Defending Territory,Challenging Neoliberalism in Postwar Guatemala: Peaceful Resistance La Puya

Abstract

Beyond the more spontaneous and reactive urban mass protests against corruption, the most sustained and explicit challenge to neoliberal policies in postwar Guatemala has been advanced by rural communities. As the case of Peaceful Resistance La Puya and its opposition to a mining project indicates, this form of agency has gone beyond indigenous territories to localized resistances in areas of mixed or primarily ladino population. A key factor in explaining the persistence of this process of defense of territory is the emphasis its members put on preserving the strong horizontal features of their locally rooted mobilizing structure. This has reinforced their antagonistic position toward the promoters of the mining project while encouraging the appropriation of the struggle among community members.

Más allá de las masivas protestas urbanas de índole más espontáneo y reactivo contra la corrupción, el desafío más sostenido y explícito a las políticas neoliberales en la Guatemala de la posguerra ha sido aquel promovido por las comunidades rurales. Como indica el caso de Resistencia Pacífica La Puya y su oposición a un proyecto minero, esta forma de agencia ha trascendido los territorios indígenas para dar lugar a resistencias localizadas en áreas de población mixta o principalmente ladina. Un factor clave para explicar la persistencia de esta defensa del territorio es el énfasis que sus miembros ponen en preservar las fuertes características horizontales de su estructura de movilización, arraigada localmente. Esto ha reforzado su posición antagónica hacia los promotores del proyecto minero al tiempo que fomenta la apropiación de la lucha por miembros de la comunidad.

Keywords

Mining Neoliberalism Resistance Mobilizing structure Guatemala

Two decades after the signing of the peace accords, a number of changes have taken place in Guatemala’s landscape of collective action, one of them being the urban mass protests against corruption involving high-ranking government officials of recent years. However, while capturing a large amount of public attention, these have remained irregular outbursts of dissent in reaction to specific legislation or corruption scandals without generating a tangible or continuous organizational structure. At the same time, over the past decade rural communities have advanced a much more sustained challenge to neoliberal policies. As successive governments and business elites have promoted the extraction of natural resources, local networks based on the everyday experiences of community members have persistently resisted these interests. This rural collective action has emerged against the backdrop of a broadening of political spaces for contestation under Guatemala’s formally democratic postwar regimes. The state continues to resort to repressive tactics, and different elite factions have largely managed to shield access to political power from subaltern groups. However, violent crackdowns by security or paramilitary forces have become less frequent, while business elites have increasingly taken advantage of their influence over judges and state prosecutors to resort to legal tactics for criminalizing and wearing out groups opposing their interests.

The majority of the licenses targeting natural resources in postwar Guatemala were initially granted in areas populated primarily by indigenous people. This meant that the first expressions of resistance to these projects emerged among indigenous communities and often captured the attention of analysts and academics (Holden and Jacobson, 2008; Yagenova and García, 2009; Urkidi, 2011; Rasch, 2012). However, the collective organizing has gone beyond indigenous territories, and in recent years some of the most sustained opposition has surfaced in areas with a mixed or predominantly ladino population, among them the case of Resistencia Pacífica La Puya (Peaceful Resistance La Puya). This article offers a detailed account of this collective organizing in the municipalities of San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, where community members have articulated a relentless resistance to a mining project. I will highlight how they have exploited the above-mentioned openings for contestation of state-driven policies in postwar Guatemala while developing particular organizational features that have enabled them to persist in their resistance over the past seven years.

I will argue that the sustained character of Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s agency—which led to the suspension of a key mining license in 2016—has been made possible primarily by key features of their mobilizing structure, “the collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action” (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1996: 3). Within its networked organizational structure, it has avoided the emergence of vertical leadership, insisting on horizontality and collective decision making to frame the interactions among its members. In doing so, it has implicitly inverted prevailing patterns of political culture and ways of structuring political interactions by creating the “delicate balance” in its organizational model that Tarrow (1998: 137) identified as a central challenge for collective organizing. It has been effective in combining a robust formal organization for structuring antagonistic relations with nonhierarchical connections that leave space for the contextually rooted local units. These horizontal characteristics represent a shift from previous generations of revolutionary or democratic agency in Guatemala. Instead of supplanting or isolating certain ethnic or religious identities among the population, Peaceful Resistance La Puya has shown that local cultural and demographic complexity can nurture its political interactions and encourage collective appropriation of the organizational process.

I will start by putting Peaceful Resistance La Puya in the context of preceding generations of agency and highlighting features of neoliberal development in Guatemala. I will go on to analyze its antagonistic collective framing and then explore how this is reinforced by horizontal political practices.

Guatemala’s Multiple Generations of Collective Action

During extended periods of Guatemala’s armed conflict (1960–1996), the ferocity of the counterinsurgent strategies against any show of dissent meant that popular organizing without links to the guerrillas was practically nonexistent. Although in some areas of the highlands subaltern organizing was never completely absorbed by the revolutionary project,¹ in many cases the geographical overlap and shared grievances led to an alliance between the insurgent groups and union members, activists of the Catholic Church, and indigenous communities (Gónzalez, 2011). Additionally, the guerrilla factions, especially the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor—EGP), stimulated patterns of agency that translated into the expansion of organizations such as the Comité Unidad Campesina (Peasant Unity Committee—CUC) (Le Bot, 1995; Bastos and Camus, 2003).

However, the relationship between the communities and the guerrilla factions in the indigenous highlands was also marked by tensions. Communities continued to seek a space for communal organization that the hierarchical and militaristic insurgent project driven by the aim of taking state power could not offer (Le Bot, 1995). As Macleod (2013) has argued, the idea of integrating the indigenous population into the revolutionary project represented an acknowledgment of its position as an excluded societal section. However, the command of the revolutionary factions was also intent on keeping control of the potentially diverging opinions on the relationship between the indigenous population and the guerrilla forces. Even as the country entered a transition toward a democratic constitution in 1984, collective action beyond the influence of the insurgent factions was initially absent. The push for democratization was a top-down process that coincided with a reformulation of military counterinsurgent strategies and the interests of economic elites, who were keen to obtain access to international markets and attract foreign investment. It did, nonetheless, lead to a gradual opening of spaces and new kinds of social activism in the second half of the 1980s as a number of groups with a focus on denouncing human rights violations emerged (Brett, 2006).

The period leading up to the peace negotiations witnessed a further expansion of this organizational spectrum. The Asamblea de Sociedad Civil (Civil Society Assembly), a space brokered by the international community to act as a consultative body in the peace negotiations, absorbed a large part of the collective organizing. However, this international influence went beyond facilitating these spaces for participation, given that almost all organizations taking part in the Assembly were funded by international donors. In many cases the support was subject to externally formulated criteria, leading the organizations to embrace deradicalized discourses validated by the international institutions (Howell and Pearce, 2001) while their impact on the peace negotiations remained marginal (Dary, 2013).

Especially in the sections referring to socioeconomic and agrarian aspects, the peace accords reflected the extent to which the elites had taken control of the institutional spaces of the state. The global influence of neoliberal policies reinforced their position and left no room to question market-based approaches, while redistributive measures were promptly shelved (Brett, 2006). The impact of these patterns was especially evident among the increasingly fractured peasant movement, whose influence at a national level continued to wane. As Granovsky-Larsen (2014) has argued, the concessions granted to the movement by the neoliberal state and the international financial institutions clearly contributed to these divisions.

In addition to the rural organizations’ traditional demands around land, a discursive emphasis on indigenous identity surfaced among sections of the Mayan population, in line with tendencies in other Latin American countries. A range of loosely connected organizations emerged in the course of the 1990s and embraced this trend through the search for a broader Mayan identity and common elements in language, rights, and spirituality among the 21 different Mayan linguistic groups (Warren, 1998; Bastos, 2010). This “culturalist” line of thought also sought to strengthen links with formal institutional spaces as indigenous leaders accepted offers to take up state positions despite the obvious neoliberal orientation of the postwar governments (Bastos and Camus, 2003). The articulations around this Mayan discourse became increasingly divorced from grassroots organizing in rural communities (Howell and Pearce, 2001). Thus, distancing themselves from what they perceived as detached “Mayan elites” (Illmer, 2016: 144), Guatemala’s rural communities launched their own strategies for responding to the reconfiguration of their surroundings by natural-resource extraction projects.

Neoliberal Reconfiguration of Space in Postwar Guatemala

The gradual diversification of Guatemala’s agriculturally dominated economy and its growing focus on the extraction and commodification of natural resources mirror broader regional and global shifts. Investments in natural-resource extraction had been on the rise since the 1970s in various countries of the Global South, among them Guatemala. The Washington Consensus of the 1990s provided a renewed impetus for these economic interests in Latin America by outlining a series of structural reforms and trade agreements for countries to engage with (Canel, Idemudia, and North, 2010). Svampa (2013: 5) has argued that in the following decades a “commodity consensus” became consolidated in the region to complement the previous economic reorganization driven by the international financial institutions. Regardless of their ideological orientation, governments in the region accepted their role as providers of raw materials, among them hydrocarbons, metals, minerals, and food, within a globally differentiated economy.

In the case of Guatemala, the armed conflict slightly postponed a neoliberal reconfiguration of policies and institutions. The same delay applied for investments in large-scale natural-resource projects. Throughout the counterinsurgent campaigns, the military had been exploring potential sites for natural-resource extraction and the construction of hydroelectric projects. A master plan outlining dozens of potential hydroelectric power plants in different parts of the country published under the presidency of General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (1974–1978) reflects these intentions (Instituto Nacional de Electrificación, 1976). However, the military regime struggled to attract investments, and of the large-scale projects outlined in this plan only the Chixoy Dam was built during the armed conflict. Among other reasons this was because of allegations of rampant corruption among army officers in the course of the construction of the dam (Bracking, 2007: 244) and the growing international outcry as the extent of the human rights violations and massacres against local communities became known.

Nevertheless, the peace process of the 1990s opened the door to investments in natural-resource extraction and commodification, while the selective implementation of the accords tipped the balance toward the promotion of capital accumulation for national and transnational elites in the postconflict state (Granovsky-Larsen, 2014). Business elites promoted the development of the natural-resource sector as part of a series of measures in line with neoliberal ideology such as the privatization of state assets, the liberalization of foreign trade and finance, and campaigns to attract foreign investment. Among the postwar governments, Álvaro Arzú’s presidency (1996–2000) proved key by favorably adjusting legislation and applying the most concerted pressure toward natural-resource extraction, although the ensuing administrations followed suit (Solano, 2009). New concessions for metal exploration increased from 3 under the Arzú administration to 26 under Alfonso Portillo’s presidency (2000–2004) before registering a further increase to 64 under the Óscar Berger (2004–2008) government (Dougherty, 2011). According to data from the Ministry for Energy and Mining, by 2018 it had granted 36 mining licenses for the extraction of minerals or metals to national and transnational companies (Ministerio de Energía y Minas, 2018).

Recent administrations have made timid and unsuccessful efforts to reform mining laws and redistribute income from the mining operations. In an attempt to control growing social conflict around mining projects and promote debate around legislation, the Álvaro Colom government (2008–2012) declared a moratorium on new mining licenses. In 2012 the Otto Pérez Molina government proposed more distribution of profits among the communities and aimed to declare a percentage of Guatemalan ownership compulsory for extractive projects. However, it rapidly withdrew the proposal, citing its potential negative impact on mining investments (Kosich, 2012).

Meanwhile, resistance to the extraction and commodification of natural resources gained momentum at the local, municipal scale. Opposition to projects of this nature is not new in Guatemala’s recent history.² However, it was not until 2004 that rural communities started to frame their agency more explicitly around the idea of the “defense of territory.” Two aspects linked to shifts in political and institutional opportunities contribute to explaining the emergence of this “cycle of contention” (Tarrow, 1998: 141) and its forms of organizing.

First, during the 1990s, human rights organizations and indigenous movements around the world had achieved the incorporation of explicit references to indigenous rights into international legal frameworks. In the case of Guatemala, the global receptivity to the need to protect indigenous culture and identity-based significations influenced the peace negotiations and was key in pressuring its national congress to ratify International Labor Organization Convention 169³ in 1996. This context also encouraged the emergence of numerous national indigenous organizations and almost a decade later, the fact that legal guarantees were formally enshrined in law stimulated a tactical appropriation by grassroots movements in the highlands. Following a first wave of protests against the Marlin Mine in San Marcos in 2004, multiple instances of collective action surfaced and engaged in similar displays of dissent. The emphasis on sociopolitical and cultural attachment to particular spaces and rights-based demands were key features of these processes of collective action as rural communities sought to contest incursions into their local surroundings promoted by the dominant political and economic actors.

Secondly, despite persisting limitations, a general amplification of opportunities for contention in the context of postwar Guatemala has to be acknowledged. Although threats against community activists and the use of security forces and paramilitary groups mirror wartime patterns regarding the exercise of power and the push to implement economic projects, the state’s propensity for the use of outright force has declined since the peace accords. As communities and organizations have taken advantage of these openings to articulate their opposition, state officials and business elites have increasingly resorted to other tactics, among them the criminalization of community leaders. The legal system has acquired a repressive role as business elites denounce activists as violent and engaging in criminal activities to move disputes onto the terrain of the courts. In the best-case scenario, the accused are acquitted after facing the ordeal of months of trial or custody. In the worst-case scenario, judges aligned with elite interests have sentenced community leaders to prison, often on the basis of fabricated evidence.

Nonetheless, the threat to the water supply and the land and the failure to inform or consult Guatemala’s communities on the projects that characterize the recent neoliberal offensive have left local community members with little choice. Faced with extractive projects, they have seized much of the organizational initiative and established their local spaces as the prime focus of their antagonistic collective action. Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s emergence in the municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo can be seen as part of this recent generation of agency.

Locating the Resistance

The periurban municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo and the communities belonging to those administrative units are located in an area between 15 and 30 kilometers from the capital, Guatemala City. Their proximity to the capital is reflected in the constant flow of residents to the capital for work either on a daily or a weekly basis. In recent history the area was spared the large-scale violence linked to the armed conflict partly because of this proximity, which meant that it was easily controlled by the military and a well-organized network of civil defense patrols.

As in many other parts of the country, local figureheads have dominated the municipal councils by remaining in power for lengthy periods, and local and regional rent-seeking networks have consolidated around municipal governments. In addition to the corrupting features of the municipal entities, social interactions in the area are marked by the composition of the local population. The majority of the population of the two municipalities is self-identified as ladino, although around 27 percent of the population of San Pedro Ayampuc, especially in and around the community of Nacahuil, identify themselves as Kaqchikel Maya (SEGEPLAN, 2011). In the case of Nacahuil, a tightly knit community network, a communal land title, and internal organizational patterns have contributed to reproducing a strong sense of ethnic belonging despite the constant migratory flow to the capital (Sales Morales and Pixtún Monroy, 2009). An insistence on nominating its own authorities has enabled the community to determine intracommunal relationships. In line with the traditions of many indigenous communities in the country, the role of community authorities is linked to the idea of service to the community and based on the obligation to consult community members and turn to the community assembly for decision making. These organizational features add social and political complexity to the context and have nurtured the internal procedural aspects of Peaceful Resistance La Puya.

The influence of religious organizations has added a spiritual dimension to the resistance. This can be traced in Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s understanding of tactics such as direct action, which is embedded in a discursive affirmation of life, dignity, and justice. Catholic organizations such as Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ), which has a long-standing relationship with communities in the area, have also integrated environmental concerns into their work. These community-based networks have compensated for the absence of prior experiences of collective action in the area and provided important “informal building blocks” (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1996: 3) from which in a relatively short period the mobilizing structure of Peaceful Resistance La Puya emerged.

The projection of mining interests into the area and the coercive strategies that have accompanied attempts to implement the project have clearly been the prime mobilizing impetus. Rent-seeking agents at different levels have converged around particular economic projects. Emerging elites linked to the national subsidiary company and traditional elites close to the Chamber of Industry have joined forces to ensure the completion of the mining project (CMI, 2015). Additionally, international capital has at different stages played a role in operations on the ground, with the U.S. company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates ultimately acquiring 100 percent of the ownership in 2012. Currently Progreso VII Derivada is the only metal mining project in the two municipalities, but five additional metal mining licenses have been granted for exploration in the area (Ministerio de Energía y Minas, 2015). This seems to confirm the view that Progreso VII Derivada is only an initial access point from which further mining projects are to be implemented.

Enacting Resistance: The Protest Camp

It was only when official notification about the mining project reached the communities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo in 2010 that they realized that the company had been secretly operating in the area for over a decade. The first exploratory license in the region had been granted in 1999, and local residents recalled that, over the years, strangers visiting the area had left with samples of earth or rocks in their pickups without raising suspicion at the time. Additionally, individuals who turned out to be linked to the mining company had started to acquire stretches of seemingly worthless land without revealing their real motives (Hernández and Ochoa, 2012). As reports on the project reached the communities, they sparked a first wave of organizing as residents held meetings to discuss its potential implications. Local leaders shared information with the communities and organized makeshift film screenings to highlight the negative impacts of mining experienced in other regions. In the course of 2011, protest marches followed, and in preparation for the elections a public debate was held with the mayoral candidates in the two municipalities as local residents sought to ensure that either candidate would oppose the mining project if he reached office (Mendizábal Juárez, 2013).

However, the national and local authorities ignored these initial expressions of dissent and granted a license for extraction in an area of 0.15 hectares to a joint venture of the Canadian company Radius Explorations and the South African company Gold Field in November 2011. In response, local residents stepped up their efforts, partly encouraged by a spontaneous act of rebellion when a local community member spotted machinery and workers near the prospective mining area along the road between San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc. She blocked their path by stopping her car in front of the gate leading to the mining compound before calling other community members for support (Hernández and Ochoa, 2012). Local residents responded and made a collective decision to establish a permanent protest camp at the entrance to the mining site. From this moment on the camp sought to impede the transport of materials and machines into the mining compound by blocking the entrance, a task that community members succeeded in for over two years. In doing so, they consolidated a space that became the main physical reference point for the emerging expression of collective action, Peaceful Resistance La Puya. Shifts were established to guard the entrance as alternating groups took turns of 24 hours a day and seven days a week to allow local residents to combine the task of controlling the entrance to the mine with the communities' everyday life.

Direct action has been a key tactic for obstructing access to the mining compound. It was first used in May 2012 as a convoy of heavy machinery approached the mine accompanied by hundreds of antiriot police. Local community members reacted swiftly, forming human chains to block the narrow road leading to the mining compound and stopping the machinery from passing. The mining company and the police, surprised to find the opposition turning out in such numbers and unsure of how to deal with the situation, were forced to withdraw a few hours later (Yagenova, 2014).

Following this first episode of confrontation, the national subsidiary company Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala (Mining Explorations of Guatemala—EXMINGUA) stepped up its efforts to ensure the implementation of the project by hiring a local company, Servicios Mineros de Centro América (Mining Services of Central America), run by a number of former military officers. A wave of rumors and campaigns of public defamation began to circulate in the local area in an attempt to delegitimize members of the opposition (Véliz Estrada, 2014; Yagenova, 2014). The effort to implement the project turned violent as Yolanda Oquelí, a member of the resistance, narrowly survived an assassination attempt on June 13, 2012. She had left the protest camp to fetch petrol for the small electric plant that supplied light to the community members on shift. Minutes later she was ambushed and shot three times. She ultimately survived the assassination attempt with a bullet remaining lodged in her body (De León, 2013).

After months of apparent calm, tensions in La Puya flared up again in November 2012 as the promoters of the mining company sought to organize a group of individuals consisting of alleged company employees to break through the resistance’s roadblock. This led to a standoff as the former military official Pablo Silas led the group of alleged workers—with locally known gang members among them (Bastos, 2012; GHRC, 2014)—toward the Peaceful Resistance La Puya encampment hurling insults in an attempt to provoke a violent confrontation. Journalists present at the scene were warned that they would “have their hands cut off to stop them from taking pictures” (UDEFEGUA, 2013: 57). The presence of representatives of the human rights ombudsman, national and international human rights organizations, and journalists from the Centro de Medios Independientes (Independent Media Center—CMI) was significant in preventing a violent escalation. With their graphic reporting, the journalists were also able to promote an alternative discourse to that of the mainstream media, and images of the arrogant and aggressive behavior of the mining company’s employees were disseminated at the national and international levels. By contrasting the hostile strategies with the peaceful response of the communities, they added a dimension that Graeber (2009: 452) has identified as key to successful direct action against neoliberal institutions; beyond the actions of the immediate protagonists of resistance, other agents are required to expose and transmit injustices to spark moral indignation among a larger public.

However, the Chamber of Commerce was increasing its pressure on the government, urging it to set a precedent by accusing Peaceful Resistance La Puya of breaking the law and alienating potential international investors (Vásquez, 2012). Only a few days after the confrontation with alleged employees of the mining company, another eviction loomed as hundreds of antiriot police returned to La Puya. Desperate last-minute negotiations allowed community members to gain enough time for staff from national and international human rights institutions to arrive, and the eviction was aborted. Instead, a series of dialogue meetings between state representatives and Peaceful Resistance La Puya was agreed upon.

Strategies aimed at criminalizing members of the resistance complemented the coercive attempts at eviction of the protesters (Bastos and Sieder, 2014; UDEFEGUA, 2015). Charges of having illegally detained and threatened workers of the mining company were initially filed against nine members in May 2012. The court proceedings revealed collusion between private interests and state institutions—primarily the state prosecution—in seeking to target, disrupt, and weaken Peaceful Resistance La Puya (CALAS, 2016). After months of hearings, three members were eventually sentenced to three years in prison, though their sentences were waived after they had paid a fee of US$4,212.

The dialogue meetings scheduled after the standoff in November 2012 were initially seen by state officials as a means to convince local community members of the benefits of the mining project. However, on May 23, 2014, after denying the illegalities committed during the implementation of the project, they instead ordered the violent eviction of the protest camp. This seemed to advance the interests of the mining project in the short run, but in the long run it prepared the ground for the strengthening of ties among local community members, and over the following months they reestablished the protest camp.

The complementary character of legal action is highlighted by the legal support provided to Peaceful Resistance La Puya by environmental and human rights organizations to challenge the criminalizing strategies deployed by the state and contest the legality of the mining project. In 2016 this litigation resulted in a ruling by the Constitutional Court ordering the suspension of the mining license because of failure to consult the local population prior to the implementation of the project. While this decision reflected the significance of Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s legal support, it was nonetheless the persistence of activists in the protest camp in denouncing the illegality of the mining project that constituted the heart of this resistance.

Collective Framing amidst Demographic Complexity

The environmental impact of the mining project is one of the central issues around which the various rural communities and urban areas of the municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo have framed their resistance. Community members are well aware of the potential consequences of the mining project for water supplies in an area located within the so-called dry corridor (group interview, members of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, San Pedro Ayampuc, September 24, 2012). These fears have been nurtured by exchanges with other communities in Guatemala where mining projects are already operating. Additionally, analysis by environmental engineers has complemented these firsthand experiences and debates in the protest camp with technical arguments and data (Robinson and Laudeman, 2013). Receptivity to “relational” ideas that integrate the environment into collective sense making has developed. In the field of social activism in Guatemala, the persistence of holistic worldviews has been associated primarily with the linguistic frameworks and processes of signification of indigenous communities. Especially in the indigenous highlands, the defense of territory has led to a revitalization of meanings that reflect these relational understandings, with communities challenging the romanticized notions of indigenous identities promoted by the elites, which present them as uncritical with regard to neoliberal policies. However, as the case of La Puya shows, the local predominantly ladino communities have also embraced this struggle to contest the hegemonic meanings of development, territory, and natural resources on the basis of their experiences of rural everyday life. In doing so, they too have highlighted the existence of a “cultural distribution conflict” (Escobar, 2008: 14) and portrayed this standoff not only as a conflict over the distribution of potential revenues or resources but as a fundamental disagreement over the use of their territory and natural resources and the meanings attached to them.

This ecologically nurtured signification is articulated in a discursive affirmation of life and linked with another key feature of the resistance, its strategic use of nonviolence as a symbolic challenge of the legitimacy of the state’s use of coercion. “We have always tried to understand the nonviolent struggle as the best way to reach objectives. There will always be provocations that aim to cause problems. But if the struggle is understood as being for life, we have to defend life and not take away life as they do, hence the centrality of the peaceful struggle” (members of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, group interview, San Pedro Ayampuc, September 24, 2012). Community members have abstained from physical force in their resistance practices despite the exacerbation of feelings of injustice stimulated by the threat posed by the mine and the aggressive tactics employed to advance the project.

Beyond ethical and symbolic motivations not to engage in violent tactics, the emphasis on abstaining from the use of physical force and maintaining the struggle within the margins of legality relates to changes in the nature of state-society relationships in postwar Guatemala. Following the transition to a formal democracy, successive political regimes and elites have been more selective in their use of outright force against opposition to their policies. However, in multiple conflicts related to natural resources they have denounced opposition movements as consisting of violent or criminal gangs and alleged “legal transgressions” to pave the way for coercive interventions by state security forces or the criminalization of community leaders. This tendency has clearly encouraged Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s peaceful and legal framing of struggle and its attempts to minimize opportunities for the state to find an excuse to intervene by force or apply its criminalizing tactics.

As both men and women within the movement emphasize, the women of Peaceful Resistance La Puya have been central to encouraging the idea of nonviolence as part of their struggle and ensuring its implementation (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, San Pedro Ayampuc, September 29, 2014). The key role of women can be seen in the standoffs and in situations with the risk of eviction, when women have consistently made up the first row of protesters blocking the entrance to the mine. This strategy was adopted in part because women were seen to be less likely to react to the provocations of the police or individuals linked to the mining company (Llopis, 2014). Additionally, given the fact that many men leave for work during the day, women have taken on the main burden of the day shifts in the camp and guaranteed a steady supply of members to cover shifts. They are widely acknowledged as representing the “heart of Peaceful Resistance La Puya” and as guaranteeing “a long-term vision of the struggle” (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, Guatemala City, September 20, 2012). The importance of women in the resistance has also stimulated their empowerment and encouraged female members to embrace the organizational process (Yagenova, 2014). Without claiming to have completely eliminated gender hierarchies or dissolved patriarchal power dynamics, female leaders have emphasized the complementary character of the different members of the resistance, thereby strengthening the above-mentioned notion of horizontality and the inclusive nature of the organizational flows.

The horizontal character of Peaceful Resistance La Puya is also reflected in attempts to draw on the local demographic complexity instead of basing the resistance on one form of knowledge or tradition of organizational practices. This implicitly addresses the constraints that the failure to bridge ethnic divides has often represented for previous generations of resistance in Guatemala. The collective perception of injustice and the ensuing process of resistance at La Puya have drawn different sectors of the population together in solidarity, challenging reified neoliberal categories of identity in the process. Prejudices have given way to an appreciation of the various contributions that are seen as nurturing the movement while allowing community members to identify similarities in their understandings (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, San Pedro Ayampuc, September 29, 2014):

The problem of mining has created a social cohesion due to the need to demand and exercise rights, and it is a question that transcends issues of racism or patriarchy because one sees how the things men do can complement those that women do and the things women do complement those that men do. In this political, public, and social space there is a clarity of the complementarity of engagement toward the same objective, without its being important if they can read and write, whether they are Mayans or not.

In articulating its opposition to the mining project, Peaceful Resistance La Puya has drawn on this local demographic complexity, producing a hybrid collective framing that is incompatible with the proposed neoliberal reconfiguration of its local surroundings. Beyond a discursive dimension, this diversity has also nurtured the design of internal processes of consultation and decision making. In turn, this has enabled Peaceful Resistance La Puya to consolidate a solid mobilizing structure for opposing external threats while internally prioritizing the horizontal and inclusive nature of its resistance practices.

Translating Resistance into Political Practice

The outlined approach of integrating relational and horizontal elements into the processes of collective framing can also be traced in the political practices of the Peaceful Resistance La Puya. In the course of the resistance an assembly made up of all the community members participating in the resistance has been consolidated as the central space of deliberation and decision making. Its creation has been central to encouraging the appropriation of the struggle by community members while also reflecting the influence of organizational traditions of indigenous communities in the area (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, Guatemala City, November 13, 2013). By introducing this participative space of deliberation and decision making, Peaceful Resistance La Puya has followed the example of other local nodes of resistance in the country in their attempts to leave behind the constraints of hierarchically led and leadership-focused organizational processes. This horizontality clearly contrasts with the patterns of political interaction predominant in formal institutional spaces and seeks to equip the decisions agreed upon by members with a high level of local legitimacy. It represents a shift of emphasis from expert knowledge and conventional modes of representation toward decision making embedded in “ordinary” members of the resistance, an implicit step toward recognizing their potential and knowledge irrespective of ethnic background or gender. It also means placing trust in the collective and immanent dimensions of the process and the ability of the assembly to reach legitimate decisions (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, Guatemala City, November 13, 2013):

If the resistance decides to hand over to the mine, well, it is their decision. This process of collective participation, the collective consensus I believe is one of the biggest challenges that we have not just in the case of La Puya but in many processes that are ostensibly based on the making of consensual decisions but in reality are not. . . . It has a lot to do with the managing of power. If we do not start this change of consciousness and procedures in things, they may seem good ideas but the way in which one proceeds takes away their legitimacy.

Many communities in the two municipalities have little record of collective and horizontal decision making in recent decades. However, drawing on the experiences of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, local community members have been engaging in efforts to restore power to these communities. Especially in areas where support for the opposition to the mining project has been strong, they have been successful in modifying organizational patterns. A number of communities have taken up the modality of nominating their own representatives in a community assembly, thereby countering the prevailing tradition in municipal politics according to which the mayor nominates favorable community authorities (member of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, interview, Guatemala City, November 13, 2013). In San Pedro Ayampuc, on the basis of communal decisions, a number of community representatives have managed to act as a strategic counterbalance within the formal municipal system and block decisions that could favor mining activities in the area despite the continuous attempts by the municipal authorities to sideline them. The tactic of rethinking political interactions in terms of local experiences and knowledge has been essential to reinforcing Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s organizational framework. This collective production of political practices has proved critical to the construction of solidarity, the managing of emotions and relationships among community members, and the consolidation of common ground. However, the internal reconfiguration of interactions has also deepened the antagonism between this collective action and the actions of the state and the private actors promoting the mining project. The resulting incompatibility became especially evident in the course of the dialogue with state representatives set up in the aftermath of the attempted eviction of the protest camp by police forces in November 2012.

The decision to engage in this dialogue constituted a strategic choice on behalf of Peaceful Resistance La Puya to relieve some of the pressure and postpone the immediate danger of eviction. However, it also represented a platform for the communities to publicly contest the views of the institutional actors while advancing their own ways of framing political interactions. When high-level talks with former President Pérez Molina and members of the cabinet were set up, the communities made their participation conditional on a set of demands in line with their emphasis on the collective and horizontal features of their struggle.

First, they insisted on adequate representation of the communities during the meetings, rejecting the government’s position of inviting only two Peaceful Resistance La Puya representatives to face the president and the various ministers and their advisers. In doing so they sought to counter a tactic commonly used by the state authorities—identifying and isolating leaders of organizations or communities and thus making them vulnerable to co-optation. Secondly, they insisted on the presence of journalists from the CMI and honorary witnesses to prevent the distortion of information on any agreement. Journalists recorded the entire meeting and ensured that the information was transmitted as transparently as possible to the communities, with the honorary witnesses acting as guarantors of this process. Thirdly, they refused to meet or dialogue with the mining company’s representatives. On various occasions this forced the state officials into the awkward situation of having to ask the company representatives to leave the room during the meetings. A fourth condition related to decision making during the dialogue. Despite being pressured by the government to reach immediate agreements during the talks, the “delegates” of Peaceful Resistance La Puya insisted on consultation with the communities before any agreement could be reached. While the representational status of these delegates introduced a certain degree of verticality into the organizational process, Peaceful Resistance La Puya sought to bridge this representational gap by instituting a circular flow of information. The assembly remained the prime space for discussion and decision making, with the delegates responsible only for transmitting information from formal state spaces to the assembly and vice versa.

The coercive response and eviction of the protest camp that followed the cancellation of a dialogue meeting in May 2014 highlighted the frustration of state officials at being unable to instrumentalize the dialogue in their favor. While the eviction initially seemed to open the way for the mining project, the odds soon shifted against it. Fueled by a strong sense of injustice, the community members decided to resume their struggle after a short period of internal deliberations. Within days of the eviction the community members set up a new protest camp, just a few yards from the previous one. In the course of the following months they expanded it and retook their previous position at the entrance to the mine. They have persisted in the camp even though the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have since ratified the suspension of the mining license (Ramos, 2017). Peaceful Resistance La Puya has remained wary with regard to the implementation of the ruling and the definite closure of the mining project, knowing that legal battles will ensue. It has maintained the protest camp to highlight its determination to monitor the suspension. Additionally, the camp represents a signal of dissent not just with regard to the Progreso VII Derivada project but also with regard to the other licenses granted in the region for which La Puya was meant to constitute a strategic access point.

Conclusion

Offering a detailed analysis of a case of collective action in Guatemala’s periurban municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo, this article has explored the emergence of Peaceful Resistance La Puya as one of a number of horizontalist movements in defense of territory to oppose policies promoting the extraction and commodification of natural resources. I have argued that these movements have seized upon certain openings for political contestation in postwar Guatemala and that, despite their local character, they represent the most explicit resistance to neoliberal policies. By looking at the case of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, the article has highlighted some of the characteristics that explain the persistence and success of horizontalist movements at the local, municipal level in an area marked by demographic and cultural complexity. Beyond the effects of its direct action tactics, the capacity to interpret and develop its struggle in a way that resonates with local community members and draws on their diversity has helped the resistance survive.

Peaceful Resistance La Puya’s inclusive and relational forms of conceptualizing its collective action have been reproduced in concrete political practices, thereby encouraging local communities to embrace the struggle against the mine. By placing the assembly and participation of all members at the core of its deliberative and decision-making processes, it has sought to institutionalize horizontality in its mobilizing structure. These participative features stand in stark contrast with the prevailing patterns of formal politics and have been associated primarily with the collective organizing of indigenous communities. However, the predominantly ladino community members of Peaceful Resistance La Puya have also identified this organizational tactic as vital to the establishment of solidarity and mutual trust and the broader significance of their collective process. Crucially, the constant search for this internal balance has stimulated the necessary appropriation among local community members, allowing them to persist in their resistance and endure the hardship this imposed on them over the past seven years.

Footnotes

Notes

Patrick Illmer is a lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Studies of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. This article was developed in the course of a postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Center for Latin American Studies funded by DGAPA-UNAM. The author thanks the issue editors and reviewers for their very helpful comments.

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