The Defense of Community

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 11 No. 4, October 2011, pp. 556580.
The Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala

LEIRE URKIDI
Mining is one of the most controversial activities in contemporary Guatemala. The antimining movement was studied during ve months of participant and qualitative research, focusing on its strategies and discourses. The movement is multiscalar, with local, national and transnational dimensions, but the defence of community is a central claim in its discourse. The community is reclaimed as a legitimate scale for decision-making by the anti-mining movement because it is: (a) the scale that suffers the material impacts of mining; (b) the place of Maya cultural resistance for reimagining alternative development projects; and (c) an historically marginalized sector of the population, that should be empowered in order to achieve more participative and fair decision-making processes. As in other peasant struggles, defending the community is not an objective per se, but a strategy to contest domination. The community is dialectically redened in relation to Guatemalas historical injustices. Keywords: gold mining, social movements, political ecology, community, Maya resistance
INTRODUCTION Since the early 1990s, Latin America has become the extraction frontier for many metal commodities (Bridge 2004; Urkidi 2010). Mainly mining companies from the global North have been exploring and extracting gold, silver, copper, zinc, tin, bauxite and other metals in the region (USGS 2008). The high prices of metals such as gold, stricter labour and environmental requirements in Northern countries than in Latin America, and attractive mining legislation reforms carried out in the 1980s and 1990s all fostered the mining rush (Amey and Butterman 2005). However, the expansion of mineral exploration and extraction has not been peaceful. Mining is an environmentally risky economic activity, so many communities in Latin America have raised objections to projects in their territories. The Latin American Observatory of Mining Conicts (OCMAL) has reported more than 130 conicts1 in the region since 2000 (OCMAL 2010). When mines reach indigenous lands, the territorial and political rights of indigenous peoples become central claims in the conicts. In the case of gold, Moody (1996) believed
Leire Urkidi, Institut de Cincia i Tecnologia Ambientals, ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Science Building, C, 9th area, 4th oor, UAB, 08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Valls), Barcelona, Spain. E-mail [email protected] I would like to thank Joan Martnez-Alier and Marco Armiero for commenting on previous versions of this paper. For the support during the eldwork in Guatemala, I would like to thank COPAE San Marcos, FLACSO-Guatemala and FAS-UAB (Fundaci Autnoma Solidaria). This research was funded by a PhD scholarship from the Basque Government (BFI: 06.303). I acknowledge support from the Spanish MICINN project (CSO2010-21979). I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very useful comments. 1 OCMAL reports conicts on every kind of mining activity (metal, coal, building materials), but the majority concern metal mining. 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 557 that, without taking Africa into account, half of the gold mined in the world from 1995 to 2015 was likely to come from indigenous lands. Indeed, in 2010, the indigenous question is a key mobilizing factor in the opposition to mining in Latin America. This is certainly the case in Guatemala, where 95 per cent of the existing licences2 in 2004 had been granted after 2000, and most of them were in indigenous provinces (Defensora Qeqchi 2004). As explained by President Alvaro Colom at the United Nations in February 2010, Guatemala was never a mining country and its regulatory framework for mining activities is poor with regard to the economy, the environment and indigenous rights (see Colom 2010). Indeed, the growth of mining has faced signicant opposition. More than forty communities have rejected mining in public consultations, appealing to ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples and the Guatemalan Municipal Code.The anti-mining movement has organized many public protests, resorting to road blockages, demonstrations, information talks and legal complaints.The debate about the most appropriate conditions and procedures for making decisions about and carrying out mining projects became public and active in 2003, when Canadian Goldcorp Inc.3 started the construction of the Marlin mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacn and Sipakapa (San Marcos province). In June 2005, Sipakapa carried out a public consultation about mining that became a milestone in the history of contemporary Guatemalan social movements (Arvalo 2006; Yagenova 2006). This paper focuses on the Marlin mining conict, explaining the multiscalar character of the resistance to the project, and then analysing how the community is defended in the movements discourse. The relevance of mining conicts in Guatemalan contemporary politics has led to a proliferation of academic and activist research about their procedures and results (Cuffe 2005; Fulmer et al. 2008; Holden and Jacobson 2008, 2009; Yagenova and Garca 2009; Sieder 2010). In every study, the multiscalar character of the Marlin case is manifest. By multiscalar, I mean that the movement is composed of actors in different geographical locations, that it acts simultaneously in various political spheres, and that it is inuenced by a combination of international, regional, national, municipal and communitarian social processes and regulations. The increased ows of information and resources between scales may be a novelty of the anti-mining and other current social movements in Guatemala. However, there is another relevant process regarding the political innovation of this movement: the reconstruction and defence of community as the proper scale for decision-making on mining and natural resources management. The community is a basic organizational scale in the Maya world and its defence is increasingly present in contentious Guatemalan politics.4 The resistance to mining has contributed greatly to increasing the relevance of the community in Guatemalan social and political life. I argue that the community is dened by the anti-mining movement as: (a) the scale where mining impacts happen, and therefore the scale at which nal consent or rejection should take place; (b) the place for reconstructing the Maya understanding of naturesociety integrity; and (c) an historically marginalized sector of the population that should be empowered in order to achieve more participative and fair decision-making processes.
2 3
In 2009, the country had 395 mining permits: 114 of them were for metal exploration and 27 were for metal extraction (Ministry of Energy and Mines 2009). The Marlin mine has been a Goldcorp project since 2006. Before that, it was owned by other Canadian companies: Montana Goldcorp (19962002) and Glamis Gold (20026). In 2010, Goldcorp had two other gold mine projects in eastern Guatemala (www.goldcorp.com). 4 See, for instance, the decentralized struggles against CAFTA, Plan Puebla Panama, hydroelectric projects, biofuel plantations and foreign enterprises such as Unin Fenosa. 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
558 Leire Urkidi In line with Escobar (2001), I state that the strategic rescaling of the movement, resorting to transnational courts and to national and supra-national networks, is compatible with the claims of the local place. I argue that the defence of community should not be understood as its idealization and essentialization (Vayda and Walters 1999), but as a historically contextualized political strategy. The paper is structured as follows. First, the methodology of the research is explained.Then, the theoretical basis of the study is presented: the discussions around environmental movements in the global South and the politics of scale. Third, contemporary Guatemalan politics are contextualized. In the fourth section, the conict around mining in Guatemala is explained, focusing on the Marlin case. Subsequently, the paper analyses how the community is defended by the anti-mining movement. Finally, the conclusions are drawn in the last section. METHODOLOGY The analysis of the movement and its discourse is based on ve months of eldwork in Guatemala (OctoberDecember 2008 and JulySeptember 2009). In order to collect the opinions of actors at different locations, in-depth interviews were carried out with anti-mining activists in Guatemala City, San Marcos City, Huehuetenango, Sipakapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacan. Even if the research was focused on the anti-mining movement, since struggles are relational processes, it was seen as necessary also to interview pro-mining social actors, government agents local and national and members of organizations that are ideologically close to the mining company. Goldcorps representatives did not agree to talk to me. A total of twenty-ve in-depth interviews5 were carried out (for details, see the Appendix). Subsequently, a content analysis of the transcribed interviews was conducted. Other research techniques, known as direct and participant observation, were also employed (Jorgensen 1989; Gabarrn and Hernndez 1994; Yin 2003). I attended demonstrations, small gatherings and general meetings of social organizations, mining consultations and press conferences related to mining.6 Moreover, I participated in an action-research project that was established by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, an organization of the Catholic Church of San Marcos province that is working on the Marlin conict (COPAE, Comisin Pastoral Ecologa y Paz Ecology and Peace Pastoral Commission) and a working group on social movements of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Guatemala).The project organized a series of participative sessions with 20 people from Sipakapa and San Miguel, in order to train them in social research methods. Eventually, the sessions became open discussions about mining, territory, legality, resistance, and their daily lives and needs. It was very useful to take part in the planning of this project and in the sessions in order to understand the resistance to the Marlin mine. Additionally, a literature review was carried out and Internet reports, leaets and pamphlets, and previous research on the case, were collected. A press search7 about the mining issue was also completed for the years 20052009. I found and read over 330 items on mining news and articles in Prensa Libre, which demonstrates the signicance of the mining debate in the media.
Each interview lasted for one hour on average and was carried out by myself personally. In order to respect their anonymity, the interviewees will be referred to only as numbers in the Appendix. 6 In San Marcos, Guatemala City, Sipakapa, San Miguel Ixtahuacan and Huehuetenango. 7 Prensa Libre (one of the principal Guatemalan newspapers) was comprehensively reviewed, since it regularly monitors mining issues. Other newspapers, such as Siglo XXI, were also consulted. 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 559 ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS AND THE POLITICS OF SCALE In their thesis on the environmentalism of the poor, Guha and Martnez-Alier (1997) argue that peasant and/or indigenous groups tend to defend their environment because they depend on it directly for their livelihood. However, they note that those struggles may be expressed in different valuation languages, comprising not only livelihood needs but also human rights, indigenous recognition, sacredness or claims for economic compensation (Guha and MartnezAlier 1997; Martnez-Alier, 2001, 2002). According to Robbins (2004), the emergence of environmental movements in the South responds to material causes such as threats to livelihood or to environmental resources and services, but the conicts subsequently build bridges to class, ethnic or gender struggles. Indeed, many communitarian struggles over the environment are not just expressed in environmental terms, but are combined with questions of social justice, land rights, ethnicity, gender and human rights (Escobar 1995; Pellow 2002; Watts and Peet 2004). The hybridizing of indigenous and environmental claims, of social justice and ecological concerns, is a key current trend in Latin American environmental movements (Hurtado and Lungo 2007; Carruthers 2008). According to Hurtado and Lungo (2007), during the rst decade of the twenty-rst century, environmental conicts in Guatemala were related to transnational megaprojects (hydroelectric projects, dams, oil projects and mines) and free trade agreements. In general terms, those protests have developed in decentralized ways and indigenous groups play a central role (Hurtado and Lungo 2007). For more than thirty years, the variegated research on social movements has focused on different aspects of social mobilization. Some authors have emphasized the structural grievances that generate social mobilizations (Habermas 1984), while others have studied the processes of identity reconstruction (Melucci 1985; Touraine 1985), the mobilization of the necessary resources (Zald 1992; McAdam et al. 1996) or the way in which discourses are framed (Snow and Benford 1988) as key processes for explaining a movements existence. In a broad sense, social movements could be dened as a form of reexive collective action, maintained over time and space, that develops networks of individuals, organizations and social processes (Hurtado and Lungo 2007). Those networks share complaints, discourses and values, building a certain collective identity and acting on transformative social processes in search of an alternative agenda (Escobar 1995; Bebbington et al. 2007). My research aimed to understand the roots of mobilization and the resultant strategies of the anti-mining movement in Guatemala. According to a Guatemalan pro-mining spokesman, when the peace was agreed and concepts such as revolution or socialism lost relevance, in Guatemala and mainly in the highlands where the armed revolutionary victory had been planned new ideological niches were obviously sought. One is the environmentalist and the other is the anti-mining one (Interview 23). An article by political journalist Carlisle Johnson8 gives another twist to this thesis. According to him, the resistance to mining is formed by foreign NGOs that are fed with political money, and they have particular political and economic objectives that do not favour the prosperity of Guatemalan families (El Peridico, 14 September 2004). The idea is that the resistance to mining is a conspiracy that ignores national and local needs. Although the Marlin conict could hardly be understood as a foreign conspiracy, these discussions centred the mining debate on the scalar dimensions of the resistance movement. Are
8
Carlisle Johnson is a neoliberal political analyst and journalist, working at the Universidad Marroqun and hosting a radio programme in English in Guatemala: Good Morning Guatemala.
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560 Leire Urkidi protests local or transnational? Where, according to the movement, should mining decisions be made? When analysing the eldwork data, I noticed that the community was the key location of the movements demands.The defence of community has a long tradition in Latin American land conicts (see Mallon 1983, on the Peruvian highlands). According to Watts and Peet (2004), the community looms large in political ecology:9 it is important because it is a locus of knowledge, a site of regulation and management, a source of identity, the embodiment of various institutions, an object of state recognition and control, and a theatre of resistance and struggle (Watts and Peet 2004). However, the community is not an unproblematic concept in political ecology and in geographical political economy (Brown and Purcell 2005). The territorial understanding of the community the territorial trap, in Agnews words (1994) has been frequently contested with the argument that peoples sense of political community is nowadays not as much related to physical proximity as in the past (see the reviews of Leitner et al. 2008; Nicholls 2009).10 Indeed, it is pointed out that territorial conceptions of places and scales typically feed a politics of nostalgia rather than one of progressive change, and that they fuel localist or nationalist claims to place based on eternal, essential, and in consequence exclusive, characteristics of belonging (Massey 2004, 6). According to Mohan and Stokke (2000), it is the uncritical idealization of local situations that overlooks internal differentiation. In contrast, other authors argue that social movements may exert a defence of the place in a certain territorial sense and reclaim a political scale, not as an essentialist position but as a strategy (Escobar 2001). In this sense, place could be dened as the experience of a particular location with some measure of groundedness (however unstable), sense of boundaries (however permeable), and connection to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed, traversed by power, and never xed (Escobar 2001, 140). Following the same approach, Harvey (2000) suggests that many social struggles are placebased they are militant particularisms, using Williams words (1989 in Harvey 2000) but, later on, they may network in order to create broader movements in spatial and political terms.11 This process is similar to the idea of scaling from below, where social movements engage in broader scales in order to construct solidarities and political opportunities (Smith 1996; Brenner 2001; MacKinnon and Phelps 2001). Below in this context can refer to both lower scales in territorial terms, and to lower in the sense of grassroots movements, marginalized groups and lower classes (Haarstad and Floysand 2007). According to Swyngedouw (2004), scales can be conceived as regulatory orders, as networks or as their discursive representations. Indeed, scale is nowadays conceptualized as a relational, power-laden and contested construction with which actors engage strategically, in order to legitimize or challenge existing power relations (Leitner et al. 2008). When analysing the Marlin case in Guatemala, some authors have analysed the regulatory systems operating at different scales. According to Fulmer et al. (2008), the regulatory
9 Although it is not a homogeneous eld (Watts and Peet 2004), it could be summarized that political ecology studies, by means of a critical and radical approach, the social forms of access and control over resources and their implications for environmental health, sustainable livelihoods and environmental degradation (Robbins 2004). An underlying assumption is that politics and environment are thoroughly interconnected (Harvey 1993) and that the environment is constituted through struggles over material practices and over meaning (Bryant 1998). For more information on political ecology, see Robbins (2004). 10 See Nicholls (2009) for a review of the implications of this debate on the study of social movements, and Leitner et al. (2008) for a review on the spatialities of contentious politics. 11 For a critique of Harveys thesis, see Featherstone (2005, 252). He puts forward a more generous and recursive account of the relationship between place and broader political imaginaries than accounts which suggest militant particularisms are formed and then networked.This positions solidarities as equivalences that are productive of new political identities rather than just bringing together xed interests (see also Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 12731).
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 561 frameworks inuencing the Marlin conict are simultaneously international, national, municipal, and public and private. But they argue that international conventions, IFIs norms, companies social responsibility programmes or incoherent decentralization policies will not provide the conditions for just and democratic decision-making on mining.They conclude that the political will of a state is needed to assure it (Fulmer et al. 2008). Sieder (2010) acknowledges the central role of communitarian institutions in this conict. She argues that the weak performance of Guatemalan courts and the development of international laws, institutions and conventions supporting communitarian and indigenous rights are leading to a juridication of the anti-mining conict (Sieder 2010). In this case, juridication means that the focus of the political strategy lies in appealing to courts, in developing and reclaiming customary regulation12 such as communitarian consultations and in adopting a legalistic language of protest. Other authors have approached the conict by focusing on the relevance of the different activist networks. Some analysts emphasize the key role played by transnational actors (Christian foreign organizations, indigenous coalitions) and national ones (the Guatemalan Catholic Church, environmental NGOs) in resource and discourse mobilization (Holden and Jacobson 2008, 2009). Other authors highlight the protagonist role of rural communities in the conict (Cuffe 2005;Yagenova and Garca 2009): The protests are territorially grounded, reecting the unsatised needs and demands arising from daily life.They do not necessarily reect nationwide strategies of struggle. Instead, they emerge from the analysis and reection of local actors, driven by an awareness of their own discontent (Yagenova and Garca 2009, 1578). This paper tries to explain the apparent contradiction of the existence of a multiscalar movement that has reconstructed the community as the legitimate scale for decision-making in the course of this conict. Even if scales are based in material conditions biophysical, social and economic they are dialectically reconstructed during conicts.They are not pre-given or totally xed, but redened in the struggles (Swyngedouw 1997; Brenner 2001). GUATEMALAN DEMOCRATIZATION AND MINING Guatemala endured 36 years (19601996) of bloody internal war. During the conict, 300,000 people were exiled and 200,000 were killed or disappeared. According to the Historical Clarication Commission (Comisin de Esclarecimiento Histrico; see CEH 1999), 95 per cent of such crimes were carried out by the army, three out of every four victims were indigenous people, and 400 Maya villages were directly devastated by the army. The so-called civil governments, or restricted democracy, started with the elections of 1986. As the repression decreased, the popular movement beyond the guerrilla forces started to reconstruct itself mainly in relation to human rights (Figueroa Ibarra 2004). On the quincentenary of Columbus arrival, protest events ooded several regions of Latin America and demonstrated the growth of the indigenous movement. In 1992, Rigoberta Mench won the Nobel Peace Prize, making Guatemala well known internationally. With the international legitimization of indigenous rights, considerations about ethnic identity began to permeate most Guatemalan movements. The historical marginalization of the Maya population was a grievance that had been repressed for too long. According to Figueroa Ibarra (2004, 166), nowadays almost every sphere of popular protest is permeated by ethnic claims. These were also the years during which the pan-Maya identity emerged as that sum of all the Maya
12 Customary law could be dened as the concepts, beliefs and norms that, within a given community, dene prejudicial actions or crimes, the processes by which these should be resolved, and the sanctions determined and applied (Sieder 1999).
562 Leire Urkidi ethno-linguistic groups of Guatemala (Bastos and Camus 1995, 2003; Warren 1996), although even today, indigenous people tend to identify themselves as Quich, Mam or Cachiquel13 rather than as Maya. In 1996, the government and the URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional de Guatemala) the guerrilla umbrella organization that later became a political party signed peace agreements, and the parties to the conict began to negotiate constitutional reforms.14 That process, which was pursued with the involvement of civil society organizations, demonstrated that while the government was willing to negotiate on human, civil, political and indigenous rights, socio-economic rights were non-negotiable (Brett 2006), a position that was to have important consequences for later conicts over mining.The tendency to recognize cultural and political rights, but leave economic ones off the agenda, was common to other democratization processes in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, Hale argues that the cultural project of neoliberalism entails proactive recognition of a minimal package of cultural rights, and an equally vigorous rejection of the rest (Hale 2002, 485). The postwar context shapes many aspects of current Guatemalan social movements. First, democratization created the opportunity for organization and action by social movements. Second, the peace negotiations raised the possibility of political participation by indigenous actors, which was also encouraged by the ratication in 1995 of ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. Finally, as the negotiations on constitutional reforms were actually understood as a failure by many national organizations, the beginning of the twentyrst century led to a moment of crisis and reection. For the anti-mining movement, two more aspects of the post-war context were determinant: the fact that during democratization the country was opened up to foreign mining capital, and the implementation of decentralization policies that broadened the participation of municipalities. In Guatemala, the current Mining Code was written in 1997. While the previous law stipulated royalties of 6 per cent, the 1997 law decreased the amount to only 1 per cent. At the same time, the political stability created by the democratic system favoured the arrival of new foreign capital.The so-called neoliberal and populist-neoliberal governments of Arz (19969) and Berger (20048) granted the majority of the mining licences that are in force nowadays (Solano 2005). Moreover, the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was signed in 2004, includes investor rights. Mining companies can actually sue the government for non-compliance with that agreement. The Latin American decentralization policies of the 1990s were part of the neoliberal reforms promulgated by the international development community in order to satisfy the cuts in government bureaucracies and services mandated by the International Monetary Fund (Warren 1996). The Guatemalan Law of Urban and Rural Development Councils and the Municipal Code of 2002 are the concretion of the decentralization measures negotiated in the peace agreements.The former creates a series of interrelated institutions at the communitarian, municipal, provincial and national scales.The latter grants greater autonomy to the municipality as decision-maker. Regarding public consultations, the Municipal Code says that the municipal government can call for a local consultation about specic administrative decisions that affect the residents (Municipal Code 2002, 20). While those measures are a step towards more democratic conditions and towards communitarian and indigenous empowerment, their appliThese are some of the twenty-one Maya linguistic families in Guatemala. The constitutional reforms were rejected in the referendum of 1999. According to Sieder (1999), elements of the private sector orchestrated a virulent campaign against the reforms. Afterwards, some commitments of the peace agreements were advanced via ordinary legislation but, in comparison to other Latin American countries, indigenous rights juridication was weak in Guatemala (Sieder 2007).
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Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 563 cation leaves some decisions to asymmetric negotiations between municipal governments and transnational companies (Rull 2007). The rejection of binding mining consultations by the Guatemalan courts shows that the decentralization policies are limited measures. MINING AND RESISTANCE IN GUATEMALA: THE MARLIN CONFLICT15 The rst transnational metal mining project in Guatemala the EXMIBAL nickel mine, a subsidiary of the Canadian INCO (now the Brazilian VALE) operated from 1977 to 198216 in Izabal province. At the time, four university professors organized a research commission on mining and asked for larger royalties for Guatemala. Since those were the years of the internal war, two members of the commission were assassinated, a third suffered an assassination attempt, and the surrounding communities reported severe human rights violations by the army and the mining staff (Rey Rosa 2002; Solano 2005). In 2003, the construction of the Marlin mine (Figure 1) was the starting point of the current resistance cycle around mining. However, it was only in December 2004, during the violent events at Solol, in western Guatemala, that the popular opposition to mining became known nationally. As in other Latin American cases,17 the popular protest against mining in Solol was strongly repressed. A community demonstrated against the arrival of a company truck carrying a heavy cylinder. A huge police and military mobilization was deployed and a peasant, Raul Castro Bocel, was killed (Prensa Libre, 18 January 2005; Castagnino 2006). Although the connections among the scales have evolved over these years, the multiscalar character of this movement can be identied in different key moments and events that will be described below: the emergence of protests in Sipakapa, the organization of Sipakapas consultation, the preparation of national and international lawsuits, and the formation of the Western Peoples Council, among others. The Marlin permit was granted in 1996, but the gold mine construction only started in 2003. The mine is located in the highlands of San Marcos province: 85 per cent of the project is in San Miguel Ixtahuacn and 15 per cent in Sipakapa. According to the ofcial census, San Miguel has 29,650 inhabitants, 95 per cent of whom are Maya Mam, and Sipakapa has 14,050 inhabitants, 70 per cent being Maya Sipakapense (INE 2002). The two communities consist mainly of peasants below the poverty line: 87 per cent live in relative poverty and 33 per cent in absolute poverty (SEGEPLAN 2002). In these municipalities, people basically cultivate corn and beans for subsistence, and other products for exchange in local markets. Since 1870, the lowlands of San Marcos province have been dedicated to coffee plantations in the hands of the coffee elite often owners of German descent (Cambranes 1985) and peasants from the highlands have been forced to work there
Guatemalan social movements are so complex that it is not possible to explain in detail, within the length of a journal paper, the resistance and support activities of every organization in relation to mining. There are several groups, such as Frente Nacional de Lucha, Plataforma Agraria, Comit de Unidad Campesian CUC and many others, that are active in the anti-mining movement. Important struggles concerning projects in San Juan Sacatepequez or El Estor are taking place (Colajacomo and Chen 1999, Hurtado and Lungo 2007), but they will not be analysed here. This study is mainly based on the Marlin case and the organizations related to it. 16 Since 1994, different Canadian companies have been negotiating the reopening of nickel extraction in the area, with resulting violent conicts with the local population (Solano 2005; Hurtado and Lungo 2007). Guatemala had other mining experiences in the 1970s, in Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz, at mining sites developed by national companies (Solano 2005). 17 In response to the protests, the anti-mining movements have been strongly repressed by the police and military forces (such as in the Majaz project, Peru; see Red Muqui 2009) or by private security forces (activist deaths in Tambogrande Peru, in March 2001; in Chiapas, in November 2009; and in Oaxaca, in April 2010). 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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564 Leire Urkidi

Figure 1 The location of the Marlin mine, in western Guatemala
seasonally18 (Forster 1994; Schweigert 2004). After 1944, the legally enforced work obligation was repealed, but seasonal work in coffee or sugar-cane plantations became the customary activity for earning extra income in Sipakapa and San Miguel. Nowadays, remittances from family members in the United States are the most important source of monetary income. Soil infertility in the area is often mentioned as a major cause of impoverishment, although the local population argues that well-managed fruit trees and shaded coffee plantations could be a sustainable development option for San Miguel and Sipakapa (Interviews 6, 7 and 13). The emergence of the anti-mining protests in Sipakapa happened due to an information ow from national and supra-national social actors towards local ones. Information about mining impacts arrived in Sipakapa through the national environmental NGO MadreSelva which was already linked to OilWatch and other networks in Latin America the Catholic Church of San Marcos, and the local priest, and the negative response to mining was massive. The environmental impacts of mining were the rst reason for its rejection. In order to be protable, gold mining requires a series of environmentally risky technologies (Moran 2002). Currently, gold is extracted from low-grade elds, by open-pit mining, and by using cyanide
18 The Vagrancy Law of 1934, for instance, obliged peasants to work for 100 days every year in the plantations (Forster 1994).
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 565 leaching for the recovery process (Mudd 2007). Indeed, due to its high price, gold is the metal with the biggest exploration budget in Latin America (Wilburn 2009). As with many other projects in the region (Urkidi and Walter 2011), the Marlin mine is also an open-pit goldmining project, using cyanide leaching. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates a drop of 300 metres in the water table of the areas surrounding open-pit mines in Nevada, due to the mining water demand. The acid mine drainage of Summitville gold mine in Colorado destroyed all the biological life within seventeen miles of the Alamosa river.19 The place was designated a Superfund Federal Site and the Environmental Protection Agency spent US$30,000 a day in treating the drainage. On 5 May 2010, the European Parliament asked the European Commission to declare the mining use of cyanide illegal, due to its uncontrollable environmental impacts.20 Led by the priest and some local authorities, the resistance to mining spread through Sipakapas communities. Several leaders from Sipakapa visited other mining areas in Central America, such as Valle de Siria in Honduras, and engaged in regional networks against mining. The Central American Anti-Mining Network was a key information and discourse source for the Guatemalas incipient movement. In 2005, Sipakapa held its consultation and made the Guatemalan resistance to mining known internationally.21 The organization of the consultation meant a paradigmatic articulation among supportive local, national and supra-national organizations. The Municipal Development Council (COMUDE22), the parish and its catechists, the Linguistic Community of Sipakapa, the Justice of the Peace and other local institutions worked together, with the support of MadreSelva, the National Association of Maya Lawyers, the Catholic Church of San Marcos, and the Indigenous Advocacy of Human Rights. National and international observers were called in to verify the process. Some projects had been halted in Latin America, by local referendums by secret ballot, as in Tambogrande, Peru, and Esquel, Argentina (Muradian et al. 2003; Svampa and Antonelli 2009; Walter and Martnez-Alier 2010). In Sipakapa, some communities voted by a show of hands, while others did so by secret ballot: 45 per cent of the registered electorate took part and 98 per cent voted against mining. The Guatemalan Municipal Code states that a neighbours or local citizens consultation23 must be demanded by 10 per cent of the population and that, in order to be binding, 20 per cent of the registered electorate must participate. It considers the case of indigenous communities special since, in those cases, 50 per cent of the registered population must participate and the consultation can be conducted in accordance with indigenous customary law (Municipal Code 2002, 201). Similarly, ILO Convention 169 states that indigenous peoples must be properly consulted, particularly through their representative institutions, on decisions that directly affect them (Xiloj and Porras 2008). The Constitutional Court declared in 2007 that the Sipakapa consultation was valid under the Municipal Code and Convention 169, but that it was non-binding because the laws and conventions to which reference was made were
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/PHA/summit/sum_p1.html). See www.europarl.europa.eu For example, the documentary lm made about the event, Sipakapa NO se vende (Caracol Producciones, 2005), has been distributed internationally. 22 The Municipal Development Council is a municipal institution created in 2002 following the Guatemalan Law of Urban and Rural Development Councils. It is formed by the municipal government, leaders from the communities, representatives of local public institutions and representatives of local civil society organizations. 23 The neighbours consultations or consultations of indigenous peoples are different from national popular referendums, which must be called by the Electoral Tribunal and promoted by the president or the Congress, on constitutional issues of relevance to all citizens. These are legislated by the Guatemalan Constitution (Xiloj and Porras 2008).
20 21 19
566 Leire Urkidi imprecise; because there was no coherence between them and the Constitution; and because mining was an activity in the national public interest, on which Sipakapas municipality had no authority to pronounce (Xiloj and Porras 2008). Although the Marlin mine did not stop working, the consultation signalled a collective and active rejection of mining. Indeed, Sipakapas municipality has never accepted its mining royalties. In 2007, a group of leaders involved in the consultation created a civic party in order to take part in municipal elections. Their success was interpreted as the success of the mining resistance (Yagenova and Garca 2009). Since then, a sustainable coffee project which this political party is carrying out with the support of a Dutch NGO has been the development alternative to mining. The process in San Miguel was quite different. The criticisms of mining were not shared equally, since the municipal government had already negotiated with the company, the indigenous authorities were less organized than in Sipakapa, and the development promises of the mining company that enjoyed a high prole in San Miguels social and political life had been accepted with trust (Interviews 2, 3, 5 and 22). The initial opposition in San Miguel was weaker and more repressed than in Sipakapa. Moreover, in San Miguel itself, it was acknowledged that the people of Sipakapa had a historical rebel identity (Interviews 1 and 8), being Quiche descendants in Mam territories, and this favoured the resistance to mining in comparison to San Miguel. Mining resistance in San Miguel emerged slowly over time and in relation to Goldcorps practices. The rst complaint was lodged against the land acquisition process. Allegedly, the subsidiary in charge of the acquisitions did not explain the companys plans for the lands. People were told that their lands would be orchid plantations, rather than a gold mine; so the prices that were paid did not represent the real value (Interview 25). Moreover, both Sipakapa and San Miguel have collective land titles that were ignored by the company (van de Sandt 2009). Second, in 2007 some former mineworkers protested against their dismissal. In 2008, women from areas near the mine started complaining about mining impacts dry wells, skin infections among children, cracked walls in houses due to explosions and about the mines electrical cables, which ran over their plots.They were eventually accused of cutting the cables. Both the ex-workers and the women were brought to court by the company and many of them still have criminal charges pending. These events fostered San Miguels solidarity towards their criminalized neighbours. Direct action against the companys infrastructure became more frequent after criminalization started. Third, in 2009, several community authorities that were linked to the Catholic Church started to claim that Goldcorps development commitments were not being fullled. The Catholic church of San Miguel, which until then had been in a far less active position than in Sipakapa, moved into public opposition. The anti-mining platform, formed by the church and local organizations, signied a clear shift in San Miguels resistance to mining. During these years (200510), several international institutions were asked to act in the Marlin case, regarding the lack of effective public consultation, harmful socio-environmental impacts and repression against local peasants. These were the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the ILO, the United Nations, the World Bank since its nancial arm, the International Financial Corporation had lent the company US$45 million for the Marlin project the Canadian government, and several embassies and foreign research institutes (Prensa Libre, 24 August 2005, 15 June 2006, 22 June 2009, 12 September 2009 and other dates). International solidarity amongst members of civil society was also called upon to support the mining struggle, and some international organizations provided key nancial resources and
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 567 diffusion channels.24 Indeed, many international human rights NGOs had been in Guatemala since the peace agreements, given that their negotiation and implementation were highly transnationalized processes (Sieder 2007; Morales and B 2009). In 2010, the ILO and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination declared the Marlin mine illegal due to human and indigenous rights violations (Prensa Libre, 30 March 2010), and the IACHR ruled in favour of the precautionary closure of the project because of potentially harmful health and environmental impacts.25 The lawsuit was brought to the IACHR by a national lawyer working on indigenous issues, who had been personally collecting information from the protestors of San Miguel and Sipakapa. However, since these were not binding national resolutions, the Marlin mine continued to operate (El Peridico, 3 June 2010). As for national initiatives, in 2005 Guatemalas Catholic Episcopal Conference, in line with liberation theology and as a member of the mining resistance, was invited by government institutions to take part in a High Level Commission, which would prepare reforms to the 1997 Mining Law. The Episcopal Conference, in turn, invited some environmental NGOs and research institutes to take part in the commission.The Ministries of Environment and of Energy and Mines represented the government. In 2006, this High Level Commission presented a reform proposal with royalty increases, stricter environmental controls and the requirement of fully informed local consultations as a binding step in mining approvals. In the same year, the Ministry of Energy and Mines presented a more conservative proposal, but neither this one nor the proposal of the High Level Commission prospered. However, in 2008, seven articles of the Mining Law were declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court after a petition presented by the NGO CALAS (Centre for Legal Environmental and Social Action). When, in the same year, the social-democrat Alvaro Colom was elected president, he said that the High Level Commission would be reactivated, and he verbally declared a moratorium on mining licence approvals. However, the licences that had already been approved continued in force, the law was not reformed and the commission was not reactivated. The High Level Commission was experienced as a frustrating process by the anti-mining movement, and many opposition actors decided to follow strategies other than negotiating directly with the government.The Western Peoples Council was the crystallization of this spirit. It is a regional network from western Guatemala, organized in 2008 as a coalition of provincial councils, such as the San Marcos Peoples Council and the Huehuetenango Natural Resources Assembly. The Western Peoples Council was not the rst activist coalition to be organized against mining in Guatemala, but it was the most successful and long-lasting one. At the very beginning of the protest cycle, in 2004, a network of organizations, the National Front against Open-Pit Metal Mining, had been created. According to the interviews, it was an alliance of already existing organizations and NGOs, and it became difcult to maintain due to the groups divergent agendas. In contrast, the Western Peoples Council was formed by organizations that worked explicitly against mining and in the defence of natural resources, and it incorporated the leaderships of the municipalities that had held mining consultations. It does not bring together every organization that resists mining, since there are other groups from the capital or even from western Guatemala with their own strategies for national lobbying or international legal claims. The Western Peoples Council focused instead on fostering a community-based strategy. It helped many municipalities in the region in carrying out mining consultations, and it helped
24 25
Mainly Christian, environmental and human rights associations and NGOs from Europe and Canada. See http://www.cidh.org/medidas/2010.eng.htm
568 Leire Urkidi the leadership of those consultations to become involved in the resistance. The process in Huehuetenango, where the so-called Huehuetenango Assembly played a central role, was the leading experience of the regional movement. Among the more than forty consultations carried out in Guatemala, the majority took place in the highlands of western Guatemala, and twenty-eight of them were held in Huehuetenango the province has thirty-two municipalities and 382,267 people have rejected mining there (Loarca 2010), out of a total population of 846,544 (INE 2002). Recognition of the consultations as binding is the principal demand of both the Western Peoples Council and the Huehuetenango Assembly. They understand the consultations as a protest event by the communities and as a reconstruction of the traditional Maya decision-making processes. Indeed, the consultations organized since 2007 have opened up participation to people who were not registered on the electoral rolls, and they have taken place mainly by shows of hands, as in traditional community assemblies. THE COMMUNITY IN THE MOVEMENTS DISCOURSE The community can be conceived as an administrative unit, as an organizational structure, as a residents network or as the discursive construction that some actors develop around it. On the one hand, according to the Law of Urban and Rural Development Councils (2002), communities in Guatemala are the territorial units below the municipalities, the smallest administrative units, sometimes also called aldeas or caseros (hamlets). The municipality of Sipakapa consists of 13 communities, while San Miguel consists of 20. In colloquial Guatemalan Spanish, the community name is also used for the municipalities; for instance, the community of Sipakapa in a broad sense. On the other hand, the concept is often used to denote the social and class features of Guatemalas rural population. The community is a key organizational structure for Maya peoples. As in many other Guatemalan rural areas and mainly in the highlands, Sipakapas and San Miguel Ixtahuacans inhabitants are mostly indigenous peasants, and they suffer high levels of poverty. The term people from communities is often said to denote the peripheral, impoverished population, and to refer to those below, both in scalar and social terms. This section approaches the community in a discursive sense, analysing how Guatemalas social movement against mining reconstructs and defends the community as the relevant place for decision-making. What lies behind this scalar political proposal? The three main arguments around the community are presented and discussed below. These arguments have been identied in the discourse of the movement around the Marlin conict, in its local, provincial and national expressions. It is a broad movement heterogeneous and with internal divisions, mainly related to strategic decisions. However, the defence of community has taken root in the discourses of the majority of groups. Slight differences may exist about the conceptualizations of community among actors from different scales and different strategic traditions, but here only the commonalities are analyzed. The Local Socio-Economic Impacts of Mining By 2009, the Marlin mine had been operating in San Miguel Ixtahuacn for over 4 years, and the impacts of the activity were increasingly being reported by local residents. As a member of the COPAE in San Marcos explained: I have gone with several families to places where they say that there used to be a well. It could be seen with the naked eye that the water level was lower or that it had simply dried up. Also in infrastructure, you can see the cracked houses. I have also had the
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 569 opportunity to see the health problems, very strange cases. I cannot assure you that it is because of mining.The main thing is that people are convinced that there were not such illnesses before and that now endemic illnesses are appearing. (Interview 13) The monitoring of the environmental impacts was one of the most controversial themes among the resistance organizations, Goldcorp and the Ministry of Natural Resources. From the ministrys point of view, even if they lacked the nancial resources for proper monitoring, the completed analyses had not demonstrated excessive pollution levels However, the results were not made public. Goldcorp organized and nanced a group of local people the Communitarian Environmental Monitoring Association26 to conduct an independent water analysis. It also concluded that there was no contamination. In 2008, COPAE decided to set up a small laboratory to carry out its own water studies. They revealed the existence of contamination in the areas downstream from the mine in 2008 and 2009: the levels of aluminium, arsenic, copper and manganese were higher than the World Bank norms that were considered safe (COPAE 2009). A preliminary investigation carried out by a multidisciplinary team of scientists in 2009 revealed higher than local average levels of certain metals (urinary mercury, copper and zinc) in individuals close to the mine and higher levels of aluminium, manganese and cobalt in water downstream from the mine (Basu and Hu 2010). The lack of trustworthy government water-quality studies increased local concerns about environmental security and eroded the governments legitimacy in the area. The cyanide risks, dust and noise produced by explosions and heavy vehicular trafc, air pollution, water contamination and water ow reduction were the key environmental and health concerns around the Marlin mine. Environmental impacts become threats to livelihoods in the case of the subsistence peasantry (Guha and Martnez-Alier 1997). The environmental services provided by water, soil and forests are not commodied and accounted for in GDP measurements, but they are essential for the survival of Sipakapas and San Miguels people.The effects of water pollution will not be noticed in income poverty indices, but they will appear in malnutrition and health conditions; the poor cannot afford to buy bottled water (MartnezAlier 2002).The capacity of the local population to survive and prosper is undermined: I think that the mine attacks communities experience, communities life. It is not just the environment, the economy, the politics, or the society. It is the populations life, their survival.The mine does not create security for life and that is the main problem (Interview 2). Moreover, it was a common assumption in San Miguel that the project had generated a social conict beyond previously existing internal divisions. Goldcorp insisted that the mine improved local welfare, since 64 per cent of the 1,900 people working in the Marlin mine were said to be from San Miguel and Sipakapa. However, increased alcoholism, prostitution and rape, divisions among people, and the criminalization of resistance were other social impacts that were mentioned in the area.The war years had already left a great social division among villages and families (Erazo 2007). The further division and the criminalization promoted by the mine made people remember the war: The issue that worries most in San Marcos province is the confrontation that exists nowadays in every community of San Miguel. Simply because Montana is developing a strategy of getting the support of communities and this is confronting the leaders among them, and weakening communities own structure (Interview 13). The localized character of the mining impacts meant that communities and their authorities felt that they were the legitimate actors in the decision-making process: So people said no. This
26 The investigation about the impacts of the Marlin project on human rights carried out by On Common Ground Consultants recommended that Goldcorp should not nance the Association, since this weakens its credibility (El Peridico, 23 May 2010).
570 Leire Urkidi concerns us. It is the plundering of communities, because the permits are where we live. The water [that the mining company is using] is from our lands (Interview 22). The Community Base of Maya Resistance We have been discriminated against as Mam people. Because of that, we live in the heights, even in the gullies, . . . meanwhile the winning or conquering peoples are in at places. So something is always carried in the blood, . . . we are always resisting to impositions and to things entailing death.We resist (Interview 1). In Mayan Guatemala, the community is the main organizational structure beyond the family. The strength of the communitarian structure may lie in the heritage of pre-Hispanic cultures, or it may be the consequence of centuries of marginalization and of imposed institutions such as the Catholic brotherhoods (cofradias) (Ekern 1998). Since colonial times, the indigenous political organization has been limited to the communitarian scale. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown created ethnically separate local jurisdictions: Spanish cities and Indian villages (pueblos de indios) (Barrios 1999). Although in late colonial times and after independence, mixed municipalities were created, the indigenous mayoralties survived in many communities as the main or at least parallel governments. Nowadays, in the Guatemalan highlands, indigenous mayors are the representatives of communities and hamlets, even if subordinated to the municipal government, which is elected through the party-political system. Beyond organizational purposes, the community has a symbolic relevance for Maya people. The community is understood as an essential character of Maya culture or as the result of the opposition to colonial oppression (Watanabe 1990). The imagined Maya community is a historized identity related to the idea of a traditional sacred community, where the cult of earth, landscape and mountain spirits had a central role (Wilson 1993). According to Wilson (1993), the Christianity-based communities of the 1970s and the civil war undermined the imagined traditional communities but, since the 1990s and the revival of indigenous identities, the indigenists are forging new cultural forms inspired by past customs. Be it as it may, Guatemalas anti-mining movement has evoked the internal solidarity and the spiritual respect for nature of Maya communities as opportunities to construct alternatives to mining. The relevance of community organization and solidarity was emphasized by the anti-mining movement against the individualist ideology of modernization. As the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources explained: You have the indigenous deep environmentalism and their organizational capacity, which is better than ours. Immediately, they organize themselves because they are communitarian. They have a concept of community deeper than ours. They are organized in communities. So an action does not affect just an individual but the whole community. (Interview 20) The anti-mining movement reinvented tradition in relation to decision-making in Maya communities. As the following quote exemplies, it stressed the deliberative and harmonic nature of decision-making in traditional Maya societies, and it reclaimed the consultations about mining as a reappropriation of those politics: The whole process of resistance started using procedures, norms, and principles that are used in communities. I mean the legal and political system that has been practised for many years (. . .). We see that communitarian consultations did not arise because mining or hydroelectric projects arrived. Those consultations are an ancestral mechanism of the
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 571 Maya people for participation and decision making. It is part of our worldview. When we speak about consultations, we speak about solidarity, harmony, consensus, and dialogue. Those are terms and elements of the Maya worldview. We are using those ancestral mechanisms and answering the government back. (Interview 15) Currently, many Maya communities are governed by a rotational hierarchy of public ofces, where men serve according to the reputations that they have earned in religious and political juridical services or festival organization in the community (Barrios 1999). The decisionmaking process is based on assemblies of community leaders or on general assemblies that aim to generate consensus (Ekern 1998). Like any other institution, the community government tries to maintain its internal rules and favour social stability.The consensus construction process is well accepted, so that the parties in conict can devote hours to discussion in order to arrive at a solution. However, there is no egalitarian distribution of political power. There is no universal conception of the citizen, since there exists a distribution of duties/benets according to gender, age and previous behaviour in the community: those who do not full duties cannot benet from rights (Ekern 1998). Maya community institutions, which are assembly governed, are also criticized for being exclusionary and very hierarchical (cf. Agarwal 2001). According to Sieder (1999), counter-insurgency structures and ideologies permeated rural communities during the 1980s, creating authoritarian attitudes in local and communitarian governments.The communal unity achieved 20 years later during the consultations was seen by the anti-mining movement as a challenge to the internal divisions promoted by militarization and current forms of democracy tied to a clientelist party system. In the following quote, an activist and social researcher speaks about this issue: There exists [in the anti-mining movement] a very relevant revaluation process because the war destroyed the social fabric and the prolonged militarization of the rural area, mainly in the West, destroyed the system of traditional authorities and replaced them by military commissioners or others the ones holding economic power. Nowadays the community authorities and the indigenous mayors are being recognized. (Interview 22) Historical oppression, authoritarian regimes and war dynamics may be key causes of internal differentiation in communities. In any case, the issue is that communities are not homogeneous and conict free. Discrimination exists with regard to gender, age and religious afliation, and an unequal allocation of responsibilities and benets. As explained in the following section, the anti-mining movement has tried to combine the defence of community practices with a more inclusive democracy, both at the local and national scales. Although it is a counter-hegemonic mechanism to contest domination (Roseberry 1996), the reinvention and reclamation of tradition by subaltern groups is often also a self-critical process. With regard to the environmental impacts of mining, the traditional Maya understanding of nature has also been evoked by the resistance movement. The holistic environmental approach of the Maya is presented as a challenge to the economic reductionism of mining promoters. According to the Maya worldview, nature is not an isolated part of reality. It is totally integrated into the social and economic dimensions. Every dimension of life forms a unity and is sacred, so every element deserves respect and protection: the mountains, the valleys, the wind, the soil, the trees, the harvest and the seeds. Every natural element has its Nawal, or protective spirit (Copmagua 1999). As a member of a Guatemalan agro-ecological association explained: At rst, environmentalists started this, since they were providing information. But the environmentalist view is not in the communities any more. Now there is the defence of life, which is more related to the Maya cosmovisin (worldview). Indeed, in the Maya
572 Leire Urkidi cosmovisin, everything is considered as a unity. For instance, the human being, the water, the air, and every element of life are inside a circle. Therefore, the human being cannot be superior to other elements. We are conscious that every natural element is life. They say for instance that if royalties increase they will give us the 10 per cent. If we are going to have ill children and the whole population ill, what do we want the 10 per cent for? We see that the movement is defending life, not so much the environment. It is almost the same but different ways of calling it. A man said that we are ghting for leaving life to our children; that we do not want to leave them death. And people have strongly appropriated this idea. (Interview 14) However, the contradictions between this environmental spirituality and the actual practices of many communities were acknowledged by the anti-mining movement.They spoke about the Maya worldview as a group of principles of the past that should be recovered. Indeed, nowadays, the Maya worldview is the reinterpretation of a series of spiritual and moral values related to Maya symbolism. The following quote exemplies this situation: We realized how nature was managed in the past.There was a respect for nature that does not exist nowadays. People see it from an economic point of view and hence they are exploiting it disproportionally. The Maya cosmovisin gives us the idea that nature can be exploited but just for family needs and not for making money.We are now mistaken. Both the industries and even the peasantry are not aware of protecting the environment. Maybe we lack orientation. However, the issue is that there is no awareness of taking care. (Interview 6) The anti-mining movement was seeking to mobilize a reinterpretation of the Maya environmental approach and to apply it to concrete decisions about development at different scales: from family economic decisions to national decisions about transnational mega-projects I think that there are many values that are disappearing because of what is happening in the world, in the media, and even in family practices. There are many cultural elements that are getting lost but that we are trying to recover (Interview 2). The coffee project27 developed in Sipakapa as an alternative to mining is a good example of how social struggles may change imaginaries and also practices.Through the opposition to mining, the Maya environmentalism was reclaimed in Sipakapa and more sustainable farming practices were promoted. Participation and Democracy from Below The Constitution of 1985 acknowledged indigenous communal land rights and recognized them as inalienable and perpetual (Thillet 2003; van de Sandt 2009). Sipakapa and San Miguel have communal, or ejido, titles for all the municipal territory granted by the Presidency of the Republic in the early nineteenth century. However, these lands are not included in the current land registry and double-titling exists, since there are also some individual titles on ejido land. Nevertheless, these ejido titles never lapsed. With regard to these titles, plots are designated for individual use, but they remain in collective ownership. The Municipal Code highlights in its Article 109 that indigenous communities and authorities should consent to any decision regarding the alienation of communal lands (ejidos) to outside parties (van de Sandt 2009). The sale of lands for the Marlin mine was an example of such a sale without a previous collective
27 Sipakapa is not a traditional coffee-growing area in San Marcos. However, many peasants have cultivated coffee for their own consumption, and the project is trying to expand this coffee of the highlands. This coffee is shade coffee and it is grown in combination with other agricultural pursuits.
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 573 consultation. The company and its subsidiaries ignored the communal titles and co-opted the municipal authorities in San Miguel, denying collective titles to land, indigenous rights and municipal autonomy (van de Sandt 2009). Despite national legislation and ILO Convention 169, Sipakapas consultation of 2005 was declared non-binding, so the anti-mining movement concluded that the only way to prevent the entry of mining companies was to collectively decide not to sell individual lands to them. More than 40 municipalities carried out consultations as precautionary measures, even if there were no imminent mining projects in their territories, but just licences for exploration: My main hope is that [mining companies] could not spread to other communities because people already have their meetings minutes. It is already decided so they cannot play with the decision. In peoples opinion, a collective decision is very valuable. It is word of honour (Interview 1). The consultations added up to a forceful internal strategy to stop the advance of mining. Moreover, they were seen as a way to reclaim both the legal participation rights of communities indigenous or not and the democratization of the decision-making processes. In the following quote, the Western Peoples Council criticized the vertical and unfair structures of not only the national government, but also current community institutions and traditional leftist social movements: We think that one main principle of the movement of consultations is that the means cannot be separated from the ends (. . .) We truly think that this is one distinctive characteristic of communitarian consultations (. . .) We think that the rst step is to organize ourselves and protest against the existing order, against the transnational consortium, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in a manner where the means are consistent with the ends, and where we could create the desired future human relationships. It means to organize ourselves without a centralized authority, without charismatic leadership, in a manner where we could create the ideal egalitarian society of the future. (Interview 16) The participation of women and young people in consultations was much higher than in political elections or community institutions, and it was understood as a step towards more egalitarian social and gender relationships within communities. The leading role of women in the resistance to mining was a challenge to their exclusion from community hierarchies (Agarwal 2001). Moreover, the horizontal and decentralized political structure that the movement proposed was a novelty in comparison with traditional revolutionary organizations, where internal decision-making was highly vertical and indigenous participants never played a leading role28 (Warren 1996). Comparatively, the centrality of the community collective subject in the movements composition and discourses is the innovation of current protest cycles (Yagenova and Garca 2009). In a language similar to that of their Zapatista neighbours in Chiapas, the Western Peoples Council demanded a democracy from below in order to ensure both fair participation in development decisions and recognition of Maya culture and territorial rights. Indeed, indigenous parties in other Latin American countries, such as Bolivia or Ecuador, have proposed intercultural cooperation and the participation of individuals and civil society groups as the key tools for improving the quality of democracy (van Cott 2006).
28 Almost every leader of the guerrillas was non-indigenous, and some indigenous activists reported racist behaviour (Bastos and Camus 2003).
574 Leire Urkidi CONCLUSION According to Swyngedouw (2004), scales can be regulatory orders, networks or their discursive representations. In this paper, the discursive representations of community developed by the anti-mining movement in Guatemala have been analyzed.The community is seen as a bulwark against mining in Guatemala because of three main arguments. First, the anti-mining movement acknowledges that the socio-environmental impacts of mining most directly affect the livelihoods of the people close to the projects. It is argued that mining affects the survival of local communities, both in physical and social terms, while the prots go elsewhere. Although the Marlin mine leaves a small percentage of its revenues in San Miguel Ixtahuacan,29 mining was perceived to deepen social and economic inequalities at the local level. Second, the anti-mining movement reclaimed the community as a traditional Maya organizational structure, and related the community to a series of values that implied a development approach alternative to mining.Values such as the sacredness of nature and collective solidarity were mobilized in the movements discourse. In line with Wilson (1993), those values are an evocation of the imagined traditional Maya community, but are also based on a series of practices and customs that have been historically transformed. The anti-mining movement proposes a reconstruction of such values and their application to the governance of natural resources. Third, the participation of communities is requested in order to achieve more democratic and fairer decision-making processes.This would lead to the participation of the people affected by mining and to the empowerment of a historically marginalized population. By reclaiming the community, the anti-mining movement is asking for a redistribution of political power, mainly in relation to ethnic and class inequalities. Additionally, it is also demanding more inclusive practices within communitarian structures. The defence of community carried out by the anti-mining movement should not be understood in essentialist terms, but in contextual, relational and dialectical ones (Leitner et al. 2008). For instance, in the decision-making process regarding the Marlin mine, the opinions of the affected population were not taken into account; nor was their dependence on their immediate environment. Moreover, the culturally embedded institutions and values were not recognized in later judicial decisions. This has inevitably led to the defence of community, not because it should be the only scale in mining decisions, but because the institutions, cultural identities and the opinions of communities have been misrecognized by Goldcorp, the World Bank and national governments.30 In her Defence of Community, Florencia Mallon (1983) explained that, in the Peruvian central highlands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, communal ideology and relations of reciprocity were mobilized by the peasants not as a defence of an ideal homogeneous community, but to guarantee their subsistence against the growing power of haciendas and mining companies. Those discourses and relationships shaped the form in which villagers challenged the beneciaries of capitalist transformation (Mallon 1983).This is what is happening in the Guatemalan mining conicts: the community is being reclaimed beyond its internal
29 Mining leaves 0.5 per cent of its economic benets in municipalities. However, mining contributes only 1 per cent of the Guatemalan GDP (Le and Bonilla 2009) and, for several years, the Marlin project was under-taxed, under the Maquila regime. 30 Legislation on indigenous peoples, to a great extent, rests on the principle of special rights and positive discrimination for historically discriminated against and disadvantaged groups in order to achieve greater justice within society overall (Sieder 1999, 106).
Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 575 injustices, in order to ght larger ones.Although uncritical praise for the local is often offered by political actors and analysts, this is not exactly the case in the Guatemalan anti-mining movement. Guatemala is among the most unequal countries in the world.31 Poverty is highly concentrated among the Maya and the rural population, and there is a historical relationship between race and land distribution (Sundberg 2008). These structural conditions are central in the defence of community. I agree with Escobar (2001) when he points out that many social movements in the South mount a defence of a place in a local territorial sense and are simultaneously involved in multiscalar processes. As explained, the resistance to the Marlin project is more a multiscalar movement than a local resistance, but its discourse focuses on the community. This is because the defence of community is much more than the defence of a specic local place; it is intimately related to justice grievances, as mentioned above. This case shows that the community is not just the place of cultural attachment and revival, but that it symbolizes a wide sector of the Guatemalan population that has been oppressed by historical injustices and racism. The defence of community is also the defence of a broader community, making horizontal and vertical alliances feasible. As pointed out by political ecologists, struggles born out of environmental grievances are often also expressed as resistance to social injustices. The discursive articulation of indigenous, environmental and social claims is bringing together historically disparate organizations in the region. The national network against mining in Peru (CONACAMI) has become a relevant articulation of many indigenous and non-indigenous communities from the highlands to the coast, and has increasingly framed mining conicts not just in peasant justice terms but also in indigenist ones (Bebbington 2007; Hinojosa and Bebbington 2008). The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) was born out of the agrarian reforms of the 1960s, and has been increasingly involved in oil extraction, mining and water conicts, mixing cultural, peasant and environmental languages. With clear material roots, the anti-mining movement in Guatemala asks for greater participation for Maya people, communitarian access to land and to natural resources, ecologically sustainable development practices and radically democratic decision-making processes. This mixture of claims is the cause and consequence of the great and diverse support that the resistance to the Marlin project has received from national and international allies. National environmental groups, the provincial Catholic Church, national indigenous networks, national popular or class-based organizations, transnational human rights NGOs and foreign environmental justice networks, among many others, have campaigned against Marlin and other mining projects in Guatemala. Moreover, the defence of community and environmental justice discourses bring together historically disparate social organizations in Guatemala. Unlike the situation in countries such as Bolivia or Ecuador in recent times, claims of regional indigenous autonomy have not been frequent in Guatemala perhaps because the indigenous population is spread throughout the national territory (Sieder 1999) and the Maya movement continues to be very fragmented. The social distrust among Guatemalan organizations is in part a consequence of the long period of authoritarian regimes and war (Erazo 2007). Even if many class-oriented organizations adopted the Maya discourse during democratization, the indigenous movements organized during the late 1980s distrusted the revolutionary organizations (Bastos and Camus 1995, 2003; Warren 1996; Hale 1997, 2002). The networks and proposals of the anti-mining movement are
31 The Gini Index for income in Guatemala is 0.587 (data for 2002; IARNA 2006) and the Gini Index for land inequality is 0.79 (Vakis 2003). The Gini Index is a standard economic measure of inequality. The higher the number above zero, the greater is the inequality (see also World Bank 2004).
576 Leire Urkidi representing a challenge to the historical division among Guatemalan social organizations: the material/cultural or indigenous/popular dichotomies32 (Warren 1996). A key question for critical analysis in future research is whether the rapprochement that has taken place within the broad anti-mining movement can be consolidated over time, and whether it will be able to forcefully challenge current inequalities and development trends. Indeed, the Latin American trend is a continued expansion of extractive activities at the commodity frontiers, in order to feed the metabolism of the growing world economy. REFERENCES
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580 Leire Urkidi APPENDIX: DETAILS OF THE LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Interview number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Interviewee Where When
Catholic nun in San Miguel (indigenous woman from Comitancillo, San Marcos) Local development association Town Council of San Miguel Sierra Madre, development foundation of Goldcorp in Sipakapa and San Miguel Local health promotion organization that worked with Goldcorp Town Council of Sipakapa (1) Town Council of Sipakapa (2) Member of a womens development project in Sipakapa Catholic church of Sipakapa Member of the Medical Centre of Sipakapa Local leader and organizer of Sipakapas consulation Member of the Movement of Country Workers Member of COPAE, Ecology and Peace Pastoral Commission Member of Ceiba, Guatemalan agro-ecological association Member (1) of the Western Peoples Council Member (2) of the Western Peoples Council Ex-member (1) of the MadreSelva environmentalist group Ex-member (2) of the MadreSelva environmentalist group Member of CALAS, Centre for Legal Environmental and Social Action Minister of Environment and Natural Resources Mining Department of the Ministry of Energy and Mines Activist and social researcher Members of the Guatemalan Chamber of Commerce (group interview) Former representative of Invest in Guatemala Legal adviser of the local opposition to the Marlin mine
San Miguel San Miguel San Miguel San Miguel San Miguel Sipakapa Sipakapa Sipakapa Sipakapa Sipakapa Sipakapa San Marcos San Marcos Chimaltenango Huehuetenango Huehuetenango Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City Guatemala City
August 2009 September 2009 September 2009 September 2009 September 2009 August 2009 August 2009 August 2009 August 2009 August 2009 September 2009 September 2009 September 2009 November 2008 October 2008 October 2008 November 2008 July 2009 August 2009 July 2009 July 2009 July 2009 July 2009 July 2009 September 2009

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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 11 No. 4, October 2011, pp. 556580.

The Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

564 Leire Urkidi

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 577

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

578 Leire Urkidi

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Defence of Community in the Anti-Mining Movement of Guatemala 579

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

580 Leire Urkidi APPENDIX: DETAILS OF THE LIST OF INTERVIEWS

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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