Securing a National Water Policy in Guatemala: Understanding Barriers and Potential Implementation Strategies through Comparison with the Establishment of Regional Mining Laws

Abstract

Guatemala has proven an informative case study into the many barriers which inhibit the establishment of comprehensive national water policies (NWPs) in low- to middle-income countries (LMIC). The country has formally established the right to adequate sanitation and drinking water many times over: through the ratification of three international treaties, two water-specific constitutional articles, and regulatory bodies for infrastructural projects. Despite these measures, the existing water policy is piecemeal, and each of the at least 13 attempts to establish an NWP over the last century has stalled in Congress. As a result, poor infrastructure and industrial abuse of waterways have made water accessibility and sanitation constant concerns for generations of Guatemalans. Here, we investigate the many factors which have led to the recurring failure to establish an NWP in Guatemala. Following this investigation is a comparative analysis between barriers inhibiting the establishment of an NWP and those which face another Central American sector historically rife with human rights abuses: mining. Notably, major gains have been made with regard to the mitigation of harms enacted by the mining industry in several Central American countries, with the closing of several major mines in Guatemala, a pit-mining ban in Costa Rica, and the world’s first blanket ban on metal mining in El Salvador. We identify factors which have led to the success of the mining ban in El Salvador—namely, coordinated community involvement from campesinos to the traditional oligarchy, grassroots strategizing which snowballed from local referenda to national policy, and the leveraging of international attention—and make suggestions for their implementation with respect to the establishment of an NWP in Guatemala. This project is part of an ongoing, mixed methods research endeavor examining factors impacting water security in Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), especially as the region’s weather patterns become more erratic and intensified under climate change.