Postwar Guatemala Research Articles

Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala

Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala

Assembling prevention: Technology, expertise and control in postwar Guatemala

This article examines the technopolitics of prevention in postwar Guatemala. In the 2010s, experts and policymakers shifted security governance in Central America’s most populous country towards anticipation. Against the background of rising gang violence, they implemented a set of sociopolitical and techno-material measures – based on the latest crime-control technologies, new policing strategies and urban design methods – in Guatemala’s most violent municipalities. The stated goals were to reconstruct state sovereignty and to improve public security by strengthening community resilience and inducing positive behavioural change in ‘at-risk’ citizens. Zooming in on the case of Villa Nueva, the article examines the emergence and effects of Guatemala’s ‘prevention assemblage’. It demonstrates that this technopolitical project has failed, as prevention turned into a new layer of control that shifted responsibility to local communities, further securitized urban spaces and populations, and reproduced exclusionary and repressive security governance.

Roadblocks on the ruta de denuncia: negotiating women’s rights and resisting violences in postwar Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip

ABSTRACT In 1996, Guatemala’s Peace Accords were signed, concluding 36 years of war and genocide. However, persisting violence, including violences against women (VAW) and criminalisation of human rights defenders protesting inequalities provoked by postwar extractivism, threatens the democracy promised through formal peace. Specifically, women human rights defenders (WHRDs) play key roles in these struggles, which this paper explores. Drawing on ten months of qualitative fieldwork in Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the Northern Transversal Strip (FTN) region, I ask: what roles do WHRDs play in resolving VAW and in challenging gendered and environmental injustices? Secondly, what political and collective strategies are drawn on by WHRDs; what challenges do they face; and what movements and processes do they engage in, to envision a better future? This paper foregrounds the intersections of municipal political spaces and a constellation of postwar women’s rights legal frameworks, including a 2008 Law on Femicide criminalising all forms of VAW as central to WHRDs’ mobilisations. I explore how locally elected members of consejos de mujeres (women’s councils) and municipal oficinas de la mujer (women’s offices) offer important spaces for WHRDs to organise collectively. I also highlight connections between WHRDs’ struggles against VAW, extractivism, and environmental devastation in the FTN. Simultaneously, I identify several ‘roadblocks’ to WHRDs’ engagement in these spaces and the dangers and criminalisation they face. Ultimately, such ‘roadblocks’ contribute to a vernacularisation of women’s rights in the FTN, which instrumentalises and empowers the language of rights for WHRDs’ struggles.

The trend in mean height of Guatemalan women born between 1945 and 1995: a century behind

BackgroundAdult height is a cumulative indicator of living standards with mean height increasing with a greater socio-economic level. Guatemalan adult women have the lowest mean height worldwide. The country’s population is ethnically divided between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. This study aims to identify trends in the mean height for indigenous and non-indigenous adult women born between 1945 and 1995 in Guatemala and the association with individual, household and environmental factors.MethodsWe used pooled data of adult women from five Demographic and Health Surveys. Mixed-effects multilevel linear regression models estimate the mean height associated with the explanatory variables. Mean height was modelled as a function of birth year cohort, wealth, education, geo-administrative regions and elevation.ResultsThe mean height increased 0.021 cm per year on average. The annual increase for indigenous women was 0.027 cm, while 0.017 cm for non-indigenous women. Height is associated with household wealth and women’s education level. We found an interaction effect between ethnicity and household wealth, with indigenous women at the lowest quintile 0.867 cm shorter than the corresponding non-indigenous group. Height is associated with the geo-administrative region, those women in western regions being shorter than those in the metropolis. Mean height is reduced 0.980 cm for each 1000 m increase in elevation.ConclusionsGuatemalan women have grown only 1 cm over half century, a slow improvement between 1945 and 1995, a period characterised by political instability and civil war. There are persistent inequalities in women’s height associated with socio-economic status, education and attributes of the geographical context. These aspects need to be considered when implementing strategies to encourage growth. Further research is required to understand the evolution of adult height and the standard of living in post-war Guatemala.

Guatemalan Youth - Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition. By Michelle J. Bellino. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $34.95 paper.

Guatemalan Youth - Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition. By Michelle J. Bellino. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $34.95 paper. - Volume 79 Issue 3

The Fiction of Javier Payeras and the Neoliberal State

AbstractThis essay establishes parallels between sexual diversity and the neoliberal state, ultimately to demonstrate how queer and trans Guatemalans embody public urban space where they have been ostracized in the postwar period. The essay begins by situating queerness in the context of recent Latin American cultural criticism to subsequently provide a detailed genealogy of the mutual imbrications of queerness and neoliberalism in postwar Guatemala. Ultimately, I contend, emergent discourses of LGBTQ+ subjectivities as depicted in the novels Ruido de fondo (2003) and Días amarillos (2009) by Javier Payeras elucidate how queer and trans Guatemalans navigate the fragmented cityscape.

A Death Squad Dossier: Counterrevolutionary Policing, Photographs of Disappearing Identities and Evidentiary Aesthetics in Postwar Guatemala

This article is concerned with photographic images and identity photographs utilised for military counterinsurgent policing in Guatemala City during the civil war (1960–96), in the context of Latin America’s Cold War. The article explores the historical conditions that made militarised policing and its photographic record possible in Guatemala, focusing on a dossier produced in the early 1980s known as Diario Militar. The article pays attention to aesthetic and evidentiary regimes that rely on the indexical force of photographs under circumstances in which indexicality fails. In doing so, it elaborates on counterrevolutionary policing as a way of seeing and not being seen, producing photographic images that at once identify political subjects and attempt to disappear their identities, and how these photographic imaginaries are being re-signified in contemporary struggles for justice in postwar Guatemala.

A matrix of violences: the political economy of violences against Mayan women in Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip

ABSTRACT Following the signing of Guatemala’s 1996 Peace Accords, which brought an end to 36 years of conflict culminating in a genocide against Mayan communities, violences have persisted at alarming rates. Research has noted a high number of reports of violences against women and femicide, highlighting legal battles and challenges to address this issue. This article aims to make an empirical contribution, in that it explores the political economic dimensions of violences against women in predominantly Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in Guatemala’s development corridor, the Northern Transversal Strip region. Furthermore, the article emphasizes how women community leaders have linked violences against women in the contemporary context to the historical gendered violences of colonialism and armed conflict, as well the postwar extractivist development model and related ecological violences, particularly in relation to palm oil. Drawing on qualitative research and expanding on “continuum” theoretical approaches, the article concludes by suggesting that violences against women in postwar Guatemala can be understood as existing within an intersectional matrix, illustrating the dynamics of continuity and change. Violences against women are shaped by political, economic, historical, and social factors, which in turn shape how women organize to resist and address the violences against them in the Northern Transversal Strip region.

Gendered violences and resistances to development: body, land, territory, and violences against women in postwar Guatemala

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationships between violences against women (VAW) and rural development in the context of postwar Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip region (FTN). How might we understand the relationships between postwar development, its gendered implications, and VAW in this context? What are the implications of these entanglements for feminist activism? The article explores this question in a twofold way. First, drawing on decolonial and feminist political economic critiques, it broadens the understanding of VAW in relation to development, informed by decolonial, communitarian, and territorial perspectives of bodies, land, and territory. Second, in contending that colonial and neocolonial dispossessions linked to development are linked with VAW, it suggests that these relationships shape women’s defence of land and territories as well as the strategies women community leaders pursue in resisting VAW. Focusing on the impacts of palm oil cultivation in Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the FTN, it highlights the overlapping interests and strategies for feminist activism, highlighting the webbed interconnections between struggles for land and territory and struggles for justice and an end to VAW as they manifested empirically through the research.

Perceptions of Peace Agreements and Political Trust in Post-War Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT (Re)gaining citizens’ trust is a challenge for post-war governments. Political trust is crucial for understanding both the risk of civil war in the first place and the state-society relationships that emerge afterwards. Peace agreements are tools to stop the fighting, address war’s injustices, and provide a blueprint for the state’s future – and they do so to varying degrees. Yet we have little systematic knowledge of how people react to such agreements and with what consequences. We argue that in post-war societies, people’s perceptions of the strategies aimed at ending the violence and (re)building the state have an enduring impact on people’s view of the state. In this study, we examine the association between post-conflict political trust and people’s approval of peace agreements analyzing a set of nationally representative, comparative surveys from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland, three cases where long civil wars were ended by peace agreements. We find that individuals’ approval of the agreement and the perception that it has been implemented are positively associated with political trust, and that accounting for views of the peace agreement substantially improve on conventional explanations for political trust.

\u201cNing\xfan lugar sagrado\u201d de Rodrigo Rey Rosa: una ficci\xf3n paranoica desde la di\xe1spora centroamericana

This paper analyzes “Ningún lugar sagrado” (1998) by the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa as a ‘ficción paranoica’ (“La ficción paranoica”, Clarín, 10 de octubre de 1991; Blanco nocturno, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010). I will explain that Rey Rosa’s short story does not include univocal clues to identify the protagonist as an unreliable narrator whose overinterpretations give rise to a misrepresentation of the facts. According to my reading of “Ningún lugar sagrado”, the paranoiac features of the main character contribute to the ambiguity of the text that, in fact, never explicitly confirms or discredits his persecutory ideas. Following this line of argument, I suggest that Rey Rosa’s short story narrates an “imaginario de amenaza” (“La ficción paranoica”, Clarín, 10 de octubre de 1991) that, alluding to the climate of repression, intrigues and complicities in postwar Guatemala, generates paranoia –including that of the reader. “Ningún lugar sagrado” points to a more general tendency in recent Central American literature that, from the realm of fiction, highlights the widespread nature of paranoia in the region. Unlike social discourses that discuss the topic, these literary texts make use of narrative techniques that do not necessarily respond to a referential notion of truth (including hyperboles, digressions, irony and narrative ambiguity), when constructing the voice of a paranoiac character. According to my perspective, such narrative techniques lend themselves especially to capturing the alienating dimensions of violence in Central America where paranoia, rather than being a question of truth or exaggeration, constitutes a survival strategy.

Conjuring the Criminal State: The “State-Idea” in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and International Statebuilding

AbstractA central challenge of post-conflict recovery is the reconstruction of state institutions, which often emerge from war destroyed or otherwise unable to carry out core administrative activities. But scholarship on international peacebuilding and post-conflict politics tends to focus narrowly on the functional aspects of the state, the state-system, to the neglect of another critical dimension: the state-idea, or its symbolic and normative authority. How do internationally backed institution-building efforts shape the ideational foundations of the state following conflict? Drawing on original interviews and archival research from postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates how, paradoxically, postwar peacebuilding and rule of law initiatives that sought to strengthen the capacity of state institutions simultaneously contributed to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization. Specifically, the United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), in seeking to combat state-based criminal structures and bolster institutions, transformed long-held conceptions of Guatemala's “weak” or “failed” state into an alternative vision of the state as a powerful complex of clandestine, predatory networks, and practices. In conjuring the state as a criminal organization that appropriates the formal organs of political power for illicit ends, this international statebuilding initiative generated a coherent and durable state-idea that belies key advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law. Overall, this article contributes to growing debates about the unintended, deleterious effects of international statebuilding efforts by demonstrating how distinct ideas of state power come to fill the void between state capacity and legitimacy.

Cartographies of Justice and Rights in Ronald Flores's Último silencio

Published in 2000, Ronald Flores’s Ultimo silencio has yet to captivate a criti-cal audience even though it was awarded the Premio Mario Monteforte Toledo. The novel recounts the return of a psychiatrist who had fled to the United States during the thick of the Guatemalan Civil War, where he earned accolades for his treatment of torture victims. Back home, he sets up a clinic to help the vic-tims of the war. His plans, however, are complicated when he unintentionally secures a notorious military leader known for committing atrocities as a client. In a fast-paced and polyphonic style, Flores explores the ethics of culpability, the concept of evil, and the politics of human rights and justice in post-war Guate-mala. Of interest to me in the discursive and thematic trajectory of the novel is the mapping of these concepts onto the space of the city and nation. Basing my analysis on ideas by Ileana Rodriguez, Jean Franco, and Edward Weisband, the following pages trace the relationship between cartography, ethics, and human rights in Ultimo silencio. Ultimately, I argue that the novel is only capable of arriving at a just conclusion through a spatial displacement away from the city and the crafting of a counterhegemonic, counterpublic sphere.

Fluid illness

In response to the rising rate of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in Guatemala, the public health system established a national community-based dialysis program to enable people living in rural areas to complete treatment in their homes. Here we explore how this newly available, life-prolonging technology has altered local worlds by transforming ESRD from an acute, life-ending illness into a managed chronic condition with an uncertain trajectory. Through case studies, we describe how living with dialysis influences family relations and caregiving in rural Guatemala. We find that dialysis interacts with an insufficient health care system, one that avoids life-ending complications but does not sufficiently manage life-altering symptoms. In addition, the need to care for people with ESRD for an uncertain amount of time may disrupt and strain family-based caregiving networks. Amid this meager health and social welfare infrastructure, life on dialysis exacerbates the chronic insecurity and structural inequality of life in postwar Guatemala. As both life and illness are prolonged through dialysis, the unceasing demands of the treatment and illness strain the webs of obligation and care that Guatemalan families and communities have developed to adapt to their decentralized and fragmented public health care system.

Translated Justice? The Ixil Maya and the 2013 Trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt for Genocide in Guatemala

ABSTRACTThis article takes an ethnographically engaged, discourse‐centered approach to questions of representation and cultural difference in democratic process in postwar Guatemala. When José Efraín Ríos Montt became the first former head of state convicted of genocide within his own country, in 2013, Ixil Maya witnesses who testified against him became international human rights icons. However, the trial was marked by difficulties in communication between Ixil witnesses and non‐Ixil lawyers, judges, and observers. “Miscommunications” resulted from diverging forms of speech that are deeply connected to different identities and ways of experiencing and understanding history. Discursive expectations within the courtroom limited recognition of Ixil ways of speaking and, consequently, of Ixil subjects. These expectations also obscured Ixil contestations to systems of power both inside and outside the courtroom. This analysis calls attention to the central role of language in processes of justice and political activism in solidarity with marginalized populations. [discourse‐centered approach, genocide trial, Ixil, Maya, Guatemala]

Letting Go and Holding On, Documenting Hope in Postwar Guatemala

Letting Go and Holding On, Documenting Hope in Postwar Guatemala

Reproduire la culture, reproduire la nation : éducation et citoyenneté des mères indigènes dans l’après-guerre au Guatemala

A partir d’une ethnographie de dispositifs institutionnels de planification familiale destines a des meres indigenes, l’article analyse les effets de rhetoriques educatives qui visent a reguler et normer la reproduction humaine au Guatemala. Nous verrons comment la question reproductive oppose une « reproduction citoyenne raisonnee » a la « reconnaissance d’une specificite culturelle menacee ». A l’intersection des rapports de pouvoirs presents au sein de la societe guatemalteque, les dispositifs educatifs de planification familiale classent et differencient des citoyen.ne.s, dans un contexte de post-conflit ou se negocient des statuts de citoyennete en tension.

Is Development “The New Peace”? Global Citizenship as National Obligation in Postwar Guatemala

Amid growing policy interest in global citizenship education, this ethnographic study examines one school’s mission to foster global citizens among elite youth in Guatemala. Despite educators’ efforts to raise awareness about local inequities and instill national identity and attachment to Guatemala, students constructed a neoliberal vision of citizenship that allowed them to disregard national politics of diversity. Instead, they focused their efforts on becoming globally competitive, often at the expense of reproducing inequality and division.

Disenfranchised: Mapping red zones in Guatemala City

International fast food franchises, such as McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza, have become vital arbiters of security in postwar Guatemala City. They map red zones with a moral authority that even the National Police cannot match. Red zones, or zonas rojas, are neighborhoods in Guatemala City deeply affected by gang- and drug-related violence. While the National Police map these zones by documenting the location of committed crimes, international fast food franchises produce delivery maps that assess the quality of transit through the city. International fast food franchises worry less about the relative security of a given address than about their drivers’ ability to travel safely from their restaurant to the customer’s address. This article, in response, assesses this mobility as a constituent dimension of security in Guatemala City while also detailing its effects. One effect is the affective fallout of being denied a home delivery and becoming what this article calls “disenfranchised.”

“Tocar puertas”: Potere indigeno, ONG e sviluppo nel Guatemala post-guerra

Questo articolo si basa su un caso etnografico di “rafforzamento della governabilità” messo in atto da una ONG internazionale nel municipio indigeno di Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala. Attraverso l’intreccio tra le voci dei funzionari delle ONG e quelle della popolazione locale, cerco di mettere in luce le implicazioni di alcuni malintesi concernenti le forme egemoniche di percepire l’alterità maya, implicite nel multiculturalismo neoliberista, la nuova forma di governance adottata nel Guatemala post-guerra. L’articolo prende in considerazione una performance democratica che mette in luce una appropriazione rituale indigena del discorso dello sviluppo, risultante in un processo di acculturazione/resistenza. Ciò che emerge è una riflessione su come la leadership maya si ridefinisce come mediazione tra la ragione umanitaria della Cooperazione Internazionale, portatrice di risorse, e le logiche locali di potere e prestigio, dove risiede ancora la sua principale fonte di legittimazione.