Indians are drunks and drunks are Indians: alcohol and indigenismo in Guatemala, 1890–1940

This article explores the ways in which the use of alcohol articulated with the discourse of indigenismo in Guatemala between the late 1890s and the late 1930s. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the public language of alcoholism merged with that of indigenismo. By the early 1930s, during presidency of Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), the theoretical conflation of alcoholism and indigenismo was fully evolved, providing a seamless paradigm for those who would place the credited Guatemala's‘drunken’and‘racially degenerate’indigenous majority with the nation's underdevelopment. The article utilises indigenista literature, newspapers, contemporary legislation and judicial records on the alcohol contraband trade and drunkenness to construct this argument.     

The defence of territory and local struggle for more democracy in post-war Guatemala

Twenty years since the signing of the Peace Accords, shifts have taken place in Guatemala’s landscape of collective struggles for democracy. Instead of the historical peasant movements or the civil society organizations based in Guatemala City that dominated collective action in the context of the Accords, over the past decade local, rural nodes of resistance to neo-liberal policies have consolidated as the most sustained attempts to instil a democratizing impetus. In the context of Guatemala’s post-war state, captured by legal and illegal elite factions, this rural agency is directed primarily towards the municipal and community level. It is framed around the defence of territory and emerges on the basis of local meanings and practices. By analysing the case of an organizational process promoted by indigenous communities in Guatemala’s northern highlands, I argue for paying attention to these organizational patterns despite their limited geographical projection. I derive the importance of this collective agency from their attempts to transcend a purely antagonistic stance by reconfiguring local political interactions and making their immediate surroundings more democratic.     

The Global Gold Mining Industry,Junior Firms,and Civil Society Resistance in Guatemala

Over the past two decades, the gold mining industry has increased its activity in Latin America. Growing contestation and conflict around gold mining projects have accompanied this shift. This article draws from the case of Guatemala, where metal exploration has grown by 1,000 per cent since 1998, to illustrate how the proliferation of small ‘junior’ firms – together with neoliberal investment policies and suitability of mineralisation – set the stage for fly‐by‐night gold mining and, therefore, intense resistance from host communities to mineral development.     

Mass grave localization prediction with geographical information systems in Guatemala and future impacts

Conducting physical searches for mass grave locations based on anecdotal evidence is a time-consuming and resource-intensive endeavor in circumstances that often pose a threat to personal safety. The development of tools and procedures to speed such searches can greatly reduce the risk involved, increase the number of individuals whose remains are recovered and identified, and more importantly, reunite these remains with their loved ones to provide them with a proper burial. Geographic information systems (GIS) software, which can analyze and manipulate the spatial characteristics of known mass grave data, represents a powerful tool that can be used to predict new mass grave locations and increase the speed and efficiency with which they are investigated. Using the open source QGIS project, existing mass grave locations in Guatemala were analyzed based on their distance from and change in elevation relative to roads, streets, waterways, points of interest, and possible villages/towns. Statistical and geostatistical analyses performed to detect relationships among the variables resulted in patterns that warrant further study and can be used to further narrow areas of investigation.     

Reality and rumour: the grey areas of international development in Guatemala

In Guatemala, development projects and practitioners are frequently associated with rumours. These rumours, often related to suspicions of ulterior motives, have a high degree of potency and endurance. This paper investigates this relationship between development and rumour, focusing on some of the more prevalent rumours including robaniños (baby-stealers), religious rumours regarding the Antichrist and rumours related to vaccinations and sterilisation. As a counter to perspectives which essentialise a lack of education in the perpetuation of rumours, I explore how they become devices through which one can understand power imbalances and everyday violence(s) inherent in many development projects and processes.     

Private Security in Guatemala: Pathway to Its Proliferation

It has become common to explain the proliferation of private security services as causally determined by crime rates and institutional weakness. This article on the contrary argues that other explanatory factors need to be emphasised, especially for post‐war societies: institutional trajectories and political processes. The article first presents the present situation of commercial and non‐commercial private security services in Guatemala (private security companies as well as security neighbourhood committees). Against this background it reconstructs mechanisms and critical junctures through which the Guatemalan state had sourced out policing functions to the private sector during the war and traces the reinforcement of these mechanisms in post‐war society. It argues that the proliferation of private security services is an outcome of the reinforcing of an institutional pattern of public security displacement to the private sphere. The continuity of self‐defence and vigilante organisations thereby emerges as a stronger explanatory factor of the proliferation of private security services in post‐war societies than their self‐explained authorisation through high crime rates.     

Imperial Incompetence and Guatemalan Militarism, 1931–1966

Drawing of Guatemalan and US sources, this paper complicates the instrumentalist argument that US assistance and intervention explain the Guatemalan military's repeated intervention in politics, and the rise of a military government in 1963. This study contends that the US government had little to do with giving Guatemalan officers the capacity and motive to intervene in politics. However, the US did contribute to their opportunity to intervene through its opposition to regimes it opposed, as was the case in the infamous 1954 coup, and also by inadvertently weakening regimes it backed.     

Analizando la violencia después del conflicto: el caso de Guatemala en un estudio sub-nacional

This article conceptualizes post-conflict violence by developing its definition, analyzing the factors which can explain it and constructing a typology of eight forms of violence. A central concern of this analysis is that there are different degrees of relation between the violence of conflicts and post-conflict violence given that some forms are fully related, while others are only partially related, and still others are completely independent of armed conflict. While general conditions of peace define post-conflict violence in a weak sense, direct legacies of war define post-conflict violence in a strong sense. The Guatemalan case study allows to identify patterns related to each form of violence at a sub-national level of analysis.     

Modified landscapes: vulnerabilities to genetically modified corn in northern Guatemala

From the countryside to the cubicle, this contribution explores vulnerabilities to genetically modified (GM) contamination of maize landraces in northern Guatemala following the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement). Although some industrial farmers elsewhere in Guatemala might welcome GM seeds, in this lowland refuge zone, transnational agribusiness corporations would largely face a recalcitrant and risk-averse peasantry not easily converted into reliable customers. While the unpredictability of improvisational swidden systems in this dynamic frontier zone has protected small farmers from corporate seed marketers, it also leaves them vulnerable to informal (and invisible) GM gene flow into local maize landraces. Recent changes to Guatemala's biosafety regulatory structure may compound processes of involuntary contamination despite latent citizen opposition to GM corn.     

Government stewardship and primary health care in Guatemala since 1996

This article analyzes the role of government stewardship in the expansion of primary health care in post‐conflict Guatemala. By the time the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, the country's primary health care system was scarcely functioning with virtually no services available in rural indigenous areas. To address this gaping void/deficiency, the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance (MSPAS) embarked on a progressive expansion of primary services aimed at covering the majority of rural poor. Through a series of legal, policy, and program reforms up to 2014, the MSPAS dramatically expanded primary coverage and greatly improved basic health indicators for the entire population. To succeed in this effort, the MSPAS and its partners needed to simultaneously grow their stewardship capacity to oversee and develop the primary health system. On the basis of recent health systems strengthening literature, we propose a stewardship framework of 6 critical functions and use it to analyze the gains in government capacity that enabled the achievement of many of the country's primary health goals. Of the 6 stewardship functions, “building relationships, coalitions, and partnerships” especially with civil society organizations stands out as one of the keys to MSPAS success.