War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala
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War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala
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Overview
Contributors consider a wide range of issues confronting present-day Guatemala: returning refugees, land reform, gang violence, neoliberal economic restructuring, indigenous and women's rights, complex race relations, the politics of memory, and the challenges of sustaining hope. From a sweeping account of Guatemalan elites' centuries-long use of violence to suppress dissent to studies of intimate experiences of complicity and contestation in richly drawn localities, War by Other Means provides a nuanced reckoning of the injustices that made genocide possible and the ongoing attempts to overcome them.
Contributors. Santiago Bastos, Jennifer Burrell, Manuela Camus, Matilde González-Izás, Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, Greg Grandin, Paul Kobrak, Deborah T. Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Elizabeth Oglesby, Luis Solano, Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Paula Worby
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Carlota McAllister is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto.
Diane M. Nelson is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala, also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala
By Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5493-2
CHAPTER 1
Greg Grandin
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS
Guatemala has more than its share of martyrs but few, if any, national heroes. It is impossible to imagine a child of a Guatemalan president being named after an indigenous leader or a peasant revolutionary, as were Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Emiliano Zedillo, the sons of Mexican presidents from opposing ends of the political spectrum. Of Central America's three major New Left insurgencies—the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity—only the last didn't take the name of an idealized leader whose death symbolized frustrated national aspirations.
One reason for this distinction is the persistence of the country's extreme racial divide, which has restricted the kind of multiclass politics that memorializes popular figures like Emiliano Zapata and Augusto Sandino. In Mexico by the late colonial period, an expanding economy had begun to break down indigenous ethnicity in the central valley into a homogeneous rural identity, which, though still ethnically marked, allowed for the emergence of fluid alliances (Knight 1994: 78). Peasants participated on all sides during Mexico's tumultuous nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet a great many marched on the winning side of liberal-national history: independence from Spain, anti-imperialist struggles against the United States and France, the rise to power of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, and, of course, the Mexican Revolution.
Guatemala's backwater colonial economy, in contrast, allowed for the consolidation and endurance of distinct indigenous identities centered on residential communities; the nineteenth-century coffee economy created an agrarian proletariat defined along racial lines. Indigenous communities were singled out as sources of labor; workers were conscripted through a series of extra-economic "incentives," including forced labor drafts, debt peonage, and vagrancy laws. Whole villages became captives of specific planters, who relied on them not just for labor but, unable to maintain a full-time labor force, to subsidize, through ongoing subsistence production, the nutritional needs of workers during the off-season. Indigenous peasants, in turn, used the wages they did receive to maintain and even revive community traditions and rituals—for example, cofradías (Catholic saint cults), fiestas (celebrations of specific saints), and cabildos (indigenous administrative institutions, associated with Spanish colonialism)—even as the land base that traditionally underwrote such activities was coming under intense pressure.
As a result, the concordance of liberal nationalism with a form of capitalism that deepened rather than dissipated racial identity generated a stable opposition: on one side stood indigenous communities allied with the Catholic Church, defending communal land and local autonomy; on the other were modernizing liberals pushing to alienate the corporate protections of both church and indigenous cabildo. When liberals took control of the state and its ideological apparatus in 1871, indigenous mobilization was uniformly portrayed as an obstacle to achieving their nation. In 1951, in the middle of Guatemala's "national-popular" decade, the historian Daniel Contreras (1951) did try to claim Totonicapán's Atanasio Tzul, who led a significant uprising in 1820, as a national procer, or statesman, paving the way to independence from Spain. This one exception aside, nationalist intellectuals nearly unanimously blamed the failures of Guatemalan liberalism—the fall of the first postcolonial liberal regime, the destruction of the highland Estado de los Altos, the collapse of the Central American Federation, the endurance of Rafael Carrera's conservative regime—on indigenous obstinacy.
The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the myths it generated inspired historians to search Mexico's agrarian past for the Revolution's origins and antecedents, yielding a rich historiography. Scholars set Mexico's revolutionary history within a context of long-term agrarian transformation, drawing on research done on other twentieth-century revolutions (Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, various African nations, and Vietnam) and on concepts associated with peasant and subaltern studies. Guatemalan historiography, in contrast, came forth not in the flush of revolutionary victory but in the midst of counterrevolutionary terror. Starting in the 1970s historians and anthropologists, driven by an urgency to publicize and explain escalating repression against mostly indigenous peasants, produced studies that sketched out the history of the forced labor, stolen land, and militarized politics that formed the foundation of Guatemala's plantation regime (Smith 1990; Carmack 1988; Handy 1984; Cambranes 1985; Piel 1995; McCreery 1994). But subsequent scholarship failed to follow up on this work. While it is taken for granted that repression has played a central role in mediating community-state relations over the centuries, there is no long-frame rural sociology that examines how forms of violence, both oppositional and pacifying, changed over time, and how those changes indexed specific economic regimes and political epochs. As a result, accounts of Guatemala's post-1954 civil war tend to be either ultradeterministic (holding unspecified racism and exploitation responsible for the conflict) or ultracontingent (conflating the causes of the war with its most immediate provocation, often in one localized region).
Violence itself accounts for a lack of in-depth analysis of rural violence. No one in Mexico would think to explain the Mexican Revolution by trying to document whether it was the Zapatistas or the Federales who fired the first shot in Morelos, largely because the country has a vital intellectual class and a fully realized historiography that would render that exercise meaningless. But such an approach did consume much of the postbellum debate in Guatemala, where state terror had eliminated, either by execution or exile, a generation of scholars.
A case in point is the Guatemalan historian Severo Martínez Peláez, who in the 1970s had begun to sketch out a longue durée framework for studying rural violence. Martínez Peláez is best known as the author of Patria del Criollo, published in 1970, which today is often criticized for defining indigenous identity as something created whole cloth by Spanish colonialism. But it also was an early effort to take seriously the generative and repressive function of what he called "colonial language." "The colonial regime," Martínez Peláez wrote, "was a regime of terror," and needed to be that way (2009: 264). He had planned to follow up this book with a study of agrarian indigenous protest from the colonial period through independence, compelled to do so, as he put it, by the "current situation." At the time, violence against peasant activists, increasingly indistinguishable from the savagery inflicted on the urban opposition, was on the rise and about to enter a new stage with the 1978 Panzós massacre and the ensuing scorched-earth campaign. But he was forced to flee to Mexico at the end of the 1970s and therefore didn't go beyond surveying episodic and colonial indigenous motines, or riots—more often than not provoked by elite overreaction to peaceful petitioning of grievances. But extrapolating from Martínez Peláez's (1991) initial review, five distinct stages of agrarian mobilization and repression can be identified as playing a "decisive role," as he put it, in the formation of the modern Guatemalan state, leaving the country on the threshold of the 1981-83 genocide.
1524-1712
Following the shock of the Conquest and the consolidation of colonial institutions—which included drastic demographic collapse and forced resettlement of survivors into controllable communities—Spanish rule in what is now Guatemala, as it did in most of Mesoamerica, entered into what Friedrich Katz has called a pax hispanica, a period of notable quiescence and stability. In Guatemala, Q'eqchi's in the area of the Verapaces resisted Spanish domination for decades and retained a degree of brokered (through the Dominicans) autonomy throughout the seventeenth century. For hundreds of years the lowland Petén jungle, which extended east into what is now Belize and north to the Yucatán, offered sanctuary to those who refused to be incorporated into the colonial state; communities around eastern Chiquimula, as well as those in the far reaches of the Cuchumatanes, continued for decades to withstand Spanish incursions (Jones 1998; see also Matthew and Oudijk 2007; Restall and Asselbergs 2007).
Yet in the core Mam, K'iche', and Kaqchikel highland zones, the Spanish established authority quickly. There existed no common language or tradition among these Maya, as in the more rebellious Andes, to unite subjugated peoples. And within a generation of the Conquest, the complexity that defined pre-Columbian politics and society in this region had been muted. Noble lineages throughout the western and northern highlands continue to this day, yet by the middle colonial period macehualization—the erosion of aristocratic hierarchies and absorption of noble families into a more diffuse population largely made up of macehuales (commoners) and led by principales (elders)—had the effect of removing the nobility as an institution or symbol through which opposition to Spanish rule could be mounted (see Pastor 1987: 323-44). Land for subsistence production was plentiful, which allowed survivors to participate in the colonial economy on relatively good terms. Forced labor in the mines of Huehuetenango and in the indigenous hinterland of the colonial capital, though onerous, was nowhere near as central a colonial institution in Guatemala as it was in Mexico or Peru. Many communities, including central ones like Santiago Atitlán, had a minimal Spanish presence throughout much of the seventeenth century, while the presence of mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans helped buffer against too heavy repartimiento (forced labor) or tribute de mands levied by encomenderos (Spaniards granted a land concession settled by indigenous peoples), royal officials, and the secular clergy (not belonging to one of the orders, often associated with the Catholic hierarchy; van Oss 1986). Spanish institutions that did take hold often allowed indigenous leaders to take a stake in them. In K'iche' areas, for instance, descendents of precolonial lineages helped collect tribute, carry out censuses, organize work obligations, enforce church attendance, and adjudicate local disputes; principales from Quetzaltenango negotiated new rights, including the right to operate stores in the city plaza, in exchange for help in suppressing the 1712 Tzeltal uprising in Chiapas (Grandin 2000a: 45).
1712-1821
That uprising, which took place shortly after the ascension of the interventionist Bourbons to the Spanish Crown, brought the pax hispanica to an end. Provoked by intensified extractive demands, the revolt quickly expanded geographically through dozens of villages north and east of San Cristóbal. It also escalated ideologically, taking on a strong millennial cast as rebel leaders pledged their allegiance to an incarnate Virgin and proclaimed a "republic" beholden to neither God nor king. Language divisions among Chiapan Mayans limited the revolt, although rebels compensated by terrorizing neighboring towns that refused to join the insurrection, completely razing some communities and forcibly conscripting residents of others. Royal troops, with reinforcements from Guatemala, launched a punitive counterinsurgency, taking a year to completely pacify the insurrection. Martínez Peláez identifies this campaign as previewing one of the basic "modalities of repression" subsequently deployed by colonial and republican officials against indigenous mobilization, be they contained "riots" or transcommunity revolts: horrific, exemplary violence, including the wholesale destruction of insurgent communities and public executions of leaders followed by proclamations of forgiveness and often some concessions, including promises to rein in local abuses. Martínez Peláez locates in the suppression of this revolt, even more than in the violence of the Conquest, the elite race fear that would psychically structure state-indigenous relations for centuries to come. A hundred years after the event, he writes, criollos (Spaniards born in the Americas) were holding annual masses to thank God for the defeat of the Tzeltals; decades after independence, a panoramic painting could be found in Guatemala's old Audiencia, the royal administration building, depicting "massacres of ladinos, massacres of rebels, the torture and hanging of clergy and the torture of rebel leaders, towns burned to the ground by the insurgents, other towns reduced to ashes by the repressors, all presented with the most exact detail" (1977: 6).
The frequency and intensity of revolts increased throughout Mesoamerica in the century that followed, with each riot and uprising signaling that, as Martínez Peláez writes, the "limits of the tolerable" in any given community had been reached (1991: 7). Fifty serious indigenous riots took place in what is now Guatemala between 1710 and independence from Spain in 1821. (There were probably more, considering the poor communication of the time.) Plagues, famines, droughts, and other natural catastrophes could still, as they did in the earlier colonial period, instigate unrest, but increasingly the provocations were intrusive Bourbon efforts to strengthen colonial administration and regulate nearly every aspect of social life: alcohol, cockfighting, religion, education, burial rituals, dietary habits, and sanitation practices. Spain also demanded more and more taxes and tributes in order to fund its wars with other European empires. An expanding regional economy strengthened the power and wealth of local criollo elites, who took advantage of a royal state distracted by interimperial war to push their wheat and cattle haciendas deeper into municipal ejidos (common lands, often administered by indigenous cabildos) and step up their efforts to press labor, revenue, and land from indigenous communities. At the same time, the trend toward social secularization-due to migration and increased commerce—led to a growing class divide separating principales from commoners, beginning the unraveling of the patriarchal expectations of obligation and deference that bound together high and low, men and women, placing further stress on communities.
Starting around 1811, simultaneously with a massive, violent uprising (upward of half a million people lost their lives) led by the Catholic priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos that was spreading through Mexico's central valley, the pace of indigenous protests picked up in Guatemala. Riots and uprisings took place in Santiago Sacatepéquez (1811), Patzicía (1811 and 1821), Momostenango (1812), Comalapa (1812), Sololá (1813), Chichicastenango (1813), Santa Ana Malacatán (1814), San Juan Ostuncalco (1815), Quetzaltenango (1815), San Martín Jilotepeque (1815), Santa María Chiquimula (1814 and 1818), San Andrés Sajcabajá (1819), Santo Domingo (1821), and San Francisco El Alto (1821). And in 1820 in Totonicapán and surrounding communities a full-scale insurrection broke out. Yet these protests did not coalesce into a movement similar in scope or intensity to the Hidalgo and Morelos revolt. Historians of that revolt describe distinct regional variation in the levels of support it received from rural communities; the rebellion was stronger in areas, such as Jalisco and Bajío, that had experienced the intensified commercial agricultural production that generated grievances as well as, by significantly breaking down community autonomy, the possibility of joining the kind of transregional, multiclass alliances that powered the rebellion. But Guatemala's situation corresponded more closely to those Mexican regions where communities still retained significant land and cultural integrity, where support for Hidalgo was either mixed or nonexistent. Bourbon-period pressure on rural community life in Guatemala did generate unrest, as did expectations of emancipation associated with the French Revolution and the 1812 liberal Spanish Constitution. But complaints remained localized. Furthermore Guatemalan criollos continued to remain loyal to the Crown, preferring, until Mexico's final break with Spain left them no choice, not to be left alone with a racially distinct majority population. This opposition of liberal-nationalists standing in fearful antagonism to rural society (as opposed to allying with rural society against a common enemy, be it the Crown, conservatives, or foreigners) would form the basic premise of Guatemala's counterinsurgent nationalism.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Aftermath: Harvests of Violence and Histories of the Future / Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson 1
Part I: Surveying the Landscape: Histories of the Present
1. Five Hundred Years / Greg Grandin 49
2. Difficult Complementarity: Relations between the Mayan and Revolutionary Movements / Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus 71
3. Testimonial Truths and Revolutionary Mysteries / Carlota McAllister 93
Part II: Market Freedoms and Market Forces: The New Biopolitical Economy
4. Development and/as Dispossession: Elite Networks and Extractive Industry in the Franja Transversal del Norte / Luis Solano 119
5. "We're No Longer Dealing with Fools": Violence, Labor, and Governance on the South Coast / Elizabeth Oglesby 143
6. "A Dignified Community Where We Can Live": Violence, Law, and Debt in Nueva Cajolá's Struggle for Land / Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj 170
Part III. Means into Ends: Neoliberal Transparency and Its Shadows
7. What Happened to the Revolution? Guatemala City's Maras from Life to Death / Deborah T. Levenson 195
8. The Long War in Colotenango: Guerrillas, Army, and Civil Patrols / Paul Kobrak 218
9. After Lynching / Jennifer Burrell 241
10. Labor Contractors to Military Specialists to Development Experts: Marginal Elites and Postwar State Formation / Matilde González Izás 261
Part IV: Whither the Future? Postwar Aspirations and Identifications
11. 100 Percent Omnilife: Health, Economy, and the End/s of War / Diane M. Nelson 285
12. The Shumo Challenge: White Class Privilege and the Post-Race, Post-Genocide Alliances of Cosmopolitanism from Below / Jorge Ramón González Ponciano 307
13. A Generation after the Refugees' Return: Are We There Yet? / Paula Worby 330
Works Cited 353
Contributors 377
Index 383