Development and Indigenous Ecopolitics in Post-Peace Guatemala

Buen Vivir, Development, And Decolonization

Anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2020) understands Indigenous territorial defenses as manifestations of ontological politics, clashes between different ways of being—the dominant, Western one that sees humans as separate from and superior to nature, and Indigenous ways that see humans and nature as fundamentally interrelated, and nature as living, sentient, and sacred. In the latter, humans and nature are bound in relations of reciprocity and interdependency. Nature is a non-human relative; humans care for nature, nature cares for humans. These are not different beliefs about a pre-existing reality, but fundamentally different realities. Marisol de la Cadena (2008) argues that the colonization of Indigenous territories through extractive development has incited grassroots political responses that bring distinct ontologies into national politics. Buen vivir encapsulates this rupture. It is a discourse of transition, part of a chorus emerging from movements originating in the global south, along with autonomy, degrowth, food sovereignty, and others, that take as their point of departure the ecological and spiritual crises of modern civilization.

Escobar (2020: 77) denounces the “imperatives of growth and development” as the “ontological occupation of the earth” and as incompatible with the pluriversal politics of buen vivir. This echoes anti-extractivism theories from Latin America, which see buen vivir as an “alternative to development,” rather than an alternative form of development (Gudynas, 2011; Gudynas and Acosta, 2011). Gudynas explains that “it is not sufficient to try ‘development alternatives,’ because those maintain the same rationality of understanding progress, the use of Nature, and relations between humans” (2011: 3). ¹ The recent political proposal from Waqib’ Kej’(2021: 139-140), a convergence of Mayan organizations and Indigenous governments in Guatemala, shares this perspective, explaining buen vivir as:

[A] model contrary to capitalism, to extractivism, to progress, to mercantilist and consumerist modernity, and “development.” It refers to living without destroying, promotes living better with less, generating life instead of provoking death, and knowing how to live together in harmony and reciprocity, because everything that exists is interconnected, what I feed, feeds me, what I destroy, destroys me.

They propose restoring communal property, recognizing the rights of nature, revindicating ancestral knowledge and caretaking practices for mountains, rivers, and forests, and traditional medicinal and agricultural practices, among other kinds of environmentally-oriented cultural recuperation (Waqib’ Kej’, 2021: 163-5). For Escobar, the question of whether modernist politics can be compatible with Indigenous ontological politics remains open, with an overarching concern that it reproduces binaries antithetical to their principles. This essay poses the reverse question: To what extent do Indigenous ontological politics displace decolonial projects and demands conceptualized and materialized through the discourse of development?

Let us begin with food sovereignty, La Vía Campesina’s conception of a radically democratized and decommodified food system as an alternative to the global corporate food regime (LVC, 2007; McMichael, 2014). Escobar (2020: 78) embraces food sovereignty as part of the broader movement against the Western civilizing model. So does Waqib’ Kej’ (2021: 163), who call for “[A] permanent policy of food sovereignty, healthy, accessible and of good quality, based in agroecological production, revitalizing ancestral knowledges, incentivizing family and community cultivation to recover [traditional] technologies of planting, harvests, and conservation.”

However, it is not so easy to disentangle food sovereignty from the discourses and practices of development, and some would caution against trying. Food sovereignty arose as a developmentalist response to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) imposition of market rationality through agribusiness-dominated free trade regimes in the 1990s and the subsequent crisis in rural agriculture. Consider the definition from the 2002 statement by the Peoples’ Food Sovereignty Network: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets.” La Vía Campesina landed upon the term food sovereignty precisely to draw on “collective rights already recognized by the United Nations (UN), such as the right to self-determination, the right to development, and the right to permanent sovereignty over natural resources” (Claeys, 2013: 4; cited in McMichael, 2014: 937).

Furthermore, many influential critical agrarian scholars embrace food sovereignty as a component of liberatory national development. Sam Moyo (2015: 57) places “national integrated development” and democracy at the center of the postcolonial agrarian question. He describes how International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs of the 1990s dismantled state support for rural agriculture and expanded free trade, bequeathing the “underdevelopment of Africa’s agrarian production systems, through the subordination and super-exploitation of agrarian labor and consumers by monopoly capital,” which resulted in a “second low-intensity wave of land concentration, and expansion of food imports and food-aid dependency” (2015: 57). Rather than an intrinsic pathology of traditional Indigenous and peasant agriculture, Moyo explains that “[t]he peasantry’s alleged technological ‘backwardness’ is driven by neoliberal policies, which disproportionately transfer the cost of inputs relative to commodity prices [. . .] and reduce their realized incomes through the absence of state subsidies and protection” (2015: 57). The unmitigated “failure of the African agricultural reforms to prioritize the development needs of its vast peasantries” then served as a justification for more land and resource grabs (Moyo, 2015: 57).

Scholars of peasant participation in anticolonial liberation movements understand underdevelopment or “backwardness” as a condition imposed by imperial capitalism: “as a dynamic process intrinsic to imperialism and industrialization as an aspect of a larger strategic objective: national liberation” (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros, 2013: 96). Moyo (2015: 71) insists that underdevelopment “can only be reversed by national and regional policies that promote food sovereignty,” specifically robust state investment in rural agriculture and land. These policies entail “knocking down obstacles such as land monopolies, which condensed economic, political and ideological power, or mobilizing the peasantry [. . .] to unlock the energies of liberation” (Moyo, 2015: 57). The embrace of radical anti-colonial development echoes a long tradition of neo-Marxist political economy (Amin, 1972; Rodney, 2018). When Guatemalan peasant organizations born in national liberation struggles helped to elaborate the food sovereignty concept in the 1990s, they too equated food sovereignty with national development policies focused on improving conditions for small farmers through land access, input subsidies, state support for domestic food production and local economies, promotion of ecologically sustainable agriculture, and fair access to regional and international markets.

Throughout the 2000s, the concept of food sovereignty evolved through a “dialogue of knowledges” led by Indigenous members of La Vía Campesina, resulting in the cross pollination of traditional peasant demands for land and development with Indigenous knowledge and cosmologies (Martínez and Rosset, 2014). The word development does not appear in the influential statement of food sovereignty in the Declaration of Nyéléni (LVC, 2007). Militant agrarian scholars Omar Giraldo and Peter Rosset see refusal of the “colonial machinery of development” that reproduces individualism, dependency, and market rationality as a hallmark of emancipatory agroecology, which, by contrast, “creates attachment to place and deep affection for the land, and offers opportunities to remain in the territory with dignity, and pragmatic orientation for buen vivir” (2023: 841). Ideally, in this view, emancipatory agroecology spreads through campesino-to-campesino exchange in the construction of autonomous communities, free from dependency on the state, political parties, international supply chains, and inputs (Rosset and Barbosa, 2021).

Has the ascendance of Indigenous ecopolitical imaginaries forged in resistance to extractive development decentered development-oriented demands? Maristella Svampa (2017: 69) highlights an “innovative intersection between the indigenous communitarian and environmental discourses” as a defining feature of the “ecoterritorial turn” in Latin American politics:

The commons, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and buen vivir are among the topics emerging from this productive intersection between different frameworks, to which can be added the ecofeminist perspective. In this sense, it is possible to talk about the construction of common frames of collective action, which work not only as alternative diagrams of cooperation but also as producers of a collective subjectivity.

Development certainly qualifies as a “common frame of collective action” and a “producer of collective subjectivity” in peasant and Indigenous communities, but Svampa does not find it in ecoterritorial spaces. Alonso-Fradejas (2015) describes the integration of food sovereignty, territory, and buen vivir in Q'eqchi' resistance to African palm expansion, and Copeland (2019b) identifies many points of cross pollination between buen vivir and food sovereignty in the DT; but unlike in agrarian struggles, food sovereignty remains peripheral to place-based defenses (local resistance to, for example, mining operations or hydropower) and marginalized in the overall DT frame.

Far more visible than efforts to disentangle food sovereignty from development, the Indigenous critique of progressive extraction—extraction for poverty reduction by left-leaning governments—is one of the most sensitive divisions in the Latin American left (Gudynas, 2011; García Linera, 2012; Postero, 2017; Gustafson, 2020; Riofrancos, 2020; Ellner, 2021; Velásquez, 2022). In Bolivia, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) used rents from hydrocarbon extraction to reduce poverty by twenty percent, pay the national debt, and build a coalition durable enough to survive a coup. But Indigenous communities who bore the ecological costs of extraction denounce contradictions between MAS development policies and rhetoric of decolonization (Postero, 2017; Farthing and Fabricant, 2018; Gustafson, 2020). Despite serious concerns with extractive projects, blanket criticisms of extractivism as colonialism ignore critical differences between right wing and Pink Tide development policies and may create openings for reactionaries (Ellner, 2021: 20). They also forego the potential of resource nationalism to catalyze “the contingent crystallization of interclass alliances and political blocs involving political elites and native capitalists but also workers, indigenous groups, and, in general, fractions of the subaltern classes” (Angosto-Ferrández, 2021: 105).

If dominant forms of development do violence to relational, place-based ways of being and submit colonized peoples to exploitation and dispossession within unjust political economies with exposure to contamination, destruction of autonomous food systems, and resource grabbing uniting both sets of concerns, the question is whether some forms of development are integral to decolonization or if development is what decolonization must overcome. The answer is almost certainly yes to both. Nancy Postero (2017: 137-138) describes a tension between decolonization and development in plurinational Bolivia, concluding that “economic liberation” displaced the emancipatory power of indigeneity, even though many Indigenous Bolivians saw no such distinction. In what follows, I show how many rural and Indigenous Guatemalans see development as central to both economic liberation and the defense of territory. I also contend that framing Indigenous cosmologies and decolonization in opposition to development, in addition to removing resource nationalism from strategic consideration, leaves food sovereignty under-defined, making the alternative ambiguous and limiting the articulatory reach of territorial politics.

Contrasting Tendencies In The Defense Of Territory

The DT in Guatemala began in 2005, with opposition to the Marlin Mine, a four square kilometer open pit gold mine in San Marcos operated by the Canadian mining company Goldcorp (Mérida and Krenmayr, 2008; Yagenova and García, 2009). While unable to stop the mine, this resistance launched an international community consultation movement encompassing dozens of place-based defenses against mining operations and hydropower projects. The DT expanded to encompass agrarian struggles against sugar cane and African palm monocultures, whose vast plantations leveled tropical forest and gobbled up subsistence farms and commercial maize production during the same period (Mingorría et al., 2014; Alonso-Fradejas, 2015; 2021). After the March for Water, Mother Earth, Life and Territory, convened by the Asamblea Social y Popular (Social and Popular Assembly, ASP) in 2016, the DT strategically converged on water as a unifying theme in struggles against a range of industries and as a link between rural and urban movements (Copeland, 2023). My knowledge about the DT comes mainly from politically-engaged research on agroecology since 2015 and with water rights movements since 2018, working to expand access to water science for rural communities in resistance to a range of extractive industries, joining participatory water monitoring projects, training community water scientists, and helping to build the Guatemalan water network, REDAGUA, which during its brief (2019-2021) existence brought together grassroots organizations and NGOs in an attempt to articulate diverse struggles against extractive development.

Attention to discourses about water reveals how cosmological and developmentalist tendencies coexist in the DT. In August 2020, the Instituto de Problemas Nacionales at the University of San Carlos (IPN-USAC) organized a virtual forum on a national water law. Juxtaposing emblematic discourses from the panel shows points of overlap and divergence and their implications for thinking about alternatives to dominant development frameworks.

María Guadalupe García is a Maya Mam leader, director and founding member of Mama Maquín, the storied organization of Mayan women refugees formed during the armed conflict (Light, 1992). Her moving testimony, rooted in the Mayan cosmovision and forged in experiences of colonization and resistance, echoed across cyberspace:

The tropics where we live are in danger, and we are in defense of our existence. We will not stop fighting for water because we depend on it to live with dignity. Talking about water is talking about our life, water is part of one of the four fundamental elements of our existence: Mother Earth, wind, and fire. Water for us is sacred, it is part of our body and even from our gestation in the womb of our mother, and as already said for us, water is also healing, that is why we respect it, protect it, and defend it against projects of dispossession because water for us is not a resource, it is an essential element for the life of all of us who coexist in the web of life. Neoliberal capitalism sees it as a commodity.

Indeed, [water] is in constant threat in our territories because the State, in complicity with transnational companies, has granted exploration licenses for extractive projects, such as monocultures, mining, hydroelectric plants, uncontrolled logging, intentional forest fires, among others. These projects have caused the diversion of rivers, the drying up of water sources, and the devastation of the forests, leaving towns without water.

We mention all these extractive projects because water really comes from the mountains; water does not come from the stream; it comes from the springs; and those who have really taken care of the mountains are us.

It is not only defending water, but also Mother Earth, territory, and life. It is also important to say that this policy of extermination makes us relive what we experienced in the 80's when the scorched earth policy of counterinsurgency also stripped us of our territories and our identity as peoples; we had to flee to Mexico to save our lives. Today, they are dispossessing us again. It is not only dispossession, but looting our essential natural elements for life. They are taking away our land, water, seeds, our identity, our memory and history as peoples.

Yes, in the 80's they took us out with bullets, now it is another strategy to exterminate, to end the peoples through the looting and dispossession of natural elements. This is our thinking, our feeling on what is being discussed.

María Guadalupe speaks as a genocide survivor, Indigenous feminist, and as an elder with extensive cosmological knowledge and firsthand experience with rural struggles over water and state violence. In this frame, water’s centrality to a dignified life makes it sacred and demands that it be defended from industries which are destroying indigenous existence and Mother Earth. Indigenous people need water and Mother Earth to live, and water needs the protection of Indigenous peoples. In her eyes, the problem is not simply poor regulation; these industries are inherently destructive. And it is not just water, but the entire web of life that is at risk. Through the concept of dispossession (despojo), she connects the water violence of extractivism to the recent genocide, the creation the agro-export economy, and the violence of colonization in a single narrative whose truth she feels in her body.

Abelino Salvador Mejia Cancinos is a K’iche’ farmer and fisherman from the municipality of Champerico, located in the department of Retalhuleu on Guatemala’s southern coast. He is a leading national water and territory defender and a founder of the Consejo de Comunidades de Retalhuleu (Council of Retalhuleu Communities, CCR), thirty communities that organized in 2013 to oppose the expansion of sugar cane and African palm on the Pacific piedmont. The CCR is part of REDSUR, an alliance of south coast communities that get support from the Red por la Defensa de la Soberanía Alimentaria en Guatemala (Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, REDSAG), Asociación CEIBA, SERJUS, and Madre Selva. As he has many times, Abelino passionately and in great detail explains the water violence of cane expansion:

Communities from San Marcos to Nueva Concepción have run out of water, not because there is no water, but because it is taken over by the agro-industries. We have been characterized as a dry corridor [. . .] it is not a corridor with a water shortage, because in previous years there were trees, natural forests that called water. Since 2002, agribusiness has invaded Champerico.

For Abelino, the sugarcane “invasion” is a threat against life: the more cane, the less water for people as companies capture and divert rivers and cut down forests that “call the rain,” turning the region into a dry corridor. In the dry season, many communities do not have enough water to wash clothes or water family gardens, and wells dry up. He says that agrochemical runoff causes disease, and references “various ecocides” that have damaged aquatic ecosystems beyond the infamous chemical spill and fish die off in Sayaxché in 2015 (Escalón, 2015).

My question is that if in the end the water becomes a business, who charges for the water from Gallo [beer company] the Magdalena mill, the Tululá mill, and H.A.M.E? They all have machines that extract 6,600 gallons of water per minute. When sugarcane enters our territory, the disease begins. [. . .] They came, they cut down the trees, they threw away everything in their path, they diverted the rivers and caused great pollution, also by us because we cannot say no. Yes. . . and we must educate ourselves in that culture to rescue our rivers. Here in Champerico, each community has twenty to twenty-five malnourished children because there is no water, and no food is produced.

Abelino decries an absurd situation in which water is allegedly a commodity, but no one charges industries for water extraction. He insists that he is “not against development, but against an economic model that is really killing us,” a system Alonso-Fradejas (2021: 134) describes as “a life purging form of predatory agro-extractivism,” a prime example of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2005). Abelino believes in a fundamental, collective right to water that is undermined by privatization and wants to promote a culture to “rescue the rivers” in communities who are forced to accept contamination and to contaminate themselves: “they cannot say no.”

Abelino describes how the monopolization of water by cane expansion threatens small-scale agriculture:

Our struggle as peasant farmers is to demand from the government that they allow us to have a dignified life, that they let us work. [. . .] Since the cane arrived, we stopped producing. My community, where I currently live, we worked 1500 manzanas (~2,500 acres). We planted tomatoes, chili, carrots, watermelon, cucumber, maize, papaya, and we supplied the markets. Cane arrived and we lost the entire thing, because the artisanal wells stopped giving water, and although we had a tank, it didn't give us much anymore, and we had to draw water from other wells or go to the rivers. But you can’t go to the rivers anymore, because everything is polluted.

On a trip to Champerico in 2018, as we drove through maize fields withering in an extended drought, Abelino complained that much talk about global warming and water—which he saw as a major concern—erases the sugar industry’s responsibility for water scarcity.

Abelino supported the popular water law Initiative 5070 created by the Asamblea de Pueblos Agua Vida y Territorio (Peoples Assembly Water Life and Territory, AAVT), an alliance of community organizations working with the NGO SERJUS, that “gathers all of the knowledge of the Mayan pueblos” in twelve inalienable elements that encompass the demands of “indigenous as well as peasant farmers.” Abelino identifies as Quiche' but makes little mention of cosmologies or colonial history, speaking instead as a peasant farmer about the injustices of monocultures, the structures that enable them, and the deleterious effects on farming and health. Recognizing water’s economic value, he states twice that he is “not opposed to development,” but insists that sugar companies must not be permitted to crowd out local production: “We all have a right to work, to produce.”

These discourses provide a window into how Guatemalan water and territory defenders understand the forces that threaten water and what is required to defend water and rural communities. Their juxtaposition also reveals the presence of Indigenous and peasant-oriented frames in the DT and their synergies and divergences. These critiques converge on the injustice of industrial privatization and the demand for democratic control over common resources against colonial capitalism, and both place inherent value and dignity in Indigenous and peasant lives. They agree on the need for a national water law which, as Abelino insisted, “must come from the communities (pueblos) and be administered directly by the pueblo” without “political figures, because we know the situation of the state.”

María Guadalupe’s emphasis on Indigenous rights, territory, and Indigenous cosmovisions reflects the influence of the Pan Maya movement which emerged from the crucible of the armed conflict to challenge monocultural nationalism, the racist foundation of the Creole state, and racism in the revolutionary left (Cuxil, 2005; Warren, 1998; Nelson, 1999; 2009). María Guadalupe does not mention food sovereignty, agroecology, or rural livelihoods, focusing instead on the Indigenous relationship to water and situating ongoing dispossession within colonial histories. She calls for a decommodified relationship with nature and the restoration of reciprocity and respect.

María Guadalupe’s positioning would resonate with the sensibilities of millions of rural subjects who have taken part in over two decades of revalorization and recuperation of Indigenous identities promoted by an array of institutions and organizations. Many see strong parallels between the destruction of megadevelopment and the violence of the armed conflict (Bastos and de León, 2015; Batz, 2022). This discourse frames the armed conflict as colonialization, rather than as a conflict between an anti-imperialist socialist development project and the oligarchy’s militarized capitalist development project.

María Guadalupe’s strategic affirmation of Indigenous comovisions evokes an anti-colonial Pan Mayan imaginary in the post-peace moment, but not the experiences of millions of Indigenous people who have little choice but to participate in economic activities that harm the environment, like using chemical pesticides and fertilizers or working for mining and sugar companies (Copeland, 2019c). Moreover, many who denounce water commodification have fought for private titles to springs for their homes and fields. The DT also reaches limits at the ballot box, as millions of rural villagers see little choice but to vote for corrupt parties that support extractive development (Copeland, 2019a).

By contrast, Abelino embraces development as part and parcel of food sovereignty—the struggle to reclaim land for small producers to plant subsistence and cash crops, prioritizing agrarian transformation over Indigenous cosmovisions. Resistance to monocultures entwines environmentalism, water rights, and agrarian politics. In 2013, the CCR recovered three fincas and distributed five-acre plots to dozens of landless families who plant commercial crops (mainly maize and sesame) alongside vegetables for domestic consumption and regional markets. Many have private wells, but many families also share them. Abelino dreams of replacing cane with maize, food crops, and native trees and recovering riverine ecosystems and aquiculture (Personal communication, March 2023). This is a radical agrarian vernacular understanding of food sovereignty in the mold of historic Indigenous and peasant movements for far reaching land distribution and development (Grandin, 1997; 2011).

Transforming Struggles For Development

In Guatemala, development through land reform, state assistance, and technical training for rural communities framed in explicitly modernizing terms was a core policy of democratic nationalist governments in the mid twentieth century and the peasant organizations that were their main base of support (Handy, 1996; Foss, 2022). In the post-1954 dictatorship, rural Indigenous villagers pursued education through Catholic Action and development through cooperatives to fight against poverty and discrimination (Warren, 1989; Falla, 2001). In the Cold War, USAID funded agrarian modernization without structural reforms to preempt revolutionary organizing (Carey, 2009; Copeland, 2012; Foss, 2022). Despite counterinsurgency designs, rural communities “welcomed projects they believed would improve their quality of life and allow them to better control their futures” (Foss, 2022: 4; Copeland, 2015). Although local development movements failed to resolve structural contradictions, their existence and subsequent repression by the state primed Indigenous communities for the vision of democracy and development promised by revolutionary movements in the 1970s (Smith, 1984; Arias, 1990; Grandin, 1997; 2010; Menchú, 2010). The demands of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee for Peasant Unity, CUC), the first Mayan-led national peasant organization, for “credit, land titles, fair prices [for] fertilizer and agricultural products that they sold, adequate plantation wages, and an end to military repression” reflected the radical developmentalism of the era (Grandin, 1997: 12). These demands supported a cross-racial alliance against the oligarchic state that was targeted by extreme violence that aimed to eliminate all autonomous forms of organizing (REHMI, 1998; CEH, 1999) and tethered development to counterinsurgency (AVANCSO, 1988; Schirmer, 1998). After the transition to democracy in 1985, with rural towns under occupation, army, evangelical, and state development initiatives wove local desire for advancement into market-oriented development and electoral politics (Copeland, 2019a).

The 1996 Peace Accords, echoing the demands of peasant organizations (Brett, 2008), promised to “[overcome] the root causes of the conflict and [lay] the foundations for a new kind of development.” The Socioeconomic and Agrarian Accord outlined the state’s commitment to market-oriented land reform, investments in technical and organizational capacity, training, credit, market access, and infrastructure (roads, sanitation, electrification, and communications) (United Nations, 1996: 21-22). Overtly associated with “deindianization” during the Cold War, market-oriented development after the accords was framed as consistent with “ethnic and cultural diversity” and “maintain[ing] ecological balance” (United Nations, 1996: 26). Indigenous villagers attended workshops on Indigenous identity and human and women’s rights, while mainstream development institutions idealized a market friendly Indigenous identity that prioritized cultural rights over class demands (Hale, 2002). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Pedro Necta, Huehuetenango (Copeland, 2019a: 11), I describe how Maya-Mam residents saw neoliberal democracy and development as “hard-won openings in a rigidly exclusive, racist political order and as a means of changing that system by claiming citizenship and transforming themselves”. Nevertheless, against a backdrop of violence, the clientelist distribution of development “anchored a [. . .] world of electoral politics that operated in a machine-like fashion to refocus politics” further away from revolutionary horizons “and shatter local solidarity” (Copeland, 2019a: 14). These violent forms of democracy and development provide fodder for authoritarian populism and significantly undermine the municipality’s potential to serve, as it did in the 1970s, as a nexus for political education, radical ethnic identification and solidarity, and as a jumping off point for cross community organizing and the formation of a nationalist imaginary at odds with the plantation economy “capacious enough to transcend real and imagined divisions separating the indigenous population from itself and other segments of Guatemalan society” (Grandin, 1997: 24).

As promises to empower farmers to “become small-scale agricultural businessmen” petered out (United Nations, 1996: 22), the state abandoned the Plan Nacional de Desarrollo Rural Integral (National Integral Rural Development Plan, PNDRI) from the accords. In response, peasant organizations that reemerged the peace process crafted Initiative 4084, a proposal for a Comprehensive Rural Development Law. 4084 went beyond the PNDRI to respond to neoliberalism’s devastation of the rural sector, making the rural poor the law’s primary subject. Instead of nontraditional exports, 4084 emphasized land access (still shying away from land reform), agroecological subsistence agriculture for domestic consumption, and opening elite dominated markets (Congreso de Guatemala, 2009). It called for a new Ministry for Integral Rural Development to revamp the dismantled public agrarian sector and pursue a policy of food sovereignty. 4084 was a core demand of the 2012 Indigenous, Peasant, and Popular March which responded to the violent displacement of Q’eqchi’ farmers in the Polochic by plantation monocultures (Mingorría et al., 2014). After many promises, the initiative was blocked by the economic elite in the late 2010s, reflecting the weakness of the peasant movement, which divided over the decision to engage with the land administration program of the neoliberal state (Velásquez Nimatuj, 2005; Granovsky-Larsen, 2017). The CCR is rooted in these movements which now position themselves within the DT frame.

Ambiguous Alternatives In The Defense Of Territory

The question of alternatives is a common topic of discussion in the DT. In August 2018, I spoke with Ing. Elías Raymundo, a mestizo agronomical and hydrological engineer with years of leadership in social movements, progressive NGOs, and state agencies. He was a co-founder of the NGO Asociación CEIBA, where I had volunteered as a researcher with their women’s programs in the early 2000s. We met in 2004, when we were both doing graduate fieldwork: me in anthropology, he in hydro sciences. When I was studying state agriculture programs in 2015, he was the director of the Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología Agrícolas (Agricultural Science and Technology Institute, ICTA), and we spent long hours discussing the history, limits, and potential of that barely surviving vestige of Guatemala’s public agrarian sector.

While interim director of CEIBA in 2018, he reflected on weaknesses in popular mobilization in the three years since the anti-corruption uprising: “CUC doesn’t convoke Indigenous authorities. Waqib’ Kej’ [doesn’t] have a project and their capacity is decreasing. The ASP has lost momentum. There are too many competing water law proposals.” Waqib’ Kej’s elaboration of buen vivir represented an effort to refine their project. Despite his bleak assessment, which seemed prophetic over the next five years, Elías defended the DT in response to a criticism voiced by Helmer Velásquez from the Coordination of NGOs and Cooperatives (CONGCOOP-IDEAR), an alliance of grassroots organizations and agrarian research center, that the DT does not address agrarian reform. For Elías, territoriality marked:

an evolution in agrarian struggles. [Because of] privatized agrarian reform [market led land reform through the peace accords], you only fight for your small piece. Now the struggle is not for land. It is useless to have a small piece of land. After the accords, there were small plots, but they were sold, which has led to reconcentration. It’s useless. Then the defense of territory said “let nothing get in here”. . . it took it to another level, territorial struggles without property. Like gangs and narcos have territorial struggles without property. It is not just about Indigenous culture–everything is privatized. The DT operates at a higher level. Take the situation of Hidralias Ixquisis [a hydroelectric project in San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango]. We don’t want it. We aren’t fighting about property. And these aren’t [only] collective Indigenous rights [. . .] there are also mestizos. [. . .] The concept is defense, using land in a way that doesn’t harm people.

The DT strategically elaborated Indigenous cosmological conceptions of territory as a web of human and nature interrelationship and a site of identity construction (Zibechi, 2012), taking advantage of international law, especially International Labor Organization treaty 169 and its language of “free, prior, and informed consent,” to defend localities against megadevelopment and later to advance proposals for autonomy (Stahler-Sholk, 2007; Postero, 2017; Rosset and Barbosa, 2021).

Elías continued:

The DT doesn’t mean we want the state to leave. In favor of what? No one knows. [Communities] want to be the owners of the hydroelectrics. They want development, but they want the wealth to flow to them. Some deny it, but that is the road. The municipality has the capacity to plan [projects], but the government gives loans to companies [. . .] We need to get rid of those companies and put in our own. We lack some administrative capacity, but the profit should be for the pueblo. The people are not against development or technology, only injustice. The profits stay in so few hands. It isn’t [only] a cultural struggle [. . .] The DT is too pure, everything natural, [. . .] but that’s because they don’t have anything else. The majority don’t think this way. They want the profits to stay with them.

Raymundo’s assessment reflects the failure of market led agrarian reform, which redistributed too little land and accelerated land reconcentration (Gauster and Isakson, 2007). The new strategy to defend territory beyond property was an ingenious adaptation. In contrast to prominent anti-development DT framings, Elías is talking about nationalized, public sector, extractive development to fund redistributive anti-poverty programs—“progressive extractivism” (Gudynas, 2011) or “resource nationalism” (Ellner, 2021). Raymundo felt that the “pure” cultural stance misstates the distributive roots of these conflicts, and significant local interest in development, even megaprojects, so long as locals truly capture the benefits (they want the profits to stay with them). Ixil agronomist, M’ek Tom Torres, expressed similar sentiments about hydroelectric projects installed without consent in Ixil territory (Personal communication, 2017).

Although embracing the shift to territorial politics, Raymundo was less persuaded by proposals for a plurinational state:

Organized movements have not been able to present a broader vision. They only ask for four things: a law to reform political parties, a civil service law, reform of the justice sector, and the refoundation of the state. The business sector (CACIF) opposes justice reform, and not everyone agrees on the refoundation of the state. We haven’t been able to put together a unified proposal, just unique proposals [. . .] no one wants to lose anything and help another because they don’t want to cede space [. . .] it doesn’t help us articulate.

Plurinationalism diverges from demands for a state that works for the poor, capable, for example, of implementing a popular water law or an integral development policy; however, a functional state is not inconsistent with territorial autonomy (Rosset and Barbosa, 2021: 68-69).

Elías also lamented the lack of a coordinated agenda for agroecology in the DT that could compete with the vision for “ecological agriculture” promoted by the sugar cane industry. He had worked with Ing. Mario Godínez, then Dean of Agronomy at the University of San Carlos (USAC), and the Red por la Defensa de la Soberanía Alimentaria en Guatemala (Network to Defend Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, REDSAG), to organize a Congress on Agroecology, “but we did not present a proposal, an agenda for investigation,” in part because movements would see it as competition from urban mestizo agronomists. A strong advocate for agroecology, Elías saw this as a missed opportunity, but not only for movements: “It is the same in institutions. The state has a responsibility to give better options that don’t damage the environment. The people need alternatives, options. If we don’t have them, what’s the use? We won’t change anything.” He envisions harnessing synergies between heterogeneous agroecology initiatives and incorporating agroecology into national development policies.

For movements, the path to plurinational postdevelopment was reinforced by a place-based defense movement that expanded when agrarian politics hit a wall. The crystallization of paradigmatic critiques of development left little room for a full consideration of the agrarian question, much less resource nationalism, as elements of national liberation, both deeply entangled with development and the liberal state. A deeper explanation can be found in decades of counterinsurgency that crushed radical demands for development and reformatted them into limited spaces for indigenous advancement through non-redistributive market development and local electoral politics (Copeland, 2019a). A wholesale critique of development might seem strategic when existing options are so deeply flawed and serious proposals for transformational development have been removed from thinkability by decades of state violence and elite intransigence. A movement might as well reject all development, “because they don’t have anything else,” that is, any kind worth hoping for.

Conclusion: Recapturing The Spirit Of 1980

For centuries, Guatemalan Indigenous communities have been denied the ability to define development on their own terms and subjugated by models of development and progress that did violence to their bodies, cultures, and territories. Indigenous politics broke against neoliberal extractivism in the decades after the accords, but it has not fully rearticulated with revolutionary agrarian or development politics. Demands for far reaching land reform and support for rural agriculture are under-elaborated in Indigenous ecopolitics, in part due to repression and elite refusals, and in part because influential ontological interpretations of buen vivir screen out discussions of development as inconsistent with Indigenous values. Similar to the troubling convergence between demands for Indigenous autonomy and neoliberal policies to abandon public responsibility for well-being in poor communities (Stahler-Sholk, 2007; Nelson, 2009; Hale, 2011), some Indigenous cosmopolitical critiques overlap with state and corporate repression of autonomous development.

This undermines efforts to build a collective subject, as millions of rural Guatemalans frame liberation in terms of development due to the sedimentation and resignification of these discourses. These reworkings are hardly pure and may contain colonial baggage, but they are enmeshed with Indigenous and peasant livelihoods and languages of contention in ways that cannot be dismissed. Clearly articulated plans for alternative development, including agrarian reform and a publicly supported transition to agroecological production with support for small producers with real access to local and regional markets, as well as the nationalization or communalization of some existing extractive projects, could provide compelling answers to the extreme poverty that afflicts the rural population and forces mass migration (Copeland, 2020). Collective efforts to define a “territorialized vision of food sovereignty” (Alonso-Fradejas, 2015: 500) region by region, as the economic basis of a plurinational state could strengthen movements and Indigenous governments and transcend artificial divisions between peasant and Indigenous tendencies (Copeland, 2019b), recapturing the spirit of CUC in 1980.

Progressive extractivism entails unsustainable environmental destruction and unequal distribution of environmental costs that reproduce colonial inequalities and creates painful divisions in counterhegemonic coalitions, as recent histories in Bolivia and Ecuador make clear (Postero, 2017; Farthing and Fabricant, 2018; Gustafson, 2020; Velázquez, 2022). Because colonial legacies force poor nations to choose between ecosystem protection and poverty reduction, external environmentalist criticisms misunderstand how sovereignty has been materialized through resource extraction (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Curley, 2023). Tradeoffs are real and deeply concerning, but neither the embrace or rejection of development stands as the lone and sufficient decolonial path.

Processes in Guatemala suggest that Indigenous ecopolitics without a robust vision of alternative development pose an insufficient challenge to authoritarian extractivist kleptocracies. A call to nationalize or communalize existing projects whose environmental impact is largely irreversible, with strengthened environmental remediation and restorative justice with direct social benefits and the free, prior, and informed consent of affected communities and Indigenous governments, could potentially reinvigorate popular movements, similar to the partial nationalization of electricity by the Comité de Desarrollo Campesino (Committee for Peasant Development, CODECA). The resurgence of leftist governments across Latin America signals international support for such a project, which, coinciding with the implosion of the neoliberal peace settlement, and the surprise election of the Semilla party in 2023, creates rare conditions for long overdue social transformation. It is not my aim to advocate for multiplying extractive projects across Indigenous territories, as my direct solidarity with grassroots resistances to these projects attests. My aim is to insist that Indigenous and peasant communities exercise their collective right to determine their future development.

Rosset and Barbosa (2021: 68) refuse the division between the “struggle for the State and the proposal for autonomy” and argue that “launching processes of territorial autonomy could be a very important way to overcome the stagnation that currently characterizes many movements and organizations, and allow them to reach much more of their potential.” I suggest that overcoming the antagonism between decolonization versus development could further strengthen autonomy proposals and make them more relevant and accessible to broader sectors of Guatemalan society.

Post-development critiques do not reflect the nuance of grassroots perspectives and cede the terrain of development to the right rather than redefine it. Food sovereignty movements have reimagined agrarian politics through Indigenous rights and conceptions of territory, but Indigenous ecoterritorial and pluriversal politics have not fully integrated agrarian and revolutionary demands. It could be beneficial for them to do so. Rather than seeing grassroots demands for development as false consciousness, social movements and engaged scholars could engage productive tensions between developmentalism and Indigenous ontological politics and harness the convergences (Copeland, 2019b). Development policies rooted in Indigenous values, food sovereignty (with far reaching land reform), and resource nationalism could reduce poverty and hunger for millions, mitigate the environmental harms of capitalist extraction, stimulate local economies, and restore ecosystems. With these ends in mind, creative cross fertilizations between radical developmentalism and cosmopolitical critiques could provide a fruitful basis for a multi-dimensional decolonizing project with Indigenous ecosocialist horizons.