The Tenure Guidelines in Policy and Practice: Democratizing Land Control in Guatemala

Salena Tramel

doi:10.3390/land8110168

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges for democratizing land and natural resource control in Guatemala through use of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (Tenure Guidelines). This international human rights instrument comes at a critical moment, in which the current global land rush has shaped contemporary agrarian transformation with serious implications for the right to food and control of natural resources. The Tenure Guidelines provide us with a unique opportunity to put land and natural resource tenure squarely under the prescriptions of international human rights law, rather than allowing tenure to be subsumed by a narrow understanding of property rights based on civil and merchant law. In Guatemala, we are witnessing a political opening, where the government has incorporated the language of the Tenure Guidelines into its regulatory framework unlike any other country in Latin America. At the same time, the world watches on while a slow-motion coup engulfs the Central American country, reflecting a global trend of gutting democracies and coopting the language and legislation meant to protect them. Thus, the implementation of the Tenure Guidelines is strongly contested by state and corporate actors seeking to use the instrument in order to gain political legitimacy for the expansion of agribusiness like oil palm and sugarcane, and other forms of extractive industry. This paper’s findings indicate that when applied together with a rights-based approach, the Tenure Guidelines are a powerful social and political tool. Such is especially true of the most marginalized populations who require protection and respect for their existing tenure rights, promotion of reforms for better access to and control over land and resources, and restoration of tenure rights resulting from displacement or dispossession.

Highlights

Stark contradictions mark land and natural resource politics in Guatemala
At the local level in Sachaj and in other affected communities, who gets what in this latest phase of an agricultural economy that has routinely marginalized peasants?
In Guatemala, more than 70 percent of the Indigenous and rural population depends on agriculture, often in the form of small-scale peasant production, primarily growing maize on their own or rented land

Summary

Introduction

Stark contradictions mark land and natural resource politics in Guatemala. Deep in the country’s northern lowlands, a labyrinthine grid of oil palm plantations nearly encloses the Mayan Q’eqchi’. In settings where rural working people have no existing access to land, water, forest, and other natural resources, and this is the result of past violent expulsion from, or fraudulent or distressed loss of, their previous homeland or communities, there is a need to restore their access via land restitution and other vehicles [2] This paper applies this framework—‘respect/protect, promote, restore’—to Guatemala’s Agrarian Policy using the Tenure. It provides some broad brushstrokes of key social and institutional actors related to land in Guatemala Following this are three sections based on the respect/protect, promote, restore framework; in each of these, Guatemala’s Agrarian Policy is assessed against the Tenure Guidelines. The paper concludes with recommendations that are part of a wider synthesis

Trajectories and Actors of Land Politics in Guatemala

Respect and Protect—Land Access

Promote—Resolution of Agrarian Conflicts

Restore—Legal Guarantees and Security and Productive Assets

Findings

Synthesis and Recommendations