Against Extraction in Guatemala

Abstract

In this essay, we develop a speculative analysis of the agential modalities connected to the extractive industries that dominate the present history of Guatemala. We focus on appropriation, extraction and the destruction of places of refuge for humans and non-humans, as well as on the strategies and responses that emerge for thinking and doing “in the ruins” in seemingly apocalyptic conditions. We mobilize technoscience, multispecies thinking and Indigenous epistemologies to develop a decolonial theorization of the multiple agential modalities in play in these contemporary dynamics. More specifically, through the figures of the vampire and the snail, we explore structures of terror in the colonial order, multispecies strategies against capture, and the colonial matrix underpinning different planes and scales of mining of territory, bodies and substance. Contemporary forms of extraction are the manifestation of colonial practices, but are also tied to strategies of resistance to colonial machines and sex/race dispositifs by Indigenous, poor and marginal constituencies organizing in defense of the commons. The essay deploys decolonial knowledge practices and epistemologies for an analysis of the material-semiotic dimensions of extraction and racism in contemporary Guatemala.