reactions from below”—whether, how, and why the people affected respond

to land grabbing both politically and economically (see Hall et al., 2015). It

tends, however, to situate these reactions within a policy rather than a political

context. Neoliberalism is not merely a set of policies that lead to land grabbing;

it is a “governing rationality” (Brown, 2015) that refashions the entire political

arena, establishing new rules of acceptable discourse and tactics, organiza-

tional forms, and mechanisms of political intermediation.

Taking the Polochic Valley conflict between indigenous Q’eqchi’ campesinos

and the Chabil Utzaj sugarcane plantation as a case study, this paper explores

how the neoliberal political context in Guatemala has shaped social struggles

against land grabbing. The first section discusses the economic and political

restructuring brought about by neoliberalism in Guatemala and how it relates

to the Polochic case. The following section provides an account of the conflict

itself, briefly situating it within historical trajectories of agrarian change in the

region. The final section makes preliminary observations on the discourses,

practices, achievements, and wider significance of the struggle. The observa-

tions are preliminary because the conflict is still ongoing and its long-term

impact on agrarian change will not become apparent for some time. In addition

to published data and reports, I draw mostly on semistructured interviews

with leaders or representatives of campesino organizations, government agen-

cies, and actors from the private sector. Occasionally I cite archival research and

life history interviews with members of communities that participated in the

struggle.