Power In Guatemala Research Articles

Pentecostalism and Power in Guatemala

Guatemala is the most Protestant country in Latin America, with a rising population of Pentecostals. Although evangelicals have had substantial social and political influence for decades—one of them was a military dictator at the height of the country’s civil war in the early 1980s, and was later tried for genocide—many remain ambivalent about direct engagement with secular power. Instead, evangelical groups have been active in addressing gaps left by the state in a society struggling with violence, in areas such as education, social services, and security.

And the Heat Goes On: Police Repression and the Modalities of Power

Among security institutions, police occupy a unique position. In addition to specializing in the repression of dissent, police monitor society and enforce order. Yet within research studying state repression, how police institutions are used and deployed to control domestic threats remain under-explored, particularly as it relates to the dual functionality just described. In this study, we develop and test an explanation of police repression accounting for the bifurcation of Mann’s two modalities of state power: infrastructural power and despotic power. Infrastructural power allocates police resources to surveil dissidents and preemptively limit dissent’s emergence or escalation. Police deploy despotic power through repressive responses to political threats. Empirically, we employ unique data to investigate police repression and the modalities of power in Guatemala. To analyze how shifting the balance between infrastructural and despotic power affects police repression, we isolate damage occurring from an earthquake that exogenously reshaped the landscape of infrastructural power. Results affirm the role of infrastructural power in regulating the despotic power of the state. Where local infrastructure was most affected by the earthquake, the security apparatus lost the capacity to surveil nascent movements and predict their activity, thereby providing opportunity for dissidents to mobilize and forcing police to (over-)react rather than shutdown resistance preemptively. However, the intensity of state violence recedes as the state recovers from the infrastructural damage and regains its control of local district.

Imperialist Irony

Imperialist Irony

Guatemalan Mayan Indigenous Political Movement: between Class and Culture.

식민지 시대부터 구축되어온 과테말라의 모순적인 사회경제 구조는 19세기 초 반근대화 과정에서 더욱 공고히 되었다. 결국 사회개혁을 요구하는 "국민적" 열망은 1944년 개혁성향의 아레발로(Arevalo)의 집권으로 이어지면서 이후 10년간 과테말라는 개혁의 봄’을 맞게 된다. 하지만 사회개혁적인 정책들로 기득권을 상실할 위기에 처한 과두 지배엘리트 계층의 반발은 결국 계급전쟁의 성격을 띠게 되는 36년 내전을 야기했다. 이 과정에서 그 동안 착취와 수탈의 대상이었던 원주민은 좌익 게릴라와의 연합을 통해 새로운 정치세력으로 등장하였다. 이에 군부는 대대적인 국가폭력을 이용한‘인종’학살과 제노사이드를 자행함으로써, 원주민 운동의 기반을 제거하려 하였다. 동시에 90년대 전후 성장하기 시작한 탈정치적이고 탈계급적인 문화중심의 ‘마야운동(Movimiento Maya)"은 내전 초기의 계급적 성격의 원주민 운동을 대체하기에 이르렀다. 본 연구는 이 같은 과정에서 형성된 원주민 운동과 원주민 대중간의 간극을 통해 현재 과테말라 사회의 모순적인 사회구조를 변화시키는 동력으로서의 사회운동이 출현하지 못하는 한계를 살펴보고자 한다. Social and economic structure of Guatemalan society in contradiction has been consolidated during modernization process, which began in the early 19th century, from the colonial era. Finally this social conflict provoked the Guatemalan Civil War, which was characterized as a class conflict. During wartime the mayan indigenous people had been emerged as a political power incorporating to leftist guerrillas of Guatemala. Then the military unleashed overwhelming violence against indigenous communities because of "fears" toward to the potentiality of forming a new political power. As a result, the mayan indigenous movement has been turning out to be a culture movement, losing their class characteristics. This article aims to examine and analyze the actual mayan indigenous movement from a class perspective to explain the distance produced between "la base" and indigenous movement itself. This approach will allow us to get some reason why the social movement has not been emerged as a social power in Guatemala to represent the excluded mayan people, who are still expecting to improve their social-economic conditions.

Book Review: Global coloniality of power in Guatemala: Racism, genocide, citizenship.

Review(s) of: Global coloniality of power in Guatemala: Racism, genocide, citizenship, by Mart nez- Salazar, Egla (2014). Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. 258 pp. IS BN: 978- 0- 7391- 4123- 6.

Reforming Catholicism: Papal Power in Guatemala during the 1920s and 1930s

The status of Catholicism in Guatemala is truly deplorable,” remarked one Vatican diplomat as he gathered information about the Catholic Church in Guatemala in the 1920s. Its sorry condition, another papal representative contended, originated from the Liberal reform of the 1870s.

To Support a “Brother in Christ”: Evangelical Groups and U.S.-Guatemalan Relations during the Ríos Montt Regime

After Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian, seized power in Guatemala in a 1982 military coup, U.S. evangelical missionaries and parachurch organizations supported his regime through public outreach, fundraising, and congressional lobbying. Despite mounting evidence that Ríos Montt’s campaign against Guatemala’s “communist insurgency” involved the mass killing of indigenous Mayans, conservative evangelical groups in the United States argued that the dictator’s Christian faith would compel him to improve the country’s human rights situation. This essay explores the theological beliefs underpinning evangelical support for Ríos Montt and contends that backing from U.S. and Guatemalan evangelicals for his regime and for Reagan administration’s efforts to extend military aid to Guatemala became significant factors shaping relations between the two countries. By placing evangelical involvement in Guatemala in an international context as part of a global evangelistic campaign, this essay reveals how religious nonstate actors shaped U.S. relations with Central America in this period.

Global coloniality of power in Guatemala: racism, genocide, citizenship

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2:Genealogical Backgrounds of Power Chapter 3: Structural and Everyday Practices of Racism Chapter 4: Genocide as Tool to Eliminate the Racialized and Politically Undesirable Chapter 5: The Bureaucracy of Death and Vilified Memories Chapter 6: Citizenship as Repression and a Space of Inclusion-Exclusion Chapter 7: Some Concluding Thoughts

Beware the Great Horned Serpent! Chiapas under the Threat of Napoleon

Beware the Great Horned Serpent! Chiapas under the Threat of Napoleon

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

Public Memory and Political Power in Guatemala's Postconflict Landscape

Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.

Democratizing Civil Society in Latin America

If the twentieth century was dominated by the rise and reach of the state, its close has been marked by the ascendance of civil society. Yet this long-overdue recognition of the importance of civil society has too often evolved into a simplistic equation of democracy with a strong civil society. A strong civil society, however, may not necessarily be a democratic one. For example, popular social forces have recently sought to undermine democracy in Ecuador and Venezuela, and democratic voters have returned former authoritarian leaders to power in Guatemala and Bolivia. Even a democratic civil society does not ensure a democratic state, but the latter is unlikely to be sustainable without the former. Democratic deficits within civil society jeopardize its ability to perform its proper social functions--and its legitimacy at home and abroad. Democracy requires not just more civil society, but better civil society.

Guatemala's Precarious Peace

The Guatemalan peace process will ultimately be considered successful if it contributes to reconciliation among the many participants in the armed conflict… . While international human rights norms and institutions clearly support uncovering the truth about Guatemala's bloody past, such inquiries call nto question the fundamental structures of military, political, and economic power in Guatemala.

The Catholic Church in Revolutionary Guatemala, 1944-54: A House Divided

Although the Catholic Church wielded enormous power in Guate mala during the colonial and early national periods, the Liberal reforms of the 1870s severely restricted the Church for some sixty years. The institution experienced more freedom under Jorge Ubico from 1931 to 1944 as the hierarchy and the dictator reached a detente of sorts, but some authors claim that church-state relations grew increasingly abra sive during the revolutionary decade (1944-1954). Several scholars cite charges of the government's connection to communists as well as its continued rejection of clerical privileges as the cause of the friction between church and state. Preoccupied with these questions the Gua temalan Church provided an effective and unified opposition to the Revolutionary governments, and proved unable to acknowledge and embrace the positive social reforms embarked upon by the Arevalo and Arbenz administrations.1

Popular Insurgency and Social Revolution in Central America

This essay discusses certain aspects of the revolutionary process in Central America-the social transformation in Nicaragua and the struggle for the conquest of political power in Guatemala and El Salvador. It focuses on the problematic of the actual protagonists. The first section affirms the multiclass nature of these processes, in their insurrectional stage as well as in the initial stages of revolutionary transformation. In the second section, it is argued that this complex social profile is the result of the type of capitalism that has developed in the region, which is characterized by a slow and problematic proletarianization of the labor force. In the third section, we discuss the importance of the political project of these revolutions, in order to arrive at the class character of the leadership of the national popular bloc. Finally, in the fourth section we focus on the internal differentiation that occurs within the national popular bloc as the revolutionary process proceeds from the struggle for the liquidation of the oppressive state to the stage of political, social, and economic transformation. We also touch upon some of the contradictions that occur within this process. Although the main point of reference for this essay is Central America, we have included illustrations from other revolutionary processes when they contribute to a clarification of the arguments presented. Social revolutions always fuse together a multiplicity of questions and objectives. The transformation of the economic structure and the construction of a new kind of political power involve efforts of a varied nature and diverse range: the development of the productive forces