by Todd Gordon
While the post-coup political and economic environment has therefore been devastating for most Hondurans, it has been a boon for Canadian capital. While particularly intense in the context of a dictatorship, the general pursuit of the interests of Canadian capital by the Canadian state in Honduras is hardly anomalous. The trend is far-reaching, indeed generalizable throughout much of Latin America. The dynamics of Canadian foreign policy in Guatemala, which we turn our attention to in the following chapter, provides an additional exemplary model of Ottawa’s steadfast commitment to twenty-first century imperialism.
CHAPTER 3
MINING IN THE WAKE OF GENOCIDE: CANADIAN CORPORATIONS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GUATEMALA
Guatemala provides the quintessential backdrop to the wider Cold War narrative in Latin America: the October Revolution of 1944 inspired hope for a socialized democracy through Agrarian Reform and other initiatives; the 1954 U.S.-backed coup cut short that dream and instituted the start of a reign of terror and the concretization of a counterinsurgent state; the Left was forced eventually to take up guerrilla insurgency after all other means of political action were thwarted; and the scourge of death squads, rapes, torture, disappearances, kidnappings, and massacres, fortified by U.S.-trained and equipped central intelligence agencies, reached its apogee in the racialized genocide of 1981–1982. In 1996, with over 200,000 murdered by the Guatemalan state, the four-decade-long civil war ended with the Left vanquished, and the ideal of democratic socialism effectively crushed.317 “To write about Guatemala,” the anthropologist Carlota Mcallister points out, “is to write about twentieth-century Latin America’s bloodiest armed conflict. Rapacious agrarian capitalism, combined with systemic Ladino (nonindigenous) oppression of the Mayan majority, made Guatemala fertile terrain for struggles for radical change, but also made those struggles exceptionally punishing to fight.”318
The 1996 peace accords allowed for a concerted shift toward neoliberal economic restructuring and the consolidation of a new model of accumulation rooted in attracting foreign investment to a variety of extractive industries. It is within this context that Canadian mining companies have rapidly expanded their reach and influence in the Guatemalan political economy. As is true elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, the expansion of mining activities under the control of multinational capital in twenty-first century Guatemala has led to intensified social conflict and the slow remilitarization of politics in an effort on the part of the economic and political elite to contain unrest. Since 2003, a new wave of social protests has emerged in the country for the first time since the close of the war. Rural Mayan indigenous communities are at the leading edge of this new resistance, and opposition to mining is at the very core of their movements. With the rising level of conflict in the countryside, the response of the state, private security companies working for transnational corporations, and paramilitary groupings has been intensifying repression. A new dialectic of popular resistance from below and ferocious violence from above is a defining feature of the Guatemalan present. Canadian mining capital, and the coercive apparatuses working on its behalf, is a crucial element in this dynamic.
This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it provides a long historical backdrop of the Guatemalan social formation, emphasizing critical turning points in the country’s political economy since the mid-twentieth century, the military genocide in the context of civil war, and the transition through the peace accords to the neoliberal present. Second, it maps out the array of Canadian mining corporations active in the country, and explains their involvement in the new patterns of accumulation, exploitation, and violence. The third and final section then explains the new wave of class struggle evolving in the Guatemalan countryside, and the ways in which Canadian mining capital has become a principal target of this resistance.
HISTORICAL PORTRAIT
Between 1931 and 1944 the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico controlled the country. Free elections in 1944 opened up a new season in Guatemalan politics, however, with Juan José Arévalo’s ascendancy to the presidency. Arévalo, who distanced himself rhetorically from both Marxism and individualistic capitalism, was a self-styled “spiritual socialist.” Through an array of modest social reforms—including the Law of Forced Rental requiring large landholders to lease the uncultivated sectors of their land at low rates, the enactment of a social security system by 1950, and the country’s first labour code allowing strikes and union organizing—Arévalo earned the dual ire of U.S. foreign policy makers and the domestic ruling class alike.319 A State Department memorandum of 1948 noted that although the reforms were not “proof of communism,” this certainly did not indicate that there was “no communist inspiration behind them.”320 The move of Jacobo Árbenz into the presidency in 1950, with 65 percent of the popular vote, seemed at first glance to offer respite to U.S. functionaries and the Guatemalan landed class. But within months, the State Department radically departed from its initial assessment of Árbenz as a moderate alternative to Arévalo, highlighting what it took to be “the ascending curve of Communist influence” in the new administration.321 It is now beyond reasonable dispute in the historiography of Guatemala that neither the regime of Arévalo (1944–1950), nor of Árbenz (1950–1954) ever posed a real threat to the sanctity of private property or the institutional parameters of liberal democracy, but this proved no obstacle to their opponents pursuing the ideological frame of a red menace.322
Among other things, immediately at stake were the considerable investments of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Within Guatemala, the company had come to own a remarkable 42 percent of the country’s farm land, against a wider backdrop of extreme land concentration by a tiny elite, and corresponding landlessness for the indigenous agrarian majority; externally, the company had unusually tight political ties to the highest echelons of the Dwight Eisenhower administration—the former law firm of the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was the longstanding legal representation of the company; the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen Dulles, had been on the company’s board of trustees; the company’s preeminent public relations officer, Ed Whitman, was married to Ann Whitman, the private secretary to Eisenhower. What influence the company could not channel immediately through these connections was purchased through the coverage of journalists’ expenses on their visits to the country, ensuring the “correct” angle in the subsequent stories in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader, among others. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1953, through which Árbenz committed himself to the expropriation (with compensation) of 234,000 acres of the company’s land, clearly had something to do with the the subsequent intervention of the CIA in the destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Árbenz regime in 1954.323
But there were wider, regional shifts in U.S. security policy in Latin America that extended well beyond the Guatemalan theatre, suggesting United Fruit’s specific material interests fortuitously overlapped with an overarching set of U.S. strategic aims. Having abandoned its relative multilateralism vis-à-vis Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s, by the early 1950s the U.S. state had explicitly stated the secondary importance of democracy in the evaluation of any Latin American government, and the primary importance of anti-Communist commitment. “Technical and financial aid provided to security forces was stepped up,” historian Greg Grandin observes, “now part of a more systemic policy of containment, which included the support and orchestration of coups and destabilization programs (Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina), and, when all else failed, invasion (the Dominican Republic and Grenada).”324
1954 marked a turning point in Guatemalan history. The stage had been set for the rise of the counterinsurgent state, the evisceration of reformist electoral projects stemming from the Left, the rise of guerrilla movements—first small bands of ladinos rooted in a foco strategy and later mass-based insurgencies with organic ties and bases in indigenous communities of the highlands—and
the eventual escalation of military violence to the scale of genocide in the early 1980s. A popular narrative to have emerged out of this history is one of dos demonios, or two demons—the ladino guerrillas, on the one side, and the ladino military on the other. Trapped between was a hapless, victimized Mayan majority, devoid of agency and political intention. While it is true that the guerrilla leaderships were principally constituted by ladinos, and that there was a failure on their part to adequately incorporate and represent Mayans, the two demons thesis is nonetheless highly misleading. To “treat the Guatemalan state and its armed opposition as equally guilty of genocide,” Mcallister points out, “is not only to ignore statistics showing that state forces committed 93 percent of wartime human rights violations and the guerrillas only 3 percent, but also to occlude the phenomenon of Mayan participation in Guatemalan leftist groups, including armed ones.”325
Throughout the 1970s, demands for reform increased through an array of popular movement activity. The response from the state and ruling class was ever-escalating violence, carried out by the police, military, and death squads. Reformist parties such as the Christian Democrats, having raised expectations, were ultimately unable to win gains for their rural indigenous constituencies. As a consequence, growing numbers of Guatemalans, including Mayans, who had already been politicized in reformist political projects, joined the armed struggle.326 Alongside this process of radicalization through repression, grassroots organizations within the Catholic Church began to form Christian Base Communities as part of the eventual formation of a “Church of the Poor” perspective. These variegated religious currents fed into indigenous politicization in complex ways.327 Between 1976 and 1978, these developments led to the formation of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee of Peasant Unity, CUC), which included poor ladino agricultural workers, and Mayan peasants and agricultural workers, but with the latter taking the dominant role in leadership.328 Although the CUC was a non-military organization that transcended the boundaries of the guerrilla movement, it is nonetheless important to point out that it “was baptized on April 15, 1978, at a meeting of the EGP’s [Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, Guerrilla Army of the Poor] national leadership, and…quickly came to dwarf every previous Guatemalan indigenous political group.”329
Another factor was the changing strategic orientation of the guerrillas themselves. By the early 1970s the main guerrilla organizations had come to the conclusion that the focused, small, vanguardist strategy of the foco had not worked in the 1960s because it was overly militaristic and lacked a mass basis. One symptom of this early lack of concern with slowly accumulating a mass base had been a systematic neglect of the material, political, and cultural needs and interests of the Mayan population. By the early 1970s, as the guerrilla organizations were beginning to rearticulate themselves in novel forms, they began to reach out in an effort to build organic links with indigenous communities. The armed struggle reached its apex in the early 1980s, recruiting between 6,000 and 8,000 armed fighters, and 250,000 to 500,000 active collaborators and supporters between 1980 and 1981. As an expression of this dynamic growth and concomitant guerrilla convergence, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) was formed in early 1982, drawing together all of the hitherto divided armed organizations.330 Drawing on the many ethnographic interviews with Mayan guerrillas he conducted in the highlands of the country, Grandin makes the following assessment: “Marxism, as a theory of how to understand and act in the world, gave inhabitants in what was one of the most subjugated regions not only in Guatemala but arguably in Latin America a means to insist on their consequence.”331
In the cities, too, building on a long history of trade union struggle against state terror,332 and student activism in groups like the Frente Unido del Estudiantado Guatemalteco Organizado (United Front of Guatemalan Students), the late 1970s and very early 1980s witnessed an effervescence of left-wing militancy in myriad forms. “In 1978, shantytown dwellers, bus drivers, factory and state workers, students, and almost everyone else in Guatemala City brought it to a halt to raise wages and stop an increase in bus fares,” notes historian Deborah T. Levenson:
In mid-1979 the call for a democratic and revolutionary Guatemala was pervasive, and many people sat by their radios listening to the Sandinistas take Managua.…It did not seem unrealistic to think revolution was on the horizon. Not only did tens of thousands join the revolutionary fronts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in some areas of Gautemala these new recruits pushed the guerrilla leadership to take stronger military initiatives.333
The early 1980s registered the beginning of a tragic reversal, however. Throughout the 1970s, the increasing mobilization, and the deepening of demands for reform, had precipitated a growing unity across the state and ruling class and their array of coercive apparatuses that would by the 1980s allow for an unprecedented wave of violence from on high.334 The military, while eminently capable of repression of popular movements for many decades, took a qualitative turn in the intensity of its assault on the population. The cities were terrorized, but it was even worse in “rural Maya communities, where the military committed acts of genocide premised on its racism and its historic fear of Maya rebellion.”335 In 1981, a scorched earth campaign was initiated, leading to the murder of over one hundred thousand Mayans, and the uprooting and displacement of many more indigenous communities. Throughout 1982 and most of 1983 the army’s campaign continued. Alongside genocidal elimination, the military began to exercise a structural influence over rural life through the creation of civil patrols that forced able-bodied Mayan men to serve in local militias and participate in the killing of neighbouring communities, and sometimes their own, or be killed themselves. While often militarily ineffective, the incorporation of roughly nine hundred thousand people into the militias allowed for an incredibly deep systematization of regimented discipline, controlled movement, and dissemination of propaganda in the countryside.336
“By the time the war ended in 1996,” Grandin explains, “the state had killed two hundred thousand people, disappeared forty thousand, and tortured unknown thousands more.”337 It would be difficult to exaggerate the long term consequences of this qualitative shift in state terror and the military defeat of the Left through genocidal war for the disarticulation of popular cultures of opposition and resistance in the country. The political counterrevolution of racist militarism was what made possible the eventual shifting of gears toward an economic counterrevolution of radical neoliberal restructuring.
Indeed, the 1996 peace accords established the parameters for the deepening and consolidation of a neoliberal program for restructuring that had been unfolding in a piecemeal fashion since the Christian Democratic administration of Vinicio Cerezo (1986–1991). In early 1997, the National Advancement Party let loose a structural adjustment program of marked intensity and scope.338 It laid the basis for a thoroughgoing transformation of existing class structures, both rural and urban, and new forms of capitalist expansion and penetration into all avenues of social life.
In the countryside, the counter-insurgency efforts of the 1980s provoked a veritable tide of displaced peasants, annihilating peasant economies, and paving the way—through blood and fire—for the full incorporation of the rural indigenous population into the system of market imperatives characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. As a result of this dynamic of primitive accumulation through war, both the old latifundia (large-landholdings) and minifundia (small plots) patterns of land tenure were transformed, allowing for the first time the full establishment of a capitalist wage labour system in rural areas.339
Millions had been uprooted, fleeing temporarily into mountain areas, across the border to Mexican refugee camps or into the margins of that country’s informal economy, and sometimes, from there, onto the United States. At a conservative minimum, fifty-five thousand people internally displaced from war resettled in the poorest barrios of Guatema
la City, often shedding any Mayan signifiers from their dress to escape racist persecution. These people entered an urban reserve of unemployed or precariously employed, adopting a panoply of survival strategies in both the formal and informal domains of the city’s economic life.340 Traumatized migrant youth joined the growing numbers of vulnerable cheap labourers who were being fed into the escalating drug trade. By 2000, almost 80 percent of cocaine being shipped to the United States from South America passed through Guatemala. The warring gangs of Mara-18 (M-18) and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) sunk their roots in this new “post-conflict” Guatemalan political economy after setting up base after wide-scale deportations from Los Angeles in 1996.
The violence of the narco trade flowed up from Colombia and down from Mexico, blending together with extra-legal paramilitary violence associated with multinational corporations seeking to quell insubordinate communities standing in the way of tourist development projects or mining exploration initiatives. The murder rate fell from thirty-nine per one hundred thousand inhabitants in 2011 to thirty-four in 2012, the lowest figure in a decade, but began to rise again in the first half of 2013 and continued to be high by international standards.341
At a political level, the transition to polyarchy which accompanied the peace accords proved functional to renewed rounds of capitalist accumulation which had been stymied in preceding years by the instability embedded in the insurgency-counterinsurgency dialectic. Foreign capital fleeing Guatemala in the context of war had been tailed systematically by the finances of Guatemalan capitalists who opted in large numbers to park their money in out-of-country bank accounts until the end of the war. “A change in the mode of social control and the system of domination,” sociologist William I. Robinson rightly suggests, “was the precondition for a recovery and reorganization of the process of capital accumulation.”342 As elsewhere in Central America, the changing model of accumulation in Guatemala over the 1990s and 2000s involved a sharp turn toward large scale tourist development projects, expanding extractive industry (particularly mining), biofuel plantations, hydroelectric dam developments, and cheap feminized labour in export processing zones, or maquiladoras.343
