Violence and Political Participation in Northeastern Guatemala

The Productive Effects of Power Strategies and Resistance Tactics

This article draws deeply from Michel Foucault’s theory of power. Power is here understood as a field of relations—both repressive and productive—that rests on specific ideas and forms of power, each structured around a correlated set of mechanisms for governing people. Understood as “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men” (Foucault, 2008: 186), the concept of governmentality offers an interpretative framework that sheds light on the power mechanisms and discursive regimes through which political theories and ideologies are embodied. Indeed, there is no power relation without the consequent constitution of a field of knowledge, nor is there any knowledge that does not simultaneously involve and create power relations (Foucault, 1975: 36). Therefore, each governmentality develops a “power-knowledge” apparatus: the articulation of a set of practices with a set of discourses (sciences, laws, etc.) that governs this set of practices and constitutes it as an intelligible whole.

Through his usual genealogical methodology, Foucault (1975; 1976) identifies two forms of power that are of interest for understanding politics in the Quiriguá region. Sovereign power, peculiar to feudal regimes, is the power to command and punish particular subjects. It preys on its subjects’ wealth and ultimately blood and life through brute domination. Disciplinary power, in contrast, is the power to lead and coerce populations from a distance. Tied in to the development of capitalism, its techniques aim at reducing the political might of the body while maximizing its useful force. To do so, it trains its subjects’ bodies so that they become useful and docile. These two forms of power have different effects on political subjectivities and social realities.

Although my focus was never on labor regulation, Michael Burawoy’s (1985) work on this topic opens up a new avenue of analysis by pointing to the way each governmentality may be tied to a specific regime of production. The same mechanisms used to regulate work are used outside the workplace for all social relations. These political-ideological apparatuses of production are produced by the interplay of the actions of both dominant and subaltern actors. They rely to various degrees on the organization of consent backed up by coercion. The nature of the effort (or work) and the specificities of the power balance in a geographically and historically situated context produce a particular governmentality. Thus, as we will see below, the regional militia elites’ illegal trade required a different kind of power mechanism and could rely on different assets (cultural proximity, for example) than the production of bananas for U.S. companies. The national context presented by the finca order, however, explains the similarities between the two, among them the recurrent use of force, vassalage relations, and the culture of peasant subalternity.

Foucault was more interested in the art of government than in the art of resistance and/or accommodation, while Burawoy is more interested in regimes of production than in social relations built outside the workplace. Yet power relations are productive because they are relations between power and resistance, between actors situated differently on the chessboard fighting for advantages at every locus of the social field. It is their joint actions—sometimes converging, sometimes opposing—that produce social reality. We therefore need to analyze the multiple discontinuous and sometimes contradictory actions of both dominant and subaltern actors within and outside the realm of production.

The work of Michel de Certeau (1990) helps highlight subaltern actors’ concrete responses to power mechanisms not only at work but also at home, at church, etc. Studying daily practices, he analyzed how dominated actors subvert procedures and poach on fields organized and controlled by dominant actors. More specifically, his distinction between “tactics” as the calculation of the dominated and “strategy” as the calculation of the dominant will allow us to articulate the main traits of people’s political subjectivity: mobility, ambiguity, and cunning opportunism. These traits appear mainly in the ways in which people build social relations and maintain a lively social fabric despite recurring violence (Simon, 2020). De Certeau’s analysis thus helps us describe people’s subjectivity, while Foucault’s and Burawoy’s help us understand how and why it is shaped this way.

Ethnography and History

My starting point in this article is the ethnography I did between 2011 and 2013 in the region I named “Quiriguá” after the village that was my main anchor there. My fieldwork evolved around the few friends I made, first at the archaeological park and then at a private school where I taught for a few months in 2011 and at the Catholic Church (the nuns of the convent hosted me several times). The Quiriguá region includes small villages scattered along the highway a few kilometers apart and banana plantations. This was, however, no classic ethnography. The repression of everyone who appeared to threaten the status quo, of everyone who asked or talked too much, required an ethnography careful of its movements for the safety of everyone involved. Information about politics, present or past, was particularly scarce. In the region, this kind of information is what Michael Taussig (1999: 5–6) called a public secret: “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated. . . . A situation in which people dared not state the obvious, thus outlining it, so to speak, with the spectral radiance of the unsaid.” To gather this kind of information, I had to use the tactical method of my interlocutors: patiently waiting for an opportunity, always ready to grasp it. Therefore participant observation was more productive than an interview, as I learned while doing 30 interviews with teachers, archaeological site workers, community development council members, and others.

This tactical ethnography allowed me to uncover the mainsprings of Quiriguá’s social fabric and the main features of its inhabitants’ subjectivity, both affected by the experience of violence (Simon, 2020). However, identifying how exactly violence had shaped and was shaping that subjectivity required me to go a step farther. Here I will connect this ethnographic analysis to a historical and theoretical analysis of governmentality. Indeed, governmentality theories inspired by Foucault are of great help in providing an analytical grid for uncovering the power mechanisms and discursive regimes used to control and shape people’s subjectivity. Interpreted through this theoretical lens, ethnographic analysis fleshes out power mechanisms and discursive regimes. It shows how these mechanisms alter the way in which bodies are oriented, lives are lived, and subjects are formed and the sometimes contradictory responses of the subjects, ranging from resistance to acceptance/re-appropriation (AVANCSO, 2012; Ong, 2006).

However, a strict focus on the present without taking into account social reality’s historicity leads to only partial understanding. As Johannes Fabian (2006) has shown, anthropologists too often deny the societies they study the same temporality they apply to their own. Indeed, most of the power mechanisms shaping today’s social reality developed during the nineteenth century, while the history of the families living in the region today helps explain why they could not rely on a tradition of collective organization to resist. Power configurations and mechanisms have a historical genesis: their birth and continuities can be located. Their relationships and interdependence with other power mechanisms and configurations—both national and international—can be analyzed to understand how they are constructed and maintained.

To situate the ethnographic data within a historical perspective, I used a methodology inspired by Foucault’s genealogical and archaeological analysis (AVANCSO, 2012; Foucault, 1976; 2008) but also by historical sociology (Brachet, 2001; 2010; González-Izás, 2014a). Both methodologies aim to uncover the continuities and ruptures that shape today’s reality and the social processes that govern them by linking historical and sociological data. To do so, I could not, however, rely on primary historical sources, as this would have required more resources than I had for this research. Instead, I relied on secondary sources that I cross-referenced with the few data I collected myself during fieldwork. These secondary sources give a splintered account of the region, since it has never been directly studied, being too “narco” and thus too dangerous for Guatemalan researchers and not “indigenous” enough for foreign researchers and nongovernmental organizations. The next section will therefore attempt to reassemble all the pieces into a coherent story that locates the bases and continuities of power configurations.

History of Power Configurations and Mechanisms

Almost empty at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the region became a key territory for trade routes during the colonial period because of its strategic location at the crossroads of Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, and the Caribbean harbors. The authorities and a small group of Spaniards and ladinos ¹ took advantage of this situation to develop intense legal and illegal trading activity intrinsically enmeshed in and at the core of capitalist development in the region. Accumulating great wealth, these rising elites saw their economic power enhanced by the large margins of sovereignty granted by the Audiencia de Guatemala ² in exchange for the region’s military defense against foreign powers (England and Holland, mainly) and indigenous rebellions. The Audiencia lacked the funds to take on this duty imposed by the Spanish crown itself and had to resort to the regional elites and their militias, civil armed forces. These feudal “militia armies” served in times of need and, in exchange, received various political and material benefits (the lands, tribute, and labor of the indigenous subjects). Militias and (illegal) trade henceforth became the two constitutive elements of the eastern elites’ power from colonial times to the present day (González-Izás, 2015).

Despite the dense trade activity and its strategic location, the Northeastern region of Izabal still had few inhabitants and little modern infrastructure at the end of the nineteenth century. After independence, the various liberal governments ³ had tried to foster economic development in the region but mainly through vast land concessions to foreign corporations that stirred up considerable opposition from the eastern elites. While the second generation of liberal elites (1870–1944) was more concerned with the development of its home regions in the West, its modernizing project for the country nonetheless established an institutional reorganization and a governmentality that shaped the social structure of Guatemala for more than a century, with deep influence over power relations even in the Northeastern region.

This modernizing project held that Guatemala’s future prosperity rested on the national economy’s integration into the world market as a provider of raw materials and a consumer of manufactured products. Modernization was synonymous with economic growth based on agro-exports, investment in new infrastructure, and the immigration of white people as a way to “whiten the race.” However, the plantation economy was in need of vast lands, cheap labor, abundant credit, and easy access to outside markets and supplies (González-Izás, 2014b). During the 1860s and the following decades, successive governments produced a dense body of legislation justified by discursive strategies implementing power mechanisms designed to ensure that the plantations had a sufficient workforce. This complex “power-knowledge” apparatus is better understood as a finca order that structured social relations in Guatemala and has been resignified in the present (AVANCSO, 2012).

This finca order intended not only to send the indigenous population to the fincas but also to produce new individuals who were hardworking, obedient, and self-defined spatially and symbolically as part of the finca. This was achieved through various mechanisms, including labor regulations meant to ensure enough workers for the fincas, the production of a new time and space for the lives of the indigenous people structured around the needs of the fincas, the absence of a homogeneous culture of wages (each finquero could decide how much and how he would pay his workers—with money, food and clothing, crops, a bit of everything), and physical punishment to enforce all this (AVANCSO, 2012). The finca in Guatemala can therefore be understood not only as an economic complex but also as a cultural and political one from which order was organized, hierarchies and privileges asserted, and politics played out in the countryside (Tischler, 1997).

In this context, the Northeastern region was in need of modernization, meaning integration into the agro-export economy and its infrastructure. Relying on foreign capital, the liberal governments built a new harbor on the Atlantic in Puerto Barrios and started a train line to connect it to the capital. However, the drop in coffee prices in 1897 prevented the government of Estrada Cabrera from meeting its obligations to its creditors. Seizing this opportunity, the United Fruit Company negotiated an advantageous contract with the government: in exchange for completing the train line between Puerto Barrios and Guatemala City, the U.S. company received, among other benefits, the land of most of the department of Izabal, a 35-year tax exemption, the usufruct of the port infrastructures, and control of most of the train line (Dosal, 1993).

Eager to have some return on its investment, United Fruit started its banana plantations as early as 1904. To overcome the initial lack of a local workforce, it hired black workers from Jamaica, settling them first in temporary camps while constructing housing blocks (Dosal, 1993). Villages appeared around the plantations, all on the private land of the company, which owned and provided all infrastructure: houses, water and electricity, sports fields, hospital and dispensaries, company stores with U.S. imported goods, etc. Yet the working and living conditions remained harsh, provoking strikes and uprisings violently repressed by the company with the help of the Guatemalan and/or the U.S. army. The strike of 1921 is a good example: spreading to all sectors of the company (port installations, railway, plantations), it reached a scale never seen before. In response, United Fruit asked the Guatemalan government and a U.S. warship anchored nearby to intervene and restore order (Dosal, 1993). Despite various attempts, it was therefore not until the supportive governments of the 1944–1954 Revolution ⁴ that a union could be created.

The democratic, progressive Guatemalan governments of the revolution were a serious threat to United Fruit. Supporting workers and peasants’ unions and introducing an agrarian reform, they deeply affected power relations in the countryside. This threatened not only United Fruit’s power and sovereignty but those of the elites. Both therefore allied themselves with the capital’s conservative oligarchy to overthrow President Arbenz in 1954. United Fruit appealed to the U.S. State Department to intervene while the eastern militias joined the Liberation Army of Castillo Armas (Handy, 1984). The counterrevolutionary era, marked by U.S. influence, ignited a guerrilla uprising first in the Northeastern region and then in the highlands, leading to 30 years of civil war. During this period, the Liberation Army worked as a private militia at the service of the national army, the far-right parties, and the Northeastern elites, giving their members economic and political advantages. Under the pretense of fighting communists and guerrillas, it killed and scared into exile all of the progressive leaders, among whom were many catechists and foreign liberation-theology priests. Hiring orejas (ears) in every village, it established a dense network of surveillance over the population. The body of anyone who opposed its interests would soon be seen floating down the Motagua River.

This long military occupation of the region during the 1960s and the 1970s (when guerrillas were active in the region) contributed to the formation of many paramilitary groups and forced enrollment, forging a strong military identity rooted in the first militias of colonial times. Moreover, some of the men involved in the armed actions against the “communists” later used this experience for political and economic ends. Building their own terror companies, they recycled themselves as providers of protection, security, and contract killing, becoming the easiest way to solve conflicts (González-Izás, 2014a). During the conflict, members of the military groups and the Liberation Army took advantage of their posts in customs and their ties with the region’s military bases to establish intense illegal activity, extending the tradition inherited from smuggling during colonial times.

Yet organized crime in the region experienced a turning point when its caciques (local political bosses) were contacted by the Colombian and then the Mexican drug cartels to smuggle their drugs through their territory (Lopez, 2010). In this new trade, these caciques made use of the personal connections, interaction models, and authority structures that they had developed during the Cold War. After the peace accords were signed in 1996, criminal networks maintained their contacts—both military and civilian—inside the state, and organized crime gradually became normal in the postwar era (Sieder, 2011). Filling the void left by the state in terms of both local authority and service provision, these traditional clans made control of their territory their safety net against judicial investigation and against the incursions and threats of rival clans (Lopez, 2010). Controlling every economic and political resource through local political elites, the dominion of these families was close to a new form of local dictatorship potentially far more suffocating and oppressive than a presidential dictatorship because of its proximity, both geographical and cultural (González-Izás, 2014a: 295).

Thus power configurations in the Northeastern region were constructed alongside the capitalist development of illegal trade routes and the plantation economy, both requiring, albeit in different ways, the strict control of territories and populations. To guarantee this control, both the successive banana companies and the trading and militia elites have been able to rely on a finca order giving landlords the legal means to control their workers’ time and daily lives. Imposed as the principal social unit of Guatemalan society from the 1860s until the 1940s, this order produced intersubjective relationships based on exploitation, subjectivities inspired by a feudal ethos, and a culture of peasant subalternity that still structures society today (Tischler, 1997). Furthermore, as Robert Holden (2004: 25) has noted, the improvisational character of the state—reassembled with each change of government—prevented it from being the ultimate source of power. That status was held by whatever fighting forces had won the last battle. Historically deprived of authority of its own, the Guatemalan state has always depended upon a system of followers and private militias to ensure the population’s collaboration within intrinsically violent relationships of exchange (Casaus-Arzu, 1998). This national context supported the elites’ and the banana companies’ governmentality, with their different mixes of disciplinary and sovereign techniques.

Power Mechanisms

In its pursuit of commercial gain, United Fruit developed a range of strategies to reduce taxes, increase labor discipline, consolidate its landholdings, and maximize its political influence (Bourgois, 2003), creating a governmentality for corporate plantations that echoed the finca order in some ways. To be sure, the plantations did not rely on the same recruitment mechanisms as the oligarchical model (debt peonage, among others), but they did use many of the same techniques employed in the coffee, sugar, and cotton fincas to discipline workers into useful individuals.

Among these techniques was the reorganization of time and space according to the needs of the plantation’s productivity. Life was regulated by work timetables determined by the fluctuating needs of the company (from periods of unpaid unemployment to 14-hour workdays). Punctuality was imperative. Each task had to be done within a standard period of time, controlled and written down for each worker. This inscription and consequent evaluation hierarchized workers in terms of infinitesimal gradations and disciplined them into usefulness to the company. Individuals were hierarchically distributed not only on paper but also spatially. North American employees were housed in quarters separated from the workers, with all the comfort expected in a tropical region, while the size and comfort of the workers’ lodgings depended, then as now, on their seniority and their work evaluations. Moreover, space was organized to maximize usefulness and allow close surveillance of the workers and their families. Villages were built near the operating buildings along straight streets converging toward a soccer field at the center. This not only provided an open view over and control of the workers and their families but also maximized the use of the space.

Through these disciplinary techniques, every inch of individuals’ lives and bodies was made visible and controlled. As Foucault (1975) observed, disciplinary power exerts its hold by rendering itself invisible while imposing an obligation of visibility on those on whom it acts. Workers are individualized and hierarchized through observation and evaluation, and the hierarchy is then used to create an internal labor market (Burawoy, 1979). By giving small advantages to “good” workers and senior employees (who received permanent contracts and whose relatives got priority when applying for company jobs), the company organized consent among them.

The totalizing character of the fincas reinforced these techniques. As Philippe Bourgois (2003: 103–104) has demonstrated from an analysis of United Fruit’s archives in Costa Rica, the company in many ways looked like “an omnipotent total institution—à la Erving Goffman, capable of controlling not just political and economic outcomes but even the basic tenor of social and psychological relations.” Indeed, as in other total institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and prisons, all aspects of life (sleep, play, work, family activities, etc.) on the fincas were taken care of by the company within its landholdings (lately less so), separate from the rest of the world, and under its sole authority. This totalizing character gave United Fruit and then Del Monte access to every aspect of the workers’ lives, spreading the web of their disciplinary gaze deep into workers’ homes and even their minds.

Although disciplinary techniques were less often used outside the fincas, a similar obligation of visibility was nonetheless imposed on the population by the regional elites. Skillfully distributing tiny unequal shares of power, they created not only consent but also complicity, counting on the recipients to report any significant activity by their neighbors. The network of ears set up during the civil war was just the tip of the iceberg of people’s participation in their own surveillance and control. Sometimes voluntary (in exchange for economic and/or political advantages), sometimes forced (to save one’s life), this participation was multiple and diverse. Yet it was far-reaching, turning everyone into a potential collaborator and thus creating a dense web of surveillance, an invisible gaze watching everyone.

As we have seen, both dominant actors combined these disciplinary methods to various degrees with techniques of sovereign power. Public execution was undoubtedly the most spectacular and widespread of such techniques. As Foucault pointed out, public execution is a way of showing the sovereign’s power and the dissymmetry of strength. An execution does not reestablish justice; it reactivates power. Hence its extensive use against groups or initiatives that contest and threaten this power, such as the Sindicato de Trabajadores Bananeros de Izabal (Izabal Banana Workers’ Union—SITRABI) ⁵ and the liberation-theology priests and their followers.

Negotiating the collective pacts regulating working conditions and plantation workers’ benefits since 1972, the SITRABI unionists have regularly been victims of murder and death threats. In 1999, amid the contention ignited by the closure of three fincas and the layoffs that followed, Del Monte hired mercenaries from the local Mendoza narco clan to threaten the unionists into agreeing to its conditions. After an international pressure campaign, the union eventually achieved a new agreement and the Mendozas and Del Monte were prosecuted, but its entire executive board had to go into exile in the United States to escape death threats (Frundt, 2009). The intensity and regularity of union repression puts Guatemala in a sinister second place, just after Colombia, on the International Trade Union Confederation’s list of most dangerous countries for unionists in the world (Delpech, 2014).

Similarly, in the 1970s, liberation-theology priests started working to raise awareness and support popular organizations (Ponciano, 2009). Local radio stations were created, and peasants organized to demand title to their property to counteract forced and often violent seizures of their land by regional elites. The army and the local caciques’ paramilitary groups persecuted them. After several death threats against various priests, a Franciscan friar and his catechist from Quiriguá were murdered in 1981, forcing the missionary orders to call back their friars and priests. Many practicing Catholics fled the region, while those remaining withdrew from Church activities (CEH, 1999). ⁶ In 2011, Catholic villagers told me that they were afraid for Padre Jaime, the Franciscan leading the parish, because he was criticizing the injustices too openly. However, he was transferred by his order to Congo in 2012, after the usual four years of service in one parish.

More recently, in 2017, a group of Quiriguá residents filed a petition to raise the town to municipal rank as a way of freeing it from the Los Amates city council, which keeps all the region’s resources (taxes from the banana company and from tourist sites, etc.) for itself. The petition mentioned death threats against project leaders without giving any names. The son of the project's main leader was murdered in December 2017. He had been appointed judge for transit, and rumor had it that tuc-tuc ⁷ drivers had murdered him in retaliation for enforcing the law, but the collateral effect of his murder—which caused his parents to withdraw from all collective action—seems a bit too convenient to be a coincidence.

These murders are not only intended to suppress the threat; they reactivate power for all to see. Their intense publicization (in local newspapers, through rumors, etc.) transforms dead bodies into scripts fueled by power, communicating and reactivating the power imbalance. Yet sovereign power techniques also structure social relations in other, subtler ways. One of these is the clientelism at work at each level of the region’s political game—from the transnational patronage linking central governments with the banana company via the regional elites’ relations with the central government and the company to the relationships that connect local people with the elites and their political candidates. Constituted by asymmetrical reciprocal and personal links (Auyero, Lapegna, and Page, 2010), clientelist relations are akin to a form of vassalage in which power is pyramidal rather than reticular (as is the case with disciplinary power). In this kind of relation, leaders—wherever they sit in the pyramid—build and activate their power through ostentatious benevolent events, gifts, and personal services that display their wealth and power. In return, obedience and blind loyalty are expected, turning dissent into treason instead of a valid way of building consensus (Perez Sarazua, 2015).

The relations of United Fruit and all foreign investors with the successive Guatemalan governments are of this sort. Distributing favors and attracting clients and sowing and/or taking advantage of division within the government, foreign investors have deeply influenced the formation of the Guatemalan state (Holden, 2004). Similarly, United Fruit nourishes paternalistic relations with its workers. The low salaries and small perks (a small plot to cultivate in one’s free time, credit at the company stores, health care, etc.) are calculated to satisfy the workers’ elementary needs in a way that reduces social mobility and produces thankful subjects instead of subjects of rights.

Building roads and soccer fields, distributing candies at Christmas, and providing jobs, the regional elites play a similar game, appearing as benevolent sovereigns to the population. Elected three times in a row (2004–2016), Mayor Marco Tulio Ramirez was always ready to give a financial boost to this or that activity. His omnipresence and personal generosity earned him the nickname "Papa Tulio." Political party affiliation and voting in elections are thus determined by clientelistic relationships: what people support is not a party but a person with whom they have particular links. Similarly, as elsewhere in the country (Ramos and Sosa, 2010), political candidates choose their party according to the financial and relational resources it can contribute to their campaign, not hesitating to change parties while in office if it allows them access to new resources.

Following Burawoy, we could say that each dominant actor developed its own mix of organized consent and coercion, depending on its needs and possibilities. The regional elites were more interested in controlling territories so that (illegal) goods could pass through them than in disciplining the population into good workers. They needed the population’s cooperation (willing or not) to guarantee swift transport and to protect them from rivals by keeping them informed, but they did not need its labor. Moreover, their militia tradition and ample margins of sovereignty made it easy to rely on a sovereign form of power. Their governmentality thus rested heavily on sovereign techniques, with a disciplinary touch to keep everyone under close surveillance. The banana companies, by contrast, needed disciplined, useful workers who would work fast and well and therefore relied more on disciplinary techniques, only complementing them with sovereign techniques to force consent when necessary. Despite these different balances, life in the region has always rested on relations built on violence and close surveillance. While sovereign techniques impose vertical relations of inequality by shows of strength, disciplinary techniques control individual bodies through horizontal surveillance by an invisible but omnipresent gaze.

Moreover, while individuals shared the experience of living and working on the banana plantations, the population had diverse ethnic roots in the Quiriguá region, having migrated from multiple places. The oldest of the region’s families came in the 1910s, fleeing drought and land seizures in the eastern departments of Zacapa, Chiquimula, Jutiapa, and others. Although ethno-cultural specificities—including modes of collective organization—were at first preserved and exploited by the company to divide the workers, they were then progressively erased and resignified by disciplinary techniques for training productive, obedient, and loyal individuals (Bourgois, 2003; González-Izás, 2014b). In this context, the Quiriguá region’s inhabitants could not rely on even fragmented traditions of resistance and instead developed weak capacities for organizing and regulating internal tensions (Rodas, 2009: 24). On the contrary, the principles ruling their collective life made them especially vulnerable to the destructuring effects of the violence at the core of these governmentalities.

The Productive Effects of Governmentality

Part of a process of configuring power, these governmentalities reinforce each other and help shape the Quiriguá region’s political subjectivities and social reality. On the one hand, the banana companies’ disciplinary mechanisms diminish the "political" force of the workers’ bodies at minimal cost and maximize their useful force. They produce docile and useful agricultural workers but also families, since the fincas’ totalizing character extends the discipline’s reach to everyone who lives there. This individualized control is internalized through constant, invisible surveillance that continues outside the finca through the web of surveillance organized by the regional elites. Even when the worker and his/her family leave the finca, the control persists. On the other hand, sovereign mechanisms produce an understanding of politics based on the idea of authority founded on strength, a personalization of power that considers conflict as betrayal, and vertical feudal social relations in which subjects are placed in positions of dependence and servitude. These mechanisms support the control established by discipline by reasserting power whenever necessary, while discipline amplifies and extends the subjects’ subjugation through close, internalized control. This has multiple concrete consequences.

First, no official position in Quiriguá in itself gives its holder authority; authority ultimately lies with whoever has won it through force. The leader is necessarily a “strong man” who resolves conflict only by strength. He (in the local imaginary it must be a man) intervenes only if he has an interest in the conflict. This situation places the region’s people in constant one-on-one confrontation in which conflicts—perceived as betrayals—are only resolved by force, fueled by rampant impunity. Conflict thus becomes synonymous with violence, and therefore people avoid it as much as possible and, when they fail to do so, hide it. They build what Pierre-Joseph Laurent (2013: 38) calls an “entente,” a “façade peace” in which speaking the truth matters less than sparing one’s interlocutor’s feelings and keeping one’s quarrel private. However, while this entente effectively limits public conflict and therefore violence, it draws a veil over all relationships, making them hard to interpret. Therefore, it fuels distrust, which becomes the rule of social relations instead of the exception.

Moreover, the tensions inherent in all societies pour back into rumors whose lack of a signature ⁸ (Das, 2007: 105) allows the affected persons to choose to enter the conflict or not by deciding to assign the rumor to a particular person. The uncertainty opens a third space between people in which conflict can be expressed without breaking the entente at the general level of the society. In this way, the sovereign idea of authority and leadership creates the need to hide conflict and opposition. However, because everyone is under disciplinary control, this need is even stronger and penetrates deeper into people’s lives, fueling distrust and strengthening control in a vicious circle. Distrust and uncertainty feed each other, supporting physical violence to produce a daily ecology of fear and anxiety from which rumors draw their authenticity (Feldman, 2000).

Enacting the same idea of authority’s resting on strength alone as the elites’, local community leaders are at the heart of this dynamic. To avoid physical violence, they resort to rumors and perlocutionary speech to impose their rule. Drawing from Austin’s (1991 [1962]) distinction, I call “perlocutionary speech” that which performs an act that lies beyond speech itself (Ambroise, 2014). In Quiriguá, speech is always playing on two fronts, two parallel scenes: the words (what is said) and the “in-between-words” (the act playing between and beyond the words actually uttered). However, because this last scene is never made explicit, one never knows with certainty what one’s interlocutor’s intentions are. This scene is the never-mentioned referent, the always blurred and uncertain context of every conversation, which, by its own vagueness, gives speech the power to act on reality. As rumor, its paradigmatic form, perlocutionary speech always leaves a way out by never stating its purpose. Because of this, speech is rarely a space of expression; it is an act of relation whose nature is defined by the “in-between-words” scene, with all its uncertainty. ⁹

Therefore, the power and effectiveness of speaking lie more in the act of speaking than in the words used. Leaders do not need to speak well or be eloquent; they need to be crafty with rumors and good at guessing their interlocutor’s intentions in a conversation and imposing their view and will without doing so explicitly. Successful leaders are masters of double speech, using it to vanquish their opponents. Thus any conversation can turn into a more or less well-hidden power struggle. Every person involved in a power struggle or conflict will always be ready to take the opportunity offered by the conversation in a tactical way as discussed by de Certeau (1990). Tactics is indeed what characterizes the political subjectivities of the people of the region. It results from a calculation that the lack of a place of one’s own forces one to rely on time. Without a base where it can stockpile its assets and ensure its independence of circumstances, tactics operates in the moment with the opportunities that this moment provides. It thrives in the shadowy zones and feeds opacity that covers its manipulations and circumventions. It multiplies masks and constructs its own invisibility by disappearing as soon as it is realized. It poaches on the enemy’s field of vision and hearing through mobility that allows it to be where no one expects it.

To avoid conflicts—from a neighbors’ disagreement to opposition to the elites (the boundary between the two can be blurred)—and the problems they bring, people do their best not to take sides and stay mobile. Yet regular participation in a group is often considered as siding with the local leader who will surely emerge from this group. Indeed, whereas leaders prevail over their competitors with the strength of their perlocutionary speech, they gain their status through their organizing talents, which—in a sovereign way—demonstrate their power over people. They need to show their ability to mobilize wills and to invest their own time and money in the community’s important events (religious celebrations, mothers’ day, the annual fair, school celebrations, etc.). Therefore, they are constantly searching for positions that allow them to test their organizing talents, inserting themselves into every collective space possible. Active participation is understood as a sign of support for the person leading the initiative and for that reason situates the participant in a power play that most people try hard to avoid. To avoid taking sides and leave a way out, neutral distance is required: one must keep one’s distance and stay mobile in one’s affiliations (political, religious, between friends, etc.).

The severe repression of every attempt at collective resistance noted above adds another strong reason to shun collective participation, the more so because one never knows for sure what will become threatening in the eyes of the dominant actors. Therefore, the vast majority of the population avoids all political organizations. However, while people in Quiriguá avoid structures that they consider magnets for trouble if not dangerous, they nonetheless look for and create other, informal, spaces in which to produce social ties and build the collective. These spaces are distinguished from political organizations not by their nature but by the kinds of action they shelter. Two main types of action appear from people’s decision to take part in a given space at a given time: strategic engagement and tactical engagement.

Strategic engagement results from a deliberate political ambition that it pursues through more or less long-term calculation. It is embedded in a place that defines it by defining the actions to be carried out to reach its clearly declared political aim. The community development councils and other organizations are the ultimate strategic spaces. The actions carried out there are defined by their place—a place whose purpose is openly assumed and acknowledged by all to be the collectivity and its internal and external relationships. To be part of these spaces is to be “fixed” and identified as politically active. Therefore, on one hand, these spaces and this kind of engagement are closely controlled and often repressed by dominant actors, and, on the other hand, they make it hard to keep a neutral distance from the local community leaders and their competitions. Thus, they are doubly dangerous and widely avoided for this reason.

Tactical engagement, in contrast, is a short-term calculation that makes room for unexpected moves. It opens up margins from which to surprise one’s opponent or to which one can withdraw if necessary. It is a way of being in which no one expects one’s next step, always moving, always ready to seize the opportunity and then disappear—out of sight (or earshot) and thus out of reach. Its effect is political because its actions create ties and structure them through perlocutionary battles (fought with perlocutionary speech) but in the cunning, unpredictable way proper to tactics that neither anticipates nor declares itself. Like everything that belongs to tactics’s field, tactical engagement is mainly invisible or at least opaque. All spaces are appropriate for tactical engagement as long as it can manipulate them—create ties without being framed and fixed by a strategic engagement. Each encounter is thus transformed into an opportunity to chat in order to create ties outside any declared political aim.

This tactical subjectivity—which takes advantage of every opportunity through constant mobility that creates a protective blur—enables inhabitants to forge links despite distrust and the repression of collective actions. The opacity it creates allows them to evade the constant observation and control established by both the elites and the banana companies to exert disciplinary power. As Castoriadis and Derrida have pointed out in their own ways, ambiguity and uncertainty are what turn human beings into subjects rather than machines obeying code. They open a space for meaning and creativity. The uncertainty that people place at the heart of their political activity is thus a response to the extreme, subject-erasing control they live under. Blurriness, secrecy, ambiguity, and uncertainty open margins for maneuver, fragile insularities in which people construct their political actions, their discourses, and ultimately their identities (Feldman, 1991).

Conclusion

Studies of collective action usually focus on social movements and contentious episodes. However, a focus on their absence can be as important to understanding how they are tied to social organization, routinized politics, and opportunity structures. I have explored the question why Northeastern Guatemala has had very few episodes of contentious collective action in recent decades and a very weak capacity for any form of collective action. By situating ethnographic analysis of the subjects and their everyday experience of power relations within a historical analysis of power configurations, I have identified the concrete obstacles to collective action in the region.

Northeastern Guatemala’s trading and militia elites and U.S. banana companies have organized governmentalities adapted to their economic activity: organized crime for the former, banana production for the latter. Supporting each other, these different mixes of disciplinary and sovereign techniques have created internalized control of the entire population backed by violent repression and vertical social relations. Lacking any tradition of resistance and organization to lean on because of their relatively recent migration, people have been unable to build collective mechanisms fostering solidarity. Instead, they have developed a tactical subjectivity: always moving, so as to seize the opportunity in a social reality controlled by others, and ambiguous, so as to evade the controlling gaze under which they live. Its techniques (rumor and perlocutionary speech, neutral distance, tactical engagement, etc.) allow them to build social relations under the protecting veil of ambiguity.

However, while this ambiguity protects them, it also feeds distrust, constituting an obstacle to all kinds of collective resistance and even to simple political participation. The tactical subjectivity the population has created to resist power techniques constitutes a negative social force (Burawoy, 2012), making them more vulnerable to violence and control. In this context, the state’s decentralization and its self-proclaimed consequent democratization remains a pretty façade. Failing to take into account the long-standing effects of regional power configurations, it has been easily diverted to fit the needs of regional elites. To really establish a democratic system would require enabling the population to leave its tactical subjectivity behind and adopt a strategic one.

As history shows, this becomes possible as soon as an actor is willing and able to provide some form of collective identity and/or a peaceful way to resolve conflict by standing as a third party. Both the SITRABI and the Catholic priests of the 1970s showed how these means could empower people to disturb the balance of power. However, without the support of an effective judicial system, these attempts are easily squashed, as these same episodes show. The current “war on drugs,” presented as fighting violence, only intensifies this violent power configuration by providing impunity to armed actors (Paley, 2014). Thus ethnography of governmentality coupled with historical analysis allows us to identify concrete power and resistance mechanisms as they shape political subjectivities. These political subjectivities then explain why collective action seems hard to summon up in this region while other regions have active social movements despite high rates of repression.