Constructing Indigenous Citizenship: Identity, Authority, and Rights In

Constructing Indigenous Citizenship:

Identity, Authority, and Rights in Decentralized Guatemala

Jennifer Noel Costanza

B.A., University of Rhode Island, 2001

M.A., York University, 2004

M.A., Brown University, 2007

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2013

This dissertation by Jennifer Noel Costanza is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Sociology as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date______Patrick G. Heller, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Reader

Date______José Itzigsohn, Reader

Date______Margot Jackson, Reader

Date______Michael Kennedy, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

JENNIFER NOEL COSTANZA

Department of Sociology Brown University Box 1916 Providence RI, 02912, USA

Date of Birth: November 29, 2012, Place of Birth: Wakefield, Rhode Island, USA

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Sociology

M.A. 2007 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Sociology

M.A. 2004 York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Political Science

B.A. 2001 University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island Concentrations: Political Science, Economics

DISSERTATION

Title: Constructing Indigenous Citizenship: Identity, Authority and Rights in Decentralized Guatemala

Committee: Patrick Heller (Chair); Gianpaolo Baiocchi; José Itzigsohn

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Globalization and Development Social Movements and Identity Politics Political Sociology Qualitative Methods Latin America

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

Present Deputy Director, Development Studies Program, Brown University

Present Adjunct Instructor, Development Studies Program, Brown University

FELLOWSHIPS

• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2010-2011 • Brown University Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Fall 2010

• Latin American Studies Association, Student Travel Grant, June 2009 • National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, awarded January 2009 • Rural Sociological Association, Dissertation Research Award (alternate candidate), 2009 • Brown University Sociology Department, Feinberg Award (to fund summer fieldwork), 2008 • Brown University Watson Institute for International Studies Graduate Program in Development Summer Fieldwork Fellowship, 2007 • Brown University Center for Latin American Studies Graduate Student Travel Grant, 2007 • Brown University Graduate Fellowship, 2005-06 • York University Graduate Assistantship, 2003-2004 • York University International Visa Student Scholarship, 2003-2004 • University of Rhode Island, Department of Political Science, David Warren Scholarship for Excellence in Political Science, 2001

AWARDS

• Best Graduate Student Paper, American Sociological Association, Human Rights Section. Awarded for the paper “A New Indigenous Citizenship: Constructing Citizen Rights from Human Rights at the Grassroots in Guatemala.” 2011. • Brown University, Sociology Preliminary Exam on “Race and Ethnicity in the Americas,” Passed with Distinction. 2008. • York University, Michael Baptista Essay Prize for Best Graduate Essay in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Awarded for the essay, “Elusive Hegemony: A Critical Analysis of United States Policy Towards Haiti,” 2004. • University of Rhode Island, Political Science. Josephine Milburn Award for Excellence in International Relations, 2001. • Undergraduate National Honor Societies (2001): Pi Sigma Alpha (Political Science); Omicron Delta Epsilon (Economics); Order of Omega Greek Leadership Honor Society; Golden Key National Honor Society

MANUSCRIPTS UNDER REVIEW

“Appropriating Human Rights from the Grassroots: Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent in Guatemala”

PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATIONS

“Decentralization and Mining: Defining ‘Development’ in San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala.” Panel, “Mining Conflicts and Cultural Politics in Central America.” Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, May 24, 2012.

“A New Indigenous Citizenship: Constructing Citizen Rights from Human Rights at the Grassroots in Guatemala.” Panel, “Human Rights-writ large.” American Sociological Association, Las Vegas, NV, August 20, 2011.

“What’s in a Frame? Interrogating Collective Identity Frames in Guatemala’s Campesino-Indigenous Movement.” Panel, “Collective Action and Social Movements in Central America,” Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 12, 2009.

“Identity Frames and the Meaning of Mobilization: Locating agency in Guatemala’s Campesino-Indigenous Movement.” Panel, “Post Post-War Guatemala: Contemporary Transformations in 21st Century Guatemala.” New England Council of Latin American Studies, Providence, RI, October 4, 2008.

“The Rise of Latin American Indigenous Movements? Framing the meaning of mobilization in Guatemala.” Inter-Ivy Sociology Symposium, Princeton, NJ, March 29, 2008.

“Articulating Recognition, Redistribution and Racialization within Latin American Indigenous Movements: A focus on Guatemala.” Panel, “Indigenous Peoples: Land, Struggles and Ruptures.” Latin American Studies Association, Montreal, Canada, September 6, 2007.

“Confronting a Movement’s Menace: Linking Recognition and Redistribution within Latin American Indigenous Rights Movements.” Panel, “Movement Choices, Dynamics and Consequences.” American Sociological Association, New York, New York, August 13, 2007

“Confronting a Movement’s Menace: Linking Recognition and Redistribution within Latin American Indigenous Rights Movements.” Panel, “Social Movement Frames: From Shifts and Splits to Framing the Grotesque.” American Sociological Association- Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Workshop, Hempstead, New York, August 10, 2007.

“Framing the Indigenous: Competing Discourses within the Guatemalan Indigenous Rights Movement.” Brown University Graduate Student Workshop on Culture, Politics and Society in Latin America, Providence, Rhode Island, February 28, 2007.

TEACHING AND ADVISING

Development Studies Program, Brown University (present) Teaching a Senior Seminar in Thesis Writing (present). Mentoring senior students. Advisor for all Development Studies concentrators.

Brown University, Department of Sociology (2006-12) Teaching Assistant in the following courses: Globalization and Social Conflict (four semesters); Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Modern World; The City; Theories of Organizational Dynamics and Decision Making; Methods of Research in Organizations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible, at least in its current form, were it not for the moral support of family and friends, the participation of Guatemalans in my research, and the feedback on my writing from my advisors and fellow graduate students.

I want to express my gratitude to them, as well as to the numerous institutions that funded my work. Pre-dissertation exploratory research in Guatemala was funded by the Graduate

Program in Development, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the

Sociology Department Feinstein Grant, and summer graduate student funding, all from

Brown University. A National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement

Grant and a United States Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation

Research Award financed dissertation field research. A Brown University Dissertation

Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship supported me during the writing phase.

I am extremely grateful for the many friends I made in Guatemala, and for

Guatemalans’ willingness to share their time and their lives with me to participate in my research. Literally hundreds of people met me for interviews, helped me with directions or an introduction, or shared a meal or coffee with me. I especially want to thank Doña

Toya, Odilia and her daughters and Juanito who welcomed me into their home and treated me like a member of their family. I also want to recognize Doña Ramona,

Mercedes, Mokchewan, Felipe, Don Cristobal, Nery, Nim Sanik, Saturnino, Ignacio,

Rodolfo, Hector, Rosa and Andres, the leaders of the Communities in Resistance in San

Juan Sacatepéquez, and many others who made me feel at home in Guatemala and continually inspired me with their will to pursue justice for indigenous peoples in the face of great odds. I thank Miguel Mateo, Coralia Herrera, Carlos Castillo and Eduardo

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Sacayón, whose friendship made field research much more enjoyable. Finally, I thank the

Instituto de Estudios Interétnicos of the Universidad de San Carlos, Guatemala, for supporting me as a visiting researcher and providing me the opportunity to present and get feedback on my work in progress.

At Brown University, I have been fortunate to have an incredible advisor, Patrick

Heller. He read through numerous chapter drafts, organized and led a peer reading group for me and other students, and was extremely supportive when I was in the field, helping me overcome some particularly difficult challenges to completing my project. I am also grateful to my dissertation committee members Gianpaolo Baiocchi and José Itzigsohn, and to readers Margot Jackson and Michael Kennedy, who provided insightful feedback on this dissertation. Many friends read chapter drafts or provided moral support throughout the writing process, including Sinem Adar, Angelica Duran Martinez, Esther

Hernandez-Medina, Sukriti Issar, Shruti Majumdar, Cecilia Perla, Oslec Villegas, and

Myung Ji Yang. Oslec and Daniela Villacrés provided much needed moral support as I slogged through the final stretch of dissertation revisions, and I am especially thankful to

Erin Beck, who not only has been an amazing friend during fieldwork in Guatemala and at Brown, but also read the entire dissertation draft, including multiple versions of some chapters, and shared countless lunches and coffees of dissertation talk.

Finally, I want to thank Doug Bramley for his unwavering friendship and love, for giving me confidence in my abilities from when I was writing grants to the day of my dissertation defense. Most importantly, I am thankful to my parents, Paul and Diane

Costanza, who sacrificed so much so that I could even dream of completing this dissertation.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables x

List of Figures xi

List of Illustrations xii

List of Maps xiii

List of Acronyms xiv

List of Spanish Terms xvi

Chapter 1 Introduction The Challenges of Diversity and Democracy: Guatemala, Decentralized 1

Chapter 2 Constructing Indigenous Citizenship: Theory and Analytical Approach 44

Chapter 3 Citizenship and Decentralization in a Multi-cultural Nation, Mono-cultural State 92

Chapter 4 Depoliticizing Indigenous Citizenship: San Juan Sacatepéquez 140

Chapter 5 Polarizing Indigenous Citizenship: Tecpán, Guatemala 206

Chapter 6 Transformative Indigenous Citizenship: San Juan Ixcoy 286

Chapter 7 Conclusion 357

Appendices

Appendix A Interviewing and Observation Strategies and Data Summary 382

Appendix B Sample Questionnaire for Indigenous Community Interviews 386

Appendix C Legislation in Support of Indigenous Rights 393

Bibliography 398

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1 Analytical Framework…………………………………………...12

Table 1.2 Legal Recognition of Indigenous Autonomy in Latin America……………………………………..16

Table 1.3 Indigenous versus Non-Indigenous Development: Selected Indicators……………………………………………….22

Table 1.4 Descriptive Characteristics of Municipalities Studied…………...29

Table 1.5 Research Activities………………………………………………36

Table 1.6 Research Chronology…………………………………………….37

Table 2.1 Analytical Framework…………………………………………...89

Table 5.1 Demands of the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales…………..234

Table 5.2 CATIE-ACAX Reforestation Project Activities………………..270

Table 6.1: Goals of San Juan Ixcoy’s “Strategic Plan”…………………….325

Table 6.2: San Juan Ixcoy’s Strategic Plan Thematic Committees (2005) …………………………………..327

Table 6.3: San Juan Ixcoy’s Strategic Plan: Thematic Contents (2008 version)……………………………...329

Table 7.1 Analytical Framework………………………………………….360

Table A.1: Dissertation Research Interviews……………………………….384

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Main Argument: Constructing Indigenous Citizenship…………………………….10

Figure 2.1 Main Argument: Constructing Indigenous Citizenship…………………………….89

Figure 3.1 Guatemala’s Urban and Rural Development Council System, Depicted according to the law and current functionality……….128

Figure 4.1 The Development Council System in San Juan Sacatepéquez………………………………………167

Figure 5.1 The Development Council System in Tecpán, Guatemala……..242

Figure 6.1 The Development Council System in San Juan Ixcoy………….321

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 6.1: San Juan Ixcoy’s Planning Process (as depicted in a Municipal Government Powerpoint Presentation, 2010)…………………..324

Illustration 6.2: “The Ichmam Model,” as depicted visually by the Municipal Government of San Juan Ixcoy…………………………………339

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LIST OF MAPS

Map 1.1 Map of Guatemala- Municipal Case Studies………………….....30

Map 4.1 Map of San Juan Sacatepéquez…………………………………168

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LIST OF ACRONYMS

ACAX Asociación Civil Ambiental Xayá (Civil Environmental Association ‘Xayá’)

AGIMS Asociación Grupo Integral de Mujeres Sanjuaneras (Intregrated Group Association of Sanjuanera Women)

AGAAI Asociación Guatemalteca de Alcaldes y Autoridades Indígenas (Guatemalan Association of Indigenous Mayors and Authorities)

ASEDAFASEIVA Asociación de Servicios de Desarrollo Forestal, Salud, Educativos, Infraestructura y Varios (Association of Forestry, Health, Education, Infrastructure and Various Development Services)

CALDH Centro de Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (Center for Legal Action in Human Rights)

CATIE Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Ensañanza (Tropical Agronomy Center for Research and Teaching(

CEDFOG Centro de Estudios y Documentación de la Frontera Occidental de Guatemala (Center for Study and Documentation of the Western Guatemalan Border)

COCODE Consejo Comunitario de Desarrollo (Community Development Council)

COCOM Consejo de Comunidades Mayas (Council of Mayan Communities)

COMUDE Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo (Municipal Development Council)

CODEDE Consejo Departamental de Desarrollo (Departmental Development Council)

CONAP Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas (National Council of Protected Areas)

COREDE Consejo Regional de Desarrollo (Regional Development Council)

CONADE Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo (National Development Council)

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CONAVIGUA Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas Guatemaltecas (National Coordinator of Guatemalan Widows)

CUC Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee for Peasant Unity)

EG Encuentro por Guatemala (Encounter for Guatemala)

EGP Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor)

FCA Fondo de Conservación de Bosques Tropicales (Tropical Forest Conservation Fund)

FDNG Frente Democratica Nueva Guatemala (New Guatemalan Democratic Front)

FIS Fondo de Inversión Social (Social Investment Fund)

FONAPAZ Fondo Nacional de Paz (National Peace Fund)

FPIC Free, Prior, and Informed Consent

FRG Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Republican Guatemalan Front)

GANA Gran Alianza Nacional (Grand National Alliance)

ILO International Labor Organization

PAC Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (Civilian Self-Defense Patrols)

PDH Procuradora de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Defender)

SAEP Secretaría de Asuntos Específicas de la Presidencia (Secretary of Specific Issues of the Presidency)

SCEP Secretaría de Coordinación Ejecutiva de la Presidencia (Executive Coordinating Secretary of the Presidency)

SEGEPLAN Secretaría de Planificacion y Programación de la Presidencia (Secretary of Planning and Programming of the Presidency)

UN United Nations

UNE Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (National Unity of Hope)

URNG Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity)

LIST OF SPANISH TERMS

Acta Meeting Minutes

Alcalde/Alcalde Municipal Mayor/Municipal Mayor

Alcaldía Indígena Indigenous Mayorship

Alcalde Indígena Indigenous Mayor

Alcaldía Comunal/Comunitario/Auxiliar Community/Communal/Auxiliary Mayorship

Alcalde Comunal/Comunitario/Auxiliar Community/Communal/Auxiliary Mayor

Aldea Rural Village

Asociación de Vecinos Neighborhood Association

Altiplano Highlands

Auxiliatura Refers to the office of the Auxiliary Mayor

Barrio Neighborhood (urban)

Cabildo Town Hall (referring to colonial period); open town meeting (present)

Campesino Peasant

Concejo Municipal Town Council

Caserío Hamlet

Cementera Cement mine and factory

Colonia Neighborhood (urban)

Comité Pro-mejoramiento Improvement Committee

Cosmovisión Worldview (usually refers to Mayan spirituality)

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Denuncia Legal complaint

Empresa Company

Frijoles Beans

Guía Espiritual (Mayan) Spiritual Guide

Indio permitido Allowed Indian

Indígena Indigenous (person)

Ladino Non-Indigneous/Mestizo (person)

Libro de Actas Book of Meeting Minutes

Milpa Corn

Minería Mining

Municipio Municipality

Municipalidad Town Hall

Padres de Familia Parent’s Association (of a school)

Personería Jurídica/Personalidad Jurídica Legal Representation

Quetzal Guatemalan Currency

Rendición de cuentas Transparent accounting of financial transactions

Vecino Neighbor or resident

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CHAPTER ONE

THE CHALLENGES OF DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY:

GUATEMALA, DECENTRALIZED

One afternoon in May 2010, Miguel kept shop in the Veterinariana El Centro in the small and mountainous municipio of San Juan Ixcoy, Guatemala. During breaks from his work, he read the Guatemalan Constitution with intent. Miguel was President of his rural indigenous-Q’anjob’al community’s Development Council, and the residents had chosen to write up a legal document detailing their rules—a Reglamento Interno. That is,

Quisil, a small rural community in San Juan Ixcoy, planned to regulate their customary law—rules, values and norms of acceptable behavior that had been passed down and adapted over generations. Elders in the community explained that in the past, there were indigenous laws, “leyes indígenas… for example, the elders would bring people together to solve whatever problems existed.” But now Quisil had grown to a population of nearly

1,000, and they wanted to ensure order within the community, get people to effectively work together, and protect the rights of women and children. In order to do so effectively,

Miguel explained, they needed to legally justify their actions under official law, too. The

Reglamento had been in progress for over a year, involving nearly all the community: residents, evangelical religious leaders, Mayan spiritual guides, Development Council officers, community commissions on health, agriculture, and education, the women’s council, and the community mayor. They initially brainstormed the idea as a response to challenges identified in their “Community Diagnostic,” an activity encouraged by the

Municipal Government to help them clarify their strengths, weaknesses, challenges and

opportunities. Now they were in the process of writing the final document, including its legal basis, which is why Miguel was combing the Guatemalan Constitution to identify the specific articles that speak to the rights of indigenous communities’ culture and customary law.

The idea of creating a Reglamento Interno appeared to emerge organically in

Quisil. In fact, the municipal Mayor, himself a longtime indigenous rights activist, expressed that while he supported community autonomy, he believed that formalizing customary law in writing might open a Pandora’s box of problems because it contradicted the flexibility and adaptability inherent in oral customary law. At the same time, it was the practices of the Mayor, Municipal Government and its allies within civil society that encouraged the community of Quisil to assert its indigenous identity as a local development strategy, in this case for constructing and formalizing local laws. In San

Juan Ixcoy, indigenous cultural activists years ago had achieved political power and since then have worked to institutionalize their long-held ideas on cultural rights, indigenous citizenship, and culturally pertinent development, in large part by appropriating the new legal tools afforded by a country-wide state decentralization process and other national and international indigenous identity-based laws. The result was that a new regime of citizenship and local governance was born, infused with indigenous cultural meaning.

This identity-infused transformation of governance and citizenship in San Juan

Ixcoy is reflective of two major global phenomena, the messy intersection of which this dissertation examines: indigenous rights movements and democratic decentralization.

Much is known about the impacts of decentralization and participatory democracy initiatives in local spaces, and scholarship on indigenous rights movements also continues

to grow. Yet, less effort has been made to systematically analyze how and why indigenous citizenship might be transforming within the new institutional context of state decentralization. This dissertation takes a step in that direction, pointing to the crucial role that indigenous rights activists and local power relations play in (re)constructing citizenship within the realm of local governance.

Indigenous Citizenship: Exploring and Explaining Variation

Indigenous movements globally and especially in Latin America have demanded radical changes to liberal state citizenship regimes. Specifically, they have sought greater local autonomy in order to govern according to traditional authority and organizational systems, and to control territory and natural resources. But such challenges have often been met with watered down decentralization reforms that grant indigenous groups only limited degrees of political autonomy. In theory, decentralization is posed as an effective way to construct an inclusive multi-ethnic and multi-cultural democracy. But, to what extent can indigenous citizenship demands be met under such an institutional framework?

Within a decentralized state regime, what kind of new citizenship practices and reconfigurations of citizen-community-state relations might indigenous peoples construct? How might local social and political context condition this process of

(re)constructing indigenous citizenship? This dissertation takes Guatemala as a research site for answering these questions.

In Guatemala, indigenous people have endured a long history of racism, socio- economic marginalization, exclusion from full citizenship, and denigration of their culture and identity. Decentralization reforms, including measures to establish spaces for

citizen participation in municipalities and communities, were constructed on the heels of a protracted internal conflict marked by acts of genocide, and directly aimed to address this history by incorporating indigenous people as citizens and deepening their political participation, especially in local spaces. The passage of a series of decentralization reforms in 2002 marked a conjunctural moment in Guatemala’s history, opening up new opportunities for indigenous people to be part of an overall process of multicultural democratization, and making space for contestation in the realm of local governance. The central state has been unwilling and even incapable of fully and actively implementing the decentralization reforms, leading the reforms to appear quite weak at first glance. Yet, in order to understand precisely how indigenous peoples’ experiences of citizenship are changing within the context of decentralization, one must go beyond national politics and also look to practices on the ground. This dissertation does just that. It comparatively analyzes transformations in citizenship in three indigenous majority municipalities and finds radical differences: new expressions of citizen participation, new practices of exercising individual and collective rights, and new relationships drawn between indigenous communities and the official (Guatemalan) state. I find that constructions of indigenous individual and community citizenship within the newly decentralized state are by no means predetermined. Instead, this dissertation demonstrates three distinct regimes of indigenous citizenship: depoliticizing, polarizing, and transformative.

Variations of Indigenous Citizenship

The municipality of San Juan Sacatepéquez presents a case of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship. Under certain conditions, decentralization in Guatemala produces

depoliticized political subjects, and a depoliticized regime of governance, where questions of indigenous identity and rights are virtually eliminated from the processes of constructing citizens and new local governance institutions. In this municipality, the site of a contested mining project, residents of villages that would be most affected by the project, and therefore opposed it on grounds that it violated their rights as indigenous peoples, were effectively shut out of new institutions for citizen participation. Instead, the process of building those new institutions was captured by elites, who then manipulated public debate in order to, cast those who opposed the mine as unworthy of recognition as citizens and “against development”, and remove from discussion any question of whether or not the mining project would be in the municipality’s best long-term development interests. Mining—and more generally the control and use of territory and natural resources—was thus rendered a technical, non-political decision. At the same time as citizens were led away from debating the control and use of natural resources, they were momentarily pacified with the participatory budget and increased access to their officials and to public information—all new and significant opportunities for exercising their rights as citizens. Institutional spaces for citizen participation were constructed in a way that blocked the formation of new networks of leaders from villages situated at opposite ends of the municipality, arguably hindering discussion of problems affecting the municipality as a whole and indigenous citizens and communities in particular, and instead facilitating limited discussions over location-specific development challenges. In a regime of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship, the quality of democracy and potential for positive developmental outcomes are mediocre, in large part because indigenous

identity, culture and rights are bracketed. In this case, one sees little to no transformation of the liberal citizenship regime.

By contrast, identity politics are polarizing and powerful in Tecpán, Guatemala, an ideal typical case of polarizing indigenous citizenship. Conceptions of citizenship and citizen-state relations, as well as lived and politicized experiences of ethnic identity, run in opposite directions. Among citizens (and local government officials) there is intense disagreement over what and who constitute legitimate authority, what is the substance of that authority, and what are legitimate modes of democratic decision-making. Many are content to work within the constraints of the official Guatemalan state and political party system. They see legitimate authority as resting with the elected authorities (the Mayor and Town Council), and believe those authorities can and should make decisions for the good of the municipality even in the face of opposition from citizens, civil society and communities. But others disagree. Instead, they believe legitimate authority to emanate from the indigenous communities whose leaders participate in the new participatory institutions, and they even dream of restructuring the local state to better reflect what they consider to be authentically indigenous forms of governance. They see new participatory institutions as holding absolute power to make binding decisions in the municipality over matters from the budget to the control and use of natural resources, based on a legal and normative valorization of indigenous identity and rights. And, they actually do have the power to make such decisions. Community leaders within the participatory institutions hold a virtual veto power over the municipal government, and exercise that veto on a regular basis. Often, the Mayor and Town Council are rendered virtually powerless to govern. What results is a high quality of democracy, but little potential for reaching

developmental goals, and an overall lack of governance as the municipio remains polarized over the proper relationship between individual citizens, indigenous communities, and the state. A limited transformation of the liberal citizenship regime took place.

Finally, in San Juan Ixcoy, indigenous citizenship is transformative. The idea that citizenship for indigenous people should be participatory, culturally relevant and collaborative became hegemonic in the municipio. Decentralized participatory institutions were shaped in order to reflect local organizational culture and facilitate coordination with the municipal government. The local state was democratized in a culturally pertinent manner, and local governance is the product of a cooperative, synergistic relationship between civil society and the state. Together, they have constructed plans and policies for deepening citizen participation in indigenous communities and the municipality, and achieving basic socio-economic and human development goals, particularly in the areas of education, health, and agricultural productivity. A particular interpretation of indigenous identity and culture is promoted as a rationale for making democracy more inclusive (especially of women and youth) and for achieving sustainable development. But indigenous culture is also promoted as a goal in and of itself that is intrinsically valuable, especially to activists concerned with cultural revitalization and combatting racism.

Citizens are knowledgeable about their rights, including indigenous identity-based rights, and exercise them regularly. That knowledge has been applied not only to participate in planning the municipal budget, but also in order to assert local autonomy over sub-soil natural resources at the level of the municipio, and to formalize indigenous

customary legal regimes at the level of the community, as described in the first pages of this Chapter. This municipality pushes the limits to local autonomy. In sum, in this case of transformative indigenous citizenship, identity and culture are tools for development, rationales for participatory democracy, and intrinsically valuable. A high quality of culturally pertinent democracy, real developmental outcomes, and smooth, collaborative governance characterize this case. The liberal citizenship regime underwent significant local transformation.

Explaining Variation in Citizenship Regimes

What explains the emergence of such divergent indigenous citizenship regimes? I argue that they result from the complicated mechanisms by which identity becomes politicized within local governance in a decentralized political regime. Specifically, I point to the key role of indigenous entrepreneurs in doing this. These are indigenous activists who seek to mobilize people on the basis of identity, with the goal of deepening democracy and revitalizing and (re)valorizing indigenous culture, including indigenous- framed ways of socio-political organization, authority and decision-making. They possess important resources for doing this, including identity, legal knowledge, and activist networks, and are likely found in many municipalities in Guatemala with a significant indigenous population. Indigenous entrepreneurs must navigate local politics and power relations in order to successfully impart their vision and convince others to accept it. At the same time, the cases in this dissertation also demonstrate that indigenous entrepreneurs often make strategic and consequential decisions that cannot simply be explained by looking to the local political balance of power. In sum, emergent indigenous

citizenship regimes result from both local structural conditions and the agency of indigenous entrepreneurs.

The three cases in this dissertation demonstrate that the first actors to seize the process of implementing decentralization reforms in a municipality are able to exert a strong influence in local governance even after the reforms are implemented. Indigenous entrepreneurs’ possibilities for both being the first actors and maintaining a strong influence in local governance are contingent upon two factors. One is whether indigenous entrepreneurs can organize the local population into a movement to democratize the local state. The second is the general configuration of political power relations within the municipality. Specifically, the degree to which elites are organized politically within a municipality sets limits on indigenous entrepreneurs. Where elites are less powerful and organized, indigenous entrepreneurs will be better able to organize the population into a local movement and subsequently seize the decentralization process—better enabling them to maintain their position as a counterweight to elite power in the realm of local governance. However, even within the enabling or constraining environment that elites create, indigenous entrepreneurs still have opportunities for effectively exercising agency, which they sometimes exploit and other times miss. Figure 1.1 illustrates the main argument of the dissertation.

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Figure 1.1: Main Argument: Constructing Indigenous Citizenship

Balance of

Power between Elites and

Indigenous Entrepreneurs

Capture of Reconfigured Resulting

Decentralization local power Indigenous process in relations Citizenship + municipality Regime

Indigenous Entrepreneurs’ organization, resources & strategic decisions

In San Juan Sacatepéquez, a case of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship, elites—

primarily a mining company—are powerful, organized, and collaborate with the

municipal and central government. Indigenous entrepreneurs organized a geographically

circumscribed segment of the population to oppose elite and state power, but lacked

significant voice in the municipality and missed opportunities to use organizing and

framing strategies that were successful in both other cases in the dissertation. Elites and

the state implemented the decentralization reforms in a way that effectively excluded

those who belonged to the small movement led by indigenous entrepreneurs, and blocked

the formation of new networks of leaders from villages situated at opposite ends of the

municipality. By contrast, in Tecpán, where indigenous citizenship is polarizing, elites

are somewhat organized and regularly collaborate with the municipal government. But

this provided enough room for indigenous entrepreneurs to organize the local population

into a movement to democratize the state. Strategic and innovative, they implemented the

decentralization reforms and formally institutionalized their movement through the new decentralized participatory spaces. Through this forum they have been able to check elite power, though they are not powerful enough to impose their own political and policy agenda on the municipality. At the same time, indigenous entrepreneurs’ own disagreements over strategy have sometimes led to weakness vis-à-vis elites, and failure to achieve important development goals. Finally, in the case of transformative indigenous citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy, elites have little organized presence in the municipality and indigenous entrepreneurs—who were especially knowledgeable, creative, and resourceful—were able to organize the local population, implement the decentralization reforms, and establish a new regime of culturally pertinent and synergistic state-society collaboration. Table 1.1, below, depicts how each municipality/citizenship regime type fared on the two key variables, elite power (balance of power) and indigenous entrepreneurs (their degree of organization and resources).

Table 1.1: Analytical Framework

Depoliticizing Transformative Polarizing Indigenous Indigenous Indigenous Citizenship: Citizenship: San Juan Citizenship: Tecpán, Guatemala Sacatepéquez San Juan Ixcoy Powerful & organized, are first actors, and Moderately organized, Low Elites collaborate with collaborate with organization and municipal and central municipal government power government Strong organization, High organization, Low and territorially first actors, strong local movement, circumscribed assume power in Indigenous first actors, strong voice organization, low the local state; Entrepreneurs and influence; influence; missed unified and very sometimes disagree over important opportunities knowledgeable, strategy creative, and resourceful

The Big Picture: Building inclusive multi-ethnic democracies

The different constructions of indigenous citizenship in this dissertation provide a glimpse into the challenges of building inclusive multi-ethnic and multi-cultural democracies, a broad goal of indigenous rights movements. In the early to mid 1980s, indigenous rights movements emerged as increasingly visible and powerful social and political actors, at a global level and especially in Latin America (Assies, van der Haar, and Hoekema (eds.) 1998; Brysk 2000; Li 2000; Hodgson 2002; Warren and Jackson eds.

2002; Postero and Zamosc eds. 2004; Yashar 2005; Engle 2011). Though the organizations, activists, and communities that make up the global, regional, and national indigenous movements may vary significantly in their strategies of action, their demands have fallen along a similar range. They have sought recognition and respect for their culture and identity, and more specifically for their languages, styles of dress, spiritual

practices, customary law, and ways of “knowing” or viewing the world, which they often argue conflict with Western perspectives. Material demands as well have been central to this movement, most notably calls for land reform (Stocks 2005; Horton 2006; Short

2006), and access to and even control over natural resources including forests, water, and sub-soil minerals (Assies 2003; Sawyer 2004). The International Labour Organization, in

1992, addressed many of these demands in Convention No. 169 Concerning the Rights of

Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries. Yet it was not until 2007 and after decades of pressure from indigenous activists, that the United Nations General

Assembly deemed these demands legitimate and their fulfillment essential for preserving indigenous peoples’ cultural and physical existence, in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Charters and Stavenhagen eds. 2009).

Addressing such demands for recognition of identity and redistribution of power and resources requires rethinking the very idea of citizenship: the nature and substance of the citizen-state relationship. In a cross-national study on the rise of indigenous rights movements in Latin America, Yashar (2005) argues that indigenous people are challenging the liberal democratic conception of citizenship, which at its base views the individual as the primary bearer of rights. Instead, indigenous movements call for a different version, where states would “incorporate heterogeneous notions of who is a citizen, how citizenship is mediated, and where authority is invested” (Yashar 2005: 285).

Essentially, indigenous peoples’ post-liberal challenge demands “a new political arrangement, implying a redefinition of national political, administrative and legal space”

(Sieder 2002: 8). Indigenous movements demand a type of citizenship that does not necessarily emanate from the nation-state, for individuals (only). Rather, they question

the precise role of the state in granting citizenship, and the locus of legitimate authority.

This requires not only a new kind of citizenship for indigenous individuals, but also a reconfiguration of the individual-state relations that define the liberal citizenship regime itself, in a way that recognizes the special relationship between territorially defined indigenous collectivities and the national state.

Addressing Indigenous Challenges to Citizenship: Autonomy and Decentralization

Demands for a new citizenship regime in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural democracies can be (and have been) met through a variety of institutional arrangements. Scholars and policy-makers often propose constructing institutions that allow competing identity groups to share political power, within a “consensus-based” or “consociational” democratic model (Lijphart 1968, 1999; Andeweg 2000). Central to this model is some variant of federalism or decentralization of administrative, fiscal, and political competencies from the central government to smaller territorial units. Only a small handful of countries have constructed federal systems—which are normally constitutionally embedded—to deal with their diverse societies (Stepan, Linz, Yadav

2011). Many countries have established asymmetrical federal systems to accommodate territorially bound minority populations, like indigenous peoples. In this situation, specific territories are granted a degree of local autonomy and governing competencies that other regions of the same country do not have (Ghai 2000). Liberal theorist Will

Kymlicka (1995) proposes such arrangements as the ideal institutional solution for including territorially-circumscribed minority groups within a liberal democratic state

framework, in order to respect the dignity and rights of minorities while preserving political stability and avoiding balkanization.

Such discussions of the politics of accommodation are directly relevant to indigenous peoples. Indigenous movements in many countries have sought a new citizenship that would be exercised via a degree of constitutionally and legally codified asymmetrical political autonomy within their territories, which they consider ancestral and integral to preserving their cultural identity. In Latin America, indigenous peoples living on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua is perhaps the most well-known case; autonomy was guaranteed in the 1987 Constitution, but not put into practice until the Awas Tingi people won a landmark legal battle in 2001, in the Inter-American Court of Human

Rights (Frühling, Gonzalez and Bulloven 2007; Hooker 2010). In Panama, too, the small

Kuna population exercises de jure control over its territory (Horton 2006). Today, the most extensive state changes to accommodate indigenous self-government are taking place in Bolivia, where a new Constitution (2009) initiated the federalization of the state and granted indigenous groups political autonomy over their territories, in an asymmetrical arrangement (Albo and Romero 2009).1 Table 1.2 outlines the Latin

American countries where indigenous populations have achieved formal political autonomy, and whether these laws or constitutional provisions have been implemented by the state. (Note that this says little about whether indigenous peoples in these or other

Latin American countries exercise de facto autonomy in particular places).2

1 Native Americans in the United States and in Canada also live within asymmetrical federalist regimes. 2 For example, see the following works which detail the ways in which indigenous peoples often construct semi-autonomous political spaces: Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina (2002), Speed (2008) and Ulloa (2010). In this dissertation, I also argue that indigenous peoples in many places, especially at the village level, are constructing autonomous (or semi-autonomous) governing systems.

Table 1.2: Legal Recognition of Indigenous Autonomy in Latin America

Country Autonomy Year Legal Framework and Implementation Bolivia Yes 2009 Constitution establishes Bolivia as an asymmetrical federation, including “indigenous- original-peasant” autonomies. Regulated by law; beginning implementation. Columbia Yes 1991 Constitutional recognition of autonomous indigenous “reservations.” Not legally implemented. Ecuador Yes 2008 Constitutional. Not implemented or regulated in laws. Nicaragua Yes 1987 Autonomy Statute; Constitution recognizes collective ownership of territory (more fully enforced after 2001). Autonomous regions cover ~50% of national territory. Panama Yes 1972 Constitutional recognition of territorial “reserves,” which are now twenty percent of national territory. Venezuela Yes 1999 Constitution allows for creating autonomous regimes or municipal or new forms of indigenous municipal organization. No further implementation. Argentina No Brazil No Chile No Costa Rica No Guatemala No Mexico No Paraguay No Peru No Elaborated from González (2010), Van Cott (2001), Assies (2005), and field research in Bolivia (2011). By contrast, in many places, indigenous peoples live within state institutional frameworks that do not grant them significant differentiated status and rights as political, territorially-based collectivities. However, many countries have undergone decentralization processes as a partial response to ethnic diversity and/or indigenous movement demands (Martí i Puig and Gómez-Reino 2010). To reiterate, decentralization and autonomy do not provide indigenous peoples the same institutional context. As

González explains, “autonomy, in contrast to decentralization or regionalization, requires

the creation of an ethnic indigenous (or multiethnic) jurisdiction legally recognized as part of the politico-administrative order of the state,” (Gonzáles 2010: 38) within which indigenous peoples may establish their own authority structures and decision-making institutions (also see: Díaz-Polanco 1997). Decentralization is more limiting.

In the mid-1980s, decentralization of fiscal, administrative and political competencies from the central to lower levels of the state became the fashion in the developing world and international development community. By the mid-1990s, the

World Bank reported that out of seventy-five developing countries with populations greater than five million, all but twelve were engaged in a process of decentralization

(Dillinger 1994: 8, cited in Crook and Manor 1998: 1). By the late 1990s, most of the

World Bank’s “client” countries had decentralized to at least one level of sub-national government (World Bank: 2008, 5). The details of decentralization reforms and processes can vary tremendously from one country to the next in terms of the amount of financial resources devolved from the central state, the competencies awarded to local and/or regional governments, and the degree of freedom allowed in shaping local governing institutions (Manor 1999). They can also differ in terms of whether new institutions are also created to spur citizen participation and state-society cooperation; this became much more common in the mid-1990s (Hickey and Mohan 2004). Similarly, reasons for pursuing decentralization vary widely, as do the different types of actors who have promoted it. Policymakers, development professionals and academics alike have viewed it as a way to promote economic development, increase government transparency and accountability, and even grow democracy (Crook and Manor 1998). It is said to make governments more responsive to citizen needs, and more efficient in delivering basic

services, by bringing the state closer to its citizens and by partially stripping power from rent-seeking central governments. Decentralization and associated policies to spur citizen participation in local government often went hand in hand with the rise of economic liberalization, the idea being that if the state has fewer resources to work with, then decentralization and greater participation of citizens and local politicians should allocate those resources more efficiently, to where they are most needed. Yet, because it provides local populations with potentially more political and cultural autonomy to govern, decentralization is also presented as one of a host of solutions for ameliorating conflict and inequality in ethnically and culturally diverse societies (Bardhan 2002, Crawford and

Hartmann (eds.) 2008; Hartman 2008).3 In this sense, it is a solution to what Habermas

(2001) terms the “legitimation crisis”: the centralized state cannot easily respond to the increasing demands from identity groups whose boundaries are often hardening as a side effect of globalization (also see Castells 2004).4 In the words of Larson and Ribot:

Decentralisation should strengthen both central and local government. It is not about dismantling the state in order to replace it with local democratic sovereigns. It is about creating local democracy that can build legitimate states and governments – writ large – by playing the inclusive and democratic role that many of us hope governments can play and which are the foundation of democratic systems. Decentralisation is about bringing the state back in, but this time as a positive and legitimate democratic institution (Larson and Ribot 2004, 7).

Unsurprisingly, this process of state reform tends to be more amenable to elites and non-indigenous populations than proposals for ethnic-based regional autonomy or awarding special rights and recognition to indigenous peoples as groups and collective

3 Note that even as decentralization is promoted as a solution for ethnic conflict and state building, there is debate over whether it in fact may ameliorate or further intensify ethnic conflict, as the case studies in Crawford and Hartmann eds. (2008) demonstrate (also see: Gjoni 2010; Turner 2006). 4 Habermas’ argument is more complex that this, as he also considers the economic factors that make states unable to provide for their citizens.

owners of territories.5 Since it does not leave room for asymmetrical arrangements or recognize territorially inscribed ethnic differences, decentralization preserves the territorial integrity of the state and the myth of the unified (and non-indigenous) nation— an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) that many indigenous intellectuals criticize as a colonial construct that upholds structurally embedded racism. Some examples of states that decentralized partly in order to address indigenous populations’ pressure for inclusion are Bolivia in the mid 1990s, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Guatemala, the focus of this dissertation.

Research Site: Guatemala

Guatemala presents an ideal research site for investigating the intersection of decentralization and indigenous rights because of its demographic makeup, historical exclusion and racialization of indigenous peoples, and because decentralization fits into a new policy era of democratization and multicultural recognition ostensibly aimed at incorporating indigenous people(s) as full citizens.

Guatemala is one of only two countries in the Americas where at least half of the population identifies as indigenous.6 While in the 2002 Census thirty-nine percent self- identified with an indigenous ethno-linguistic group, Yashar (2005: 21) cites estimates from forty-five to sixty percent, and the United Nations Development Program (2004: 92) reports the number at sixty-six percent. Throughout Latin America, reaching a definitive

5 Van Cott (2001) discusses the difficult process in which indigenous rights movements have negotiated with non-indigenous elites for Constitutional autonomy regimes in a selection of Latin American countries. 6 Bolivia is the other country. Nearly all indigenous people in Guatemala belong to one of twenty-one “Mayan” ethno-linguistic groups (less than one percent identify themselves as Garífuna Afro-descendants or Xinca, a very small indigenous group). The identity of “Maya” (harking back to the pre-Colombian Mayan civilization and root language) has become the politically salient identity within the indigenous rights movement in Guatemala (Warren 1998a; Fischer and Brown eds. 1996).

answer on the size of different countries’ indigenous populations has proved challenging

(González 1994). Mayan scholars (and rights activists, too) believe the more accurate count is on the higher end of these estimates; for instance, Tzian (2009) estimates the indigenous population at sixty-one percent. Critics argue that persistent racism in

Guatemala leads to a smaller count of indigenous people. For example, Maya intellectual

Demetrio Cojtí (1995) writes that the Guatemalan Census has historically been a medium of oppression against indigenous people, leading them to deny their identity. He obliquely points to the way indigenous people have come occupy a racial category in

Guatemala, and are socially constructed as racial subjects. They experience what DuBois

(1989[1903]) called “double consciousness,” or what Winant (2001) termed “racial dualism”: indigenous people see themselves through the eyes of the dominant racial group. In a place like Guatemala where outward impressions of “race” can differ depending on contextual factors like place, dress, and activity, this leads to efforts at

“passing” as non-indigenous, by denying one’s identity and roots and adopting the cultural practices of the dominant racial group.7

This shared experience of racialization (Omi and Winant 1986) is an important factor informing indigenous political subjectivities. But it is only one factor, in addition to common ethnic experiences (i.e. socio-cultural). Identity is often in flux as indigenous people are differentially incorporated into the global economy as employees of factories and multinational mining companies, as smallholder farmers growing for export, as day laborers on large plantations, as migrants to the United States and Canada, and as victims

7 Weismantle’s (2001) ethnography of cholas in Cuzco, Peru, provides an excellent account of how a chola may appear “indigenous” in some contexts but “mestiza” in others (aside from how the subject perceives herself). This is likely a similar phenomenon for many indigenous people in Guatemala.

or beneficiaries of a new wave of foreign natural resource extraction projects.8 At the same time, an indigenous movement that has permeated the country for the past twenty years seeks to “rescue” and revalorize indigenous “Mayan” language, cultural practices, and identity (Fischer and Brown 1996; Warren 1998a; Nelson 1999). Indigenous

Guatemalans are thus often pulled in opposite directions when it comes to understanding who they are and acting upon (or not acting upon) that identity politically. Specifically, not all indigenous rights activists (and certainly not all indigenous people) are focused on changing the parameters of citizenship or asserting greater local governing autonomy, though many certainly are, as this dissertation illustrates.

Efforts to transform the state and citizenship in favor of indigenous people respond to blatant inequality between indígenas and Ladinos (mixed-‘race’ people, known as mestizos in the rest of Latin America). Historically, the subordination of indigenous peoples was exercised formally within the state and informally in society (for example, see: Peláez Martínez 2009; Smith (ed.) 1990; Casaús Arzú 2007(1992);

Guzmán-Böckler and Herbert 1970). As in the rest of Latin America, indigenous peoples in Guatemala have historically been marginalized from the identity of the nation and from full citizenship in a mono-cultural state. Institutions have historically favored

Ladinos and have systemically marginalized indigenous people from access to basic public services, justice, and economic opportunities. It results that indigenous people lag behind non-indigenous people on every socio-economic development indicator (Shapiro

2006); Table 1.3 highlights some of these inequalities. In the latter part of the twentieth

8 For example, see Fischer and Benson (2006) on indigenous peasants’ incorporation into the global economy, van de Sandt (2009) on indigenous encounters with mining on their territories, and Camus (2002) and Foxen (2008) on the effects of migration to Guatemala City and the U.S. (respectively) on Mayan identities.

century, unequal land access coupled with ethnic discrimination resulted in a three- decade period internal conflict, which evolved into a campaign of state-sponsored violence against indigenous people in the 1980s (Carmack 1988; Commission for

Historical Clarification 1999). The political system and political parties have also been exclusionary. In sum, the historical, structural and often violent exclusion of indigenous people, who comprise roughly half the population, make reforming the Guatemalan state to include indigenous people as citizens with equal (individual and collective) civil, political, socio-economic, and cultural rights, particularly challenging.9

Table 1.3: Indigenous versus Non-Indigenous Development: Selected Indicators

Indigenous Non- Indigenous Human Development Index (2006)10 0.625 0.738 Poverty11 Poverty (2006) 73% 35.5% Extreme Poverty (2006) 26.4% 7.3% Health Child Malnutrition (2008/09)12 58.6% 30.6% Under 5 mortality (per 1000 births, 2008/09)13 55 36 Births attended by medical personnel (2009/10)14 29.5% 70% Education15 Average Years of Schooling (2006) 3.1 6.1 Literacy, age 15+ (2002) 49.9% 79.3% Elaborated by the author with data from the United Nations Development Programme

9 Chapter Three further elaborates on this historical background. 10 Escobar (2011: 10). 11 Source: PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo), “Pobreza Total y Extrema,” http://desarrollohumano.org.gt/content/pobreza-total-y-extrema-2000-y-2006 (accessed online July 20, 2011). 12 PNUD. “Desnutrición y mortalidad infantil etnicidad (1987-2009),” http://desarrollohumano.org.gt/content/desnutricion-y-mortalidad-infantil-etnicidad (accessed online July 20, 2011). 13 Ibid. 14 PNUD. “Anexo Estadistico,” see Cuadro 7.1, “Guatemala (2008/2009) Atención de embarazo y parto por área, etnicidad y departamento. Porcentaje de embarazos y partos,” http://desarrollohumano.org.gt/sites/default/files/anexo%20estad%C3%ADstico.pdf (accessed online July 20, 2012) 15 Escobar (2011: 13).

In Guatemala and throughout Latin America, indigenous mobilization, combined with the support of international non-governmental organizations and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and United Nations, and international law recognizing indigenous peoples are rights-bearers, led many countries to undergo significant state reforms aimed at ameliorating ethnic inequality and recognizing indigenous identity and rights (Assies et al. (eds.) 1998; Van Cott 2000; Sieder (ed.) 2002; Warren and Jackson

(eds.) 2002). Reforms ranged from language, education and dress, to justice, customary law, and land reform, and to official rhetorical recognition of the “multicultural” or

“multiethnic” character of the nation. In some countries multicultural state reforms were included in new or revised Constitutions, but in Guatemala the indigenous movement was too weak—and elite opposition too organized—to obtain Constitutional-level reforms

(Warren 2002). In many Latin American countries, many of these reforms were promoted not just by indigenous activists themselves but also by the international community, and thus certain “neoliberal” socio-economic reforms (and sometimes decentralization) were often included in a package deal (Van Cott 2006). In particular, in Guatemala decentralization was explicitly conceived as a multicultural state reform, negotiated during peace talks that ended the thirty-six year internal conflict in 1996. Indigenous representatives along with the Guatemalan government and representatives of the international community were important actors in crafting the decentralization reforms.

Decentralization was proposed as part of an overall project of democratic deepening, with the goal of providing indigenous municipalities and communities greater local autonomy, and improving indigenous individuals’ citizen participation. Some indigenous activists wanted more radical changes, akin to asymmetrical autonomy for

territorially defined ethno-linguistic groups. But elites feared this would engender conflict and would referred to it (and other multicultural state reforms) as tempting indigenous people to voltear la tortilla—a popular metaphor conveying the assumption that indigenous people would, if they could, treat Ladinos to the violence and oppression they themselves had suffered for so long. Thus state officials and elites, with the support of the international community, compromised with indigenous representatives on a decentralization process that would extend decision-making power all the way down to the community level, and create new institutions to ensure citizen participation in all levels of government, from small rural communities up to the nation. In 2002, the

Guatemalan Congress passed three key pieces of legislation that would set the decentralization process into motion. After ten years, there is now ample evidence with which to analyze the impact of decentralization on indigenous citizenship.16

Research Design and Methods

This dissertation uses qualitative data collection methods to compare the impact of the decentralization process on indigenous citizenship in three municipalities. This approach, termed the sub-national comparative method, is especially useful for researching “the spatially uneven nature of major processes of political and economic transformation,” such as nation-wide decentralization and multicultural legislation

(Snyder 2001: 94). In setting up a controlled comparison of three municipalities, “the sub-national comparative method makes it easier to see this within-nation variation, [and] contributes to a more adequate description of complex processes of change” (Snyder

16 Chapter Three further elaborates on the political process by which the decentralization legislation was crafted.

2001: 94). Therefore in this dissertation, cases were chosen in order to control for potentially important factors.

First, a majority of the population identified themselves as indigenous in the last national census (in 2002); this limited the study to 157 municipios (Cojtí 2008: 95).17

Population was an important factor to hold constant across the three municipalities, given that the dissertation aims to understand the impact of decentralization on indigenous citizenship (i.e. to local governing autonomy). A limitation of the dissertation is that it does not account for municipalities where there are significant indigenous minorities.

Second, in each municipality since at least the year 2000 (the election cycle directly prior to the passage of decentralization reforms), the mayor self-identified as indigenous.18 Granted, self-identification as indigenous does not directly imply support for an expansive definition of indigenous rights. Indeed, in only one municipality studied

(San Juan Ixcoy) did the current and former Mayors actively promote indigenous peoples’ rights. Maya intellectual Demetrio Cojtí researched the initial years of the decentralization process extensively, and found:

Not even the indigenous mayors are recognizing this right of cultural identity to their fellow indígenas, most of all because of the enajenación étnica [ethnic alienation], and the internalization of the colonial and racist discourse against the indigenous peoples. From this, one cannot see clearly the difference between a ladino municipal government and an indigenous municipal government. (Cojtí 2008: 93)

Here, Cojtí points to a historically grounded racial dualism that alienates indigenous elected officials from their own people, meaning that one should not assume that an indigenous mayor is much more likely than a Ladino one to support democracy or local

17 In the 2002 Census, there existed 330 municipios, the number has since risen to 333. 18 This does not mean that the same Mayor was in power but only that the different mayors elected in 2000, 2004 and 2008 all self-identified as indigenous.

reforms in favor of specifically indigenous rights. Informants with broad knowledge of the decentralization process in Guatemala would mention many municipalities whose indigenous mayors were “corrupt” and cared little for transparency or democratic accountability, never mind indigenous rights. However, in the racially charged context of

Guatemala, a Ladino mayor would arguably be even less likely to promote specifically indigenous rights in local government, even if he or she did support general democratic principles. Thus the research design included only municipalities with a self-identifying indigenous mayor since at least 2000.19

Third, each municipality had implemented the decentralization reforms nearly in their entirety, especially the aspects that involved constructing institutional mechanisms for citizen participation and coordination between civil society and the municipal government. A minority of municipalities has not fully implemented these crucial aspects of the laws, and the research design does not include such municipalities.

A final factor that was roughly held constant among the cases is the quality of civil society prior to the implementation of decentralization reforms. Briefly, I take “civil society” to mean “a sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically separated from the spheres of political, economic, family, and religious life” (Alexander 2006: 53), or more generally, the realm of free associational space distinct from markets, the state, community, and the private sphere of home and family. A corollary to this definition is that there can be much overlap of these spheres as one examines “actually existing” civil society (Mamdani 1996), and this is certainly true in Guatemala where for many indigenous people, the distinctions of church, community,

19 The Guatemalan Association of Indigenous Mayors and Authorities (AGAAI) reported that in 2008, self- identifying indigenous individuals were elected Mayor in 105 of 333 municipalities (data obtained directly from AGAAI).

and state that prevail in Western society are neither natural nor desirable.20

Notwithstanding, civil society is relevant because the quality of previously existing civil society is often a key factor affecting the outcomes of decentralization and citizen participation initiatives; and specifically, an organized civil society that is autonomous from the state, it is often argued, is necessary for producing optimal democratic outcomes in local governance (e.g. Avritzer 2002; Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2011). However, throughout Guatemala during the internal conflict, nearly all associational life in indigenous municipalities was decimated. Weakened systems of authority and organization existed within indigenous villages and neighborhoods, and in two of the municipalities studied, there was underground support for the guerrilla during the internal conflict. But rarely could any open and active trans-community organization exist, due to army repression. Moreover, even within villages and neighborhoods, the Guatemalan army had implemented “Civilian Self-Defense Patrols” in which young men were obligated to participate, and which monitored all public action for signs of guerrilla subversion. Thus at least until the early 1990s, municipalities and villages were mostly devoid of associational life. When the armed conflict ended, space opened up for civil society at the national and municipal levels. In the three cases selected, in the years before the decentralization was implemented, associational life was weak, and few inter- community networks existed.

In San Juan Ixcoy (transformative indigenous citizenship), a weak political movement was present for many years in the center of town and in certain villages, but it

20 In a review of civil society in Latin America, Dagnino (2010) shows that empirically, ‘civil society’ is very heterogeneous and the boundaries between civil society and other spheres, the state especially, are quite porous. This certainly holds true for Guatemala, where many of the new participatory institutions created by the decentralization reforms are also spaces where civil society and the local state engage in co- governance.

did not encompass a majority of the municipality because the armed conflict prevented these activists from overt political organizing beyond their involvement in church activities or covert support for the guerrilla. Similarly, many of the most well-known and revered indigenous scholar-activists call Tecpán (polarizing indigenous citizenship) their home, but never engaged in local politics. Finally, San Juan Sacatepéquez (depoliticizing indigenous citizenship) suffered much less than most municipalities during the armed conflict and probably enjoyed the greatest space for public association, but this did not translate into a local indigenous movement to democratize the state. Table 1.3 presents descriptive characteristics of the three municipalities studied. Analytically, the municipalities differ by the characteristics identified above in Table 1.1, above (the roles and power of indigenous entrepreneurs and elites in the municipality). Map 1.1 illustrates the location of the three municipalities.

Table 1.4: Descriptive Characteristics of Municipalities Studied

Depoliticizing Polarizing Transformative Indigenous Indigenous Indigenous Citizenship: Citizenship: Citizenship: San Juan Tecpán, Guatemala San Juan Ixcoy Sacatepéquez Ethnic Maya-Kaqchikel Maya-Kaqchikel Maya-Q’anjob’al composition (~65%) (~90%) (~95%) Population ~160,000 ~75,000 ~25,000 Central Highlands, Central-Western Northwestern Geographic near Guatemala City Highlands (Dept. of Highlands (Dept. of location (Dept. of Guatemala) Chimaltenango) Huehuetenango) Indigenous Mayor yes yes yes (2002-12) Significantly Limited armed affected by armed conflict violence, but conflict violence, strong Civilian Self- Slightly stronger than which also Quality of civil Defense Patrols often other cases because damaged society, before destroyed traditional less affected by armed community decentralization community conflict violence organization. organization; former Strong influence of leftist guerilla Mayan intellectual stronghold. movement.

Map 1.1: Map of Guatemala- Municipal Case Studies

San Juan Ixcoy

San Juan Sacatepéquez

Tecpán, Guatemala Guatemala City

Research Design and Methods

This dissertation employs a mix of qualitative methods to study the decentralization process at the national level and within the three municipalities: semi- structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. Together, this comprised a multi-sited political ethnography. Ethnographic methods were particularly appropriate for this dissertation, as they “can provide an understanding of how state, national, or global actions play themselves out on local stages” and allowed for studying political practices “as they happen, and where they happen” (Baiocchi and Connor

2007). The ethnography was multi-sited in two senses. First, each of the three municipalities was a research site in itself. Second, the research often extended to places that were spatially distinct from the municipalities, but connected to the political processes of the latter in vitally important ways. One example is events staged by social movements that had linkages with actors in the municipality, but were actually movements with regional or national influence. Below, I explain in detail the precise methodological steps taken to collect the data on which this dissertation’s analysis is based.

National Scale Research

At the national level, I collected data in order to determine the histories of decentralization, local state change, and indigenous rights movements in Guatemala as a whole. Interviews were conducted with current and former government officials and employees and directors of relevant government agencies; indigenous activists representing the many political factions of the indigenous rights movement; and

representatives of civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations, including the aid operations of foreign governments, which have been involved in aiding the national government and/or municipalities in implementing the decentralization laws.

I regularly attended twice-monthly meetings of the Foro por la Descentralización y el Desarrollo Local (Forum for Decentralization and Local Development), a loosely- defined association that included members of civil society organizations, NGOs, university officials, municipal officials, and central government officials, all of whom were working to promote the decentralization of the state and wanted to collaborate to improve the process. I also attended events on decentralization and indigenous rights organized by the government, civil society organizations, and various sectors of the indigenous rights movement that are active in the national public sphere and in particular regions of the country. When possible, I attended protests and marches organized by sectors of the indigenous movement—contentious actions that were not about decentralization per se but were motivated by identity-based concerns over territory and local power. Finally, I collected academic books and articles, and primary documents such as policy proposals and organization position papers dealing with the themes of decentralization and indigenous rights. At the Historical Archive of the Centro de

Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua, I collected original documents from the 1970s-2000s, written by indigenous activists and organizations, on the topics of indigenous rights and identity as it related to local governance. I triangulated these different forms of data in order to create a valid depiction and analysis of the reasons that decentralization was enacted in Guatemala, the key sectors of civil society and government who contributed to the laws’ construction, the power struggles that help

explain how those laws were finally written, and the process by which the laws are now being implemented, by whom, and with what effects. The initial stages of data collection helped me select the local cases to study. This data also helped me to contextualize each of the municipal cases studied, enabling me to better interpret the significance of the different political process I observed in local spaces.

Local Scale Research

Research in each municipality involved three key tasks. One task was to systematically trace the historical process by which the decentralization reforms were implemented. I identified and interviewed the key actors involved in these processes, and collected local archival materials (mostly in the form of meeting minutes) in order to triangulate multiple descriptions of what happened and why it happened. When possible I obtained other documentation (mostly published books) in order to fill in the gaps of the municipality’s history. I paid special attention to the role of indigenous entrepreneurs, interviewing them about their ideology, connections to supra-municipal indigenous rights movements and organizations, and history as activists in the municipality. I also interviewed current and (when possible) former Mayors in order to record their version of this process.

The second key task involved attending all meetings and events and, to the extent possible, embedding myself in the local community so that people would willingly share information with me. The most important meetings to attend were the monthly or bi- monthly meetings of community representatives, organized civil society representatives, and government officials who together make up the “Municipal Development Council”

(further explained in Chapter Three). However, I also attended: meetings organized by civil society and community members themselves (i.e. without the government); meetings of specific civil society organizations; meetings of political parties; cultural events like parades, festivals, photo exhibits, and religious ceremonies; community meetings; government-sponsored workshops or training sessions for community leaders and civil society representatives; and meetings of social movement organizations with a presence in the municipality. Through participation in the social and political life of the municipality, I was able to understand what issues were deemed contentious and see how different sectors of the local population and local government officials would frame and deal with those issues. Importantly, participant observation allowed me to see, first hand, how indigenous activists would utilize identity in order to frame issues as indigenous or not, and even frame the methods of decision-making and the designation of authority as indigenous or legitimate, and the context in which they would do so. Participation in the life of the municipality also helped me access and build rapport with interview subjects in an informal setting.

A third task was to conduct semi-structured interviews with community leaders, indigenous rights activists and traditional authorities, representatives of civil society organizations, representatives of local public institutions, and local government officials and bureaucrats. These interviews helped me to understand the details surrounding relations between the local government, civil society, and communities, and the various positions of interviewees (or rather, the groups they represented) on key political conflicts in each municipality. All interviews were conducted in Spanish. Interviewing was the largest component of data collection, and was particularly important because in

all three municipalities studied, residents usually spoke both Spanish and an indigenous language. While many of the civil society and political events I observed were conducted mostly in Spanish, indigenous languages were also spoken at these events. Interviews helped to fill in the gaps of understanding and allowed me to triangulate different types of data. Table 1.5 summarizes the research activities undertaken. See Appendix A for more details on data collection, including a rough count of the number of interviews conducted.

Appendix B presents the general question format I employed in interviews with indigenous communities.

Table 1.5: Research Activities

Research Activities- Research Activities- Other Research Activities Municipalities Guatemala City • Interviews with: current • Interviews with: current • Interview with and former community and former government indigenous rights leaders; current and officials (who worked on activists in other parts of former municipal issues of indigenous the country, including authorities; municipal rights and the municipality of functionaries; indigenous decentralization Totonicapán. traditional authorities policies); employees of Observe indigenous (spiritual guides, international and • movement events, midwives, and Alcaldes domestic organizations including Indígenas), indigenous working on indigenous meetings/conferences rights activists; rights and and protests; attend representatives of local decentralization; events and conferences civil society indigenous rights related to indigenous organizations activists; indigenous rights or intellectuals; academic Observe meetings of: decentralization. • and policy experts. communities; civil Compile archival society, cultural and Observe events • • materials and locally political organizations; organized by indigenous published books and Community and and other organizations articles on the topics of Municipal "Development (on the topics of indigenous rights, Councils."21 indigenous rights and/or decentralization and decentralization). • Attend cultural and local government. community events. • Participate in the everyday life of the municipality.

Summary of data collection

I conducted five months of field research in the summers of 2006-2008, which provided the initial data needed for developing the dissertation project design, aided in building a network of research contacts, and allowed me to establish a research affiliation with the Instituto de Estudios Interétnicos (IDEI), a research institution of Guatemala’s

21 Development Councils are the institutions for citizen participation that emerged from the decentralization process (see Chapter Three).

state-run Universidad de San Carlos. During the dissertation research, I was fortunate to benefit from feedback on my work, provided by scholars at IDEI. Field research lasted a total of fifteen months—July 2009-2010 and April-July 2011, split roughly equally between the three municipalities and Guatemala City. A National Science Foundation

Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation

Research Abroad fellowship, from the Department of Education, funded this dissertation research.

Table 1.6: Research Chronology

Time span Activities Pre-dissertation research, including interviews Summers of 2006, 2007, 2008 with indigenous cultural and land rights activists and academic experts. July 2009-Nov 2009 Research in Tecpán and Guatemala City. Research in San Juan Sacatepéquez and Dec 2009-March 2010 Guatemala City. Research in San Juan Ixcoy, archival work at the Centro de Estudios y Documentación de la April 2010-June 2010 Frontera Occidental de Guatemala (CEDFOG) in Huehuetenango. Additional research in Tecpán; final research tasks in Guatemala City and in the Historical March 2011-July 2011 Archive of the Centro de Investigación Regional de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua.

Process of Data Analysis

As this is a qualitative study, data collection and analysis took place concurrently as an iterative process. When I began field research, I believed that different transformations in indigenous citizenship would result from the interaction of historically produced collective identities with pre-existing and new governing institutions, yet I was not sure of the precise process or mechanisms by which this would happen. I chose my

first municipal case study, Tecpán, Guatemala, based on what I perceived were fairly strong links with indigenous activist networks. I believed that these networks could prove vital in affecting how citizenship would transform within the context of state decentralization. However, the concept of the indigenous entrepreneur, the role that indigenous entrepreneurs played in local places, and the significance of relations between indigenous entrepreneurs and elites in producing transformations in citizenship, only became evident over time, as I collected and analyzed data while in the field. Though I wrote field notes of my interviews and observations each day, at least once a week I also wrote analytical notes which allowed me to reflect on my research questions and analytical framework, and make informed adjustments to my data collection strategies. In short, the analytical framework presented in this dissertation is the result of a process of generating grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967).

Research Positionality, Self-Reflexivity, and Ethics

Because human subjects were interviewed for this dissertation, the Brown

University Institutional Review Board approved the project. I fully informed all interviewees of my identity and institutional affiliations, the purpose of my project, and how the interview data would be used and protected. All names of human subjects— indigenous activists and some community leaders—were removed or changed. Only names of government officials remain. However, the most important ethical issues that arose in carrying out a project with indigenous people were not the ones on which the

IRB tends to focus.

When I arrived in Tecpán in August 2009, one of my first interview subjects, a community leader who later became a good friend, asked me at the start of our interview,

“But what are you going to do to give back to Tecpán?” At that point, I did not have an answer to his question. My host mother overheard the conversation and asked later that night, “But what are you going to do for Tecpán?” I did not know what I would do, but I wanted to do something. A few of weeks later, I had procured for this community leader a couple books on the decentralization and citizen participation laws, and later I obtained a donation of twenty copies of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of

Indigenous Peoples, which I gave to various community leaders in the municipality.

Similarly, when visiting poor, rural communities in Tecpán and other municipios, I was almost always asked if I knew of some NGO, some project that could help them.

Eventually, I managed to assist a rural community obtain subsidized used computers for its small school.

This is all to say that the more important ethical challenges I faced in carrying out this project related to how I would give back to the people(s) who were so generously sharing their lives with me, how I might—in some cases—aid them in some capacity, and how I would represent them and their political struggles in my written work. Indigenous people, especially those in Guatemala, have been the subject of foreign anthropological and other studies for nearly a century; the majority of these studies are never returned to the research subjects themselves. When working with marginalized populations, it is important to be self-reflexive about how one’s research is interrupting peoples’ lives, or, more positively, how the results might be put to good use for the research subjects.

In response to these challenges, I committed to sharing a hard copy of my dissertation with the public libraries of the three municipalities I studied, as well as the research institutions that contributed to my fieldwork experience (IDEI, and CIRMA).

Eventually, I hope to provide a full Spanish translation, but in the meantime, I am committed to sharing a Spanish language executive summary of the dissertation with the communities, activists and municipal governments of the three municipalities. I also offered to give presentations on the results of the dissertation and answer questions, especially in the three municipalities. I considered these measures to be absolute requirements for carrying out my project.

In some cases, I assisted indigenous communities with various political problems or development challenges. In Tecpán, as a foreign researcher I was able to gain access to important public documents that civil society and community leaders needed but could not obtain on their own. These documents were specifically related to a contentious ecotourism project that was slated to take place on communal forestland (described in

Chapter Five). I provided a copy of these documents to a community leader, and he then shared them with others. It is possible that my intervention helped them to successfully block this project (though they likely would have succeeded even without my help).

Some might argue that I distorted my own data in this way, but this was the ethical thing to do and practically speaking, it provided me the opportunity to examine how the community leaders would make use of this information.

My presence as a researcher in San Juan Sacatepéquez presented additional challenges. As Chapter Five describes, in this municipality a number of indigenous communities have been opposing a large-scale mining project since 2007. They believe

this project threatens to destroy the natural environment around their communities and, perhaps more importantly, their opposition to the project has resulted in numerous human rights violations. At the time of this writing, at least one of the communities is under a

Guatemalan military state of siege. Some of the community leaders I interviewed had not left their rural villages for an entire year, because they are considered wanted criminals— just one example of the trend of criminalizing social protest in Guatemala. It is hard to determine what my response should be to this situation. In a way, I am nearly as powerless as they are. However, one strategy I have identified is to share the results of my research with transnational activist networks and human rights organizations, in order to publicize these problems. In 2011, I submitted a report of the situation to the UN

Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Rights; I now plan to write a short layperson report to be shared with rights NGOs.

I am admittedly sympathetic to the rights struggles in which many of the communities and individual activists who participated in my research are engaged. I see their struggles as just, and I agree with many of their views—about the need to combat racism and internal colonialism, for instance. In the processes of collecting data and writing the dissertation, I had to be self-aware of these biases and challenge myself to address alternate interpretations of the data. This was particularly important when it came to analyzing what and who were “indigenous.” For instance, an activist who became a good friend of mine is focused on rebuilding and strengthening traditional indigenous governing structures. In general, I shared his politics. But I also realized that many indigenous people did not. Many care little for traditions, and are fine with the new governing structures that the decentralization process imposes. For both ethical and

academic reasons, I have tried to unpack these differing perspectives in my writing, in order to provide insight into the complicated ways that decentralization affects indigenous peoples’ rights and citizenship. In sum, this dissertation is a sympathetic critique of the indigenous left, from the left.

A Note on Spanish Translations

Nearly all interviews for this project were conducted in Spanish, and all translations of both interviews and Spanish texts are mine. Some terms have been left in the original Spanish either for stylistic purposes or because an exact English translation might not convey the precise meaning of the word as used in the Guatemalan context. In those cases, I have either provided translations in the “List of Spanish Terms” or I provide the closest English translation in brackets.

Outline of the Dissertation

The rest of this dissertation proceeds as follows. Chapter Two provides the theoretical grounding for this dissertation and elaborates on the analytical framework described in this Chapter. Specifically, the Chapter reviews literature on multicultural state reforms and democratic decentralization in order to theorize how these policies might impact indigenous peoples’ citizenship. It also elaborates on the approach towards studying citizenship that this dissertation adopts. Chapter Three briefly reviews the history of relations between indigenous communities and the Guatemalan state, in order to best contextualize the changes in citizenship that decentralization is provoking. I then discuss the historical background to the decentralization reforms, and examine the precise impact that these reforms have had, from a national perspective. The Chapter argues that

although the Guatemalan State has had little interest in actively implementing the reforms, important new opportunities have arisen for indigenous people to be recognized as citizens and to implement these reforms from below. Chapters Four, Five, and Six are detailed analyses of the three cases of indigenous citizenship described in Chapter One:

Depoliticizing (San Juan Sacatepéquez, Chapter Four), Polarizing (Tecpán, Guatemala,

Chapter Five), and Transformative (San Juan Ixcoy, Chapter Six). Chapter Seven concludes by tying together the main findings from the three empirical cases, and links these findings to the greater theoretical debates that this dissertation addresses: the intersection of democratic decentralization and indigenous people (and ethnicity/identity politics), and the possibilities that these types of multicultural reforms hold for addressing indigenous peoples’ challenge to the liberal citizenship regime and creating democracy amid great diversity.

CHAPTER TWO

CONSTRUCTING INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP:

THEORY AND ANALYTICAL APPROACH

In what ways is indigenous citizenship transforming within the new decentralized institutional context in Guatemala? What are the socio-political factors and actors that condition and drive this transformation in different places? In this Chapter, I first review possible approaches to the research questions, grounded in literature on state multiculturalism and decentralization. Given the dearth of research on the precise ways that indigenous citizenship might transform with the introduction of decentralization, answering the research question requires constructing a fresh analytical framework, which I do through a series of steps. First, I unpack the key outcome this dissertation examines: indigenous citizenship. Specifically, I propose studying citizenship as constructed through the practices of citizens themselves, acting within the constraints of the state. This approach can best account for the varied ways that identity-based rights are exercised in localized spaces. Second, I argue for viewing decentralization reforms as an opening in the political opportunity structure. In local places (municipalities and communities), indigenous people now have a new set of tools with which to exercise their individual and (most importantly) collective rights. Yet, I also problematize the limits to these new tools, by reviewing scholarship on citizen participation that helps contextualize the particularities of the participatory spaces that decentralization presents to indigenous people in Guatemala. Third, I turn our gaze towards a new category of actors in local Guatemalan politics, the indigenous entrepreneur. Examining the role of

indigenous entrepreneurs in the municipalities in this dissertation helps explain the varied effects of decentralization reforms in different localities. These actors, usually tied to supra-municipal social movements, mobilize people on the basis of identity in order to mediate the effects of decentralization laws so that they benefit indigenous rights and citizenship. Fourth, I unpack the precise ways that indigenous entrepreneurs can be successful, pointing to their own skillsets as well as their relations to other powerful actors in a municipality. I end by briefly reviewing the three typologies of indigenous citizenship identified in this dissertation—depoliticizing, polarizing, and transformative.

Decentralization and Indigenous Rights: Questions and Debates

To hypothesize how indigenous citizenship might transform with the introduction of decentralization reforms, this dissertation turns to scholarship on multicultural state reform in Latin America, and to studies on the intersection of democratic decentralization and indigenous peoples.

Multicultural State Reforms

As discussed in Chapter One, in the 1990s states in Latin America began responding to indigenous demands for greater inclusion as members of the nation and as citizens of the state by enacting a series of reforms—laws and constitutional changes— meant to recognize indigenous people’s identity and rights. In theory, these reforms were geared towards leveling the playing field between indigenous and non-indigenous people, in order to ameliorate stark inequalities between the two groups. But this is not always how the reforms played out in practice. A body of scholarship largely dominated by

anthropologists and political scientists emerged to assess the varied impacts of the new state multiculturalism. Many scholars initially celebrated multicultural state reforms as the start of a new chapter in indigenous-state relations in Latin America, viewing them as potentially bringing large-scale social and structural change (Van Cott 2000; Assies et al eds. 1998; Sieder ed. 2002; Postero and Zamosc eds. 2004; Mayberry-Lewis ed. 2002;

Warren and Jackson ed. 2002). After centuries of states either trying to annihilate indigenous people, enslave them, or force them to assimilate to a uniform national culture, the move to finally recognize and even celebrate cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity was a “friendly liquidation of the past,” as Van Cott (2000) put it. In doing so, state multiculturalism marked a sharp departure from twentieth-century ideologies and state policies to force indigenous people to assimilate to the national mixed- ethnicity/cultural identity (Stutzman 1981; Knight 1990; Wade 1997; de la Peña 2005).

In some places multicultural reforms have been an important stepping-stone to more extensive state reform. For example, both Ecuador and Bolivia rewrote their constitutions in 2008 and 2009, respectively, to more fully recognize indigenous rights and set the groundwork for autonomy regimes. But it has also gradually become clear that the liquidation of the past would not necessarily bring a more culturally inclusive and egalitarian future. Even multicultural reforms that appeared unquestionably beneficial at the outset—bilingual education, for instance—effected contradictory reactions from their intended indigenous beneficiaries, who sometimes rejected the reforms as either trying to turn them “backwards” or further colonize their minds and ways of life (García 2005).

Multicultural reforms can even spur new forms of exclusion. Since the reforms are premised on the beneficiaries being “indigenous,” in some places conflicts have emerged

where the very meaning of indigenous identity becomes a “terrain of struggle” (Sawyer and Gómez 2008) and an important symbolic resource for obtaining state benefits like water rights and social services (Warren 2001, Laurie et al. 2002; Graham 2003; Gaventa and Barrett 2010: 35). Although international rights accords (e.g. the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention 169) declare self-ascription to be the main criteria for identifying who is indigenous (and thus a beneficiary of new reforms and rights), in practice states and societies may informally develop criteria for ascertaining “true” indigenousness. For instance, in Guatemala, those who project a

“Mayan” identity (especially those who practice the Mayan spirituality) are more likely to be seen as legitimate bearers of rights than indigenous peasants (Bastos 2010).

Incorporating some of these points, anthropologist Charles Hale has articulated perhaps the most influential, paradigmatic critique of state-led multiculturalism. He argues that state multiculturalism is a “menace” to indigenous peoples (Hale 2002, 2005,

2006). In a context of historically embedded institutionalized racism, multicultural reforms appear deceptively progressive, even revolutionary. But, they paradoxically fall neatly into a “neoliberal” ideology and set of policies that are designed to pacify indigenous activists and movements by recognizing less contentious rights to cultural recognition (for example, language use, traditional dress, spirituality) in order to stymie and delegitimize demands for more radical structural change (e.g. redistributive land reform and political autonomy) that would better address the socio-economic and racialized marginalization that indigenous people experience.

Within this critical logic, state decentralization and citizen participation programs, even when designed to recognize indigenous citizenship, can have a tempering effect on

indigenous struggles. The aim (and result) is to bring indigenous people into the fold of local government in a way that is rationalized, orderly, and non-threatening to non- indigenous people and elites by setting clear boundaries to the content and extent of citizen participation. Deliberating public service delivery is in, but collectively controlling natural resources is out; orderly and polite discussion is in, but contentious protests and marches are out. Working within the state is in, but challenging the inequalities built into state institutions and laws is out. Indigenous people who accept these limitations and play by the rules are considered the indios permitidos (allowed

Indians), a phrase that has made its way throughout Latin American activist and policy circles (Hale and Millaman 2006).22

Other scholars have similarly critiqued state-led multiculturalism. Gustafson

(2002) questioned how the dangerous mix of neoliberal and multicultural reforms was affecting indigenous movement struggles and sentiments of racism in the public sphere, in Bolivia. Bastos (2010) has written of “cosmetic multiculturalism” in Guatemala, whereby the state in effect determines what “real” (and “fake”) indigenous culture and identity is, and promotes that vision through state policies and bureaucratic appointments.

And, Madeiros (2001) even stretched to say that multicultural reforms and decentralization form part of a new “hegemonic project” that seductively opens up spaces for exercising rights and participating politically, that are hampered by definite limits.

These general arguments can be applied in numerous country contexts, including countries with very small indigenous populations. For instance, Park and Richards (2007)

22 The term was first coined by Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, later developed in Hale and Millaman (2004). During field research in Guatemala and Bolivia (for a related project). I found the term was common parlance among indigenous activists, indigenous NGO workers, and indigenous government operatives.

examined the complicated mechanisms by which indigenous Mapuches working in the

Chilean bureaucracy implement policies that sometimes are detrimental to the indigenous rights movement.

The reality, however, is not so black and white (Assies 2010). Park and Richards

(2007) also acknowledge that Mapuche bureaucrats may strategically use the state to further indigenous rights. Postero (2007) and Kohl and Farthing (2006: 70), while recognizing the limits to multicultural reforms in Bolivia, admit that those same reforms also opened up important political opportunities to indigenous peoples, in the realms of both local and national government. Lucero (2008) similarly argues that the reach of

“neoliberal multiculturalism” is likely more conditional than we realize. McNeish, in a comparison of Bolivia and Guatemala, argues that indigenous movements use

“government reforms and institutions of local government to break with the polarized political culture of the past and generate a more complex, and also more nuanced, political culture in which a primary aim is to rethink the representativity and responsiveness of state structures” (McNeish 2008: 48).

This dissertation, too, finds that the effects multicultural reforms, even in a context of economic liberalization and shrinking of the state, are by no means predetermined. Under certain conditions, indigenous people are indeed drawn into local governance and state-sanctioned spaces of civil society in a manner that impels them to drop radical demands –such as control over and use of territory and natural resources— but energetically encourages participatory budgeting and the maintenance of cultural traditions such as the cofradías or the annual appointment of the Reina Indígena, and

other folkloric events that have little to do with the distribution of scarce resources.23 In a municipality that exemplifies the neoliberal multicultural governance regime (Chapter

Four, Depoliticizing Citizenship: San Juan Sacatepéquez), representatives of the Alcaldía

Indígena (a traditional indigenous authority institution) participate with the local government and representatives of communities and civil society organizations in local decision-making, but self-consciously avoid raising controversial issues that directly relate to the rights of indigenous people in the municipality who are being expropriated of their land. To do so would risk losing the little support they receive from the municipal government; thus they carry themselves as indios permitidos.

At the same time, this dissertation also finds municipalities where indigenous people construct their own governing institutions, engage in ongoing debates over development choices, and sometimes coordinate with the local government to ensure local democratic control over finite natural resources including water, forests, and minerals. Moreover, throughout the country, indigenous people have used the tools of decentralization in combination with international rights accords to assert local territorial autonomy.24 In sum, this dissertation engages in debates over state multicultural reform, demonstrating the conditional impact of these reforms on indigenous citizenship in local spaces.

23 A “Cofradía” is a religious brotherhood based on a religious syncretism of Catholic and Mayan beliefs. Many Parishes throughout the country have numerous cofradías. Membership is viewed as honorary and sometimes serves to stratify indigenous people by class position. The “Reina Indígena” is an annual pageant that takes place in all municipalities with an indigenous population. One young woman who best exemplifies a particular conception of local indigenous culture is crowned the “Indigenous Queen” and acts as an ambassador of the municipality at events throughout the country. 24 In Chapter Three I describe this process, whereby indigenous communities exercise their right to Free, Previous and Informed Consent, in order to assert control over the land and natural resources on which they live and depend. Communities from all three municipalities in this dissertation have exercised this right.

Decentralization

Within the literature on decentralization, there is little examination of how indigenous peoples’ governance and citizenship might change as a result of the state changes that decentralization reforms introduce. Studies that evaluate the effects of decentralization and linked participatory democracy initiatives on citizenship, budgeting, and service delivery, imply that their findings could transport to differing cultural contexts. One exception is Ribot (2011). He argues that we need to examine what happens when decentralization is enacted but local non-state authority structures like non-governmental organizations, corporations, or traditional authorities are awarded legitimacy by the central state or foreign donors. Responding to the global push to recognize non-state actors as effective purveyors of democracy and development, he argues, “Not everything indigenous is ‘good’. Many of the ‘indigenous’ governance systems, when analyzed as political systems rather than being viewed as cultural forms, would be labeled autocratic, despotic, oppressive, patriarchal, gender biased, or gerontocratic” (Ribot 2011: 9). He argues that all local authorities—whether official or customary—should be equally “evaluated for how they represent people, encourage citizenship and produce an engaging public domain” (Ribot 2011: 9). Ribot further suggests that in many (but not all) cases, empowering local traditional or customary

(indigenous) authorities “diminishes the public domain. Such enclosure shrinks the integrative space of democratic public interaction. Without public powers there is no space of democracy - there is no ‘public domain’ for citizens to engage in” (Ribot 2011:

11). However this argument leaves out the possibility that alternate forms of governance

(i.e. alternatives to liberal democratic decentralization) may be more appropriate for

certain local populations, and that indigenous populations might not view the official state as legitimate, even if they must engage it. Indigenous peoples often live under forms of authority and governance that are constructs of internal colonialism, rather than built from their own society.25

Ribot may be correct in pointing out the flaws of indigenous authority and governance in many places. But the limited studies of the impact of decentralization reforms in indigenous localities coalesce around a more complicated set of findings that require a more conditional theory for predicting and explaining changes in indigenous citizenship within a newly decentralized state context.26 The first finding is that the liberal democratic institutions of local government and civil society that work best in

Western cultures will not necessarily function the same in non-Western cultures, especially indigenous cultures. Evidence from varying country contexts supports this contention. Cook (2005) finds in some places in South Africa, residents preferred their traditional authorities and decision-making structures, rather than the liberal democratic institutions of the municipal government. In Cambodia, Ehrentraut (2011) argues that decentralization has been implemented in the language and institutions of the dominant culture, whereas, “for decentralization to benefit indigenous peoples, powers relevant to the challenges these groups face… must be devolved to institutions controlled by their communities, with jurisdictions that respond to their territorial concentrations. It is imperative to engage indigenous peoples and their representative institutions” (Ehrentraut

25 On “internal colonialism,” see Stavenhagen (1965), who emphasizes the “second stage” of colonialism whereby indigenous people are treated as a colonized people and subject to new forms of political (and social) domination, by the dominant national society. Also Cojtí (1997: 23-36), on how internal colonialism has worked in the Guatemalan context. 26 An important exception would be Indonesia, but even there, local factors better explain whether indigenous authorities and institutions are or are not “democratic.”

2011: 110). Korovkin (2001) similarly demonstrates that in Ecuador, indigenous peoples already engage in communal governance, outside of official state institutions. She suggests that we need to account for such institutions in the process of decentralization and democratization, and that failing to do so can have negative consequences for indigenous peoples. For example, Kohl (2003) shows that in Bolivia—which in the 1990s underwent a dramatic decentralization process accompanied by reforms to incorporate citizen participation—recognizing “grassroots territorial organizations” encouraged greater participation in local governance, but also had the effect of crowding out indigenous governing institutions because those institutions often did not correspond to a territory that was coterminous with the territory of a single municipality. Moreover, in one of the only municipalities in Bolivia where the territorial jurisdictions of the municipality and traditional institutions were the same, the strict legal framework by which municipalities must operate resulted in “the limitation of autonomy and freedom for the administrative creativity that is necessary to incorporate alternative … modes of governance into municipal administrative practices” (Cameron 2010, 28).27 Finally, in

Guatemala, forestry decentralization, which was designed to improve forest management and conservation, unexpectedly “threatens historically beneficial forest management practices” that were developed and are maintained by indigenous communities who themselves live in or from the forests (Wittman and Geisler 2005: 63). Collectively, these are not just problems that could be rectified with better institutional design or better mapping of municipal boundaries. In all these examples, effective governance and incorporation of indigenous people as full citizens would require giving indigenous

27 In my own research in Bolivia (in 2011), I found similar problems. One municipality whose traditional authority structure covers the same territory as the municipality, voted to take advantage of the new right to indigenous autonomy granted by the 2009 Constitution.

people more local autonomy—that is, greater voice and participation in determining the design and jurisdiction of local governing institutions. More generally, one should question whether institutions designed by the historically dominant culture and state can effectively incorporate indigenous people as citizens in the space of local governance. As

Larson argues, referring to Guatemala, “it may not be possible for political parties and local governments that form part of a state that has historically repressed the indigenous population to unproblematically become representative of and accountable to that same population,” even if the actual individuals occupying spaces in the political parties and local governments self-identify as indigenous (Larson 2008: 36).

The second key finding from literature on decentralization and indigenous peoples is that identity politics may play an important role in mediating the effects of decentralization reforms in a particular location. To illustrate, in Indonesia, decentralization provided an “enabling context” for the revival of indigenous customs of authority and decision-making, and this identity-based revival directly influenced how the decentralization process would affect populations in specific localities (Tyson 2010).

When decentralization reforms were implemented in the context of indigenous cultural activism and local political power struggles, the result was a significant reorganization of local government (von Benda-Beckmann 2001). In Indonesia, decentralization legislation included provisions for recognizing indigenous customs, allowing competing claims to identity and its attendant customs and norms to affect the law’s implementation in different places. However, the insertion of identity politics into local government did not always have an inclusionary effect, as indigenous identity-based rights were sometimes manipulated to create new boundaries between those included in and excluded from local

decision-making and government benefits. That is, particular versions of indigenous identity and indigenous traditional authority attained prominence, at the expense of others. By contrast, in Ecuador indigenous rights activists and social movements have in some places gained control of new decentralized municipal governments, and used that power to promote participatory and sustainable development. They often galvanize local indigenous populations with ethnic discourse and innovative programs to promote participation and coordination with the municipal government, and combine established local customs with new liberal-democratic practices in productive ways (Radcliffe et al.

2002). In Bolivia, as well, indigenous populations have mobilized on identity to alter the institutions of local government, with varying results (Cameron 2010; Van Cott 2010). In sum, in the context of decentralization in specific local spaces, identity has been used as a tool for altering local power relations, gaining greater recognition of traditional forms of authority and socio-political organization, and even drawing new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

This dissertation builds upon both of the above findings regarding the compatibility of Western liberal-democratic and non-Western institutions and the role of identity politics in mediating the effects of decentralization. In Guatemala, at least one municipality, Totonicapán, rejected the new citizen participation institutions that decentralization would create because they would debilitate the strong indigenous institutions already in place and create new ways for the state to control indigenous communities. The local indigenous population clearly saw these new institutions as a threat because rejecting them also required forgoing the additional funds that the central government would devolve for spending on community development projects like

schools and infrastructure. The case of Totonicapán gives one a sense of the degree to which imposed liberal democratic institutions may be perceived as illegitimate or unwelcome, in the eyes of those who would be subject to them.

There are no additional known cases of outright rejection in Guatemala, although indigenous activists often complain that the decentralization process is damaging their culture and replacing their authorities, and that Mayors can now manipulate the citizens much more easily. However, the case studies in this dissertation demonstrate that the impact of decentralization in specific places depends on particular local power configurations and importantly, on the influence and actions of indigenous cultural activists—indigenous entrepreneurs—in local governance. Indigenous entrepreneurs have utilized indigenous identity to appropriate decentralization and other multicultural legislation that recognizes the legitimacy of their culture and institutions and lends legality to customary law. In doing so, they have constructed political projects that push the boundaries of indigenous citizenship and sometimes challenge the individual-state relation that forms the basis of liberal citizenship. These activists interpret the decentralization laws selectively, in order to construct local institutions that best fit the needs of the local context and culture. Moreover, the very definitions of local context and indigenous culture are often subject to political struggle and can be constituted and re- constituted through daily practices. But they are also undergoing transformation, as decentralization often provides the political and institutional climate in which indigenous activists can work on the greater socio-political project of revitalizing indigenous identity and cultural practices. Although one does not usually find indigenous activists pushing undemocratic practices in Guatemala (Ribot 2011), the introduction of decentralized state

institutions, and the new identity politics of local government, raise for debate questions like: Where is legitimate state authority located? What is the legitimately democratic way to make decisions? The case studies in this dissertation illustrate how debate over such questions is playing out in new fields of local power constructed by decentralization, creating new indigenous citizenship regimes.

Approach

In this dissertation, I recognize that the actual effects of decentralization and multicultural reforms can vary dramatically at the subnational level. I build on Horton

(2006), in particular, who argued that state multicultural reforms could have varied impacts in local spaces. On the one hand, they may reinforce dominant political and economic structures and racial/ethnic inequalities. But “In the best case scenario, the new multiculturalism, particularly in those nations where indigenous people are a numerical majority, offers the indigenous opportunities for political, material and cultural empowerment” (Horton 2006: 832). Horton argued that the effects of multicultural reforms would vary depending on the extent to which the process was controlled by elites versus indigenous people in the national and local spheres where the reforms were being applied. The interaction of local and national context, and in particular the choices made by local actors given (and sometimes even in spite of) national and local context, are what matter.

I take a similar approach. First, I do not assume that decentralization or other multicultural reforms have an inevitable impact of any sort in particular local contexts.

Second, I adopt Horton’s (2006) suggestion to examine the role of indigenous people in

controlling the process of writing decentralization reforms (at the national scale) and implementing them in local spaces. In the remainder of this Chapter, I elaborate a set of concepts and analytical framework for approaching the study of indigenous citizenship, and for understanding a) the identity and ideology of indigenous activists who are involved in implementing the law in local spaces, and b) the particular mechanisms and local conditions by which these activists are able to variably influence the decentralization process in local spaces. My aim is not to identify “good” versus “bad” cases of indigenous citizenship, as Horton’s approach arguably does in examining the extent to which reforms are “empowering” for indigenous peoples. Instead I am more interested in the complicated ways in which indigenous identity mediates the effects of decentralization, leading to a) new local power configurations; b) fiery debates over the meanings of legitimate authority, processes of legitimate decision-making, and extents of local autonomy; and, most generally, c) new local citizenship regimes that pose a reconfigured relationship between state and citizen at the community, municipal, and national levels.

Constructing Indigenous Citizenship

This dissertation argues that three distinct ideal-typical regimes of local indigenous citizenship emerged from the decentralization process in Guatemala: depoliticizing, polarizing, and transformative. In order to explain the emergence of these regimes, I analyze citizenship as a process of construction. That is, citizenship is constructed by citizens themselves, acting within the constraints of particular institutional and political environments. This is a strict departure from perspectives that narrowly

view citizenship as a status the central state bestows, in a top-down manner (Brubaker

1992). While such an approach is useful for determining the social and political boundaries of national inclusion, it misses the everyday details of how and by whom rights are actually exercised, and with what effects. This does not mean that the state is irrelevant to citizenship, but rather that citizens play an important role in giving meaning to citizenship and in (re)negotiating the terms governing state-citizen relations.

Citizen-state relations, recognition, and the substance of rights

A practice-based approach to understanding citizenship is first useful for unpacking the relational aspect of citizenship. As Tilly wrote, citizenship is a categorical relationship between the state and its population (Tilly 2005: 191). However, this conception is a point of departure for entertaining further questions into where the state resides, and how it is legitimized (or delegitimized) in the eyes of the citizens. This proves particularly relevant in examining how indigenous citizenship evolves, given that indigenous peoples often demand in one way or another a relocation and re-identification of state power, and a recognition of indigenous individuals and collectivities as citizens

(Yashar 2005; Sieder 2002; Gustafson 2009). This dissertation thus examines the process by which a) the state’s location and legitimacy is negotiated, and b) the relationship between indigenous communities and the state is reconfigured. A practice-based approach will examine precisely how actors in specific locations and political contexts reconfigure citizen-state relations.

Focusing on practices also allows for investigating the substance of citizenship, or what Arendt (1951) and more recently Somers’ (2010) termed “the right to have rights.”

Embedded in this parsimonious definition is the aspect of recognition: citizenship is about being recognized as a bearer of rights and obligations. “The right to have rights” also implies that citizenship is composed of a particular bundle rights, but it is not clear what those rights are. Marshall identified three categories of rights and obligations that comprise citizenship: civil, political, and social (socio-economic). However, even if these rights exist in law, all citizens may not be able to effectively exercise them. In practice, citizenship is often differentiated by social categories like gender, race and ethnicity, and class, so that equal rights on paper do not always translate into equal rights in practice

(Holston 2007). Observing this contradiction, Iris Marion Young (1989) argued that the myth of universal citizenship that liberal democratic regimes promote creates a situation where certain groups (e.g. indigenous peoples) are de facto excluded from citizenship rights because their identity is unrecognized in the political and public sphere. As

Mahajan writes, drawing from the extremely culturally diverse country of India,

Liberal democracy gives the appearance of being neutral because it formulates norms and an ethic that apply to all citizens equally. In other words, the apparent neutrality of the liberal state stems of the uniformity of its legal codes. However, uniformity of this kind is almost entirely blind to the unequal ways in which communities are affected by the common cultural code developed and imposed by the liberal state (Mahajan 1998: 3).

In multicultural societies, she writes, “laws of the state may embody values which contradict practices of some communities, while being closer to the practices of other communities” (Mahajan 1998: 2).

The result is that, with the onset of identity politics globally, identity-based cultural rights have become a central element of citizenship in many countries, and are viewed as vital in enabling recognized groups to fully exercise their civil, political, and

socio-economic rights (Melucci 1980; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1995; Kymlicka

1995; Castells 2004[1997]).

Identity-based Rights and their Challenges

Indigenous peoples in Latin America have mobilized on the claim of a human right to culture in order to achieve international recognition of their identity and special arrangements for ensuring that their civil, political and socio-economic rights are respected (Engle 2010). Culture, however, is understood in very broad terms and forms the basis of a variety of identity-based rights that fall into two categories, individual and collective. At the level of the individual, indigenous citizens may exercise the right to wear their traditional dress to work or school, access the justice system and state institutions in their native language, and enjoy legal protection from discrimination, among other rights. Identity-based rights, when borne by individuals, can fit neatly within liberal citizenship. However, identity-based cultural rights as applied to a collectivity challenge conventional notions of liberal-democratic citizenship because such collective rights imply the right to create or maintain rules and institutions internal to the collectivity that may differ from those of the larger nation-state. For example, an indigenous collectivity may have the right to design a school curriculum for its own people, that respects the distinctiveness of its culture and ways of knowing the world. In the realm of justice, a collectivity could exercise the right to customary law—to apply justice internally in a way that differs markedly from the official justice system of the larger nation-state. Importantly, collective rights may extend to property (i.e. land rights)

and the control and use of natural resources.28 Although both individual and collective cultural rights are arguably important for incorporating indigenous people as full citizens, this dissertation is mainly concerned with those cultural rights that apply to a collectivity.

Specifically, the cultural rights of indigenous peoples that this dissertation examines include (but are not limited to) the right to maintain internal systems of organization, authority, rules and decision-making, that are rooted in shared values and norms, and that pertain to a specific territorial space; and the right to control land and territory, which in cultural rights discourse is considered vital to the maintenance of indigenous cultural systems.29

When the topic of identity-based rights arises, the question of who belongs to that identity group and can benefit from those rights is always a controversial issue.

Specifically, the process by which individuals and collectivities are deemed “indigenous” often depends on the wording of laws and popular caricatures of how an indigenous person should look or speak, rather than the complex reality of shifting and porous identities and group relationships (Graham 2002; Jackson and Warren 2005; Jackson

1995; Warren 2001; Laurie et al. 2002; Rivera 2008; Wiesmantle 2002). The result is that indigenous rights can be manipulated in ways that exclude individuals, groups and practices that do not appear “truly” indigenous. Indigenous activists therefore often strategically deploy essentialist notions of identity and culture in practice and in discourse in order to support their rights claims (Warren 1998a, Graham 2002). In Guatemala this

28 Kymlicka (1995) discusses these distinctions at length. 29 The dependency of indigenous culture on land and natural resources is not only an argument leveled by indigenous activists, but is also recognized in international rights conventions including the ILO Convention 169 and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, many indigenous people in Guatemala and other countries maintain their cultural practices and ethnic identity even as they migrate to urban areas or other countries.

struggle has unfolded whereby the culturally and spiritually loaded “Maya” identity has become acceptable or legitimate, whereas the campesino (peasant), traditionally a

Marxist class-based category into which rural indigenous people have fit, is denigrated by the state, media, and even public opinion (Bastos 2010). The implication for citizenship is that identity-based rights may lead to new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, as individuals and groups whose identities do not appear ‘truly’ indigenous find it difficult to benefit from those rights. For essentially this reason, Engle (2010) argues that cultural rights can be damaging to indigenous rights struggles:

…right to culture claims, when successful, threaten to limit the groups that might qualify for protection, force groups to overstate their cultural cohesion, and limit indigenous economic, political and territorial autonomy. That is, I encourage indigenous peoples and their advocates to resist essentialism in a way that would not only be willing to expose the often fragile nature of the culture claims, but might facilitate the study of the background distributional inequality that both underlies and structures them (Engle 2010: 13).

Nancy Fraser (1995), writing on the risks of identity politics more generally, similarly argues that mobilizing on the right to recognition can be divisive and—more importantly—can divert attention from distributional injustices (i.e. socio-economic inequalities) that crosscut identity groups. The dilemma is that for indigenous peoples, who have suffered a history of cultural annihilation and racism, appealing to identity is vital in order for citizenship to truly be universal. The analysis of indigenous citizenship in this dissertation takes into account these struggles over culture and identity by examining the precise ways that indigeneity is called upon in order to exercise identity- based rights, and the process by which identity struggles can transform citizenship, both substantively and relationally.

How Citizenship Transforms: A practice-based approach

This dissertation’s main concern is how indigenous citizenship is transforming in the context of the newly decentralizing state. Approaching this question of citizenship transformation, one is first drawn to T.H. Marshall’s seminal work on Citizenship and

Social Class (1994 [1964]). Based on his studies of England, he argued that civil, political and social rights are extended in temporal stages to larger shares of the population as a country democratizes and develops. However, other accounts add nuance to this model of citizenship. Somers (1993), by more closely investigating the emergence of social rights in different regions of England, found that citizenship was not extended in the linear manner that Marshall posits. In other democracies, as well, citizenship has not expanded in a linear fashion. Writing on the case of Brazil, Holston (2007) argues that citizenship evolves in a “disjunctive” manner. In this way, indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition of their identity and cultural rights (Taylor 1994) disrupt the linear model.

These rights, comprising a new era of “multicultural citizenship” (Kymlicka 1995) demonstrate how citizenship expansion is not smooth, even if it appears that way from a macro (national) perspective. Rights to cultural identity, including the rhetorical recognition of the multicultural nation, have preceded the extension of socio-economic and some political and civil rights in many Latin American countries. In this dissertation

I posit that citizenship is best understood as a dialectical process that transforms as, on the one hand, laws are developed and implemented by the central state, while on the other hand, people in local spaces creatively appropriate the law for their own purposes.

Given the challenges of identity-based cultural rights, discussed above, understanding how citizenship transforms requires an approach that can move beyond

analyses of national legislation, to account for the struggles over identity, meaning and power that bring life to such rights in practice. This dissertation thus treats citizenship as a relational, instituted process (Somers 1993), where in particular social, political and institutional contexts and in diverse scales and spaces (Deforges et al. 2005, Heller and

Evans 2010), citizenship is constructed by the citizens themselves through their own political and civic practices. A practice-based approach helps to account for times when rights are exercised, even though they may not exist on paper. Indigenous groups’

“illegal” declarations of political autonomy in Mexico (Speed 2008) and indigenous villagers’ construction of parallel juridical systems, as I have observed in Guatemala, are key illustrations. Moreover, in the case of indigenous peoples, citizenship may also be constructed by drawing upon international rights legislation like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) or the ILO Convention 169. In Guatemala, one finds that indigenous people have appropriated both international human rights accords and national laws in innovative ways, engaging in a process of juridification, “the strategic invocation of legal instruments and the adoption and appropriation of law-like discourses and practices” (Sieder 2010: 162). Santos and Rodríguez Garavíto (2005) similarly posit that subaltern actors sometimes appropriate laws and legal discourses in order to build counter-hegemonic projects that, in the case of indigenous peoples, could challenge both capitalist power and the liberal citizenship regime. But truly understanding those projects and how they are constructed requires a methodological approach that examines actors as they utilize the law and exercise rights, in practice. In sum, this dissertation views indigenous people(s) themselves as key actors in constructing citizenship in local spaces. They exercise rights within the context of the newly

decentralized state, and often use national and international laws to manipulate new decentralized institutions to serve various purposes. In focusing on practices, and their intersection with state institutional and legal environments, this dissertation joins a growing body of work that analyzes citizenship as something that is actively constructed in local places (e.g. Baiocchi 2005; Garcia 2005; Mische 1995; Speed 2008; Lazar 2008,

Ong 2006; Appadurai 2002).

Decentralization: A New Institutional Framework for Exercising Citizenship

To understand how indigenous citizenship is transforming in specific places, this dissertation begins by viewing decentralization as an opening in the political opportunity structure, and specifically as providing a new favorable institutional climate for expanding indigenous citizenship, in municipalities and villages (Tarrow 1998[1994];

Baiocchi 2006; Duncan 2007). This is the perception of many activists and policy analysts in Guatemala; as one activist said, “now there is a space and you can do a lot with this space.” Decentralization laws are written in vague terms, opening up opportunities to restructure local governing institutions according to locally specific indigenous norms and customs, whatever those may be. Decentralization legislation also overlaps with other national laws and international rights conventions, which may be more or less favorable towards the rights of indigenous peoples. The vagueness of the laws, and the overlapping of indigenous/customary and official juridical systems, creates a web of legal uncertainty that can be appropriated in various ways. In particular, at the municipal and village (sub-municipal) level, decentralization legislation offers an institutional framework that can be utilized in the pursuit of indigenous “traditional”

governance revitalization and more generally to democratize the local state and work towards defining and achieving development goals in ways that are culturally appropriate. However, legal uncertainty can just as easily be utilized in order to block the exercise of indigenous rights.

Scholarship on the potential democratizing effects of decentralization highlights the risk that local elites will “capture” newly decentralized institutions, including those designed to promote citizen participation in local government. Decentralization might be a “double-edged sword” (Hiskey and Seligson 2003); given variation in local village or municipality conditions, the reforms may either create greater opportunities for citizen participation, or to the contrary, be exclusionary when the process and institutions are captured by elites. Despite bringing government closer to the citizens and theoretically making public officials more accountable, decentralization “is susceptible to elite

capture, which means benefits get diverted from people in need to clients of elite politicians. This, and strong prejudices against poor, low-status, and minority groups in local areas often mean that decentralization does not alleviate poverty” (Crook and

Manor 2000: 24). According to the World Bank, “transferring decision-making power from central administrators to local elites may worsen the quality of services, at least for the majority of constituents” (Burki, Perry and Dilinger 1999).

Capture of local government and new citizen participation initiatives can take place through a number of mechanisms (Mansuri and Rao 2011). Local elites, equipped with greater information and education, may monopolize spaces for citizen participation in order to get their own agendas prioritized; they can also manipulate elected authorities in order to influence political decisions, such as those over resource allocation. Local

politicians may also manipulate spaces of citizen participation in favor of their own individual and community clients. When strong accountability mechanisms are in place—that is, where citizens have the necessary information and opportunities in order to hold public officials accountable—elite capture may be less likely (Ribot 2004: 8;

Agrawal and Ribot 1999; Blair 2000). However in developing countries local government institutions and mechanisms of accountability are often quite weak, increasing the risk of elite capture (Bardhan 2002: 192; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2006).

Guatemala’s overall weak state institutions make elite capture more likely, but decentralization laws do stipulate significant accountability mechanisms.30 For example, the municipal government must report its income and spending to the public on a quarterly basis; and the laws establish participatory spaces in which government officials must coordinate with representatives of communities and civil society in order to decide questions relating to the annual budget and the overall development plans for the municipality. Yet even with such mechanisms, elite capture is possible when local populations do not know how to take advantage of them, or when even the accountability mechanisms themselves are captured by elites.

The question of elite capture becomes most relevant in cases of decentralization where citizen participation—a key accountability mechanism—does not emerge organically but rather is imposed. Whereas organic participation in local governance emerges from grassroots social movements seeking to disrupt existing power relations and the institutions that uphold them, “induced” or “invited” participation is “promoted through policy actions of the state and implemented by bureaucracies,” often on a large number of communities at the same time (Mansuri and Rao 2011: 21). These spaces of

30 Chapter Three goes into greater detail about these aspects of the laws; also see Appendix C.

participation are rarely free from power relations that pervade other areas of social and political life and in fact, “spaces made available by the powerful may be discursively bounded to permit only limited citizen influence, colonizing interaction and stifling dissent” (Cornwall 2002). The power exerted (by elites) within these spaces might be tacit or overt, and have the effect of silencing and even excluding certain actors

(Cornwall and Coelho 2007: 11). Cornwall summarizes the distinctions between invited and organic participation and the spaces in which they take place:

The key characteristic of these [invited] spaces is that external resource-bearing agents bring them into being and provide a frame for participation within them. In contrast are spaces that emerge more organically out of sets of common concerns or identifications; they may come into being as a result of popular mobilization, such as around identity or issue-based concerns, or may consist of spaces in which like-minded people join together in common pursuits. These may be ‘sites of radical possibility’ where those who are excluded find a place and a voice; they may also be spaces created and peopled by the affluent to defend their interests. What distinguishes them is that they are constituted by participants themselves rather than created for the participation of others (Cornwall 2002: 17).

In Guatemala, decentralization reforms at the national level, and their implementation in local spaces, are neither entirely invited nor organic. Both the laws and their implementation are results of top-down imposition and bottom-up adaptation. As

Chapter Three details, the basic contours of the decentralization process were negotiated during peace talks in the mid 1990s, and the actual legislation is the product of participation by representatives from organized civil society and indigenous movement organizations (as well as elected policy-makers and international actors). The participation of indigenous activists resulted in the particular vague aspects of the laws— such as the option to recognize indigenous authorities in the municipality, or to organize spaces of citizen participation according to local norms. This case studies in this dissertation illustrate that local actors can variably manipulate these opportunities, in

ways that can effectively eliminate certain types of citizen participation (in the case of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship), challenge the authority of the official local state (in the case of polarizing indigenous citizenship), or even create a culturally-pertinent and participatory citizenship regime marked by state-society synergy (in the case of transformative indigenous citizenship). At a more general level, the fact that the

Constitution protects municipal autonomy means that the central government will not obligate mayors to implement key aspects of the decentralization laws—particularly the aspects that make room for participation. Citizen participation through decentralization in

Guatemala thus can often result from local mobilization even though national laws provide the legal backing for that participation.

Organic social movements seeking greater participation in local government emerged in all three cases in this dissertation. Yet in only two cases were the movements included in new participatory spaces and able to significantly impact municipal governance and challenge prevailing conceptions of liberal citizenship. I want to direct our focus, then, to the ways in which participatory spaces and overall rules of local governance can be captured by different actors, whether they be elites or local organic movements. That is, I recognize that decentralization and spaces of invited participation can be captured by elites, or by contrast be sites for potential “resistance,” and

“productive of possibilities for subversion, appropriation and reconstitution” (Cornwall

2002: 9).31 As such, I argue for a more expansive conception of “capture,” that includes not only the ways elites manipulate government officials and budgetary processes, but also the possibilities for controlling the process of designing participatory institutions and

31 It is also important to recognize that in one of the most famous cases of democratic citizen participation, Porto Alegre, participation took place in state-sponsored spaces (see Baiocchi 2005)

accountability mechanisms, in specific places. This can carry important consequences for indigenous peoples because it can determine whether the institutions and other accountability mechanisms will be implemented in a way that respects local culture and allows indigenous people to participate on their own terms. Moreover, one finds that these new participatory spaces in Guatemala can be stretched by local actors in order to reconfigure relationships between the state and citizens and effectively challenge the liberal citizenship regime.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs and Identity Politics

To examine the processes by which participatory institutions and the local state are captured, and new expressions of citizenship constructed, this dissertation focuses on indigenous entrepreneurs. In short, these are indigenous activists who seek to mobilize people on the basis of identity, with the goal of deepening democracy and revitalizing and (re)valorizing indigenous culture and identity, including indigenous-framed ways of socio-political organization, authority and decision-making in local government. The concept of the indigenous entrepreneur first emerged organically from the case studies in this dissertation; I then linked it to pre-existing scholarship on ethnicity and social movements, as described below.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs: Promoting Indigenous Norms in Local Contexts

In conceptualizing the indigenous entrepreneur, I draw from multiple sources.

Foremost is Finnemore and Sikkink’s work on norm entrepreneurs, actors who “attempt to convince a critical mass of states (norm leaders) to embrace new norms,” that is,

standards of appropriate or desirable behavior for a given community, in this case the international one (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 895). By comparison, much of what indigenous entrepreneurs try to do is construct new norms in the realm of local governance. Like norm entrepreneurs, indigenous entrepreneurs “call attention to issues or even “create” issues by using language that names, interprets, and dramatizes them”

(Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 897). In other words, they “frame” new issues and reframe old ones (Benford and Snow 2000; 1986) as indigenous, as worthy, and (often) as democratic and correct. When they are successful, their framings “resonate with broader public understandings and are adopted as new ways of talking about and understanding issues” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 897). Framing exercises and attempts to promote new norms, however, “take place within the standards of ‘appropriateness’ defined by prior norms. To challenge existing logics of appropriateness, activists may need to be explicitly ‘inappropriate’” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 897). This might mean engaging in politically contentious actions. Finally, indigenous entrepreneurs, like norm entrepreneurs, are usually motivated by empathy, altruism, and most importantly,

“ideational commitment.” The indigenous entrepreneurs in the municipalities in this dissertation may differ in their precise ideologies and strategies (i.e. in the emphasis on and depiction of culture, or in their stance towards the official state), but the keystone of their normative ideational commitment is similar: to valorize being indigenous and work towards transforming indigenous citizenship and wellbeing.

Understanding Indigenous Identity

Undergirding the concept of indigenous entrepreneurs is a particular approach to understanding and analyzing indigenous ethnic identity. Today, most social scientists have moved beyond essential conceptions of ethnicity that view it as something primordial, permanent, and unquestionably natural (Geertz 1973: 259; also see Shils

1957; Horowitz 1985), and instead assume it to be socially constructed and open to change.32 Ethnic identity is understood to be contextual, situational, and multivocal

(Wade 1997: 19), where the boundaries defining “us” versus “them” may blur depending on physical and social space.33 This has been a particularly useful approach to understanding indigenous identity in Latin America (Weismantel 2002; Madrid 2008).

A highly influential articulation of the constructivist position in sociology is

Brubaker’s. He and his colleagues argue against utilizing the concept “group”, preferring instead to discuss ethnic “categories” and the political and cognitive processes of ethnic

“group-making” (Brubaker 2002; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004). They focus on processes of boundary construction, but deny that the common and collectively lived social contents of those boundaries can constitute ethnic “groups.” This variant of constructivism views ethnic identity as an invented phenomenon, similar to the

“invention of tradition” perspective (Hobsbawm and Ranger eds.1983), which seeks to unmask inauthentic cultural traditions that some argue hold real connections to the past.

Brubaker (2002) further builds on this perspective in his conceptualization of

32 An important exception is the recent work of political scientist Roger Petersen (2002), who takes a neo- primordialist approach to identity. 33 Additional contributors to the constructivist approach include Barth’s (1969) writings on group-making, and Okumura’s (1981) work on situational identity. The constructivist approach is also dominant in work on social movements (Melucci 1980; Polletta and Jasper 2001), nationalism (e.g. Anderson 1991), and ethnic violence (Fearon and Laitin 2000). Also note that scholars have articulated numerous variants of the constructivist (and related) approaches to ethnicity over the years. See Wimmer (2008) for a comprehensive review.

“ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” individuals who make a living “off” and “for” ethnicity.

Through their public rhetoric and discursive framing, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs enact an ethnic call to arms, convincing people to mobilize in the name of ethnicity, and making the ethnic “group” seem real. “By invoking groups, they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being” (Brubaker 2002: 166). Ethnopolitical entrepreneurs seek to reify groups, Brubaker argues, and “when they are successful, the political fiction of the unified group can be momentarily yet powerfully realized in practice” (Brubaker

2002: 167).

I take a different approach, grounded in anthropological studies of indigenous identity, and argue against judging the authentic versus mythical quality of one or another depiction of ethnic identity or manifestation of an ethnic “group.” To so firmly deny the

“groupness” of indigenous peoples would be to deny a long history of racial formation that binds these people together. As Tania Li argued, individual or group self- identification as indigenous “is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted or imposed. It is rather a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle” (Li 2000: 151). I, too, take a nuanced position on the authenticity of certain claims to indigenous identity, while also acknowledging the real, lived experience of being indigenous, and the group boundaries that are socially constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis, and have evolved over centuries of institutionalized racism and ethnic marginalization. Yet, I further advocate paying attention to the counter-claims to authentic ethnic identity, and the positionings of the

actors who make them.34 This proves particularly important in the realm of indigenous politics, where debates abound over the definition of “real” indigenous people and their cultural traits, and the resolutions to those debates can mean the difference between benefiting from rights or not, or having one’s rights claims taken seriously, or not.

My approach is similar to that advocated by Jackson and Warren (2005), who urge us to focus on “the authenticators—on the authorities in indigenous communities and the experts beyond who determine what is deemed authentic at any one time,” and mechanisms of authentication (Jackson and Warren 2005: 559). Taking this approach, discovering the “objective” reality of whether particular portrayals of indigenous ethnic identity are authentic is less important than unearthing the power relations that motivate and condition claims to authenticity or inauthenticity. In the case of indigenous peoples, these power relations are often historically embedded and institutionalized, (re)producing racism and socio-economic marginalization. Moving the gaze to authenticators and authenticating mechanisms allows one to more easily overcome facile critiques of activists’ usage of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1990)—the practice of portraying essentialized versions of identity in public discourse and performances, in order to achieve goals of social and political change. And, it helps one look past whether essentialist identity portrayals are “real” and instead examine the ideational motives and political struggles that inform them.

Indigenous activists in this dissertation often engage in strategic essentialism, for multiple reasons. First, in order to benefit from international and national laws that recognize indigenous people(s) as bearers of new rights and assign new currency to

34 In later work, Brubaker et al. (2006) qualify the approach to ethnicity by calling attention to “claims” and “counter-claims” (in their case nationalist ones), and the discursive and political fields in which they are embedded. However they maintain the preference of “categories” to groups.

“being” indigenous. Second, in order to combat prevailing narratives that denigrate indigenousness. In the cases in this dissertation, questions of what are authentic, valuable, useful, and sometimes “legal” indigenous cultural practices and traditions of local governance are often the subject of debate, even among indigenous people themselves.

For example, a popular political strategy of many indigenous organizations and activists today is to resuscitate “indigenous” customary forms of governance, especially the systems of Alcaldías Indígenas. As Chapter Three explains, the Spaniards first imposed the figure of the Alcaldía Indígenas as a form of colonial indirect rule.

Gradually local populations appropriated it as a form of resistance, but today the system has waned in most municipalities, and thus indigenous activists identify it as something intrinsically valuable that should be renewed, as an institutional form through which to exercise customary law (derecho indígena). Preeminent Maya activist-intellectual

Demetrio Cojtí notes that the Alcaldías Indígenas as they exist today are a product of colonialism, but he recognizes their potential value. These forms of indigenous government, “…though they were trastocadas [violently twisted] by 500 years of the colonial system, are a form that the indígenas have resemantizado [resignified] as their own and that constitute a possible model to follow” (Cojtí 2008: 99).

However, efforts to resurrect and (re)insert value into hybrid colonial-indigenous institutions leaves activists vulnerable to critique not just from fellow indigenous activists and sympathizers like Cojtí, but also from those who would want to delegitimize their claims. I encountered such an unfriendly critique once in a conversation with a Ladino man, over a Mayan’s woman’s use of the traje, or traditional dress (a hybrid colonial- indigenous cultural form). After glaring at this Mayan woman, the man told me that her

clothes “disgusted and offended” him, because it showed she was ignorant of her own people’s history. That is, the traje was originally conceived by the Spaniards during the colonial era. They forced women from the same location to wear the same clothes, in order to keep better control of them. But this man chose to ignore that over time, traje became a source of anti-colonial resistance and cultural pride; this is why many indigenous women (and some men) proudly wear it today.

In sum, in both of the examples presented here, unpacking the social and power relations that inform claims and counter-claims to indigenousness and the value inherent in certain cultural practices provides a window into how identity is produced and used for political and social ends, including in the realm of local governance. This is the approach

I take in the three case analyses, and proves particularly helpful for understanding the logic driving indigenous entrepreneurs’ words and actions.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs: The Ethnopolitical Entrepreneur’s Foil

In conceptualizing the indigenous entrepreneur, I draw from both Finnemore and

Sikkink (1998), as discussed earlier, as well as from the approach to understanding indigenous identity described above. I pose the indigenous entrepreneur as a foil to

Brubaker’s ethnopolitical entrepreneur. To repeat, the ethnopolitical entrepreneur is said to politicize a “fake” ethnic identity, calling to action a mythical ethnic group, all for the instrumental goal of personal profit. With the term “politicize,” I simply mean to call attention to the act of drawing a barrier between the “in” group (we) and the “out” group

(they), and linking those identities with particular claims or political projects.35 By comparison, the indigenous entrepreneur similarly seeks to politicize identity, but this is not a “fake” identity, as Brubaker posits. I avoid judging the authenticity of these identity claims, and instead focus on their effects and the motives of indigenous entrepreneurs who make them. It is helpful to view the indigenous entrepreneur as engaging in a rhetoric of identity politics that is linked to a combination of “real” (observable) cultural practices and traditions that have been constructed in light of historical and current ethnic and racial relations.

The ethnopolitical entrepreneur is instrumentally strategic, focused on calling ethnic groups into action for his or her own personal gain. By comparison, indigenous entrepreneurs may be “extremely rational and, indeed, very sophisticated in their means- ends calculations about how to achieve their goals,” but these are norm-based goals, pursued in a way that is consistent with the indigenous entrepreneur’s norms and values

(Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 910). Thus some goals at the outset appear instrumental: benefiting from international and national laws dictating identity-based rights. But the means for doing this—mobilizing on identity—is also a substantive goal in itself: valorizing indigenous identity for the intrinsically valuable purpose of asserting the dignity of being indigenous and combatting persistent racism (including internalized racism).

Finally, the indigenous entrepreneur, in stark contrast to the ethnopolitical entrepreneur, does not mobilize people on the basis of identity in order to extract personal gain. Rather, indigenous entrepreneurs hold collective goals that place the well-being of

35 As Seyla Benhabib wrote, “Since every search for identity includes differentiating oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a politics of the creation of difference” (Benhabib 1996: 3).

all indigenous people at the forefront of all strategies and actions. As Finnemore and

Sikkink wrote, such ideational commitment is “the main motivation when entrepreneurs promote norms or ideas because they believe in the ideals and values embodied in the norms, even though the pursuit of the norms may have no effect on their well-being,” personally (1998: 898).

The Indigenous Entrepreneur: Its specificity in the Guatemalan Context

Indigenous entrepreneurs in Guatemala often aim to re-create or “rescue” Mayan culture and ensure the conditions for its survival. They personally value a version of

Mayan culture that has been promoted by activists and intellectuals throughout

Guatemala particularly since the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they want to put it into action.36 Indigenous entrepreneurs worry about Western culture and values permeating indigenous communities and ways of life, and are engaged in a battle over cultural production and re-production. An important part of this project is going back to

“community” values. Often, indigenous entrepreneurs view this as a means for the survival of Mayan culture as well as physical survival, as in the case of San Juan Ixcoy

(Chapter Six, Transformative Indigenous Citizenship), where indigenous entrepreneurs, who took power in the local government, promoted a return to Mayan culture in the communities as a way to facilitate socio-economic development, valorize indigenous identity, and support participatory democratic practices of participation and inclusion.

The indigenous entrepreneur is a focal point for analyzing how the politics of recognition play out in local politics and government.

36 In Chapter Three I further discuss the Mayan movement.

Resources of the Ideal-Typical Indigenous Entrepreneur

Indigenous entrepreneurs are key actors in local governance in Guatemala, and emerge because they possess vital resources that are needed for mobilizing local populations to engage in actions to support indigenous rights (McCarthy and Zald 1977).

These resources include identity, legal knowledge, and activist networks.

Identity: Indigenous identity is arguably the most valuable resource in indigenous entrepreneurs’ “repertoires of contention” (Warren and Jackson 2002: 12; Tilly 2006).

Aspects of the decentralization laws that open up opportunities for indigenous peoples can only be appropriated when people mobilize on their identity. Thus convincing people to mobilize as indigenous people is strategic for this end. But identity is a resource for other reasons as well, that directly inform how decentralization will impact a specific locality. Politicizing indigenous identity is a way to convince people to value themselves as human beings and to value their cultural practices and ways of knowing; once people accept those values, they can be mobilized to better put their values into action. The cases of polarizing (Tecpán) and transformative (San Juan Ixcoy) indigenous citizenship illustrate how indigenous entrepreneurs problematized indigenous identity, culture and values with the end goal of deepening democracy, expanding citizenship, and improving socio-economic development. They reframed the practices of citizenship and local governance/government in order to better fit with certain understandings (local and/or

Mayan) of indigenous culture. And in all three municipalities, indigenous entrepreneurs used identity to validate claims to land, natural resources, and rights.

Legal Knowledge: Indigenous entrepreneurs have a sophisticated understanding of the national and international laws that apply to indigenous rights, local government

and land/ territory, and seek to take advantage of the opportunities that legal framework presents to specifically indigenous people. When involved in the process of implementing the decentralization laws, they can work to ensure that the laws are applied in a way that makes sense for the local population, by respecting their culture of organization and authority. They also strive to pass on their legal and political knowledge to members of local civil society and indigenous communities, creating a more educated citizenry.

Previous studies of decentralization and indigenous peoples suggest that the process is more beneficial when people understand what the decentralization policies mean, and how to take advantage of them (Roper 2003; Reyes-Garcia et al 2010). One Ladino activist who has helped indigenous rural communities take advantage of the decentralization in Guatemala, explained this problem: “The state does not reach the whole country, and much of the population does not know of the state. They know that they have a diputado, they know that they have a Mayor. But they do not care.” For him, this was also related to the point that indigenous peoples, when they encounter the state, often encounter conflict. “There is always a conflict when they have a conflict with the

Guatmalan State.” Or rather, when indigenous people encounter the state, conflict often results. They are not accustomed to dealing with the Guatemalan State, especially as citizens (collective or individual). For many of them, it holds no legitimacy, and moreover “they don’t know about their rights.” This is why indigenous entrepreneurs can play such an important role as purveyors of legal knowledge on rights, laws and politics.

Networks: Legal knowledge and the ability to mobilize it in the name of indigenous rights emerges from a third resource that indigenous entrepreneurs possess— links with activists and organizations from the regional and national indigenous

movement. All the indigenous entrepreneurs in the case studies in this dissertation maintain strong links to indigenous rights movement organizations active in the regional and national public sphere. It was clear that their relationship with these movements provided them with a) a nuanced understanding of the legal and political context that indigenous peoples must navigate, b) knowledge of how to organize people and motivate them to act, c) the discursive and visual-symbolic tools for politicizing indigenous identity.37

In sum, the ideal typical indigenous entrepreneur pushes an indigenous identity- based movement agenda in the local context, and employs resources like identity, legal knowledge, and networks in doing so. Within a given municipality, one might find many groups of people who self-identify as indigenous. Such groups may pressure for the local government to fulfill particular obligations, or even seek political power. But self- identifying as indigenous is different than promoting indigenous identity as a political project and strategy for expanding the rights and citizenship of explicitly indigenous people. This is what indigenous entrepreneurs aim to do.

Variation among Indigenous Entrepreneurs

The indigenous entrepreneur described herein is an ideal type. Yet, indigenous entrepreneurs may vary in ways that can directly condition if and how citizenship transforms in local places. First, there is significant diversity of political positionings and ethnic subjectivities among indigenous people in Guatemala. Different people see their cultural identity in different ways, and variously understand their identity as holding

37 Social movement theory has long identified activist networks as an important factor for explaining movement success (Diani 2007). Likewise, here networks are vital to the emergence of indigenous entrepreneurs in a municipality.

political implications (or not). Even within the broad swath organizations that one might argue form the “indigenous” movement in Guatemala, there is great variation in terms of the framing of identity and associated politics associated with that identity frame. If we borrow from Gamson and Meyer (1996) to consider a movement a “field of actors” rather than a monolithic entity, it seems natural that a variety of agendas, strategies and ideologies would co-exist within the indigenous movement. In the three municipal case studies, similarities and differences among indigenous entrepreneurs will become clearer.

More precisely, individual indigenous entrepreneurs may differ from the ideal type in a number of ways. For instance, they may differ in terms of how they view the legitimacy of the official state, the proper way to use culture as a political and developmental tool, and the limits to customary law and value in formally codifying it.

Though indigenous entrepreneurs, like most indigenous activists, seek to democratize the state (both local and national) in order to include indigenous peoples as citizens with individual and collective rights, they may differ in terms of the emphasis they place on collective rights, and the rigidness with which they believe “indigenous” customs should be followed. Some indigenous entrepreneurs call the new decentralized participatory spaces a Western imposition, while others perceive them as potentially emancipatory.

Some believe indigenous individuals must place “community” above the individual self at all costs, or else leave the community. Others are more willing to search for middle ground. These debates should be understood as different claims on authentic indigenous identity and culture. Finally, whereas politicizing indigenous identity can facilitate expanding indigenous citizenship in a normatively positive manner, there is always a risk

that it can create new exclusions, just as any identity naturally solidifies a boundary between “we” and “they.”

Indigenous entrepreneurs may also possess differing quantities and qualities of resources: identity, legal knowledge, and networks. Some might have more knowledge of international human rights laws than national laws. Others might be variably skilled in framing identity for differing purposes. And, some indigenous entrepreneurs may have stronger links to national movements than others. Finally, since indigenous entrepreneurs play important leadership roles in municipalities, their own ability to recognize and seize upon political opportunities may prove consequential in terms of transforming indigenous citizenship.

The Argument

Indigenous entrepreneurs can play a vital role in mediating the effects of the decentralization reforms in each municipality, and in organizing the population to democratize the local state. But they also compete with other powerful actors, namely political elites and owners of capital. Through an inductive analysis of the three case studies in this dissertation, I identified precise ways that indigenous entrepreneurs can exert power and influence in local spaces, and potentially counteract elite power.

Principally, the case studies demonstrate that the first actors to seize control of the locally specific decentralization process are able to exert a strong influence in local governance, even after the reforms are implemented. In particular, I am interested in whether indigenous entrepreneurs are the first actors to implement the elements of the

decentralization reforms that establish new spaces for citizen participation.38 As Cornwall writes, “who determines the form participation takes in any given spaces—who initiates, chooses methods or techniques, facilitates, takes part—is critical for assessing the contributions participatory initiatives can make to democratize practice, and [for] understanding their power dynamics” (Cornwall 2002: 8). In Guatemala, the “form” that participation takes includes not only the rules of participation within the spaces, but also the very design of the spaces. As Chapter Three will show, the participatory spaces that this dissertation examines exist at the municipal and community levels, and the laws provide leeway for altering the precise ways that communities send representatives to the municipal-level spaces, and for how they establish accountability mechanisms, rules for who participates, and what is fair game for debate within those spaces. The three case studies demonstrate that the form and content of these spaces matters a lot. As in most indigenous municipalities in Guatemala, civil society in the three municipalities studied was quite weakly organized before the state decentralization was enacted.39 Therefore, the new participatory spaces can potentially craft the very shape that an emergent civil society will take. Most simply, the spaces can facilitate greater citizen engagement with the local state in matters of co-governance. But, depending on how the spaces are constructed, they can also provide a new venue through which members of communities from far ends of the same municipality can finally communicate, creating associational networks where none before existed. Moreover, the new spaces hold potential for challenging the liberal citizenship regime, by awarding power to indigenous communities

38 It follows that the scope of my analytical framework is limited to those municipalities that have established the new spaces for citizen participation, as stipulated by the Rural and Urban Development Council Law. 39 As noted in Chapter One, this was due to the Army repression during the internal conflict.

as collective actors (i.e. groups with collective rights), and by providing a space where new conceptions of collective rights can be introduced. Indigenous entrepreneurs, working within participatory spaces, can promote their conceptions of indigenous rights and identity, in accordance with their “ideational commitment” (Finnemore and Sikkink

1998). By contrast, these spaces can also be constructed in ways that limit participation and communication by setting clear boundaries on who can participate, when and where participation takes place, what sorts of topics are admissible to discussion, and how discussion will be conducted. The authors of these spaces can also establish expectations and norms for how power between state and civil society will be balanced.

In sum, the capture of new participatory spaces is crucial for understanding how indigenous citizenship transforms within the decentralized state because the power within these spaces can be self-reinforcing. The actors who control the process of constructing the spaces, the case studies in this dissertation demonstrate, are able to maintain significant influence in local governance. When indigenous entrepreneurs construct the spaces, participation and citizenship can likely be expanded and deepened (as in the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship); by contrast, when elites capture the spaces, participation and citizenship will likely be more limited (in the case of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship).

Indigenous entrepreneurs’ possibilities for being the first actors to capture the decentralization process are mainly a product of their organizational capacity and the local balance of power. First, can indigenous entrepreneurs organize the population into a social movement to democratize the local state? And, can they effectively utilize the decentralization reforms in this process? Second, what is the general configuration of

political power relations in the municipality? Just as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and

Stephens (1992) and Esping-Andersen (1990) identified the balance of class power and political coalitions as determinant when predicting and explaining the emergence of

(social) democracies, and also following Horton’s (2006) suggestion to examine whether elites or indigenous people control the process of applying multicultural reforms in local places, I find that the balance of power between indigenous entrepreneurs and elites is vital in explaining how and why different local indigenous citizenship regimes emerge.

Specifically, the degree to which political and economic elites are organized within a municipality sets limits on indigenous entrepreneurs and their possibilities for organizing a local movement and capturing the process of implementing the decentralization reforms. That is, elites pose a structural constraint on indigenous entrepreneurs.

To be clear, indigenous entrepreneurs’ ability to organize the local population cannot be mechanically inferred from an analysis of power relations in a given municipality. Following Sewell, I view agency as a constituent of structure: “to be an agent means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree” (Sewell 1992: 20). Accordingly, if local power relations represent the structural constraints to transforming citizenship then indigenous entrepreneurs, though participants in those structural power relations, at the same time possess the capacity for transforming both those relations and the local citizenship regime itself. In fact, indigenous entrepreneurs in all three of the municipalities in this dissertation made strategic decisions and consciously seized or missed political opportunities, with clear consequences in terms of altering power relations and

transforming citizenship. As noted earlier, indigenous entrepreneurs may possess different ideologies and allotments of resources from which they draw when making decisions. In sum, individual agency of indigenous entrepreneurs will affect local transformations of citizenship, independently of existing power relations. The goal of the researcher, and my goal in the case studies in this dissertation, is to identify these instances of unpredictable agency.

At the same time, the absence of powerful elites in a municipality does not necessarily mean that indigenous entrepreneurs will be effective—or will even be present. For instance, we will see that indigenous entrepreneurs were particularly powerful in San Juan Ixcoy, a case of transformative indigenous citizenship. Yet, this is not only because elites were weakly organized, but because certain unpredictable historical conditions led to the emergence of a critical mass of indigenous activists who were well-connected with regional and national social movements and who were grounded in both Mayan and leftist ideologies. There are likely many similarly small and rural indigenous municipalities with few landed or business elites, but without strong indigenous entrepreneurs.

Figure 2.1 illustrates the process by which new indigenous citizenship regimes emerge. Table 2.1, and the brief discussion that follows, preview how this analytical framework applies to the three cases in this dissertation.

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Figure 2.1: Summary of Main Argument: Constructing Indigenous Citizenship

Balance of

Power between Elites and

Indigenous Entrepreneurs

Capture of Reconfigured Resulting

Decentralization local power Indigenous process in relations Citizenship + municipality Regime

Indigenous Entrepreneurs’ organization, resources & strategic decisions

Table 2.1: Analytical Framework

Depoliticizing Polarizing Transformative Indigenous Indigenous Indigenous Citizenship: Citizenship: Citizenship: San Juan Tecpán, Guatemala San Juan Ixcoy Sacatepéquez Powerful & organized, are first actors, and Moderately organized, Low Elites collaborate with collaborate with organization and municipal and central municipal government power government Strong organization, High organization, Low and territorially first actors, strong local circumscribed assume power in Indigenous movement, first actors, organization, low the local state; Entrepreneurs strong voice and influence; missed unified and very influence, sometimes important opportunities knowledgeable, disagree over strategy creative, and resourceful

In the case of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship (San Juan Sacatepéquez), a local movement formed but did not grow to encompass communities from all parts of the municipality. Additionally, both economic and political elites were well organized; together they collaborated to capture the process of constructing participatory spaces and implementing the decentralization of the state. The state treated indigenous collective rights as illegitimate, and further depoliticized many political decisions, turning them into technical ones that only experts and government officials could solve. Indigenous entrepreneurs sought to democratize the local state, but saw the political party system rather than decentralization and citizen participation reforms as the best route for doing so; it was a failed strategy.

By contrast, in the case of polarizing indigenous citizenship (Tecpán, Guatemala), a strong local social movement emerged to democratize the state, led by highly knowledgeable indigenous entrepreneurs who possessed a strong Mayanista ideology.

Though political elites and local business owners were moderately organized, indigenous entrepreneurs convinced the local movement to demand the creation of participatory institutions, and then influenced the process so that those institutions were constructed to benefit the movement that had emerged, and the communities those movement participants represented. However, over the years, political and economic elites also maintained a fair degree of power and thus no particular agenda gained hegemony in the municipality. Citizenship was polarized as conceptions of legitimate authority and proper decision-making procedures divided into two camps: one based on the official state and political party system, and the other based on indigenous and “Mayan” community norms. These two perspectives reflected opposite processes of identity (re)construction:

Ladinization (becoming more “Ladino”) and Mayanization (becoming more indigenous, more “Mayan”). This polarization produced a general lack of governance.

Finally, in the case of transformative indigenous citizenship (San Juan Ixcoy), political and economic elites were comparatively weak. In fact, there appeared to be few economically powerful actors present in the municipality. This provided ample space for indigenous entrepreneurs to organize the local population, demand that the new participatory spaces be created (soon after Congress passed the decentralization legislation), and eventually shape those spaces in order to facilitate greater communication and expand and deepen citizenship. Certain indigenous entrepreneurs soon won local elections and were able, over the course of eight years, to promote culturally pertinent development and citizenship from two positions: that of civil society, and that of the government. Citizens learned to exercise their rights as citizens of the state and as indigenous individuals and collectivities. Individual communities and the municipality as a collectivity asserted territorial autonomy in the face of the official state.

Moreover, under the leadership of the local government, the municipality’s communities began using their identity as a tool for socio-economic development. Relationships between the individual, community, municipality (as community), and official state (both municipal and national) were questioned and reconfigured. Yet, a transformative citizenship regime also laid bare the limits to indigenous citizenship with a national decentralized state regime.

The next four chapters examine the process whereby these citizenship regimes emerged, from a national perspective (in Chapter Three), and through in-depth case analyses (Chapters Four, Five, and Six).

CHAPTER THREE

CITIZENSHIP AND DECENTRALIZATION IN A

MULTI-CULTURAL NATION, MONO-CULTURAL STATE

Decentralization in Guatemala was motivated largely by ethnic concerns, and principally the need to democratize the state and incorporate indigenous people as full citizens. This is a country where racism is institutionalized (Omi and Winant 1986) historically and today: in the state (Smith ed. 1990; Cojtí Cuxil 2005), in powerful

“white” kinship networks (Casaús Arzú 2007[1992]), and in access to political parties and power (Saenz de Tejada 2005). Moreover it is barely hidden in interpersonal relationships and public discourse (Hale 2006; Casaús Arzú 2002). Analyzing how and why indigenous citizenship is transforming within the new institutional context of state decentralization, and in particular understanding both the extreme challenge in transforming indigenous citizenship as well as the remarkable changes that have already taken place, requires that we contextualize the current process within a history of colonization, decentralized and overt control over indigenous populations, formally differentiated citizenship, and a thirty-six year armed conflict and state-sponsored genocide.

This Chapter provides a brief historical overview of indigenous citizenship in

Guatemala, including the ways that indigenous peoples related to the Guatemalan State and to their own legitimate authorities. I then move on to analyze the decentralization process, from its first inception in the 1985 pacted transition to civilian rule, to the push to more fully decentralize and deepen democracy as planted in the Peace Accords in

1996. Finally, I examine the current decentralization process, since 2002. I explain what the decentralization laws stipulate, and review the extent to which they have been implemented, and by which actors.

Generally speaking, both national and local politicians appear loath to invest the necessary human and financial resources to fully implement the political, economic, and administrative decentralization of the state. This lack of political will ties the hands of those state bureaucrats who want to see the decentralization process move forward, but find themselves with little political assistance and scarce financial resources to do so, all couched within a disorganized field of state bureaucracies—no one seems to be sure who is truly responsible for which aspects of the decentralization process.40 The fact that high- level bureaucrats frequently revolve in and out of powerful posts—owing to the politics involved in such appointments—only exacerbates the challenges of decentralization.

Moreover, since top bureaucratic appointments are politically motivated, at any given time, arguably under-qualified and inexperienced individuals might be directing the complex state decentralization process. Numerous non-state actors including Guatemalan and foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign government development agencies, and social movements, have intervened to help speed along the process, especially since 2002. The end result is that most progress is happening in local spaces, at the levels of the municipality and community (i.e. sub-municipal units), underscoring the well-known axiom that “all politics is local.” These are the key spaces that offer indigenous peoples the greatest possibility to transform the state and citizenship.

40 Findings in this Chapter are based on extensive interviews with current and former state bureaucrats, politicians, indigenous activists and intellectuals, and employees of foreign and Guatemalan institutions that work on decentralization and local governance.

Historical Evolution of Indigenous Citizenship

In Guatemala, citizenship for indigenous people, as individuals and collectivities, has evolved tremendously over the years and can be understood as operating on three scales: national, municipal, and village. In the pages that follow I discuss the historical evolution of relations between the Guatemalan state and indigenous communities (later, municipalities), a slow process of eroding indigenous autonomy, expropriating their land, and inserting the state into indigenous community life. I then describe the particular systems of authority and leadership within indigenous municipalities and (especially) communities that characterize local citizenship.

At the national scale, indigenous individuals have always existed as less than full citizens, as part of a differentiated citizenship regime where access to education, health care, justice, and government officials is measurably worse for indigenous people than for Ladinos. Likewise, the Guatemalan state has treated indigenous communities and municipalities differently than their Ladino counterparts. Persistent de facto and de jure differentiated citizenship is the current product of a long historical process.

During the colonial (1524-1821) and conservative (1839-1871) regimes, state relations with indigenous communities were characterized by paternalism and legal differentiation. The state aimed to protect indigenous communities, allowing them a significant degree of autonomy but also extracting tribute and (at times) forced labor. The

Spanish colonial state used Catholic missionaries to control indigenous community settlements, which were then called “pueblos de indios” and evolved into the municipios of today. This contrasted with strategies of both direct rule and “decentralized despotism” found in other countries, whereby colonial powers exert indirect control through specially

chosen native elites (e.g. Mamdani 1996). In Guatemala, indirect rule via the Catholic

Church left localized indigenous populations relatively united vis-à-vis the colonial state, partly explaining why they were able to maintain a degree of local autonomy by gradually appropriating the institutions established by the Catholic Church, e.g. the community treasury, cofradía (Catholic brotherhood), and cabildo (town council) (Smith

1990a). Though constructed to control indigenous peoples—and successful in doing so, in many ways—these institutions became “the means by which the corporate Indian community could express its opposition to the state” (Smith 1990a: 15). In particular, the cabildo was appropriated as a form of local government in the pueblos de indios, merging with pre-Hispanic norms and customs of authority and spiritual practice (Barrios 1996). It was not until the latter years of the colonial period (mid-eighteenth century) that the non- indigenous population living in some pueblos de indios began to expand and ask the state for their own cabildo, separate from that of the indigenous community (Barrios 1996).

This was the first step towards a bifurcated system of local governance and (eventually) citizenship in many places: an indigenous cabildo and a ladino cabildo. In a few places, a

“mixed cabildo” was established to serve both ethnic populations, but was controlled primarily by Ladinos.

In the years immediately following independence (1821-1839) and during the liberal reform period (1871-1944), the state adopted policies of forced cultural assimilation, dismantling the colonial and conservative differentiated citizenship regime.

Under the first (post-independence) liberal regime, the goal was to create a secular state, eradicate communal forms of land tenure (that held together indigenous communities), and “break down Indian insularity by using educational and political means to draw them

into the Guatemalan nation” (Smith 1990b: 78). Only the goal of secularizing the state was successful. Notably, with the Catholic Church stripped of its power and finances, the local institutions that the Church had established to control the indigenous population, such as the cabildo—called the Alcaldía or Municipalidad in the post-Independence period—became “more genuinely indigenous political and religious vehicles” (McCreery

1990: 101, my emphasis).

Accordingly, until the Liberal Reform in 1871 (the second Liberal regime), indigenous communities maintained a high degree of autonomy. However, the year 1871 was a turning point in Guatemalan history; under President Justo Rufino Barrios, the state aimed to modernize its economy, focusing on large-scale coffee production for export.

This included banning communal property, expropriating indigenous communities of their land, and forcing indigenous peasants to work as seasonal laborers on coffee plantations (Smith 1990b: 84-88).41 From 1934 to 1944, a Vagrancy Law forced indigenous peasants to work for cheap on large plantations, and carry a “passbook” with them at all times, documenting the days they had worked (Handy 1989).

During Liberal period, Ladinos assumed political control of most indigenous communities (now better understood as “municipios”), as more ladino Alcaldías were established where ladino populations were growing among indigenous municipios, and as the state appointed more Ladinos to posts within indigenous or mixed Alcaldías (Smith

1990b: 88; Barrios 1998a). Indigenous people had only indirect or personalistic influence within mixed and ladino Alcaldías, and their own customary practices of choosing leaders (like the Mayor) were replaced with the popular vote—although indigenous

41 This was not technically “slave” labor but was it required by the state, low-paid, and often saddled indigenous families and communities with large debts that they would never be able to pay back.

people were denied the right to vote until 1945. Despite these obstacles, indigenous populations managed to maintain their own Alcaldías in many municipios, exercising authority alongside the “mixed” or ladino/official Alcaldía (Barrios 1998a). Through the

Alcaldía Indígena, indigenous populations sustained autonomy in the realms of imparting justice among their own people (customary law), traditional methods of choosing leaders, and maintaining the “cargo system”—the system of obligatory and ad honorem posts/services and spiritually-informed vocations that indigenous individuals must take on when the community or Mayan spiritual traditions require it of them.

In 1944, the country moved through a brief (ten year) democratic interlude, which introduced social reforms to support the poor and in 1951, under President Jacabo

Arbenz, extensive redistributive land reform (Handy 1994). By 1950, two percent of the population controlled seventy-two percent of arable land, while half the population subsisted on less than the bare minimum needed for subsistence, 3.4 acres (Handy 1988:

707). The democratic reformers also managed to more fully insert the state into indigenous community culture. A new Municipal Law in 1946 allowed municipalities to choose their own leaders (and indigenous people were given the right to vote).42 At the same time, national political parties emerged and gained influence in indigenous communities and municipalities, drawing indigenous peoples into the national political culture, and impacting their ways of doing local politics. While it was arguably a development that could deteriorate indigenous organizational culture, it also provided them an opportunity to elect their own leaders in the “Ladino” (i.e. official) Alcaldías: in

42 From 1931-44, under authoritarian President Jorge Ubico, local governing officials were appointed in all places (though not in the Alcaldias Indigenas that were not officially recognized by the state).

1948 this occurred in twenty-four of forty-five mostly indigenous municipios in the highlands (Handy 1990: 166-167).

The short democratic spring was quashed in a 1954 CIA-backed military coup, triggered by elite opposition to land reform and specifically to President Arbenz’s attempt to expropriate the vast lands owned by the United Fruit Company (Schlesinger and

Kinzer 1999). Military rule ensued and gradually a campaign of reverse land reform, including violent eviction of indigenous peasants from their lands and villages, was rolled out throughout the countryside. From 1954 until 1985, the office of the Mayor was not subject to free and fair election in most places, and was often appointed from above

(Amaro 2003). The remaining Alcaldías Indígenas in the country were also weakened significantly during this time period (Barrios 1998b)

Indigenous Citizenship (Outside the Guatemalan State)

Within indigenous municipalities and especially in rural villages, practices of customary law, social organization, and traditional authority remain today, though they have been twisted and reconfigured as a result of the years of state and capital penetration described above.43 Although the intricacies of these practices tend to be location specific and have evolved over time, similarities among villages and municipalities can be identified.

At the scale of the municipio, the Alcaldía Indígena still functions as a strong customary authority system, alongside (but unrecognized by) the official state, in about fifteen of the country’s 333 municipalities (see Cojtí 2008). However, in many more

43 Information on village customs of authority and organization was obtained from extensive interviews with community leaders in three municipalities, and with activists in national, regional and local indigenous organizations. Also see: Defensoria Indigena Wajxaqib’ No’j (2008).

municipalities it exists as a primarily religious institution and there is currently a growing movement to resurrect it in its administrative/authoritative and religious sense in places where it has died out completely.44

Community-based governance is also rooted in a centuries-old institution, the alcalde auxiliar (auxiliary mayor); a system of alcaldes auxiliares is found in all indigenous municipalities because it is was established by the central state in the post- independence Conservative period, 1839-1871(Barrios 1998a: 23-26). The alcalde auxiliar was to be a liaison between rural communities and the official mayor. However, over time indigenous communities appropriated the institution as their own (adding a team of two to fifty secondary alcaldes), established alcaldías in urban neighborhoods in some places, and over time destabilized the link between these alcaldías and the official

(Ladino) municipal government, instead turning this into the main authority system within communities themselves. In recent years, the institution has been renamed the alcalde comunitario or comunal, signifying the indigenous community’s (rather than the official state’s) ownership of the institution. The alcalde auxiliar still remains the community’s main link to municipal government, and is also charged with solving community conflicts (including intra-familial ones) and imparting justice according to community customs.45 Like other important community authority figures, the alcalde auxiliar is chosen according to community customs and norms. Though customs and

44 For example, indigenous activists and traditional authorities in San Juan Comalapa have successfully resurrected the Alcaldía Indígena as an option for settling disputes outside of the official justice system. Of the municipalities studied in this dissertation, in San Juan Sacatepéquez (Chapter Four) the Alcaldía Indígena is intricately tied to the Catholic Church. In San Juan Ixcoy (Chapter Six), by contrast, it promotes Mayan Spirituality, understood as the Mayan Cosmovisión, though the municipal government (of 2004-12) sought to reinsert it into the realm of local governance. Tecpán (Chapter Five) lacks an Alcaldía Indígena because over time the weaker indigenous municipal government was replaced by a single Municipal government tied to the official state and dominated by Ladinos (Esquit 2002). 45 That is, according to customary law, alternative known in Guatemala as derecho consuetudinario, derecho maya, or derecho indigena.

norms can differ from one community to the next, a common custom is the tendency for authority positions to be obligatory services to the community, rather than rights; and yearly or biennial rotation with no re-election to the same post.46

Other forms of community leadership and organization are rooted the Mayan spirituality.47 The ajq’ ij (Mayan priest, shaman, or guía espiritual) is a person of great respect who guides community members’ actions, in line with the principles emerging from the Mayan “worldview,” such as equality, honesty, respect for others and for nature, and participation in and service towards the community. In communities where the

Mayan spirituality remains strong, other types of leadership exist. For instance, comadronas (midwives) are important leaders and carriers of the Mayan spiritual beliefs—they know the Mayan divinity calendar well and in some places will use this spiritual knowledge to declare a person’s vocation at the time of their birth. Principals are also important community leaders—these are the elders who will guide community decision-making and serve as advisers to the alcalde auxiliar.

Finally, some forms of community organization and leadership particularly that emerged in the twentieth century, are linked neither to the system of the Alcaldía

Indígena nor to Mayan practices. These are development committees, found in almost all indigenous villages, both rural and urban. The comité pro-mejoramiento, or improvement committee, was a small group of village leaders who were given the task of

46 Some communities have council of mostly male elders (i.e. former leaders) who choose the community mayors each year. In other places, mayors are chosen publically, during a community assembly. Individuals almost never campaign to be mayor. Rather, it is considered a serious obligation, not a right. Community members will thus usually identify those individuals who have proven themselves to be effective leaders in less important roles, who have not held a leadership position in recent years, and who have the physical capacity to travel to the town center on a regular basis. 47 “Mayan spirituality” refers to the religious beliefs that have been carried on (though inevitably transformed) from pre-Hispanic times. In Guatemala, these beliefs are never referred to as a “religion.” Instead people tend to speak of the Mayan cosmovisión (worldview).

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identifying and solving problems in the community related to material issues such as water and roads. At times, other ad-hoc committees would be formed in order to tackle specific community problems, such as water, electricity or roads. However these committees would be dissolved as soon as the project was completed. Moreover, election to the committees, though it would often be an obligatory service, would not carry a one- year limitation in many places.

Beyond these specific forms of authority and leadership, indigenous community life is guided by unwritten but commonly known rights and obligations.48 Three of these are worth highlighting here. One is the practice of obligatory community service, whereby improving the village road or even a village member’s home was a project in which all would participate. Second is the practice of making community decisions openly in public assemblies; while it is not possible to verify how often this is done in practice (or how often it was done in the past), people interviewed for this dissertation generally considered it to be a characteristic of indigenous community organization.

Third is the practice of communal landholding—that is, the norm of land and resources

(i.e. water sources) being communally rather than privately owned, even if subsistence farming tended to be a private affair. This does not mean that indigenous communities possess an official collective land title (though some do, today). Moreover, given the process of land expropriation over the years, some communities might have very little land left. Furthermore, there might be deviations from this custom, especially today as indigenous people are increasingly swept up into the capitalist economy. Despite these

48 The indigenous community customs and norms of behavior, organization, and leadership described here can and do vary in practice according to individual community dynamics as well as region of the country. For example, the municipio of Totonicapán is widely known to carry on distinct traditions of community and trans-community organization and authority. See: Tzaquitzal, Ixchíu, and Tíu (1999).

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caveats, the concept that natural resources are not owned nor for sale tends to be a commonly held norm.49

The norms and customs of leadership, organization, and community life described above comprise the “citizenship” that indigenous peoples historically experienced within their communities. Within the Guatemalan state, they were not really citizens even in the thinnest sense of the term. One might say that indigenous people were thus citizens within their customary “states”—communities and Alcaldías Indígenas—but arguably not in the eyes of the Guatemalan state.

Indigenous Citizenship in the Late Twentieth Century: Effects of the Internal

Conflict

Broadly speaking, the gulf between indigenous people and citizenship in the

Guatemalan state was deepened during the internal armed conflict that lasted from roughly 1960 to 1996. In the mid-1960s, ladino (i.e. non-indigenous) leftist activists began to resist, forming a guerrilla army to oppose the state military. Years later, in the

1970s, the guerrilla insurgency came to encompass indigenous people as well. As noted above, the conflict was (at first) primarily over land, and particularly over the growing incursion of large landholders (with support of a military state) onto the land on which the indigenous and poor lived. But it was also driven by problems relating to the complete absence of indigenous (and poor Ladino) voices and participation in the

Guatemalan state.

49 The fact that over sixty indigenous municipalities have, in recent years, collectively defended their natural resources against exploitation by mining and hydroelectric companies, and have sometimes prevented their neighbors from selling their own parcels of land, is further evidence to the fact that the land and natural resources are often seen as communally held, even if they are not protected by a formal collective land title.

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For these reasons, proposals to reform the state emerged many years before the official decentralization process began. These proposals, written by indigenous intellectuals and movements in the 1970s, were often radical in nature, denouncing the persistent racism in Guatemala and proposing large-scale state change. For example, the

Movimiento Tojil in its 1978 manifesto, “Guatemala: de la República Burguesa

Centralist a la República Federal” (Guatemala: From the Centralist Bourgeois Republic to the Federal Republic), urged a process of “decolonization,” declared the indigenous peoples to be communities without a state, and proposed a separation of the “Mayan

Nation” and creation of an “Independent Mayan Republic” through a federalist arrangement (Ba’ Tiul 2006).50 But, their ideas were never further realized, and the increasing power of the Guatemalan army brought indigenous activism—and more broadly, leftist and campesino activism, armed or not—to a bloody halt by the late 1970s.

During the armed conflict, many of the elements of community organization and authority described earlier in this Chapter were disrupted. Elderly village leaders and

Mayan spiritual guides were murdered, cutting a village’s lifeline to its own history and culture, and in the early 1980s, entire indigenous villages were swept off the map as the

Guatemalan Army carried out a campaign of genocide in the countryside (Carmack 1998;

Jonas 1991; Commission for Historical Clarification 1999). According to the

Commission for Historical Clarification (1999), at the end of the conflict, an estimated total of 200,000 victims were killed or disappeared. During the most intense period of violence (1982-83) anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million persons were displaced, including 150,000 who escaped to Mexico. The Guatemalan Army was responsible for

50 Other proposals of this time period emanated from the Frente Indigena Nacional, indigenous intellectual Antonio Pop, the Comité de Unidad Campesina, and at least one anonymous source (Ba’Tiul 2006).

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ninety-three percent of the acts of violence, eighty-three percent of which was suffered by

Mayans.51

Indigenous community life was harmed in other ways, as well. Although violence against indigenous peoples exhibited regional variation, in general indigenous people were not free to assemble in public or voice their concerns about government, even in their own municipalities and small rural villages, which had been devoid of nearly all central state presence before the conflict. During various interviews for this dissertation, indigenous community leaders commented that our conversation would have been impossible during this time. Any meeting, especially among people who appeared indigenous, was suspected as possible subversion and collusion with the guerrillas. This period thus marked a destruction of associational life in Guatemala, at the national, municipal, and village scale, as indigenous peoples became subjects of a “permanent counterinsurgency state” (Anderson and Simon 1987). The counterinsurgency state embedded itself within individual indigenous communities in 1981 through the institution of Civilian Self-Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil, PACs), which replaced existing community authorities and customs with a militarized, hierarchical system of permanent vigilance and violence: neighbors were now keeping an eye on each other, and violence became a solution to conflicts.

51 Anthropologist David Stoll (1993) famously argued that indigenous people were “caught between two armies,” the guerrilla and the Guatemalan military, and that we should thus place more blame on the guerrilla for the violence. However, the Historical Clarification Commission’s data clearly contradicts Stoll’s position: while there were two sides in the conflict, it cannot be considered a civil war between equal powers.

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The End of Authoritarian Rule and Slow Start of Decentralization

Guatemala formally transitioned from military to civilian rule in 1985. This was a pacted transition among military and civilian elites, rather than a revolutionary one from below (Jonas 2001: 100). This year marked the first time since 1954 that Guatemala held

Presidential elections that were competitive (i.e. not dominated by the military) and free of fraud (Jonas 1991). However, prohibition of public association at the village and municipal scale continued meaning that even with the introduction voting at the national and municipal levels, this transition from authoritarian rule was barely democratic.

The transition to democracy—if it can even be called that—also marks an important new stage in the evolution of the Guatemalan state because it was during this democratic opening that the seeds of decentralization were planted.52 Decentralization was appears as a mandate in the 1985 Constitution and was subsequently put into place in three pieces of legislation, passed by the Congress and Presidency, both in the hands of the center-right Christian Democratic Party at the time.53 The Regionalization Law

(Decreto 70-86) territorially grouped the country’s twenty-two Departments into eight administrative Regions, with the objective of decentralizing public administration to these regions (though neither the Departmental Governors nor Regional administration would be subject to democratic election; all are Presidential appointments). Second, the

Municipal Code (Decreto 58-88) laid out the rights and obligations of municipal governments, in conformity with the new “autonomy” provided by the 1985 Constitution, and the devolution of eight percent of the national budget to the municipalities (in 1993

52 Jonas (1991) argues that it is better not to view the transition as a democratization process, but rather as a top-down liberalization of an authoritarian regime. 53 On decentralization in the Constitution, see Articles 134, 224-231.

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this was increased to ten percent).54 Finally, and arguably most importantly, the first

Urban and Rural Development Council Law (Decreto 52-87) unrolled a system for incorporating citizen participation in development policy decisions at all administrative levels of government, from local to national. However, the “Local” and “Municipal”

Development Councils—which were the most important mechanism for incorporating participation—were controversial and subject to much political opposition from parties, mayors, and other sectors of government that saw it as an infringement on municipal autonomy (i.e. the autonomy of the elected officials), and a stealthy way for the Christian

Democratic Party to manipulate the population into re-electing them in perpetuity

(Amaro 2001; Galvez et al 1998: 55).55 The Constitutional Court subsequently ruled the

Local and Municipal Development Councils unconstitutional and a violation of municipal autonomy, in 1988. This essentially took the teeth out of the Development Council Law, leaving virtually no impact on citizen participation, until it was revised in 2002.

The Peace Process and Mayan Efflorescence: 1990s

In the early 1990s, negotiations to end the armed conflict began. This winding down of the violence meant that new opportunities had opened up for association in the public sphere. In particular, as international actors—especially the United Nations and the countries included in the “Group of Friends”—pressured for an end to the conflict,

54 See Articles 253 (municipal autonomy) and 257 (fiscal decentralization) of the Constitution; Decreto Legislativo 18-93 (Article 37) revised Article 257 of the Constitution, to raise to 10% the portion of the national budget to be devolved to the municipios. 55 An interview with former Decentralization Secretary José Antonio de León Escribano also provided this context 10 February 2002, Guatemala City.

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civil society and an emergent culturally-focused Mayan movement were now in the position to effect real political change through the peace process. 56

Pan-Mayan Activism and their role in the Peace Process

The Mayan movement, even more powerful today, emerged as a type of indigenous activism that rejected the Marxist focus on class differences that dominated the guerrilla insurgency, and instead emphasized the racial inequality and cultural assault that indigenous people suffered.57 The movement first emerged in the mid to late 1980s, beginning as a small group of highly educated self-identifying (indigenous) Mayan intellectuals. As they became visible in the national public sphere—through publishing their writings and through dialog, not through protests or similar types of contentious action—they articulated a critique of Guatemalan social inequality, couched in cultural, ethnic, and racial terms. These were terms that the leftist guerrillas had largely ignored

(despite the fact that many on the left were indigenous) (Warren 1998b).58 They sought recognition and revalorization of a Mayan identity that carried a specific culture and a history that, they claimed, could be traced back thousands of years. (Cojtí 1996; Warren

1998a; Fischer and Brown eds. 1996; Nelson 1999). Mayanistas then and today want to unify under a singular “Mayan” collective identity the twenty-one indigenous ethno- linguistic groups in Guatemala whose languages are rooted in an original Mayan tongue, and “to revitalize our Mayan identity and weave back in the sections worn away by centuries of neglect” (Montejo 2002: 129). Rather than focus on capitalism and the

56 The “Group of Friends” included: Mexico, Norway, Spain, the United States, Venezuela, and Colombia. 57 Of course, it is important to note that ethnic activism did arise in the 1970s, but was cut short by the counterinsurgency. 58 See the writings of Mayan intellectuals, for example: Sam Colop (1996); Víctor Montejo (2002); Alberto Esquit Choy and Victor Gálvez-Borrell (1997), Demetrio Cojtí (1997).

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bourgeois state as the root of the subordinate position of indigenous peoples—as the guerrillas did—Mayanistas developed a narrative of historical processes of colonialism, racialization and state institutionalized racism. Though they lacked the organizational structure of the guerillas and growing leftist organizations in the 1990s, in the peace process, Mayanistas gained stature in the public eye and managed to place more explicitly indigenous issues on the negotiating table.

Early in the peace process, as actors within civil society writ large began meeting and strategizing, certain Mayan organizations and activists began proposing the possibility of territorial, political autonomy for indigenous people. Initial statements were published by the Consejo de Organizaciones Mayas de Guatemala (COMG) in 1991, and rising Mayan scholar activist Demetrio Cojtí (1991, 1994). However, these proposals were swiftly taken off the table, as other sectors of civil society and the international community viewed them as too radical—and in truth, given the political climate, they were not viable. Instead, gradually a consensus formed around the proposal to decentralize the state and institute mechanisms to ensure political participation, especially for indigenous individuals and communities.

The Peace Accords and Post-Peace Decentralization Plans

In 1996, the armed conflict formally ended when the Guatemalan government and guerrillas—leaders of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, URNG— signed the last of a set of agreements that are collectively called the Peace Accords.

Decentralization and citizen participation were planted in two of these Accords.

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First, the Accord on Socioeconomic Aspects and the Agrarian Situation (1996) elaborates steps that the government should take in order to explicitly decentralize the state administratively, politically, and fiscally, and institutionalize citizen participation in all levels of government. This Accord specifically called for the reform of the Municipal

Code ( I.A.9.a) and the re-establishment of the Development Council system, including the local level councils (I.A.10.f). Second, the Accord on the Identity and Rights of the

Indigenous Peoples (1995) spells out numerous ways in which indigenous forms of government and organization should be respected, and calls for a reform to the Municipal

Code, specifically. It stipulates the creation of a Joint Commission on Reform and

Participation (Comisión Paritaria de Reforma y Participación), which would be integrated by members of the government and indigenous organizations, to develop proposals for legal reforms that would guarantee indigenous political participation (Part

IV, Derechos Civiles, Politicos, Sociales y Económicos).

The Joint Commission was soon formed (Acuerdo Gubernativo 649-97), and it was through this Commission that indigenous representatives were able to push for reforms to the General Decentralization Law, Municipal Code, and Urban and Rural

Development Council Law, that would formally recognize indigenous traditions and integrate them into local governance. Although documentation on what actually occurred during the years this Commission met is scarce, it is clear that there was some conflict between the indigenous and government representatives. One of the indigenous representatives remarked that many of their demands were never incorporated into the

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final draft laws, while a government representative recalled that indigenous people tried to block the whole process.59

In the years immediately following the signing of the Peace Accords, it was never absolutely clear that any significant further decentralization would actually take place. In a national referendum in 1999, the population voted against incorporating the Peace

Accords into the National Constitution (Warren 2002). This was a big blow to the movement for indigenous rights, and it also called into question the extent to which non-

Constitutional legal reforms from the Peace Accords could be implemented. In the years

1999-2001, many expressed doubt about whether any new laws will be passed, and particularly questioned whether the local level Development Councils—the key to ensuring citizen participation—would be incorporated into new legislation. Therefore, the fact that new decentralization legislation was indeed passed by Congress in 2002 can be considered a big step forward. Though some indigenous activists were (and still are) critical of decentralization because it did not fully incorporate the measures they wanted, many still pushed for it, seeing it as crucial for the democratization process. The former

Mayor of Quetzaltenango, Rigoberto Quemé Chay, possibly the most well-known indigenous Mayor in Guatemala’s recent history (and a leader in the indigenous movement), said that “for a State that is historically centralized, colonialist and exclusionary, it is a great challenge to promote decentralization with a democratic, participatory and pluralist vision” (Infopress 2000, cited in in Chavez Miños 2000: 60).

59 Interview with Saturnino Figueroa (multiple dates), who was the leader of the indigenous representation in the Commission. The government representative referenced here spoke under condition of anonymity.

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Decentralization in the Law

In 2002 Guatemala made a new commitment to decentralize, deepen democracy, and better include indigenous people as citizens, through a set of three laws: the General

Decentralization Law (Decreto 14-2002) and its accompanying Regulation (Acuerdo

Gubernativo 312-2002); the Municipal Code (Decreto 12-2002); and the Urban and Rural

Development Council Law (Decreto 11-2002) and its Regulation (Acuerdo Gubernativo

32-2002). These laws recognize, reconfigure, and reproduce a system of local legal pluralism in Guatemala. At times they can constrain indigenous community autonomy by recognizing indigenous customs and authorities but at the same time limiting their power by requiring they be tied to the state, again subordinating them to official state power but by new means. That is, if indigenous activists had hoped that decentralization might create spaces for local autonomy, such autonomy would only come to indigenous communities that are willing to attach themselves even more tightly to the same state that has historically (and recently) oppressed them psychologically, structurally, and violently. However, in spite of these limitations, decentralization has arguably provided indigenous peoples new opportunities where they can utilize the law in order to transform the state from below. Or, as Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito (2005) suggest in their work on subaltern cosmopolitan legality, one should pay attention to the possibility that subaltern subjects might use “hegemonic” law to promote “counterhegemonic” projects.

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The General Decentralization Law60

The General Decentralization Law is very short and makes little reference to indigenous peoples beyond stating that a principle guiding the decentralization process will be “respect for the multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual reality of Guatemala”

(Article 4.1). Since the Executive Branch of the government (and specifically the SCEP,

Secretaría Coordinadora Ejecutiva de la Presidencia) will be responsible for coordinating the decentralization process, most of the details will be fleshed out in practice and in further legislation (much of which does not yet exist).

The Municipal Code

The Municipal Code, which is designed to regulate municipal governance, grants indigenous peoples special recognition in a number of ways. Traditional community authorities and customary laws are considered important “elements” of the municipio

(Article 8), and residents are granted the right to organize themselves according to their own traditions (Article 18). In the event that an issue might affect indigenous rights or interests, the municipal government must consult with indigenous authorities and communities, according to the latter’s norms and customs (Article 65). Further, the municipal government is charged with respecting and “promoting” the Alcaldías

Indígenas (where they exist; Article 55), and recognizes the alcaldías auxiliares/comunitarias as inherently community-based institutions that maintain a linkage with the municipal government (Article 56). However the law also states that the

Mayor should name the alcaldes, but according to the designation/election of the

60 See Appendix C (Legislation in Support of Indigenous Rights) for a more precise and extensive breakdown of the decentralization laws, as regards their impact on indigenous rights.

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communities—leaving unclear exactly how much autonomy the communities have to choose their own leaders, and making it possible that local power relations could determine the answer in specific municipalities. Finally, the law explicitly recognizes the right of indigenous communities to their personalidad juridíca (legal status in the eyes of the state), so long as they inscribe themselves the civil register of the municipal government” (Article 8). As noted above, this last point (and the others, to a limited extent) presents indigenous peoples with a double-edged sword. Their traditions and organization are being recognized as valid, but only if they inscribe themselves legally in the state. Obtaining personería jurídica is often not so easy because it requires a lawyer and money to pay that lawyer. But more critically, it can be problematic because it further ties indigenous peoples to a state that is not theirs .Yet, despite these drawbacks, the Municipal Code arguably provides indigenous peoples important new opportunities to be recognized as such and to exercise a limited degree of local autonomy.

Other elements of the Municipal Code are not directly aimed at indigenous peoples’ rights, but do present important possibilities for deepening local democracy. For example, the law outlines in detail the municipal government’s obligation to provide timely information to the residents, including information about the municipal government’s activities, finances, and budget. Residents can request to be formally consulted on issues of great import, via a municipal-wide vote. Further, they may form a committee to audit the municipal government. Finally, the Municipal Code indicates the parameters of municipal autonomy and the obligations of the Concejo Municipal (which comprises the Mayor and Town Councilors, called Concejales and Síndicos). It gives the

Concejo Municipal the power to create local laws, including ones that would regulate

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territory, and promote and protect the municipio’s renewable and non-renewable natural resources—though the central state retains ultimate rights to non-renewable natural resources (Article 125 of the Constitution).

In terms of opening up the state to citizen participation, however, the Urban and

Rural Development Council Law is most relevant. Since this law figures central in the dissertation’s analysis, I address it more extensively in the next section.

The Urban and Rural Development Council Law

This law establishes a system of Development Councils that are meant to facilitate citizen participation and civil society-government coordination. The law establishes

Development Councils at all administrative scales of the state: National, Regional,

Departmental, Municipal, and Community. In each type of Council, indigenous participation is stipulated. For instance, the Departmental Development Council

(CODEDE henceforth) includes a representative from each of the indigenous peoples

(interpreted as Maya, Xinca, or Garífuna) that inhabit the department. However, the most important opportunities for indigenous participation are at the local and municipal level.

The Community Development Council (COCODE)

The COCODE is composed of the assembly of all community residents, and a

“Coordinating Organ” whose membership will be chosen by the community assembly,

“in accordance with the community’s own principles, values, norms and procedures,” or simply in accordance with the existing municipal regulations (Article 13 and 14.a). The law then states that the alcalde comunitario should preside over the Coordinating Organ,

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which should ideally be composed of a maximum of twelve representatives. Such nebulous legal wording is characteristic of much of the law: on the one hand, communities can organize according to their own norms, but on the other hand, guidelines for organization are provided. This nebulous wording results from efforts to reconcile official law with the persistence (and variability) of customary law, and thus opens up valuable opportunities for indigenous communities to appropriate the law for their own needs. Yet in practice, at least as concerns the composition of the COCODE’s

Coordinating Organ, this can prove difficult for a couple of reasons. First, if the alcalde comunitario/auxiliar is the maximum authority in the community, then asking this person to also take the helm of the COCODE would require (s)he perform the jobs of two people at once. In the past, these jobs were kept separate, especially since their requirements were very different: the alcalde auxiliar is often older and more experienced, whereas the community leaders working on development problems (i.e. President of the Comité Pro-

Mejoramiento) should be literate and able to travel easily. The second problem is that the alcalde auxiliar only serves a term of one year, whereas the law dictates that the

Coordinating Organ of the Development Council serves a two-year term. It results that this law can potentially disrupt existing community norms of organization and authority.61 Moreover, the Guatemalan state appears to give greater recognition to the

COCODE leaders rather than the traditional authorities of indigenous communities, especially when one sees that COCODE leaders have become the primary actors to engage and even collaborate with the local state, sometimes taking on the position of authorities themselves, as the case studies in this dissertation illustrate.

61 For this reason, the indigenous communities in the municipio of Totonicapán have rejected the Development Council Law, preferring to preserve their own forms of organization rather than change in order to obtain limited funds from the state.

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Substantively, the COCODE is to be the institutional space of participation for all in the community, and is charged with prioritizing needs, identifying solutions, and working towards “the integrated development of the community” (Article 14.b). It should form policies, plans, programs and projects for community development, propose them to the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE), participate in executing those projects, and later evaluate that process. It should also obtain funding for projects and plans, either by soliciting the COMUDE, or seeking it elsewhere (Article 14).

Since the law does not specify what constitutes a “community,” either in terms of the size of the territory or population, any given municipality might contain any number of COCODES. In municipalities where there are more than twenty COCODES, the law dictates that a “Second Level” COCODE be established (Article 15), whose assembly would be integrated by members of the COCODES’ Coordinating Organs. The

Coordinating Organ of the Second Level COCODE should be established according to the members’ “own principles, values, norms and procedures or their statutory norms”

(Article 15). This means that the internal organization of the Second Level COCODE can differ from one municipality to the next, as is the case in the municipalities in this dissertation. In municipios with particularly high and dense population, a third tier of

“Second Level COCODES” might be established (Article 54 of the Reglamento).

Municipal Development Council (COMUDE)

A COMUDE should be established in every municipality. It should comprise the

Mayor (who presides), the members of the Concejo Municipal (elected officials), representatives of public (government) institutions that are present in the municipality

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(for example, the local instance of the Ministry of Education), representatives of civil society organizations (or at least the ones that the Mayor convokes to the meetings) and up to twenty COCODE representatives (designated by the coordinators of the

COCODES). The COMUDE should meet at least twelve times per year (Article 16,

Reglamento), and it is the Mayor’s responsibility to convoke the COMUDE members to the meetings. The Regulation of the law further stipulates that indigenous traditional authorities (without any further specification of what those authorities might be) must be included in the COMUDE (Article 43, Regulation).

The law states that the COMUDE is responsible for proposing to the Concejo

Municipal, policies, plans, programs and projects for development, based in the

COCODES’ proposals. In particular, each year the COMUDE should come up with a list of priority projects (usually infrastructure), for which the Mayor will seek funding from the Departmental Development Council. However, it is important to remember that the

Concejo Municipal is part of the COMUDE, and thus within the law appears to have a double vote in terms of municipal plans. It votes as part of the COMUDE, and then can theoretically veto decisions that pass the COMUDE, since these are technically

“proposals” to the Concejo Municipal. Thus while the COMUDE provides a space for participation in identifying problems, projects and policies, and in the municipal budget generally, the Concejo Municipal is not legally obligated to carry out the decisions of the

COMUDE. In fact, depending on which article of the law one wants to follow, the

Concejo Municipal may enjoy more or less decision-making autonomy, vis-à-vis the rest of the members of the COMUDE. The cases in this dissertation demonstrate that the

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power of the Concejo Municipal (and Mayor) vis-à-vis the rest of the COMUDE can potentially swing either way.

Finally, the law does not further define what constitutes a development policy, program or project, or even what constitutes “development.” This leaves open much room for local interpretation, meaning that whether or not an issue is about

“development” and is thus within the purview of the COMUDE, is inherently a political question.

Fiscal Decentralization

Municipal governments operate on resources devolved from the central government in a number of ways. Most importantly, the Constitution mandates that ten percent of the central government’s operative budget be devolved to the municipios, according to a complex set of criteria.62 Second, through the Development Council

System, municipal governments obtain funds for projects proposed by the COMUDE.

These funds tend to be distributed according to population size, as well as informal political criteria (such as whether the Mayor is from the same party as the President, or how well the Mayor can reach a deal with Departmental Governors, who are always appointed by the President). Third, the devolution of the property tax (Impuesto Unico

Sobre Inmuebles, IUSI) to the municipalities is considered an important element of fiscal decentralization. Most large landholders avoided paying this tax when it was controlled by the inefficient central government, so there was significant opposition to devolving it

62 Article 119 of the Municipal Code states that the monies should be distributed 25% according to the population proportion, 25% equally to all municipios, 25% proportionally according to the per-capita income of the municipio, 15% according to the number of rural villages, and 10% distributed “directly proporational to the inverse of the per-capita income” of each municipio.

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(Miños Chavez 2000: 54). The government also devolves to municipios, one percent of the vehicle tax (collected by the central government).

Finally, a host of social development funds exist at the level of the central government, which are managed semi-autonomously and to which Mayors or COCODE leaders can petition for assistance in carrying out specific projects. For instance

FODIGUA (the Guatemalan Fund for Indigenous Development) funds projects (usually infrastructure) in indigenous communities and municipalities.63 Such funds are not technically considered an element of fiscal decentralization, but do provide important resources for development projects in communities and municipalities.

Decentralization in Practice

As of August 2009, of a total of 333 municipios, 295 had a COMUDE, and 264 were categorized as “functioning.”64 These numbers indicate that the Development

Council Law is having a significant impact. Yet, this data obscures many details of the process. It is very common to hear those familiar with the decentralization process remark that the laws are muy bonito (very nice), and then lament all the ways they just do not seem to work out in practice. In this section of the Chapter, I look at how differing actors—the government, foreign and domestic non-governmental organizations and agencies, and indigenous organizations and activists—have sought to implement the laws, the ways they have avoided doing so, and the motives behind their actions.

64 Data obtained from SEGEPLAN (Interview with Luis Ovando, November 24, 2009, Guatemala City).

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Government Efforts

The central government has not engaged the necessary resources to implement the law. Key informants (i.e. policy experts, representatives of civil society) all pointed to the

“lack of political will” to fully implement the laws, and this becomes evident in a number of ways. Firstly, there is overall confusion as to which institution is in charge of coordinating the decentralization process-—the SCEP (Secretariat of Executive

Coordination of the Presidency) or SEGPLAN (Secretariat of Planning and Programming of the Presidency). The law states that it should be the SCEP, but in practice both institutions are carrying out different aspects of the process and pinning their shortcomings on each other.65 For instance, the institutions have even been unsuccessful at completing the basic task of educating the citizenry about their rights and obligations under the new system. Moreover, without the SCEP facilitating inter-institutional coordination, municipalities are less able to meet their development goals. For example, if a municipality obtains funding for a new school classroom from FONAPAZ (one of the autonomous social development funds), they might not get any teachers or school supplies because of the lack of coordination between FONAPAZ and the Ministry of

Education.

Second, no President has exerted the necessary leadership to ensure that both institutions carry out their job. High-level bureaucrats (including the two Sub-Secretaries for Decentralization and the Development Council System) are political appointments; this means that on the one hand, particularly under-qualified people may occupy positions of great power and on the other hand, there is frequent replacement of these

65 This was a general finding from interviews and participant observation in the Forum for Decentralization and Local Development.

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bureaucrats, which may be because of changing political winds or resignations. Formal and informal interviews with actors involved in this process suggested that many appointed bureaucrats do want the decentralization process to progress, but may find they have highly insufficient resources for doing their jobs. Without continuity and capacity in the SCEP, the decentralization process will be interminably stunted. These shortcomings of the SCEP in its role as coordinator of the decentralization process have led to efforts to rewrite the Decentralization Law so that it more precisely indicates the responsibilities of the SCEP, and further institutionalizes the process.66

At the municipal level, José Antonio de León Escribano, first Sub-Secretary for

Decentralization (after the 2002 law was passed), noted that very few mayors take on the responsibility of promoting decentralization, building local state capacity, and coordinating with civil society through the COMUDE.67 Part of the reason has to do with not wanting citizen participation, but many mayors are also loath to take on new governing responsibilities that they are likely ill equipped to handle. He further noted that where one does see this happen, it is usually because the local population demanded it. In fact, in terms of forming the COMUDE and fulfilling other measures to ensure citizen participation, if the Mayor does not willingly initiate it, or the population demand it, then there is no legal way to ensure that the law is applied. According to the Sub-Secretary of the Development Council System, the central government can do nothing to interfere in local government, because it would violate municipal autonomy, which is

66 Government and civil society participants in the Forum for Decentralization and Local Development were collaborating to draft new legislation. 67 Interview with José Antonio de León Escribano, 10 February 2002, Guatemala City.

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Constitutionally guaranteed (in contrast, citizen participation is not Constitutional).68 As of late 2009, the SCEP had taken new steps to strengthen the decentralization process at the municipal level and was assisting a short list of seven municipalities whose Mayors had requested help in setting up their COMUDE and in local governance, more generally.

Interestingly, two of those seven municipalities are the sites of the most contentious conflicts over open-pit mining on indigenous territory. One of these municipalities, San

Juan Sacatepéquez, is analyzed in Chapter 6.69 The SCEP considers this municipality to have the best citizen participation, best organization and best local governance in the country.

Non-Governmental Efforts

Guatemala is populated with NGOs and agencies of the international cooperation that arrived after 2002 to help implement the decentralization of the state. According the

SCEP, in late 2009, the following institutions were supporting the Development Council

System: United Nations Development Programme, Plan International, JICA (Japan

International Cooperation Agency), Intervida (national), ASDI (Sweden); Fundación

Soros, FUNCEDE (national), Fundemuca (national), and international development arms of the Spanish, Canadian, German, and United States governments. The true list is likely much, much longer.

Europe has been one of the biggest supporters, especially through the European

Union’s Municipios Democraticos program, which did little more than produce a host of

68 Interview with Mauricio Benard, 30 November 2009, Guatemala City. However, this is likely another example of the central government’s lack of interest in promoting citizen participation, because does violate municipal autonomy in many other ways. 69 The other is San Miguel Ixtahuacan, site of the infamous Marlin Mine, managed by the Canadian transnational company, Goldcorp.

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“user manuals” for different offices of the municipal government. Their Tinamit program, on the other hand, worked directly with COCODES and COMUDES, but did not clearly report the results. The German government’s international cooperation, GTZ, has been working on local governance in Guatemala the longest, since 1997. In 2009 they were working in thirty-five rural and mostly indigenous municipalities. However it was not clear that they were doing anything to directly promote indigenous citizenship and governance. For instance, a Mayan woman working for GTZ said that in the organization there were different visions over what were “legitimate indigenous authorities” and how they should be incorporated in the COMUDE.70 Moreover, even though they had worked in municipalities that had drawn from the Municipal Code, Development Council Law and ILO Convention 169 to exercise their right to be consulted over large-scale mining and hydroelectric projects (discussed later in the Chapter), GTZ avoided supporting these efforts. They wanted to concentrate on “the laws” but the collective rights of indigenous peoples to be consulted over issues directly pertaining to them and their lands was not an aspect of the laws they wanted to deal with.

It was similarly illuminating to see the way that the US Agency for International

Development (USAID) was assisting with the decentralization process in indigenous municipalities. They had been continually involved in the process since 2002, mostly providing assistance to mayors and municipal governments, in order to strengthen local governing capacity. Some of their work did center on multiculturalism, but in a very limited and cosmetic manner. For instance, on the one hand, they sought to promote

Mayan language use in the municipal government, so the government could serve the citizens in their own language. But the remainder of their work was on

70 Interview with GTZ bureaucrat, 13 August 2009.

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“sensibilización”—trying to sensitize individuals to cultural differences. In one municipality they created a “cultural center” and had affixed Mayan symbols and hieroglyphs to buildings, bridges, and other constructions, so that the area would bear markers of the K’iche’ peoples’ identity. But USAID avoided working with the

Development Councils because they are “too political,” according to one of the directors of USAID’s field operations.71 In short, both the USAID and European assistance has been limited in the extent to which it focuses on the key issues that many (perhaps most) indigenous people have identified as crucial to them—greater participation, and recognition and respect for their own governing structures and authority systems.

Indigenous Efforts

Most indigenous movement organizations that are active in the national public sphere are not directly involved in promoting the decentralization process, nor are Mayan activist-intellectuals. Instead, both groups are more likely to criticize decentralization as either a form of neo-colonialism or more simply a devolution of corruption and repression. For example, Ricardo Cajas, President of COMG (the Concejo de

Organizaciones Mayas de Guatemala), noted that the Development Council Law might call for the participation of indigenous people, but the COCODES and COMUDE amount to a “usurpation of the indigenous ancestral authorities.”72 He further argued that in the law, “collective rights very often refer to the COMUDES and COCODES,” and not to indigenous groups themselves. Similarly, another indigenous rights activist, who had experience in working with the COCODES and COMUDE, complained that these

71 Interview, 28 July 2009, Guatemala City. 72 Interview, 1 October 2009, Guatemala City. COMG was founded in the early 1990s and since then has been a key actor in the Mayan movement in Guatemala.

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institutions are not their “organización propia,” their own organic form of organizing.

They are something foreign. Clearly within these political positionings is a critique about what real indigenous systems of governance are. This perspective, which for people like

Cajas emanates from a broader idea that the state remains “monista, centralista, y racista” (monistic, centralized, and racist) is partly why many indigenous movement organizations have not focused much effort on taking advantage of the decentralization process.73

Many activists, and more specifically proponents of rescuing systems of autoridad ancestral (ancestral authority) believe that the decentralization of the state and new forms of citizen participation are just a new way to further incorporate indigenous peoples into the ladino liberal state.74 As a community activist and advocate for resurrecting the Alcaldías Indígenas once said to me, “an indigenous mayor is still a mayor of the State.” Activists like this one tend to view state institutions like the Mayor and COCODES—even if controlled by indigenous peoples—as “inauthentic.” Others point more generally to the way decentralization exacerbates the domineering power of the state in indigenous communities, and serves to decentralize political corruption, spreading its tentacles further into indigenous life. A representative of the national indigenous organization Wakib Kej argued a permutation of this view, specifically that

“the COCODES, it is a form that the state can use to maintain and construct more permanent links with the [indigenous] communities.”75 He believed that the majority of the COCODE leaders just listen to the mayor, and cannot really speak for their own

73 They are more likely to engage in contentious action (protests, demonstrations, etc.) or negotiations and dialog with the state. 74 “Autoridad Ancestral” refers to systems of authority that are based in the Mayan spirituality, or even the system of Alcaldías Indígenas. 75 Interview, 15 March 2010, Chimaltenango.

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people, at the risk of suffering political repercussions: “If you aren’t in agreement with the mayor, you’re not going to get a project.” He argued that most mayors are like this.

However, there is virtually no research on this.76 The case studies in this dissertation start to shed some light on how indigenous activists are taking hold of the process.

Impact of the Development Council Law

The Development Council Law is arguably the most important of the three decentralization laws, in terms of creating a space for indigenous citizen participation, facilitating the transformation of the local state. But after ten years, what is the impact of this law? In what ways have citizen-state relations changed?

The first thing to note is that citizen participation has not been primarily channeled through this new institutional system, at least at the national scale. Ad-hoc negotiations between social movement leaders and high level state officials (often including the President) have been common since the signing of the Peace Accords.

Blanco and Zapata (2007: 427, 429) compiled a long list of the many commissions and

“mesas de negociación” (tables or spaces of civil society-state negotiation) that have been established over the past few years. For instance, in 2006, leaders of indigenous and peasant organizations, representatives of the landholding elite (CACIF, Committee of

Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations), and high level state officials, met regularly (and under the scrutiny of the national media) to draw up plans for

76 There is limited research on decentralization on Guatemala, most of which does not addresses how the process impacts explicitly indigenous people and communities. See: Wittman and Geisler (2005); Gibson (2006); Barrientos 2007; Flores and Gómez-Sánchez (2010).

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a land reform, which ultimately led to nothing.77 The fact that many (perhaps most) high level policy negotiations between the state and indigenous peoples happens behind closed doors in ad hoc meetings resulting from protests and marches is partly reflective of the

Development Council System’s failure to channel specifically indigenous demands to the national government. This is particularly true in the case of tenancy, inequality of access to, and ownership over land; policy on agricultural production, technical support and subsidies; and territorial control, including questions over the control and use of natural resources, especially sub-soil minerals and water.

What does the Development Council System actually do for indigenous participation? Below I provide a general overview of the functioning of each level of the system, and explain how indigenous people have been impacted, when relevant. Figure

3.1 visually illustrates the Development Council System, noting the degree of functionality at each level of the system.

77 These talks were the headlining news story during the author’s field research in Guatemala, June-August 2006.

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Figure 3.1: Guatemala’s Urban and Rural Development Council System Depicted according to the law and current functionality*

CONADE

The National Development Council hardly functions

COREDE Of the eight Regions in Guatemala, only two Regional Development Councils function

CODEDE

All 22 Departments have a functioning Departmental Development Council

COMUDE

As of August 2009, 295 of 333 municipalities had a Municipal Development Council; 264 were functioning

Second Level COCODE For every 20 COCODES in a given municipality, the law dictates there be a Second Level COCODE. The Second Level COCODE(S) send 20 delegates to the COMUDE

COCODES Each village, hamlet, and neighborhood in a municipality may form a Community Development Council

*Source of functionality: Interview with Luis Ovando, SEGEPLAN official, Nov. 23, 2009. Guatemala City.

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National, Regional, and Departmental Development Councils

The Development Council Law stipulates mechanisms for participation at all administrative scales of the state, but in practice many of these mechanisms do not work, likely due to a combination of lack of political will and state capacity.78 The National

Development Council (CONADE) hardly functions, meeting once a year, if at all.

Moreover, in practice there is much confusion on the precise difference between the mandates of Congress versus the CONADE: if the CONADE is charged with creating plans, policies, programs and projects for the nation’s development (as per the law), then what is the role of Congress in relation to the CONADE? Second, the Regional Level

Development Councils (COREDE) are similarly dysfunctional. Of eight regions, only two COREDES hold meetings, but this is only because those two regions, Petén and

Guatemala, are coterminous with the Departments of Petén and Guatemala, and their

Departmental Development Councils are fulfilling the same function as a COREDE would. In sum, since the National and Regional elements of the system barely function, it likewise cannot accommodate discussion of issues that affect indigenous peoples at the regional or national scale.

The limited data available suggests a bleak situation. First, there is no clear method for choosing indigenous representatives.79 The institutional constraints of the

Development Council System require that indigenous peoples create for themselves their own institutions, norms and rules for organizing their own participation in the

Development Council System. While this presents indigenous peoples an opportunity to develop better organization, doing so has proven difficult. For instance, in the

78 As noted above, it is the SCEP’s responsibility to coordinate the decentralization process, and this includes ensuring the functioning of the Development Council System. 79 The law itself provides no guidance.

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Department of Chimaltenango in 2007, a local social movement managed to mobilize sixty Kaqchikel communities from various municipalities, to elect a representative to the

CODEDE. But this was an ad-hoc movement and dissolved quickly afterwards; and moreover this system has not been replicated in all Departments. Under these conditions, even when the movement in Chimaltenango mentioned above succeeded in choosing a representative to attend the CODEDE, there were lingering questions of downward accountability that were particularly vexing for the indigenous representative himself. He felt paralyzed in his position and not want to vote on issues in the CODEDE without knowing if his people would agree with those decisions.80 As he put it:

It is not a participation that is very… how it should be, you know? Because there are questions about how to propose something. But I cannot do it myself. I cannot make decisions—there must be consensus [among the indigenous people]. And so, the proposals from there [the CODEDE], the representatives make decisions, yes or no. The objective of having a representative in the CODEDE is for planting the basic problems of the indigenous peoples. But in my case, here in Chimaltenango, the big problem is organization. We are not organized as an indigenous people.

There are also practical considerations. The representative above explained, “The other problem is that one does not count on any resources. For example, the money to attend the meetings. These are limitations, and I cannot participate freely and easily.” By contrast, the other representatives have resources. For example, government officials like the Departmental Governor and representatives of different government ministries and agencies are paid to attend the meetings; they need not worry about the cost of transportation, food, or taking a day off of work. The indigenous representative described himself as “marginalized and isolated” in the CODEDE.

80 Interview, 9 October 2009, Tecpán, Guatemala,

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After three years of participating in the CODEDE of Chimaltenango, a

Department where seventy-five percent of the population is indigenous, the representative reported that:

There are no proposals specifically for the indigenous peoples. There could and should be discussion of indigenous rights, but there is not any of this. The Law is good, what is contained in it. But when it is put into practice, it does not work.

Most of those who actively participate during the meetings are from the government, not civil society, he said. When Community Development Council (COCODE) leaders occasionally attend the meetings, they have voice but no vote. Mayors, who are connected with the Governors and political parties and who might be defending special interests, decide nearly everything, he said. And even when one looks at the law as written, one indigenous representative hardly seems enough for ensuring that issues important to indigenous peoples are placed on the CODEDE agenda, especially when the total membership of a CODEDE might reach 100.

Many civil society organizations have elaborated proposals to reform the

Development Council Law in order to address these kinds of issues—challenges to indigenous participation, and the imbalance of civil society and government actors in decision-making. For instance, the Guatemalan Association of Indigenous Mayors and

Authorities (AGAAI) and their collaborators have a proposal to revise various aspects of the law.81 As regards the COMUDE, they propose revoking the participation of the

Concejo Municipal (elected officials) and stripping non-COCODE members (i.e. members of public institutions and civil society organizations) of their vote. They also

81 The proposal is a collaborative effort between AGAAI, AMEU, the Junta Directiva de los 48 Cantones de Totonicapán, and the organization Kimolooj Mayab’ Utijoxelaab’ Ri Nimatijob’al. Unpublished documentation of the proposal was obtained from the offices of AGAAI in Guatemala City. Also see: Asociación Maya de Estudiantes Universitarias (coord.) (2008).

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propose changing the guidelines for forming Second Level COCODES in order to better account for local needs. At the level of the CODEDE, they seek to improve indigenous representation and codify a format for choosing representatives, which would include constructing an indigenous Departmental assembly; moreover, at both the Departmental and Regional levels, they propose broadening the indigenous representation from one representative per “indigenous people” (Maya, Xinca, Garífuna) to one representative per linguistic community (which would include twenty-one Mayan languages, plus Xinca and Garífuna).

The SCEP has been collecting proposals to revise the Development Council Law from research and public policy institutions, although they were not aware of AGAAI’s proposal. Although the SCEP sees the need to revise the law to include greater participation of civil society (especially in the CODEDES), they want to remove explicitly indigenous participation. An interview with the SCEP’s Sub-Secretary for The

Development Council System, Mauricio Benard, and another SCEP official, Yadira

Santiago, went as follows:82

M.B.: Explain to Jennifer what are the criteria, that we have spoken about here, with respect to the issue Indígena, Xincas, that is in the law. Y.S.: We have discussed that, if we diversify the law too much, naming each of the indigenous peoples that exist, this provokes a rejection in some moments, because I have to identify as Garífuna, as not indigenous, the other one as Maya, the other as Xinca. And we should not be distorting, separating ourselves, rather, all the citizens are one [the same], right? …On the one hand, we [the SCEP] think like this. But on the other hand, there are groups that think that there should not just be the four pueblos that exist but that each language and its representatives [should be included]. M.B.: Right, that there be one K’iche’, one Kaqchikel, one… right? Y.S: I am just going to say, for example: Sacapulas, which is a municipio in the Department of Quiche. It has four languages. It has Sacapulteco, it has K’iche’, it

82 Interview, 30 November 2009, Guatemala City.

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has Mam, and it has Awakateka. Plus Spanish. So, if we were to hold meetings of the Municipal Development Council, we would have to invite five pueblos of indigenous languages, right? M.B.: And you know, that is a factor that generates in Guatemala a lot of conflict, right?

The SCEP’s response—that greater indigenous participation would generate conflict, and that many indigenous people themselves “reject” this differentiated participation— illustrates the challenge that indigenous activists have faced in gaining greater participation in the state. It also contradicts the actual experience of the Kaqchikel representative to the Chimaltenango CODEDE, described above. In a country where the state barely addresses challenges specific to indigenous individuals and communities, clearly there is a need for increasing rather than eliminating their representation in the

Development Councils.

Municipal and Community Development Councils: Transforming the State from Below

The space for indigenous participation in the Development Councils is small at the national, regional and departmental levels. However, the municipal and community levels do provide opportunities for indigenous peoples in terms of citizen participation, realizing indigenous rights, and inserting issues important to indigenous peoples in public policies. Of the entire Development Council System, the Municipal and Community

Development Councils function the best. As noted above, the vast majority of municipalities count on a functioning COMUDE. Moreover, as of November 2009, there were a total of 13,449 registered COCODES scattered throughout the country, including

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in municipalities where the COMUDE is malfunctioning or does not exist.83 This is because a COCODE is the only community-level organization that can legally seek assistance for development projects, from the state. A COCODE can skip over the municipal government and COMUDE (if there is one) to seek financing for a community project from one of the many autonomous government development funds (e.g.

FONAPAZ, FODIGUA) and sometimes from government ministries (for example, the

Ministry of Education). A COCODE with personería jurídica (legal status) can also manage funds, and therefore carry out projects itself, if it is able to obtain the financial resources. Thus for many communities, since 2002, it has been worthwhile to form a

COCODE, even if there is no COMUDE in the municipality. In a similar fashion, mayors can tap into the project funds in the CODEDE only if their municipality has a COMUDE.

Thus there is an incentive to form the COMUDE, which is likely why one finds such a high level of compliance with the law at the municipal level—in deciding whether to form a COMUDE, a mayor must weigh the costs of opening the doors to citizen participation (and inviting a possible assault on the mayor’s authority) with the benefits of the new funds the COMUDE can bring to a cash-strapped municipality.

Among the sea of COMUDES and COCODES in Guatemala, in many places indigenous actors are appropriating these institutions in very creative ways, in order to exercise rights that the state might not recognize in practice, and to reconstruct indigenous systems of governance. First, there is a movement to reconstruct the system of

Alcaldías Indígenas. While this is best considered a parallel system of municipal government, in some places indigenous activists are utilizing the new spaces for

83 Data obtained from SEGEPLAN (Interview with Luis Ovando, November 24, 2009, Guatemala City). This number is likely higher now.

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organization that the COCODES and COMUDE open up in order to mobilize the population to rescue (or construct from scratch), the Alcaldía Indígena. For instance, activists in Tecpán (Chapter Five) have done this (without success) and in Patzicía, a local movement is trying to reconstruct the Alcaldía Indígena through the COMUDE.

In other places, indigenous activists and local populations have used the

COCODES as a way to institutionalize customary law and lend greater legality to community decisions over contentious issues like property rights and control of common resources like water. For example, the rural community of Quisil in San Juan Ixcoy

(described in the introduction to Chapter 1) is doing this. However in other municipalities as well, indigenous communities are using the COCODE as a way to formalize their customary law—the unwritten but collectively held rules and norms that guide social life.

Every COCODE meeting is recorded in a Libro de Actas—a book of meeting minutes that is considered an official state document. All decisions taken and points made are recorded for the public record, and all who attend the meeting must sign the Acta. Today, indigenous communities can now point to their COCODE’s Libro de Actas as a legal basis for individual and collective actions that deviate from official law but are acceptable within their community. In one case in Tecpán, a community resident escaped imprisonment by demonstrating his actions were indeed legal. Another community used its Libro de Actas to formally assert communal control over territory—water sources in particular—that were located on an individual’s private property. Other communities have initiated local laws that prohibit any resident from selling his or her land without the express permission of the entire community. In many of these cases, “indigenous entrepreneurs” who are either from that particular village or who are friends with the

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villagers, assisted in constructing the legal arguments and formal documentation.

However, I found that many communities, even without assistance from indigenous entrepreneurs, were now recording their customary law, due to the requirement to maintain a Libro de Actas.

Finally, increasing numbers of indigenous communities and municipalities in

Guatemala, since 2005, have used the institutional figure of the COCODE as space for holding democratic referendums to protest open-pit mining operations, hydroelectric projects, and other natural resource extraction projects that private corporations or the central government wish to enact within or near their communities—what many of them now call their “territories.” They frame these referendums, called “Good Faith

Community Consults,” as an act of exercising their right to free, previous, and informed consent (FPIC) over any initiative or project that may affect them or the territories on which they live—a right supported by international legal instruments including the

International Labor Organization Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Guatemala ratified the former in 1996 and signed onto the latter as a member of the UN General Assembly in 2007.

The strategy for holding the community consults and legally justifying them emerged from a self-conscious and organized process involving indigenous activists, lawyers, and affected communities.84 In particular, they have drawn upon the ILO

Convention 169, articles of the Constitution, and the Municipal Code and Development

Council Law to justify the process, appropriating the COCODE as the institutional space

84 See: Centro de Estudios y Documentación de la Frontera Occidental de Guatemala (2006); Merida and Krenmayr. (2008).

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in which to hold community consult, and recording the results in the Libro de Actas.85

The President of the Mayan Lawyers’ Association explained that they consider the

COCODE to now be the smallest official entity of the Guatemalan state.86 Upon holding their consults, communities present official documentation to the Municipal government

(which has sometimes been allied with the communities), Congress, the Ministry of

Energy and Mines, and the Presidency. As of late May 201, communities in sixty-three of

Guatemala’s 333 municipalities had held Good Faith Community Consults in this manner.87 Many of these communities are taking preemptory action against mining and fear the government is “going to concede practically the whole country if we don’t oppose it,” as a leader of a major national indigenous movement organization expressed in an interview.88 These communities, as well as others from municipalities that have not yet held consultations (but plan to do so) are networked together in a growing indigenous identity-framed anti-mining movement in Guatemala.89 Indigenous communities in both

San Juan Sacatepéquez (Chapter Four) and San Juan Ixcoy (Chapter Five) have held

Good Faith Community Consults to oppose mining projects (the latter case, the consults were preemptory). Moreover, in San Juan Ixcoy, local government officials, representatives from civil society organizations, and COCODE leaders used the

COMUDE as an organizational space in which to collaborate to organize the consults in

85 Specifically, they draw from article 66 of the Constitution, regarding “Protection of Ethnic Groups,” Article 15 of ILO Convention 169, and Articles 63, 65 and 66 of the Municipal Code which require municipal government authorities to consult local residents and indigenous authorities and communities when the nature of a new project, program or policy will specifically affect them. 86 Interview, 8 February 2010, San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala. 87 A near-full list appears at: http://resistenciadlp.webcindario.com/consultas.html# (accessed online August 25, 2012). Others are posted at: http://consejodepueblosdeoccidente.blogspot.com (accessed online August 25, 2012). 88 Interview with representative of Wakib Kej, 15 March 15 2010, Chimaltenango, Guatemala. 89 I have more data on all three of these indigenous appropriations of decentralization law, and can further flush out these examples.

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all the communities. Finally, in Tecpán, there is no threat of mining, but communities have utilized both the Second Level COCODE and their individual COCODES as institutional spaces for holding consults to make binding decisions about projects and local government policies.

In sum, the COCODE allows indigenous peoples to participate in municipal politics (through their representative to the COMUDE) and to seek financial resources for projects to improve their communities. However, the system has also provided new ways for indigenous people from different villages to network and even develop local movements to (re)create more “authentic” indigenous governance systems. As a new institution of the “official” state, the COCODE opens up the opportunity to codify customary law vis-à-vis official state law. Finally, the indigenous activists and communities have used the COCODE, along with other national and international legal tools, to oppose natural resource extraction projects and affirm local territorial autonomy.

Conclusion

Historically, indigenous individuals and communities have been treated as second-class citizens by the Guatemalan state. At the same time, parallel indigenous systems of governance—truly, customary citizenship regimes involving recognized authority, rights and obligations—have persisted in communities and in some municipalities. Decentralization has reconfigured both of these systems. It provides indigenous individuals limited but significant opportunities for inclusion as citizens of the official Guatemalan state, primarily through participation in the spaces of the COCODE and COMUDE, and through the devolution of financial resources to the level of the

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municipality and in some cases the community. It also grants legal recognition to indigenous community customs, norms, and rules of local organization, as well as their authorities. This recognition comes with tradeoffs. On the one hand, recognition often requires that indigenous peoples further attach themselves to a state that has historically oppressed them. It is worth questioning the value of this recognition, when it is still the

Guatemalan state that sets the rules on how recognition will be granted, and it is the official state that determines when those rules have been met. Moreover, recognition may often require that indigenous peoples mount a legal case involving technical paperwork and lawyer’s fees. These kinds of obstacles place limits on the actual “recognition” that they can hope to attain.

However, in recognizing indigenous authority, norms and customs, and in providing new official institutional spaces of citizen participation, decentralization opened up the possibility for change, and catalyzed a process of state re-formation, from the ground up. It is thus helpful to think of decentralization in Guatemala as involving two distinct processes. First, the limited top-down work the central government does to implement the laws. But second, the work being done by social movements and indigenous activists to “de facto decentralize,” make their own laws and territorial orders, and to institutionalize their community autonomy using not just the trilogy of decentralization legislation but also international rights tools and the Constitution. It is a grassroots process of constructing a multicultural decentralized state and differentiated citizenship regime that belies the liberal model in which the individual citizen is central.

The next three chapters analyze how and why this process has played out differently in the realm of local governance in three municipalities.

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CHAPTER FOUR

DEPOLITICIZING INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP:

SAN JUAN SACATEPÉQUEZ

Many boast that San Juan Sacatepéquez is a model municipio; a model of socio- economic development and social organization, with the most active and best-organized civil society participation in the country. Those who participated in the first instance of municipal-wide civil society organization, the Municipal Development Council

(COMUDE) in 2008, expressed pride in their accomplishments in a short documentary posted on YouTube.90 In the video, dramatic music provides ambiance as scenes of

Sanjuaneros working hard and going about their days scroll across the screen, and a male voiceover, steeped in emotion, states:

We emerged as a solution. We emerged as a vertebral column of development and governability of the municipio of San Juan Sacatepéquez. COMUDE. Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo!

COMUDE members, speaking earnestly for the camera in their small communities, praised this new opportunity for participation, and celebrated the municipio’s recent transformation. At last, Sanjuaneros were in charge of their own development, engaging with the state as citizens.

But in truth, not all Sanjuaneros were participating in the COMUDE. As the documentary moves to footage of a violent scene of military police confronting

Kaqchikel campesinos, the voiceover continues, “One also observes a loss of values.

Peace and social harmony are absent.” In truth, these campesinos also demanded

90 See: “COMUDE San Juan Sacatepéquez,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmJnR6yiDVE (accessed online August 5, 2012)

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participation and inclusion in decisions affecting their own development. They expressed these demands by actively protesting the installation of an open-pit mine and cement factory amidst their villages, and calling for a path toward development that respects the environment, their culture, and their rights as indigenous people. The COMUDE has not entertained this alternate conception of development. There has been a slight hand wave to Mayan culture, particularly when it is presented in a folkloric tone and legitimizes the

COMUDE’s goals of peace and harmony, “as our Mayan ancestors taught us,” the documentary voiceover states. But a serious analysis of the link between today’s development challenges and the historically constructed power relations that produced and reproduce a situation of poverty, marginalization, and cultural subordination for indigenous people, who comprise a majority of San Juan Sacatepéquez’s population, was never raised for discussion in the COMUDE. In San Juan Sacatepéquez, decentralization and new opportunities for participation produced a depoliticizing indigenous citizenship regime, confirming the predictions of critics like Charles Hale (2002), who view decentralization in the context of state multiculturalism as simply a new mode of governmentality.

Depoliticizing Indigenous Citizenship

At a global level, the new opportunities for citizen participation and engagement with the local state that have accompanied decentralization reforms since the mid-1990s have not escaped criticism. In a 2001 edited tome, scholars questioned if participation might be the new “tyranny,” rather than a grassroots remediation to top-down development schemes and unresponsive local governments (Cook and Kothari eds.

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2001). Could participatory development actually facilitate the “illegitimate and/or unjust exercise of power,” rather than counteract it (Cooke and Kothari 2001: 4)? Critics have argued that participation, especially the “invited” (rather than organic) variety, “stresses personal reform over political struggle” (Williams 2004: 92), and importantly, by

“uncritically boosting ‘the local’ as the site for action… [participatory development] deflects attention away from wider power relationships that frame the construction of local development problems” (Williams 2004: 93). The marginalized may be “given” rights and invited to participate, but barely recognized when they voice disagreement over policies, programs or projects (Williams 2004).

This critique of participation has been explicitly taken up in the Latin American context (e.g. Paley 2001), sometimes reframed in the terms of “civil society,” the putative actor in participatory democratic schemas. Alvarez (2008) has critiqued what she calls the “civil society agenda” in Latin America, as setting limits to the who, what, and how of civil society participation and engagement with the state. In Latin America and Brazil in particular, during the 1990s neoliberal period, “virtuous civil society came to mean

‘those who give through philanthropy, solidarity, and partnerships… Because there is an attempt to eliminate conflict from the scene… social movements became altamente incômodos,” extremely bothersome (Dagnino and Alvarez 2001, cited in Alvarez 2008).

To states and elites, civil society was juxtaposed to the uncivil, even uncivilized society of social movements and political activism. These critiques of participation and civil society are just as resonant in Guatemala, and especially in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

In this municipality, lines were drawn implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, between good and unacceptable citizens. The former could take part in the COMUDE.

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The latter could not. Good citizens accepted what I argue were deceptively limited opportunities for participation. Unacceptable citizens partly rejected and partly were excluded from those spaces. In the Guatemalan context, this dichotomy of good versus unacceptable citizens also intersects with racial and identity politics. Indigenous people, if they assert their rights as indigenous people, might not be recognized as legitimate citizens. They “go too far,” Hale (2002) says, when they demand collective rights to control land, territory, and sub-soil resources—demands that challenge the basic power structures that undergird the racial and socio-economic inequalities that order

Guatemalan society. They might be labeled as radical, violent, and lacking governability, or perhaps accused of promoting “fake” conceptions of indigeneity. By contrast, indios permitidos (Hale and Millaman 2006), willingly or begrudgingly, quietly accept the limits to indigenous engagement with the state. They neither protest nor call attention to power relations. Rather, they engage in orderly dialog to reach agreements on such issues as the municipal budget. This dichotomy, so popular in the national imaginary, exists in microcosm in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Here, the indios permitidos are found in civil civil society and thus in the COMUDE. The “unacceptable,” “uncivil,” possibly “radical” citizens who protested the cement mine, were excluded. In this way, the very substance of citizenship was depoliticized in that the rights that would permit citizens to question the structural power relations causing many of the development problems that plague San

Juan Sacatepéquez, were excluded from the realm of permissibility. Meanwhile, the identity of the indigenous citizen was relegated to the folkloric at best, and denied at worst.

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This separation of indigenous citizens into two camps is one dimension of

“depoliticizing” indigenous citizenship in San Juan Sacatepéquez. As Wendy Brown wrote, depoliticization “involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of the subject” (Brown 2006: 15). Accordingly, indigenous citizenship takes on a depoliticized character when an “indigenous” citizen’s identity and rights are removed from both the power relations that produced and reproduce the indígena-ladino binary, and the history of colonialism and internal colonialism that stripped indigenous individuals and communities of their lands and rights.

Yet depoliticization also runs along a second axis, hinted at in the critique of participation above. Citizenship can become depoliticized when the very questions that citizens might want to raise in the realm of local government—e.g. conceptual questions about legitimate authority, and substantive questions about territorial and economic development—are construed as beyond the limits of participation, and instead subject to the technical intervention of political and policy experts. This phenomenon echoes critiques by Ferguson (1990) and Li (2006), who examined the complex ways that

“development” and even “poverty” can be construed as technical problems subject to expert solutions and interventions. As Li wrote, “questions that are rendered technical are simultaneously rendered nonpolitical” (Li 2006: 7). In San Juan Sacatepéquez, these two dimensions of depoliticization—stripping indigenous identity of its content and

“rendering” serious development challenges as “technical”—were closely intertwined.

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Indigenous citizens who sought a deep discussion of development that would address how natural resources (i.e. subsoil minerals) should be managed were excluded from the COMUDE and labeled as “against development.” Those who did participate in the COMUDE were unable to enter into discussions over mining and natural resources.

These were considered technical economic policy questions (rather than inherently political ones) that the local and central government would deal with, alone. Instead, representatives of the Community Development Councils (COCODES) and local civil society organizations were pacified with greater participation in decisions over how smaller development projects would be chosen and distributed to different communities in the municipio. This was surely a significant new opportunity for them. Like many places in Guatemala, San Juan Sacatepéquez had a tradition of localized authoritarianism and clientelism, where the communities most in need of assistance could often be the last to receive it. The COMUDE and overall system of Development Councils was an unprecedented opportunity to make important decisions about how funds would be spent and development projects allocated.

But at the same time, by offering the COMUDE the possibility only of considering projects and budgeting, the local (and, we will see, central) government seemed to further solidify an emerging new relationship between indigenous communities and the state, best encapsulated in the term asistencialismo. A leader of the national indigenous movement organization Wakib’ Kej explained asistencialismo as the tendency for the Guatemalan government to apply bandage-like solutions to problems of poverty in indigenous communities, and for the latter to readily accept those solutions.

More precisely, the state provides poor communities and families with small

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“development” projects or conditional cash transfers (the latter through the central government’s Cohesion Social program); but these actions do little to resolve or even call attention to socio-structural problems that indigenous communities face, like persistent poverty. In Guatemala, government elites conceptualize such problems in absence of the power relations that produce and reproduce them, and instead treat them as technical problems with clear-cut solutions: provide better (read: modern, non-agricultural) employment opportunities, and more basic services. Attract private investment. But treating underdevelopment and poverty as problems that can be solved with a few key projects or jobs, the latter of which can be difficult to generate in the Guatemalan context, arguably does not get at the heart of how indigenous people came to be poor and marginalized in the first place. Specifically, it does not address the process by which their dignity and demands for land and rights were systematically, historically denied.

Sources of depoliticizing indigenous citizenship

The regime of depoliticized indigenous citizenship in San Juan Sacatepéquez results from a process where explicitly “indigenous” voices were largely excluded from the local state decentralization process, including the process of constructing the new participatory spaces—the COMUDE and system of COCODES. Instead, this process, and arguably the content of participation within the COMUDE itself, was captured by elites: a tripartite alliance of the local state, central government, and the business

Cementos Progreso. The latter had purchased from large landholders an extensive piece of land in the rural and mountainous southwestern region of the municipality, where minerals used in cement production were discovered beneath the rich soil. The plan was

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to construct a mineral quarry (open-pit mine) and cement factory, widen the dirt roads linking the center of town to the project, and build a new road to connect the project site with the Pan-American Highway, a major transportation artery that cuts through the center of Guatemala, linking the country’s southeastern Salvadoran border with the northwestern Mexican one. Cementos Progreso is a Guatemalan company owned by the elite Novella family, though the Swiss construction materials company Holcim owns a minority (twenty percent) stake. Because exploiting natural resources and attracting multinational capital have figured prominently on the central government’s development agenda in the post-war era, and because the owners of Cementos Progreso come from a historically powerful family in Guatemala, the company enjoyed support from the central and local government (which were both controlled by the same political party, GANA from 2004-2008 and UNE from 2008 to 2012).91 Compounding this alliance was the fact that the key, high-ranking government official appointed to deal with the conflict over

Cementos Progreso (during 2008-12), Luis Velásquez, was also a contracted employee of the company. His own company, Consultoría Internacional/CONSUINTER, promoted

Cementos Progreso and carried out consultancies for them (Hurtado 2009: 31). In sum, economic and political elites were well organized in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

Indigenous entrepreneurs were not as visible or as organized in San Juan

Sacatepéquez, compared to the other two cases in this dissertation. They were the leaders among the twelve communities in the southwestern region of the municipality that sought to democratize local development and assert territorial autonomy, specifically in response to the Cementos Progreso mining project. But this localized movement failed to expand to additional geographic regions of San Juan Sacatepéquez, a spatially vast municipio.

91 On the role of natural resource extraction in Guatemala, historically, see: Solano (2005).

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This was partly because they lacked networks with other communities in the municipio, but also because they were intently focused on the territorially circumscribed effects of

Cementos Progreso. Moreover, their adversary was not just the local state (as in the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship), but also a local state that was allied with the central state and capital interests. Indigenous entrepreneurs never directly considered new participatory spaces as a possible solution to their problems and instead focused their initial efforts on capturing the local state through the electoral process, a failed strategy that arguable also reflected their particular ideology, knowledge set, and connections with leftist national movement organizations. By contrast, elites explicitly aimed to set up and control participatory spaces.

When citizens are invited to engage with the state in participatory spaces created by the state itself, such as the COMUDE, those spaces “may be discursively bounded to permit only limited citizen influence, colonizing interaction and stifling dissent”

(Cornwall 2002). They can be structurally bounded as well, limiting who participates.

This makes it imperative for indigenous entrepreneurs to be the first actors to implement the Development Council Law and set up the system of COCODES and COMUDE in the municipality. Yet in San Juan Sacatepéquez, elites were instead the first actors, and they implemented the law without regard for indigenous identity or consideration of what would be an effective way for indigenous citizens to organize, autonomously from elites and the state. In fact, one finds that the Second Level Community Development Councils were constructed in a manner that blocked the formation of trans-community networks across the municipio, and thus did not facilitate open discussion and identification of problems affecting the municipio as a whole—problems such as how natural resources

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should be managed. By way of comparison, in Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy, all communities had a presence in either the COMUDE or Second Level COCODE, and could thus identify and discuss the costs and benefits of important projects such as reforestation or mining. Strong and broad representation of communities and local civil society organizations in those municipalities allowed for balancing the power of the local state and elites; in both cases, communities had a say in how the municipio should be governed. In San Juan Sacatepéquez, however, the process of implementing and maintaining the spaces for citizen participation was captured, seemingly with the goals of a) generating local acceptance of Cementos Progreso’s mining operations; b) silencing opposition, both real and potential; and most generally, c) fostering a (big) business- friendly climate and strategy for achieving socio-economic development. In many respects, this agenda was successful, though never entirely, because many COCODE leaders and civil society representatives silently questioned the COMUDE’s agenda, and residents of the twelve communities closest to the mine saw the COMUDE as a tool of oppression against them.

This chapter proceeds by first briefly contextualizing San Juan Sacatepéquez in historical, geographic and demographic terms. Next, it discusses the weak presence of indigenous entrepreneurs and their community-based movement, analyzing how the state and elites constrained its actions. The Chapter then turns to the process by which spaces for citizen participation were constructed, before analyzing the limits to citizen participation in these spaces. The Chapter next analyzes debates over “development” in

San Juan Sacatepéquez, showing how these debates illuminate a process of differentiating civil and uncivil indigenous citizens (a depoliticized conception of indigenous citizen

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participation), as well as an effort by the government to promote a simplified and depoliticized conception of development. Before concluding, the Chapter reviews some of the alternate conceptions of development that were never taken seriously by the

COMUDE or local government, and in particular were conceived in an alternate, organic indigenous counterpublic.

San Juan Sacatepéquez in Geographic and Demographic Context

San Juan Sacatepéquez is a historically Kaqchikel municipio, sixty-five percent of its 152,583 residents self-identifying as indigenous.92 However, these proportions can be deceiving because the southeastern region of the municipality borders on Guatemala

City’s metropolitan area and in recent years has rapidly urbanized and attracted ladino migrants from all areas of the country. In the remainder of the municipality, eighty-one percent self-identify as indigenous.93

Most of San Juan Sacatepéquez is nestled among mountains, at times making one forget that it is also only thirty-two kilometers from Guatemala City. Small family-owned furniture workshops line the streets in the center of town, and moving out into the rural villages, the rolling mountains are carpeted in plastic greenhouses filled with flowers that will be sold in the local, national, and occasionally international markets. The municipio’s proximity to the capital gives residents access to a wide variety of educational and other resources, as well as employment opportunities, making San Juan

Sacatepéquez better off than many other municipalities in Guatemala, including Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy. In a government-sponsored study of human and socio-economic

92 Source: INE Census 2002, http://www.ine.gob.gt/index.php/pxwebcenso2002. (accessed November 9, 2010). 93 Calculated using INE Census 2002 dataset.

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development, San Juan Sacatepéquez ranked 207 out of 333 municipalities, where a higher number indicated a higher quality of life (SEGEPLAN 2008).

However, though the municipio as a whole is relatively better off, within the municipio there is significant development inequality. In particular, in the rural, arid region in the north of the municipality, located more than two hours from Guatemala

City, villages are populated mostly by landless Kaqchikeles who cultivate subsistence crops on small rented plots.94 Many spend half the year away from home, working as agricultural day laborers during the sugar harvest on plantations in the Pacific coastal region. It is a migration of desperation. While the center of town enjoys access to all basic services, villages here suffer staggering poverty and lack nearly all services. For example, due to years of deforestation and subsequent drought, families in these villages must purchase all their water from a truck that visits once a week, and then store it in large plastic barrels that become easily contaminated. Education facilities and teachers are similarly scarce. In the small village of Santa Rosa, children studied on the dirt floor of a corrugated aluminum structure, which becomes extremely hot during the dry season.

By contrast, the communities in the southwestern section of the municipality are more prosperous. There, flower cultivation is a staple of the economy, along with subsistence agriculture. The more temperate microclimate helps these communities succeed in agriculture. Moreover, here many families benefited from the 1950s national land reform, and thus own rather than rent their small parcels of land. But, today these communities face a new threat to their land and livelihood, namely Cementos Progreso.

94 The Gini coefficient for land inequality is fairly high, at .792 (Sandoval 2009a: 14).

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Weak Indigenous Entrepreneurs vs. Strong Elites

In late 2006 to early 2007, a significant indigenous community-based social movement emerged to oppose Cementos Progreso. This movement was directed at the local (and national) state, at democratization, and at affirming the right of “indigenous citizens” to be consulted over initiatives that may affect them or their territories, as stipulated in international rights accords.95 But it never blossomed to encompass all sectors of the municipality, nor did movement leaders ever target the Development

Council Law and general decentralization of the state as a possible way to foment support and gain legal and organizational traction against the state and Cementos Progreso.

The conflict began in 2006, when residents of twelve communities in the southwest of the municipio encountered Cementos Progreso employees intruding on their land, trampling over their gardens, and entering their small homes to make “strange” measurements, residents and village leaders recalled. Alarmed, community leaders demanded that the Mayor, who was Kaqchikel, inform them of Cementos Progreso’s plans for the municipality, and the relationship the company was building with the local government. They soon requested a formal consultation, in January 2007. The Mayor’s legal counsel, who also self-identified as Kaqchikel and was knowledgeable on indigenous rights law, advised the Mayor to organize the consult, given that it is a right according to the ILO Convention 169. The Consejo Municipal and Mayor even drafted a local law to guide the process.

The Mayor scheduled the consult for April 15, 2007, but cancelled at the last minute, purportedly because the municipality was not yet prepared. He rescheduled for

95 In legal terms, this is the right to “Free, Previous, and Informed Consent,” as stipulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labour Organization Convention No. 169 on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.

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May 13. Meanwhile, the mining-affected communities began their own organization process, holding frequent public assemblies and publicizing the consult and the reasons for it, in order to achieve high participation within their communities. They also attended weekly meetings to negotiate with the local government, national government officials, and Cementos Progreso representatives. A smaller mining awareness campaign, only loosely connected to the community-based resistance near the proposed mine site, was underway in the center of the municipality, organized by members of the Catholic Church and a Kaqchikel cultural organization, Asociación Q’anil. They held workshops and investigated Cementos Progreso’s work elsewhere in Guatemala. But, as May 13 approached, the Mayor again cancelled the consult, this time permanently, on the grounds that it would be too costly. The leaders of the twelve communities objected but the Mayor refused to budge. He now had a new legal counsel who did not believe the consult was legally necessary—a result of the ambiguity surrounding the application of international human rights law (see Nash 2012; Sieder 2010: 162).96

In the absence of a supportive Mayor and municipal-wide social movement, it was impossible to hold a consultation in all of San Juan Sacatepéquez’s communities.

Moreover, as the situation over the cement mine became potentially dangerous, those who did not live in the communities closest to the previewed site of the mine and did not feel directly affected by the project, ceased their political efforts. The twelve communities, however, went on to hold consultations. With the help of the Asociación de

Abogados Mayas (Mayan Lawyers Association) and the Procuradura de Derechos

Humanos (Guatemalan Human Rights Defender, PDH) an autonomous entity of the

96 It is also worth noting that the Mayor was likely being pressured by national government officials to acquiesce to Cementos Progreso, who did not favor holding a consultation process.

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central government, each community held an assembly at which residents openly voted for or against Cementos Progreso. They recorded the results of the consult in the

COCODE’s Libro de Actas (official record of meeting minutes) as a way of legally institutionalizing the process. Volunteers from the Asociación de Abogados Mayas and the PDH observed the process. The Mayor and local government, however, opposed these community consults and the night before, distributed leaflets and announced on loudspeakers mounted on cars, that residents should not to participate in the consults because they are “illegal”. Community leaders claim the Mayor threatened residents with imprisonment if they participated, thus it is possible that participation would have been greater without this government abstention campaign. Still, a total of 8,990 adults with legal identification cards participated, and only forty-eight voted “yes.” A majority

(roughly sixty-seven percent) of the legal voting population of the twelve communities participated in the consult.97 The communities submitted formal documentation of the consult results to the Municipal government, Congress, the Presidency, and the Ministry of Energy and Mines. However, though carrying out the consults had important impacts on the communities’ understandings of rights, it did not prevent Cementos Progreso from continuing its work, because it had the support of both the local and central government.98

In sum, prior to the implementation of the Development Council Law in San Juan

Sacatepéquez, there was a local social movement that sought similar goals as the

97 This percentage was calculated by dividing the number who voted (8,990) by the total population in the communities that is age 20 or older (as indicated in census 2002 data). Since data on the size of the population age 18-19 was not available, it is possible that the percentage that voted is slightly smaller. 98 Support came in the form of legal permits that allowed it to do its work. But in 2008, the government(s) provided support in a different way, by constructing the COMUDE and COCODES, as the rest of this Chapter argues.

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democratizing movements in both Tecpán (polarizing indigenous citizenship) and San

Juan Ixcoy (transformative indigenous citizenship). This movement demanded government transparency, especially with regard to Cementos Progreso’s plans in the municipality. They demanded a voice and vote (possibly a veto) in matters of local governance that would affect them. And specifically, they demanded to be consulted on projects that would affect the land and natural resources on which they depended for their livelihoods and the maintenance of their culture. They justified this demand with international law protecting indigenous rights (ILO 169). But a key difference between this movement and those that produced regimes of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship, is that here they were unable to broaden and organize the rest of the municipality into a larger movement.

This was a result of both power relations (the fact that elites were so strong) and the movement’s/indigenous entrepreneurs’ strategic choices. After holding the consults, a precarious situation of localized violence (seemingly perpetrated by paramilitary bands organized by Cementos Progreso, though this is difficult to confirm) emerged in the communities, and in response the Guatemalan state stepped up repression.99 Also, the government (both local and central) publically treated the conflict with Cementos

Progreso as a localized affair that only involved the twelve communities; this was particularly clear when the Mayor refused to consult the entire municipality on the matter. The remainder of the municipality was largely uninformed about the conflict or

99 The communities have catalogued some of the violations. The movement leaders have a blog (Flores en Resistencia, http://floresenresistencia.wordpress.com), on which they have published selections of a report of rights violations compiled by The National Coordinator of Guatemalan Widows, an indigenous rights organization. Women leaders from the communities have teamed with the human rights non-governmental organization Derechos en Acción/Rights Action to publish their experiences (García Mauricio coord. 2010), and Peace Brigades International and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission have also reported on the case in their newsletters.

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how Cementos Progreso might affect them, and was subjected to state-constructed portrayals of the twelve communities as violent and unreasonable. For these reasons, it was difficult for the communities to expand their movement to the entire municipality.

Moreover, before the conflict with Cementos Progreso, the communities had little experience in contentious politics or exposure to the discourse, practice, and legality of indigenous rights; there were few indigenous entrepreneurs when the conflict over the mine first emerged. Instead, community leaders gradually took on the role of indigenous entrepreneurs as the communities began to organize into a unified movement (there was no trans-community organization before this time). An indigenous rights lawyer from San

Juan Sacatepéquez who had close family and friends living in the communities became an important ally who introduced their case to activists from the broader indigenous movement In Guatemala. The communities received support from numerous indigenous organizations in the capital, including the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC,

Committee for Peasant Unity), the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas Guatemaltecas

(CONAVIGUA, National Coordinator of Guatemalan Widows), the Fundación

Rigoberta Menchu Tum (Rigoberta Menchu Foundation), Coordinación y Convergencia

Nacional Maya Waqib’ Kej (an umbrella organization of numerous indigenous movement groups), the Centro para la Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (Center for Legal

Action in Human Rights, CALDH) the Asociación de Abogados Mayas.100 Through these networks, the communities (and especially the community leaders) gained access to resources that are indispensible in the struggle for indigenous rights: knowledge of national and international law that protects explicitly indigenous rights, fluency in the

100 Note that although the Association of Mayan Lawyers assisted the communities from the start, the other organizations only gradually began to support the movement in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

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discourse and visual symbolism of indigenous rights and Mayan culture and identity, and skills in deploying that discourse and symbolism, and in calling people to action.101 Over the years they have applied these skills and knowledge. For example, they communities have now adopted a Kaqchikel-language name for their movement, framing themselves and their claims as clearly “indigenous”, and drawn on international indigenous rights law to bring their case to the International Labor Organization and the United Nations

Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Rights, James Anaya—he paid a visit to their communities in 2010.102

Yet, despite their connections with indigenous rights activists and new awareness of indigenous rights, community and movement leaders did not, in 2007 (the year when they consolidated their movement) consider the decentralization reforms, and the

Development Council Law in particular, as a possible strategy for opposing Cementos

Progreso and asserting voice in local governance—a strategy that worked well in Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy and one that could have proved viable in San Juan Sacatepéquez, had indigenous entrepreneurs correctly identified and seized up on this political opportunity.

One reason they failed to do so might be that some of the indigenous organizations that assisted them, especially the CUC, follow a political strategy that bypasses the local state and instead favors a national strategy grounded in protest. Moreover, because the struggle in San Juan Sacatepéquez was against a mining project, and because the central government controls subsoil resources, one might imagine the communities did not see the local state as an important political target. However, they were indeed clearly fixed on

101 If necessary, I can insert quotes from interviews to illustrate how they learned their rights, symbolic discourse, etc. 102 The communities now go by the name of “La Asociación de Comunidades Indígenas Kaqchikeles Q’a moloq’i San Juan Sacatepéquez.”

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influencing the local state, and fielded a candidate for the municipal elections that were held only a few months after they completed their community consults, under the banner of indigenous rights activist and Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú’s political party, Encuentro por Guatemala/Winaq. In sum, indigenous entrepreneurs in San Juan

Sacatepéquez differed from those in the cases of polarizing and transformative citizenship in that they did not see the decentralization reforms as useful tools and instead sought change through electoral politics and contentious action. This is arguably a result of the particular knowledge they absorbed from their indigenous movement networks. At the same time, the state and Cementos Progreso constricted their ability to appropriate the decentralization reforms, especially when the new municipal government entered office in January 2008.

That is, the communities’ candidate lost the municipal elections, partly because their party, Encuentro por Guatemala/Winaq, had very little support throughout the municipio (and throughout the rest of Guatemala) but also because many residents of the mining affected communities voted for the Unidad Nacional de Esperanza (National

Unity of Hope, UNE) party, whose Mayoral candidate promised to oppose Cementos

Progreso. This candidate, Marta Sicán de Coronado, won, but once in office, reneged on her promise to oppose Cementos Progreso. It was at this time, early 2008, that the local government, aided by the central government (which the UNE also controlled) took steps to apply the Development Council Law in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

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Local Governance and Citizenship before 2008

Before 2008, there was no organized effort, either on the part of civil society or the local state, to collaborate on issues of municipal governance. Autonomous organizing existed, but not for the purpose of influencing the state. In terms of indigenous traditional organization, two types existed: the Alcaldía Indígena and community-based organization. The first was an institution reaching back to the colonial era (Concohá

1997). In the past the Alcalde Indígena and his team of subordinates meted out justice and were a legitimate governing authority in the municipio. Today, the Alcaldía Indígena maintains a staff and office in the Municipalidad (Town Hall), yet its powers and responsibilities are limited to preserving cultural-religious traditions, principally the guarding of Los dos Cristos, two statues of Christ that are carried around town during the annual patron saint festival in June. Perhaps because of the municipality’s proximity to the capital, or for reasons of cultural assimilation and self-censorship, neither most members of the Alcaldía Indígena nor the Kaqchikel residents of San Juan Sacatepéquez have much interest in empowering this institution to have a more significant role in local government.103

Community-based organization took numerous forms. First, with no link to the

Alcaldía Indígena are the alcaldes auxiliares. Most communities, both rural and urban, have an auxiliatura: an alcalde auxiliar and team of helpers. In some communities the auxiliatura includes up to fifty men (though sometimes there are women) who are elected in annual community assemblies and are considered the maximum leaders of the community. In other places, the auxiliatura is smaller, the members chosen based on

103 In contrast to other municipios in Guatemala where there is a new and distinct movement to re-empower the Alcaldía Indígena.

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traditions rather than election, and their powers very weak. However, regardless of the size of the auxiliatura, most important to organization in indigenous communities is the tradition of group work, which the alcalde auxiliar organizes.

Until recently, communities in San Juan Sacatepéquez were well organized internally, but lacked any significant trans-community organization or regular communication (similar to the other two cases in this dissertation). San Juan

Sacatepéquez did not suffer greatly during the internal conflict and was not a site of guerrilla organization (to the contrary, the municipio hosts a military base). The result is that there was less influence of the guerrilla’s revolutionary ideology here, but at the same time community organization was not disrupted to the same extent as in Tecpán or

San Juan Ixcoy.

As in other municipios in Guatemala, in the past communities here often counted on a Comité Pro-Mejoramiento (Improvement Committee) that would deal with basic development challenges such as water, roads, and electricity. In San Juan Sacatepéquez, the Comités were often formed to help rebuild after the 1976 earthquake that devastated this area of Guatemala. But in many communities these Comités had existed for a much longer time, to deal with access to basic services that the local government could rarely provide to areas beyond the town center. Some communities, especially those that are younger and more urban, may have had (and still have) an Asociación de Vecinos

(Neighborhood Association) to deal with community development problems. Many of these urban communities might also have other small organizations.

When the trilogy of decentralization laws was passed in 2002, a few communities began to form COCODES to replace their Comité or Asociación de Vecinos, because they

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had somehow learned that only with a COCODE could they formally solicit funds from central state institutions like the Fondo Nacional para la Paz (FONAPAZ) or the now- defunct Fondo de Inversión Social (FIS). This was the path to undertaking infrastructure projects like school classrooms, potable water systems, and road pavement. One community reported receiving limited information about the new Development Council

Law from the central government in 2004. However, neither the central nor local government ever engaged in a concerted effort to disseminate the laws or train citizens, so those communities that did learn of the need to form a COCODE probably counted on at least one well-informed community member. Many communities did not form a

COCODE, either because they were not actively looking for project support beyond the local government or they were not aware of changes in the law. And with no interest in implementing the laws before 2008 in San Juan Sacatepéquez, former mayors readily accepted solicitations from community Comités and Asociaciones de Vecinos.

Constructing Citizen Participation

The move to transform San Juan Sacatepéquez into a “model” of participatory democracy began when the new municipal authorities were instated in January 2008. At that time, in a few municipios, mayors still had not convened the COMUDE, most likely because of fear of losing power to civil society or other political parties.104 Likewise, constructing the Development Councils was not part of Marta Sicán de Coronado’s mayoral campaign. Why was there interest in constructing and organizing these participatory spaces now, six years after the laws had gone into effect? The answer stems

104 In November 2009, thirty-eight of the 333 municipios did not have a COMUDE [Interview with SEGEPLAN official (Secretary of Planning and Programming of the Presidency) (Nov. 23, 2009)].

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from a confluence of three factors: central government influence, a politically weak and inexperienced new mayor, and the growing conflict over the proposed Cementos

Progreso mine and cement factory.

By law, the State cannot obligate mayors to establish a COMUDE, and generally the central government has had little role in assisting municipal governments in applying the Development Council Law.105 Thus it is surprising to find that the central government, at first through the SAEP (Secretaría de Asuntos Específicas de la

Presidencia) and later the SCEP (Secretaría de Coordinación Ejecutiva de la Presidencia), was a key player in constructing the new spaces of citizen participation in San Juan

Sacatepéquez.106 According to a high-ranking government official, Mayor Coronado asked for this assistance; but it was also at President Alvaro Colom’s request that the

SCEP treat San Juan Sacatepéquez as a priority.107 By early 2008, conflict over the

Cementos Progreso was growing, and the President wanted to quell it as quickly as possible. The central government believed San Juan Sacatepéquez might be heading into a situation of ingovernability. It was rumored that former Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of the SCEP, Luis Velásquez, pressured Mayor Coronado to accept assistance from the central government in dealing with this conflict; this was especially likely since his initial role in San Juan Sacatepéquez was not to convene the COMUDE but rather to intervene in the conflict with Cementos Progreso. But it is just as likely that

Coronado readily accepted any help the central government was willing to give.

105 According to the SCEP. Interview with Mauricio Benard, Director of the Development Council System, SCEP (30 November 2009, Guatemala City). Article 253 of the Guatemalan Constitution guarantees municipal autonomy and, according to Benard, prevents the central government from obligating Mayors to implement the Development Council Law. 106 Initially, it was the SAEP that intervened; the project was soon passed on to the SCEP, which is the government institution specifically responsible for coordinating the country’s decentralization process. 107 Interview with Mauricio Benard, Director of the Development Council System, SCEP (30 November 2009, Guatemala City).

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Mayor Coronado lacked experience in leadership and government administration.

In truth, she became Mayor by an unfortunate turn of events. Her husband, José

Coronado, had been the UNE’s candidate, but died unexpectedly less than six months before the September 2007 municipal elections. The UNE appointed Coronado to take his place. Even though she had little history of leadership or service in San Juan

Sacatepéquez, she easily won the election, likely because of surname recognition and perhaps because Sanjuaneros “tend to vote for the winning party,” said one informant.108

As an inexperienced Mayor dealing with a serious conflict, Mayor Coronado lacked both the political capital to refuse assistance from her party’s leadership, and the skills necessary to deal with the conflict on her own. She thus broke her promise to support the communities protesting Cementos Progreso, and instead collaborated with the central government to apply the Development Council Law.

First Steps

Two main actors directed the SCEP’s efforts to assist the local government in forming the Development Councils. The Secretary of the SCEP, Luis Velásquez, personally assisted Mayor Coronado in her efforts to coordinate with civil society through the COMUDE and improve the governability of the municipio, and Jesús Gómez y Gómez led the process of organizing the municipio’s communities into COCODES and the COMUDE. Gómez was a Quiche-Maya and a Mayan guia espiritual, as well as a university-educated professional with deep knowledge of the law, characteristics that

108 Since 1995 San Juan Sacatepéquez’s mayor has been from the national ruling party. More generally, this is a tendency in many municipalities. A ruling-party mayor can take advantage of the clientelistic networks connecting mayors with the President and national government ministries, in order to bring more funds and infrastructure projects to a town.

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gave him particular legitimacy in his role as organizer of indigenous citizen participation.109 He fell neatly into the category of indio permitido: an indigenous activist who supports identity-based rights within certain limits, which in the realm of local governance means eschewing protests in favor of proposals and dialog. To Gómez, most sectors of the indigenous movement in Guatemala, by opposing nearly all large natural resource development projects, had fallen into “fanaticism.” The communities opposing

Cementos Progreso fell into this category, and generally “lacked governability.” Thus the introduction of formalized citizen participation appeared a way to insert governability into those communities and into the municipio at large, and channel radical activism into institutionalized spaces.

The first steps in organizing citizen participation involved forming COCODES throughout the municipio. A team led by Gómez, and including other local government and SCEP officials, visited nearly all the communities in the municipio, to explain what a

COCODE is and how to organize and legalize it. “We told them the advantages, why to have a COCODE, and proposed to help them strengthen or form their COCODE, basically in order to promote development in their community,” explained Gómez.

According to him, many of the communities visited had a COCODE but it was not functional—the community was not holding meetings, there were only two or three people in the junta directiva, and those leaders were completely divorced from the community.110 The team’s plan was thus to strengthen the junta directiva of the

COCODE and provide training in order to get them back to work again. It was usually necessary to hold a community assembly to elect new leaders, and most communities

109 A guia espiritual is a spiritual guide or shaman within the Mayan system of spiritual beliefs. 110 The “junta directiva” refers to the elected leaders of a COCODE, including the President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and numerous “Vocals” (general representatives).

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were in favor of doing this. Similarly, in communities that had no COCODE, the team assisted in organizing an assembly, electing the COCODE leaders, and writing up the

Acta—the official meeting record, signed by all community members present, which would be turned in to the Town Hall as evidence of the community election’s legitimacy.

By December 2009, an impressive ninety-five percent of San Juan Sacatepéquez was organized into eighty-two COCODES, according to a report Gómez prepared for San

Juan Sacatepéquez and the SCEP (Gómez 2009).

With so many COCODES, four Second Level COCODES were necessary,

Gómez’s team determined. Their method for forming these Second Level COCODES, called Bloques in San Juan Sacatepéquez, was to divide the municipio into four geographic regions: south, west/central, north, and far north. Each region formed a

Bloque that united the Presidents of all COCODES represented in the region. From each

Bloque, five representatives were elected to represent the Bloque in the COMUDE.

Figure 4.1 visually depicts the development council system in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

The SCEP team also assisted Mayor Coronado in bringing together civil society organizations active in the town, to send representatives to the COMUDE. In the end, five representatives joined the COMUDE, representing the following sectors of civil society: women, commerce, health, culture, and the Catholic Church. The Alcaldía

Indígena, absent from local governance for so many years, also now had voice and vote in the COMUDE. By late 2008, the COMUDE began meeting regularly, establishing a new mode of citizen engagement with the local state, and determining the municipio’s development priorities.

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Constructing Indigenous Citizenship via Exclusion

The numbers above suggest a high level of citizen participation, but behind them was a deliberate process of exclusion. Two categories of communities were left out: urban communities in the center of the town, and the communities opposing the mine. In terms of the urban communities, Gómez argued that in those areas, “there is not so much community organization, historically, as in the aldeas [rural villages],” and “the people in the urban area were not interested much in it.” Moreover, the municipal government already attended well to the urban barrios, whereas the rural areas have been neglected for many years. Accordingly, there was little reason to organize them into COCODES or include them in the COMUDE.

Although it might make sense to argue for focusing on neglected rural areas in the

COMUDE’s participatory budgeting processes, nowhere does the law state that urban neighborhoods should not or cannot form a COCODE or participate in the COMUDE. In other municipios, Tecpán for example, the urban COCODES are key players in participatory spaces and are even leaders in promoting citizen participation for the whole municipality—urban and rural. In sum, the exclusion of the urban communities in the center of town belied a limited conception of both “citizenship” and “development” that was guiding the process of forming the Development Councils. It suggested that the

“development” that the Municipal Development Council would discuss would deal mostly with issues such as basic service provision (i.e. water, sanitation, infrastructure) and less with issues that transcend the municipality in time and space, such as mining or democratic governance. It also suggested that participation would be limited to citizens

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who were satisfied with such a limited scope for participation.111 By contrast, in the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship (Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy, respectively), participatory spaces were more inclusive and allowed citizens to push for a brand of participation that incorporated transcendent issues of territorial control and (in the transformative case) mining, viewing them as questions that the local state, communities and civil society should deal with transparently and democratically.

Figure 4.1: The Development Council System in San Juan Sacatepéquez

COMUDE Includes 20 COCODE representatives, each Bloque sends five

Bloque I Bloque II Bloque III Bloque IV southeast central and northern far northern region south-western region region region

COCODES COCODES COCODES COCODES

111 The communities of the urban barrios could have formed COCODES and participated in the COMUDE on their own. Indeed a couple of communities on the periphery of the urban core did this. But in general there would be little reason to expect these communities to organize COCODES on their own now, when they had never done so in the past and when most of the better-organized rural communities were unable to form well functioning COCODES without assistance.

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Map 4.1: Political Map of San Juan Sacatepéquez

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Excluding the communities that opposed the mine from the organizing process in

San Juan Sacatepéquez seemed an even more obvious effort to control the terms of discussion and boundaries to citizen participation. Gómez asserted that his team visited all the rural communities in the municipio, and that only four (not twelve) communities opposed Cementos Progreso and lacked a COCODE. In the publication he penned of the municipio’s community organizing process, eight of the mining-affected communities are listed as having a legal COCODE and participating in Bloque II of the four Second Level

COCODES (Gómez 2009). However, further investigation revealed that most of these

COCODES are not currently legal. Community leaders denied such participation and expressed annoyance and sometimes anger when I showed them their name on the official list of COCODES. In one mining-affected community, a community leader possessed a copy of Jesús Gómez’s book promoting the COMUDE in San Juan

Sacatepéquez, and pointed out where they were listed a member of Bloque II. They had never asked to be listed there, they argued, and never signed anything. Similarly, another mining-affected community had formed a COCODE but had no relationship with the local state. A conversation with leaders from that community went as follows:

Me: There are four Bloques. Do you all participate in this? COCODE leader #1: This here is very interesting because, put it this way, I participate in Bloque 2, but I have never been invited, never elected either. COCODE leader #2: But you are written-in there!! [on the official list] COCODE leader #1: Yes, I am written-in there. Me: You are in the list of members? COCODE leader #1: Yes. I am in the list of members, but I was never invited. They never even said to me, ‘mira, va…’ COCODE leader #2: …[to ask] if you were going to accept that cargo [position].

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COCODE leader #1: Yes, exactly. They just put my name there. Me: You do not receive invitations when there are Bloque meetings? COCODE leader #1: Nada. Nada. And already the COMUDE has existed for a year. One time they invited me. But it was by telephone [not a formal invitation, he said, as it should have been for a government meeting]. They invited me but it was because of the anniversary of the first year that the COMUDE had been in function. It was just the party.

In this brief exchange, one detects confusion and annoyance. It was convenient for the government to be able to say that all communities were participating in the

Bloques and COMUDE, but the reality was that the communities near the mine were kept uninformed. In most of the communities that oppose the cement mine, leaders denied having ever received any assistance or information about the new local government’s efforts to apply the Development Council Law. Leaders of more than one mining- affected community believed that “Jesús Gómez is with the empresa,” the company

Cementos Progreso. Similarly, they knew of Luis Velasquez’s roles in both the government and business sector. Said one community leader, “This COMUDE, someone that works here in the empresa cementera came to form it, Luis Velásquez. He is part of the government but he is very concerned that this empresa get settled in.”

If anything, the local government had entered into some of these communities to try to form alternate COCODES composed of the few residents who were in favor of the cement mine, had been offered a job by Cementos Progreso, or had family members who had gained employment from the company. For instance, in one community that directly borders on the mine, community leaders recounted that during a military occupation of the village in 2008 (a response to community protests against the mine), local and central government officials organized the community to elect new COCODE leaders and a new

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team of alcaldes auxiliares (fifty in the case of this community). However, most residents were locked inside their homes during this military siege, and thus most of the new

COCODE leaders and alcaldes auxiliares were employees of Cementos Progreso. When the occupation ceased, the original COCODE leaders and alcaldes auxiliares returned to their posts with the majority of the community’s support but without the legal recognition of the local government. As of spring 2010, twelve communities in the west were organized against the mine, and only three of them had a COCODE that was formally recognized by the municipal government.112

The result was that residents of most of the communities were wary of participating in the Development Council System. For example, one community was slated to benefit from an important water infrastructure project, and almost did not receive it because residents were afraid to provide the local government their signatures, which were contained within the Acta verifying the COCODE leaders’ legitimate election. According to their knowledge, in the past Cementos Progreso used some residents’ signatures and government identification numbers—provided upon receipt of a small donation from the company, like bags of cement or tree seedlings—as false proof of their approval of the mine. They now associated the local government with Cementos

Progreso, and more than one community leader exclaimed to me, “Who knows what they’re going to do with our signatures!” Most of these communities also believed that to accept local government assistance with a project is akin to accepting assistance from

Cementos Progreso, and thus voicing tacit support for the mine. Accordingly, not only were the communities against the mine omitted from the process of forming the

112 In two of those three communities, the COCODE represented a minority population that supported Cementos Progreso.

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Development Councils, but they have also come to see participation in the system, particularly participation in the COMUDE, as a tool to control them. Participation is open to them, but it is conditioned.

Whereas participation in the COCODES and COMUDE was highly inclusive in both other cases in the dissertation, here, the very process of organizing the communities into COCODES had the effect of separating legitimate, civilized indigenous citizens from the radicals, the ungovernable. Participation was conditional on whether one agreed with the government or not. By creating barriers to participation for both the mining-affected communities and the urban barrios it would be easier to control the terms of debate within the COMUDE, defining the limits to civil society participation in local governance.

Benefits of Citizen Participation

Many community leaders and representatives of civil society organizations in San

Juan Sacatepéquez were happy to finally have a voice in local government; this was truly unprecedented. In general, the Concejo Municipal and Mayor respected the COMUDE’s decisions. Mayor Coronado voiced a very positive opinion about the new COCODES and

COMUDE, explaining that she and the Concejo Municipal need the COMUDE to tell them what the communities’ needs are, because it would be nearly impossible for the local authorities to visit every community. She said that it used to be the Mayor who would decide where projects would go. Now the communities decide.

Development projects for communities now had to go through a formal discussion and transparent process of prioritization before they would be approved by the

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COMUDE.113 As one COCODE leader explained, “when there was no COMUDE, if I were a friend of the Mayor, I would get a project, and other communities would be abandoned.” It had now become difficult for the Mayor and other elected officials to reward client communities with projects. One Concejal tried to do this during the participatory budget process in late 2009, but his efforts were thwarted by the COMUDE.

More generally, COMUDE members and COCODE leaders (who did not directly participate in the COMUDE) expressed that they were glad to have greater access to their elected officials, and more information about the municipal government’s activities.

Mayor Coronado almost always presided over COMUDE meetings, and regularly held separate meetings with COCODE leaders and COMUDE representatives, including them in the municipality’s development plans and governance. Moreover, the government overall had become more transparent. One COMUDE member stated:

It is a new form of organization. We see the budget now. We know the income and spending of the municipality. We never had this information before. Now we can see how the local government works. We can see income from taxes and have transparent information. Now they give us the information in written form and we never would have gotten this without the COMUDE.

In short, the establishment of the COMUDE truly changed how local governance works, and how citizens—community leaders and civil society representatives—interact with the local state. The new move towards transparency, in particular, was unprecedented.

Though the municipal government was always legally obliged to provide accounting information every three months, they never had. Thus most citizens here are receiving this this information for the first time ever. It is not as detailed as some might like, but it

113 As of early 2010, the COMUDE had gone through a participatory budgeting process twice (in 2008 and 2009), to prioritize projects that would be funded through the Development Council System. Additionally, when the central government channeled monies for 26 new school classrooms to San Juan Sacatepéquez, the COMUDE decided which communities would benefit.

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is a great improvement over past experiences. For example, residents of one urban periphery barrio said that they are finally paving the main road in their neighborhood, with funding from the municipal government. They sought this funding for fifteen years but never received it, even though a few years ago the municipal government held a celebration to inaugurate the new road. This move towards transparency was partly thanks to Cementos Progreso: the company donated the funds necessary for printing stacks of glossy full-color copies of the municipal government’s reports, which were distributed to the COMUDE representatives and other interested parties.

Finally, the COMUDE took on limited issues related to local governance. For instance, in 2009 they negotiated moving the annual Christmas mercado to a new location on the outskirts of the center of town, to improve vehicle circulation in the central park. Initially, the vendors that usually sell in this market-festival opposed the relocation, arguing that it would hurt their business. In response, the COMUDE invited them to a meeting—at the suggestion of the Mayor. The vendors arrived and voiced their concerns, and the COMUDE members listened. All parties came to a compromise, where the vendors would relocate but only pay half of the vending lot fee. After that, some

COMUDE members considered broaching other local governance issues, such as the circulation routes of “tuk tuks,” the ubiquitous small three-wheeled taxis that serve as one of the main forms of local transportation in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Additionally, within

Commissions—small working groups composed of COMUDE members and led by one elected government official—specific governance issues were sometimes addressed and acted upon. The most active was the Citizen Security Commission, which was trying to

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improve citizen security in the municipality, and convince the central government to dedicate more resources for this purpose.

Limits to Participation and Citizenship

Despite the new and significant role that communities and civil society organizations now played in local governance, significant limitations to their participation remained. One should recall that in San Juan Sacatepéquez, participation in the COMUDE and overall Development Council system was “invited,” and the contours of those participatory spaces shaped by the local and central state (and indirectly, by

Cementos Progreso). This made it difficult for the communities and civil society organizations to assert great agency, especially since most of them did not count on an autonomous form of organization before the installation of these spaces.

Moreover, COCODE leaders and civil society representatives lacked training on the decentralization laws, and almost all community leaders were unaware of the opportunities for interpreting national and international laws to benefit of indigenous rights, a key factor that Roper (2003) and Reyes-Garcia et al (2009) identified as affecting how decentralization will impact indigenous peoples. Although communities, during the organizing drive, were taught basic knowledge about these laws, most of them, including COMUDE participants, still did not posses copies of the laws, nor did they understand the extent of their individual and collective rights and the legal obligations of the government. One COCODE leader explained:

Not one Development Council has been prepared. [The Municipal authorities] have not even brought us copies of the law. There is a Development Council Law that is very specific—what rights the COCODES have for carrying out projects in

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their communities. It is in the Law that when a Development Council is formed, the Municipalidad has the obligation to give them the Development Council Law.

Without this legal knowledge, it can be difficult to engage on equal footing with local government officials and push the spaces for participation further open. The same community leader saw this as a major weakness of the COMUDE, “because if one is not familiar with the Development Council Law, then the Concejo Municipal does whatever it feels like. That is where we see that the Consejos, in the presence of the COMUDE, the

Consejos Comunitarios have not appropriated the law. Not everyone knows the law.”

Consequently, participation in San Juan Sacatepéquez never seemed to stretch past what the local government—and central government, seeing as SCEP officials were present at all COMUDE meetings—were keen to entertain.

Where indigenous citizenship was polarizing (Tecpán) and transformative (San

Juan Ixcoy), indigenous entrepreneurs constantly instructed community and civil society leaders on the intricacies of the laws, so that they could exercise their collective rights as indigenous communities and as a municipal collective, vis-à-vis the local state. By contrast, where citizenship is depoliticizing, in San Juan Sacatepéquez, such opportunities for rights education were largely absent because the indigenous entrepreneurs with this knowledge were never incorporated into the COMUDE and

COCODE system, and rarely communicated with Sanjuaneros who lived outside the twelve communities opposed to the cement mine. COMUDE members had asked the

Mayor for training in the laws, and many said that they wanted to learn more than simply how to form a COCODE, but at the time of research (Spring 2010) they still had not received any training. The overall lack of legal and rights knowledge significantly affected the quality and extent of citizen participation in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

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First, many COMUDE members reported that meeting agendas are locked.

Women from the organization Asociación Grupo Integral de Mujeres Sanjuaneras,

AGIMS, lamented that they would like to discuss issues of importance to women but it is nearly impossible to get such items onto the agenda, and if it does get on the agenda, it is put near the end. When the COMUDE meeting begins at 8am on a Sunday and the hour nears 1 or 2pm, even if the last items have not been discussed, the meeting is usually closed. Another COCODE leader in the COMUDE reported that when the civil society representatives or COCODE leaders want to adjust the agenda, the Mayor and Concejales often object. By contrast, where citizenship is polarizing (Tecpán), COCODE leaders exert their rights to control the agenda, and in the transformative indigenous citizenship regime (San Juan Ixcoy), finalizing the COMUDE meeting agenda is a collaborative task in which the local government, civil society representatives, and COCODE leaders all partake.

Second, community leaders in San Juan Sacatepéquez were not aware of their right to organize as they see fit and make the structure of the Development Council

System work for their needs. With four Second Level COCODE Bloques, opportunities for networking were limited, in the most part, to communities located in one’s own geographic region of the municipio. Without a space where representatives of all communities can meet regularly, it was more difficult to identify and discuss municipal- wide problems, and to establish accountability mechanisms between the twenty

COCODE representatives in the COMUDE, and the rest of the COCODE leaders who did not participate in the COMUDE. I asked all civil society representatives and

COCODE leaders why there were four Bloques. Their general reply was that

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“communities in other regions of the municipio do not understand the needs of my community and the communities near me, and there are too many COCODES to meet together in one Second Level COCODE.” However, community leaders were not even presented with the option of alternate forms of organizing the supra-community assemblies, in contrast to the case of Tecpán, where community leaders themselves created their own form of inter-community organization and appropriated the

Development Council Law in order to legalize it. Similarly, communities in San Juan

Sacatepéquez were not given the option of sending someone other than the COCODE

President as their representative to their region’s Bloque and COMUDE, and never thought to discuss the possibility of having more than twenty COCODE representatives in the COMUDE, as in the case in San Juan Ixcoy. Community leaders often commented that they would prefer if all could participate in the COMUDE.

Third, without knowledge of the legal basis for indigenous cultural rights, cultural issues were rarely raised in the COMUDE, which was presented to participants as a space for discussing only “development.” Again, this was in stark contrast to the cases of polarizing and (especially) transformative indigenous citizenship. In San Juan

Sacatepéquez, the Alcaldía Indígena, a group of Mayan spiritual guides, a Kaqchikel-

Maya women’s organization (AGIMS) and a Kaqchikel-Maya group dedicated to promoting San Juan’s culture (Q’anil) are all represented in the COMUDE, along with the many Kaqchikel communities. Yet there has been little if any interest among the authorities, all of who are Kaqchikel, in using the COMUDE to promote culturally pertinent development, or to discuss the relation between indigenous culture (however broadly defined) and “development.” At least one COMUDE member had given up

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attending the meetings because he saw no willingness to discuss plans for development with cultural pertinence.

One cultural issue that could have been discussed in the COMUDE was a new law regulating the election of alcaldes auxiliares. In San Juan Sacatepéquez, traditions for choosing the alcaldes auxiliares vary by community. In some communities, elders who are active in the auxiliatura write up a list of possible candidates and name those individuals as the new alcaldes. In other communities, alcaldes are chosen in a large community assembly. Although questions of democracy and gender discrimination— almost all alcaldes are men—are clearly at play here, laws governing indigenous customary law allow communities autonomy in how they choose their authorities. In San

Juan Sacatepéquez, however, those laws were disregarded. The Mayor and Concejo

Municipal passed a new local law requiring all communities to hold assemblies to elect their alcaldes, which would be made official in an Acta to be turned in to the Town Hall.

Although this was an issue that would affect all communities, especially those that did not hold the election tradition, it was not discussed in meetings between the Mayor and the alcaldes auxiliares, nor in the COMUDE. Finally, even after the law was passed, many community leaders throughout the municipio still were ignorant of the new changes. In sum, an issue of central concern to all indigenous communities was treated as a technical policy issue for the Concejo Municipal to deal with, rather than one that should be subject to open, democratic debate—an example of how indigenous citizenship became depoliticized.

Instead, indigenous rights were violated in many ways, big and small, and those who tried to exercise agency in these issues risked being perceived as uncivil,

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unacceptable indigenous citizens. For example, in a meeting in December 2009,

COMUDE members learned of a new housing project in the Kaqchikel community of

Cruz Verde. The details were left muddled, but the project featured a plan whereby the government would relocate a large number of families to this community from other areas of the country. In a mono-cultural society, such a relocation project would be unlikely to arouse ire. But indigenous communities exist in a space that is neither entirely public nor private. In my own research experiences, I had to request permission before arriving in indigenous communities. Thus in this context, relocating families, who were most likely ladino, to an indigenous community unsurprisingly produced conflict. That no one from Cruz Verde knew about this project prior to the present COMUDE meeting made the situation worse. There was an outcry, and COMUDE members searched for blame and discovered it lay with the central government. Jesús Gómez, who was present at most COMUDE meetings, suggested a meeting with SCEP Secretary Luis Velásquez to discuss matters.114 He agreed that the communities must be respected before a project like this is begun, but in the same breath asserted that “we cannot blame anyone” for what had already happened. A COCODE leader stood up and voiced what many in the meeting were likely thinking: “We need to demand that our rights be respected. How long are we going to put up with this? Agreements need to be sought beforehand, not after the engaño (trickery).” Gómez asked them to react “civilly.” As Baiocchi astutely notes, it is often the case that in discourse and practice, “civility stands in for the standards of the powerful in society” (Baiocchi 2011: 244). One can thus understand this as a direct effort by the government (represented by Gómez) to use the participatory space of the COMUDE to make discursive distinctions between “civil” and “uncivil”

114 Secretary Velásquez was usually present at all COMUDE meetings, but in this rare occasion was not.

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behavior, where “uncivil” appeared to mean “questioning authority,” or “pointing out injustices”.

In sum, despite the advances in transparency, participation, and organization, significant barriers to participation and limitations on its content were set in place in San

Juan Sacatepéquez. Lack of legal knowledge made it difficult for civil society representatives and COCODE leaders to control discussion in the COMUDE meetings and strengthen their own inter-community organization. Questions about the role of culture or indigenous identity and rights, as well, were not raised as possible aspects of development, even though sixty-five percent of the municipality self-identifies as indigenous, as do most of the elected municipal authorities and COMUDE participants.

And finally, the question of whether Cementos Progreso’s project would be good for local development was never discussed in COMUDE meetings, aside from rare vague references. Instead, when the COMUDE was first convened, SCEP Secretary Luis

Velasquez reportedly convinced COMUDE members to form a “Commission on

Conflicts” in order to deal with Cementos Progreso, but in a way that would indicate support for the company rather than for the communities. COMUDE members refused to participate and instead remained neutral—through, arguably, remaining neutral also meant tacitly supporting Cementos Progreso.

Defining Development: The Strategic Plan

Discussion over “development,” in fact, is the prime lens through which one can understand the limited nature of depoliticized citizenship and the division between radical and permissible indigenous citizens in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Much of this discussion

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and the division it generates revolve around the approval of, opposition to, or silent acquiescence to Cementos Progreso specifically, and a private investment development model, more generally. Debate also revolved around the extent to which indigenous culture and rights, especially collective rights to territory, should be considered within a plan for development. But, open development talk—i.e. discussion in the COMUDE— was carefully filtered to avoid discussing Cementos Progreso and instead focus on concrete projects that could help achieve common goals like education, roads, and health care. Indigenous culture and rights, too, were out of bounds. But in private, community leaders and representatives of civil society revealed different conceptions of development, demonstrating the limits to participation in the Development Council

System.

The outcome of open debates over development, what the Mayor called “a participatory process of consensus generation,” are contained within a policy document that is the collaborative effort of the COMUDE, “The Integral Strategic Plan for the

Development and Governability of San Juan Sacatepéquez, 2008-2025” (“The Plan,” henceforth). The Plan was hailed as great success at a widely attended press conference at the National Palace in Guatemala City, on November 18, 2009. Representatives from international NGOs and foreign government development agencies were invited to the event, in the hopes that they would consider investing their money and their efforts to improve development in this “model” municipality. A brief exchange I had with a

COMUDE member two days later aptly summarizes the conception of development that emerged from this document. I asked José whether the COMUDE, or even his COCODE, had taken a stance to support or oppose the cement mine. He replied, somewhat

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defensively, “I’m not against development.” The very question of whether one was for or against Cementos Progreso had come to be equated with being for or against development itself, in San Juan Sacatepéquez’s formal spaces of citizen participation.

This positive association of mining and development appears to have been planted by the government itself, as the communities opposed to Cementos Progreso are described as being “opposed to development” in SCEP functionary Gomez’s description of The Plan

(Gómez 2009: 13).115

This is not to say that The Plan was entirely focused on demonizing those who opposed mining. Many COMUDE representatives were pleased that the municipality now had a plan to move forward; they viewed The Plan as a positive development and mainly argued that it needed to be diffused better to the rest of the municipio and truly put into action. Indeed, The Plan laid down in writing many issues of great importance to the municipality’s development: provision of basic services, addressing illiteracy, unemployment, and infant mortality, promoting opportunities for children, families and communities, resolving differences and “social conflict” through dialog, and overall aiming for “modern and organized” development through the implementation of short-, medium-, and long-term “concrete projects” (Plan Estratégico, section 2.2). Though some of these development goals (for example, infant mortality and unemployment) may appear outside the scope of local government, limited possibilities for addressing such systemic problems do exist, as the cases of both transformative indigenous citizenship

(San Juan Ixcoy) and the present case, to a lesser extent, will demonstrate. In San Juan

Sacatepéquez, though citizenship and development were depoliticized, work on many of

115 In the official version of The Plan, the “worsening and lack of control of social problems, such as those related to citizen security and the opposition of some communities to a cementera” is described as a “threat” to the municipio’s development (my emphasis, Strategic Plan, section 5.4)

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The Plan’s development goals had begun even just as The Plan was finalized. This was in large part thanks to the special attention the central government was paying to this municipality. The First Lady, President, and high-ranking government officials had visited the municipality numerous times, partly to support the new efforts at development; but the central government support also translated into real projects. For instance, the central government channeled San Juan Sacatepéquez monies for roughly thirty new school classrooms and an improved twenty-four-hour health center.

Yet, these projects, important as they are, seemed to spell the limits to what could be considered development in the municipio. More often than not, community leaders interviewed stated that development was “the projects one sees” or “the projects we have to do in the future. Like health care, drainage, a periphery road to connect us to departments more easily.” To achieve such development goals, “you need to search for money,” said this community leader.

Surely, these were important development goals, and money indeed was a necessary ingredient. But rarely did the COCODE leaders or COMUDE members speak of the larger socio-structural reasons why achieving development in an indigenous municipio like San Juan Sacatepéquez is so difficult—namely, a long history of institutionalized racism, whereby indigenous peoples were thrown off their land, coerced into seasonally migrating to work on large plantations, and barred from participating in the country’s governance. Today, in the northern communities of the municipio, for instance, most of the Kaqchikel population works on plantations far away from home; in their communities they have no farmable land and little access to potable water because natural water sources have dried up after years of over-cultivation on nearby large fincas

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(plantations). Arguably, the communities located near the mining site now faced yet another phase of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003), where they would be pushed off their land for the sake of ladino capital accumulation. But in the COMUDE, the lack of development in indigenous communities was not comprehended in relation to

“its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce it and contour it” (Brown 2006: 15). Rather, it was depoliticized. Some community leaders hinted at this historical undercurrent. They argued that development is “when the community has all its needs met,” but also recognized that “we all have the same rights… we should have some land to have food for our families. There are some who take everything and the poor are discriminated and treated badly.” Community leaders and residents, I argue, possess the capacity to engage in a complex debate over the meaning of (under)development, its historical roots, and the structural changes that might be necessary to improve it. But participating in the COMUDE, paradoxically, made it difficult to do so, especially since for most impoverished rural communities, this was the first time they remember having any attention from the local state, in terms of projects and assistance with basic needs. By contrast, the mining-affected communities did engage in more complex analyses of poverty and development—in a sense, challenging the standing relationship between indigenous communities and the state was what was at stake in the anti-mining struggle.

Yet, neither in COMUDE meetings nor in The Plan was history, power relations, or indigenous discrimination considered relevant to addressing development challenges.

This was in stark contrast to the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship in Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy, respectively, where issues of indigenous

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discrimination and indigenous-state relations were emphasized in COMUDE discussions and –in the case of San Juan Ixcoy—in local government policies and programs. Instead, in San Juan Sacatepéquez, the thrust of The Plan was focused on boosting private investment, and (implicitly) supporting Cementos Progreso. It was not necessarily unreasonable that private economic initiative should play such an important role in the municipality’s development plans. After all, many Sanjuaneros owned small furniture production operations or cultivated flowers for the regional and sometimes foreign markets. There are many businesses in San Juan Sacatepéquez, Gómez explained, so the

“anti-business discourse of the communities against the mine is unwelcome. It’s not just big corporations that are businesses. Even the person who sells gum on the street corner has a business,” he reasoned. Yet it was not the small businesses like street-corner candy vendors who appeared best positioned to benefit from The Plan.

The Plan proposed converting San Juan Sacatepéquez into a “Free Trade Zone”

(FTZ); this fit into the larger vision whereby it identified economic globalization as a

“window of opportunities for the municipality to improve the quality of its production and open up to national and international markets” (Strategic Plan, section 5.2). The

Concejo Municipal proposed this idea to the COMUDE in late 2008, just as the

COMUDE was first formed. Soon after, COMUDE members were treated to a two-day all-expenses paid field trip to the north-eastern coastal city of Puerto Barrios, during which they were given a tour of a FTZ there. However, COMUDE members recall being confused about why they had to travel to Puerto Barrios to learn about how a FTZ would impact San Juan Sacatepéquez. Said one COMUDE member, “Many doubts arose during the trip. It was not clear what was the reason for the trip.” Another said:

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They took us to get to know the Free Trade Zone in Puerto Barrios, and brought us there in a luxury bus. They treated us as if we were the President! …And we were all asking ourselves, ‘why, if we just formed the COMUDE, why did we come here?’ Everyone was asking this! Why are we here? We did not spend any money, they gave us everything, but what was the idea?

This COMUDE member believed the trip was a way to manipulate COMUDE members into accepting the FTZ as a potential boon to San Juan Sacatepéquez’s local economy.

Another COMUDE member had not formed a solid opinion of the FTZ proposal, but did remember enjoying what amounted to a short vacation, happily noting their afternoon cruise on the Caribbean in Puerto Barrios. Though SCEP Secretary Luis

Velásquez was the main proponent of the FTZ—he “imposed” it, some argued—

COMUDE members later discovered that Cementos Progreso had at least partially funded the trip, and overall it appeared that converting the entire municipio into a FTZ would mostly benefit large businesses like textile exporters who could move operations to San Juan Sacatepéquez, or possibly Cementos Progreso in its efforts to export cement products. No one really knew for sure. Although The Plan described the FTZ proposal as an outcome of debate within the COMUDE, there were as many COMUDE members critical of it as there were supporters. One COMUDE member argued, “We need to analyze if it is really going to benefit San Juan Sacatepéquez. First we need to strengthen the local economy, prepare the producers and the products better, before we will be able to talk about a free trade zone.”

In many ways, it appeared that the COMUDE was used as a space for courting local support for development proposals that largely supported Cementos Progreso and private capital based development strategy. This was the general perception of many people in the municipio. For its part, Cementos Progreso described the plans for its mine

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and cement factory as an “initiative” to “generate development and well-being” in San

Juan Sacatepéquez, obscuring the business deal that it really was.116 The company further courted public opinion by selectively offering small development projects to groups and communities throughout the municipio. These projects ranged from the gift of an expensive marimba instrument to a local indigenous musical group, to training and funding for a women’s traditional weaving cooperative in an indigenous rural community, to donations of cement for constructing roads in some communities. In the communities near the mine, the company offered new clean-burning stoves and assorted vocational training. Cementos Progreso was also contributing directly to the municipal government. It had paid for four full-time engineers to work in the Office of Municipal

Planning; these employees worked directly with communities in the four regions of the municipio to help them identify and prioritize development projects and conduct the costly technical studies that are necessary for seeking project funding. Cementos

Progreso also funded the publication of the municipal government’s Annual Report

(rendición de cuentas) for its first two full years in office, 2008 and 2009.117

Between this extensive support, and the efforts to depoliticize development and indigenous citizenship in the COMUDE, it resulted that many community leaders, and likely the community residents they represented, came to support Cementos Progreso, or at least not actively oppose it. For one leader, it was a matter of understanding what mining is about. He said he was supportive, “but others are not, because they don’t

116 Citations taken from the Cementos Progreso website’s information on “Proyecto San Juan” (this part has since been eliminated from the main website, http://www.cempro.com). 117 It is possible that Cementos Progreso’s contributions extended even further, but limitations of fieldwork prevented me from deeper investigation.

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understand that Cementos Progreso is development for the people. They don’t understand, so they reject it.”

This sentiment is clearly reflected in The Plan. “The opposition of some communities to development (the installation and functioning of a cement plant in the municipio)” (Gómez 2009, 13) was labeled a “threat” to the municipio’s development.

Indeed, it was not uncommon to hear that the communities resisting the mine are

“violent,” that they are not thinking about what is good for San Juan Sacatepéquez as a whole, or that their leaders were manipulative—that young and arrogant youth had taken over the communities’ traditional leadership posts and were using the indigenous rights discourse to manipulate residents into supporting a “radical” and “anti-development” agenda. Many COCODE leaders and COMUDE members clearly supported Cementos

Progreso and shared these views, making it even more difficult for those who opposed the mine to do so publicly and hope to maintain their participation in the COMUDE. One

COCODE representative within the COMUDE, for instance, was spotted participating in a major anti-mining protest and his actions reportedly caused him problems among his peers in the COCODES and COMUDE.

Alternate and excluded conceptions of development

Despite the participatory planning process, some COMUDE members argued that

The Plan did not reflect San Juan Sacatepéquez’s “reality,” and that the COMUDE was useful only for discussing infrastructure projects. Many COMUDE members, community leaders and residents held alternate conceptions of development that were omitted from both The Plan and the debates within COMUDE meetings. Specifically, these

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conceptions included a consideration of Mayan culture and identity, the environment, and human development.

Development and Mayan Culture

The role of Maya-Kaqchikel culture in development was important to many. As one community leader put it, “There is no development without culture. Development that kills the culture is not development!” A local historian and COMUDE representative for the cultural sector and indigenous cultural organization Asociación Q’anil, Hector

Concohá, elaborated his views in a public, written critique of the Strategic Plan. He argued that none of the actions laid out in The Plan:

…contemplate a cultural program, that could contribute to strengthening familiarity with the culture: individual and collective. In order to improve the quality of life in this way, it should therefore include a contemplation of cultural workshops, for auxiliares, teachers and community leaders. In order to improve the understanding of all the vecinos. And to be able to balance out a little the social integrated development, not only with infrastructure but also with cultural elements (Concohá 2008).

Concohá wanted to find a way to use San Juan Sacatepéquez’s culture for the benefit of its own people, and argued, “There is no plan to increase the consciousness of the people, to make people see and understand who they are” (Concohá 2008). Concohá’s words on culture and development echoed the general perspective of Asociación Q’anil: “We have a culture that is very rich and good; if we live it, it can be very useful for stimulating our development as a community and as a municipio” (Q’anil 2004: 4).

Some communities had begun their own cultural initiatives. In Sanjuaneritos, community members had constructed a Mayan cultural center and were teaching

Kaqchikel to adults and children on the weekends, outside the official school curriculum,

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which did not include such rigorous instruction. AGIMS, through its training of women on their rights as explicitly “Mayan” women citizens, had spurred a number of culturally pertinent women’s associations and economic development projects in communities throughout the town, and they were spreading ideas of Mayan cultural rescue as a part of development. There was clearly an interest throughout the municipio in integrating culture and development.

Asociación Q’anil and especially AGIMS could have been indigenous entrepreneurs in San Juan Sacatepéquez, but in the space of the COMUDE, the role of culture in development, even if it interested many members, was not taken seriously. Yet it was this kind of discussion that could have begun to clarify what precisely was the

“reality” of San Juan Sacatepéquez’s development challenges, and their historical roots.

Such a discussion might have heightened awareness of the Kaqchikel identity and the rights that indigenous peoples can exercise as indigenous people(s) in Guatemala. By contrast, the role of culture in development was taken seriously in the cases of polarizing and transformative citizenship. In the latter case (San Juan Ixcoy), culturally pertinent development was included in the municipality’s Strategic Plan and the local government had incorporated it into public policies, local government programs, and specific projects.

Development and the Environment

Protecting the natural environment was also an element of development that was largely omitted from the COMUDE discussions and The Plan. One Maya cultural activist, who had been invited to participate in the COMUDE but turned it down, asked me, “La Madre Tierra. Are they talking about that kind of thing, those kinds of problems,

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in the COCODES? In the Bloques and COMUDE?” Some communities had begun projects to promote environmentally sustainable development. In the large, well- organized community of Sajcavilla, leaders over the past fifteen years had managed to bring potable water to residents and charge them a small user fee, in order to conserve water and, more recently, maintain a wastewater management system and pay local employees to take care of the equipment. Communities in the dry northern region of the municipio wanted cultivable land and recognized that “if there is more forest, there will be more rain here,” as one of their leaders said. They would like to work on reforestation, but lack training and materials. As with culture, the role of the environment in development is rarely discussed in the COMUDE; thus it is difficult to obtain government funding for those types of projects. In the cases of both polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship, however, the COMUDE was the precise place for discussing environmentally sustainable development, and how it pertained to explicitly indigenous peoples.

Human Development

Finally, many leaders wanted to focus on what they called “human” development.

In the COMUDE, they argued, development is understood as physical infrastructure or economic productivity. But “for civil society, we see there is also human development,” on COMUDE member said. This member continued: “we are proposing that truly integrated development begins with human development, in terms of training, assistance, in order to improve the quality of life.” In their first year as an organized institution, the

COMUDE and local government worked to open the dilapidated public health center for

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a full twenty-four hours a day. “But what good is it if there is not enough medicine, and none of the equipment needed for birthing?” Despite the fact that many COMUDE members wished to focus more on human development, they also reported that these ideas were not taken seriously in the COMUDE. It remained unclear if this was a result of a lack of interest among the rest of the COMUDE members (i.e. the COCODE and civil society organization representatives), or if the municipal and central government authorities who led the meetings had manipulated the discussions. By contrast, human development issues were frequently discussed in the cases of polarizing and transformative citizenship, and in the latter it had become one of the municipal government’s primary concerns.

Alternate Views of Mining-as-Development

Many leaders within COCODES, civil society organizations, and even in the

COMUDE had more encompassing conceptions of development that were directly at odds with mining-as-development, but they could not raise these ideas within the

COMUDE. Members of the COMUDE who fit within this perspective would complain about the absence of real discussion over what “development” constitutes. As one

COCODE leader put it: “The problem we have here is that they [Cementos Progreso] have a different vision, and we do not have an idea of where development is going, just about projects. We have not analyzed where the resources are going. There is a lot of ignorance of the meaning of development.” Most were also ignorant of how and why

Cementos Progreso had become such a powerful force in the municipality. One normally well-informed COMUDE member had “no idea” how Cementos Progreso got the license

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to exploit minerals and operate their factory in the first place. Some other COMUDE members and local residents, before the COMUDE was formed, had been organizing to oppose—or at least openly discuss—the potential impact of mining and Cementos

Progreso in San Juan Sacatepéquez, using the Catholic Church as a meeting venue. They visited an older cement mine in a nearby town to see the mostly negative impact it left over the years, presented this information to groups of citizens in San Juan Sacatepéquez, and also sought information from the previous local government, in order to open up a dialog on the issue. Yet the dialog, meetings, and movement to stop the mine never succeeded and this dialog never entered the COMUDE.

Outside of the space of the COMUDE, and especially in the communities that opposed the mine and were more directly affected by it, informal debate over the meaning of development appeared to be much more common. An indigenous spiritual guide who was a longtime leader in one mining-affected community argued that most people in the community opposed the mine and believed it could have very negative effects:

We are indigenas, and we are campesinos, and we are farmers. We plant milpa, frijol, flowers, vegetables. All this. They are the cultures in the community. All of this affects us. That is why everyone is worried about the cementera, because it might use all our water… Cementos Progreso said they were going to fix the road, and build a big hospital. It is what they’re planning. But the people don’t accept it. Some say ‘It is good, we need this.’ But others say it cannot be accepted. And the cement factory would be here 100 years—this is what people think. What kind of environment are we going to have in 100 years? The land will be left valueless.

Other community leaders similarly argued that the cement mine and factory would cause great environmental problems, deforesting the land and turning it to desert.

A COMUDE member similarly argued that Cementos Progreso was talking with

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municipal authorities to see what projects they could do here, “But even though they are giving things, they are destroying the environment… Big buildings are development, they say. Employment, too. [But] We depend on water, air, sun, land. They’re cutting down all the trees. Basically, destroying the environment. With this there will be development for the short term, but not for the long term.” Another COMUDE member assured me that a cement mine and plant would indeed cause contamination: visual, auditory, and respiratory. It would create a great deal of dust, and Cementos Progreso most likely will not have the technology to contain it. There was no discussion of this potential contamination in the COMUDE: “No one knows how a cement plant functions.”

Cementos Progreso was taking steps to mitigate environmental damage, by helping some communities with small reforestation projects. However, there was still great opposition based on environmental grounds. One community leader said: “the communities don’t like it because they’re taking everything out of the land. They’re saying it’s minería. And minería is different than a cementera. They’re sacando un monton de cosas.” Mining

(minería) had become a contentious political issue at the national level in Guatemala. A

Canadian-owned gold mine in the western department of San Marcos, the “Marlin Mine,” had achieved national notoriety for the scale of the local indigenous resistance, which was equally matched by unprosecuted human rights abuses, deforestation and water contamination, and growing health concerns.118 Cementos Progreso tried to frame its project as a “development initiative,” but a cementera, most people were discovering, was not just a cement factory. It was also a large open-pit mineral quarry (i.e. mine) that would require extensive forest clear-cutting. And, as the community leader noted above, people were unsure what Cementos Progreso would actually be mining for; they believed

118 van de Sandt (2009).

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the company would be sacando un monton de cosas, “removing a ton of things” from the land.

Without a transparent and participatory discussion involving everyone in the municipio, it would be impossible to verify what, precisely, Cementos Progreso would be removing from the earth, and if its operations would truly dry up water sources and contaminate the environment. Theoretically, the COMUDE could have been a space for engaging this kind of discussion about mining and development, but instead the topic was more a proverbial elephant in the room that all were implicitly urged to ignore. By contrast, the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE were precisely the spaces where such contentious debates took place in the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship. In the latter case, San Juan Ixcoy, COCODE leaders, representatives of civil society, and the municipal government used the COMUDE as a space not only for discussing mining, but for planning “Community Consults” (as stipulated by ILO Convention 169) throughout the municipality, in order to pre-emptively oppose mining activity.

In San Juan Sacatepéquez, quite a few COMUDE members and other community and civil society leaders wanted to have a more open discussion about Cementos

Progreso and whether it should have a right to operate in the municipio. The company had submitted an environmental impact study, obtained the mining exploration and exploitation licenses from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and had a license to construct the cement factory from the local government. As one COMUDE member put it, “the cementera, in law, has all its rights… in the law they have everything well documented.” This included licenses to extract minerals, from the Ministry of Energy and

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Mines. But privately, Sanjuaneros often complain that Cementos Progreso lacked a social license. That is, they did not consult the communities located closest to the mine, and instead pushed through their agenda without any serious discussions with the communities most affected, let alone the rest of the municipality.

Development and Rights in the Counterpublic

Communities that opposed Cementos Progreso and were de facto shut out of the

Development Council System, were left to debate development on their own and came to very different conclusions about what constitutes development, the relationship between mining and development, and the proper role of the state in promoting development.

They also came to different conclusions about indigenous citizens’ rights and state obligations. Leaders and residents from the twelve communities opposed to the mine formed what I argue is a subaltern indigenous counterpublic. Here I borrow from Nancy

Fraser, who coined the term “subaltern counterpublic” to refer to “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 1990: 67). Accordingly, the subaltern indigenous counterpublic is juxtaposed to the public spaces dominated by elite and state power in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Participation in the indigenous subaltern counterpublic is not “invited,” as in the Development Council System. Rather, it exists organically.

In the counterpublic, leaders and residents of the communities opposed to the mine rejected the “development” benefits Cementos Progreso offered them. Some of these benefits were projects, but not ones the communities wanted. For example, one

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community’s leaders said they were offered a health center and a school, but they already had those things (or, at the very least, they had basic health and education facilities that, they believed, were no worse than what Cementos Progreso might provide them).

Cementos Progreso wanted to build an extra-wide, paved road through their rural communities, too, and they critiqued this move, stating “It could be development for some, but not for all of us.” Moreover, the communities did not want development with conditions, which is what Cementos Progreso offered. Instead, they argued, “As indigenous peoples, we have a right to a project. The law says we have a right.” The company offered them training in new vocations, but they rejected this, as well. As they theorized it, Cementos Progreso offered them this training, “so if the agriculture becomes contaminated, you can get other jobs. But these are not the jobs that we want. This is not training. This is not development.” Instead, they wanted to learn new techniques for cultivating high quality agricultural projects—training that would respect the value of their current agricultural vocations, and their choice to be farmers. But even more than agricultural training, they would like more land to work so that they can improve their quality of life in a way that makes sense. A leader from one of the mining-affected communities explained the communities’ reasoning:

The empresa says that it is development. But it is not development. It is a project of death. The land here is fertile. We cultivate here. If the company contaminates everything, what are we going to give to our children? … We indigenous peoples, what we want is land to work. Because we are renting land now. So I want us all to have enough land so that we can work and we can cultivate our corn, beans, and flowers …But we do not have enough land. It would be nice if we could use the land of the empresa in order to plant. We need land in order to get out of poverty.

He continued, pointing to the role of the state in their predicament:

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The cementera was a private estate before. But the government could have bought it to give to the communities. The state could have done something to help us. Now Cementos Progreso is trying to buy up more small plots of land and people will have even less. We do not want people to sell their land to others who are not going to take advantage of it for growing. But we do not have the community money to buy the small parcels.

What these communities wanted was to choose their own path to development, and have the state support that choice. In Senian terms, they sought the freedom to determine their own development goals and capability to achieve them according to their own methods

(Sen 1999). Their chosen path to development, they argued, would respect the environment, the solidarity and peace of their communities, and the lived culture of their communities. Cementos Progreso’s project, they feared, would destroy all of this—their entire way of life. A community leader aptly summarized the conclusions that many residents of the mining-affected communities had come to:

They want to take out all the minerals, all kinds of them. The fear we have, as human beings…. What gives a human being life? It is the heart. The heart pumps blood throughout the body. And if you take out the heart, death. It is the same way with our Madre Tierra. When they go and rip out those thirty-two minerals, then nothing will grow here anymore. They cut out its heart, they operated. That is the fear we have. That is why everyone in the community is opposed, because of our Madre Tierra.

These alternate conceptions of development were never introduced into COMUDE discussions, but they were prevalent among the communities that were most affected by the mining project, and were also shared by many COMUDE members and COCODE leaders, even if the latter did not raise these issues in public.

The mining-affected communities, however, also came to new conclusions about rights and citizenship—conclusions that one does not detect among most community and civil society leaders in the rest of the municipio. Through their experience in protesting

Cementos Progreso, and their new networks with indigenous movement organizations

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and activists in other parts of Guatemala, community leaders and residents began to re- conceptualize the citizen-state relationship. They began making important decisions openly and collectively as communities, asserting their rights as indigenous people to communally control territory (even though individual community residents might be private property holders themselves). For example, in the community of Loma Alta, residents collectively prohibited the phone company Telefónica from installing a cellular tower on one resident’s private land—violating this individual’s property rights and instead asserting indigenous collective rights to territorial autonomy. Moreover, the communities began to see the state as having obligations and indigenous peoples as bearing rights. Since the conflict with Cementos Progreso had begun, most of the communities had found it impossible to obtain from the state any kind of assistance with small development projects. They also felt that accepting assistance was conditional upon accepting Cementos Progreso; “no es un dinero limpio,” community leaders said. “It’s dirty money.” One community leader stated, “As indigenous peoples we have a right to a project. The law says we have a right. But because of the struggle with the cementera, the government has abandoned us. We are struggling for our rights. Everyone has rights.”

Community leaders claimed they were “learning to defend [them]selves.” One said:

In 2007 we did the community consult but up until then we were still ignorant. We didn’t know if what we were doing was in the law. But now I see in the ILO 169 that the State of Guatemala cannot make decisions in the communities. So if it wants to install the cementera, then it has to hold a consult in the communities. But the authorities are not working in the law. They are violating the law.

These are only a few examples of how recognition of explicitly indigenous rights entered into conceptions of rights and citizen-state relations in the counterpublic. Such ideas emerged frequently during weekly meetings of the twelve communities. Many of

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the movement leaders and participants would attend workshops on the relationship between indigenous rights and topics like free trade, mining and natural resource

“megaprojects,” and transnational capitalism. They saw themselves as part of a “struggle of indigenous peoples against large corporations,” they said, and were aware that the state and Cementos Progreso viewed them as “weak, indigenous peasants.” Yet instead of viewing themselves as weak, they continued to oppose Cementos Progreso and assert their collective rights to control “territory,” which they believed both the state and the company had violated.

In sum, within the subaltern indigenous counterpublic, conceptions of development, citizen rights, individual and collective indigenous rights, and the citizen- state relationship developed very differently when compared to the dominant discourses and official participatory spaces in the municipality.

Conclusion

In San Juan Sacatepéquez, indigenous entrepreneurs were never incorporated into the decentralization process. Instead, the construction of new spaces for citizen engagement with the state was captured by elites: the local and central government, and

Cementos Progreso. Local governance was transformed, but what emerged was a new brand of indigenous citizenship that was depoliticized. Indigenous individuals began participating in civil society and coordinating with the local government to promote development in the municipality. Yet this participation was limited to “civil” indigenous citizens, stripped of their indigenous identity and particularly of the rights that identity affords them—rights that can address the historically engrained power relations that

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marginalized indigenous peoples and perpetuated their situation of underdevelopment.

Indigenous citizens who demanded respect for identity-based rights—especially collective rights to land and local governing autonomy—were denied recognition as citizens and considered violent and “against development.” Specifically, leaders and residents of the communities that continued to actively protest Cementos Progreso were cast into this category.

Within the new participatory spaces, the very concept of “development” became a useful construct for filtering divisions between permissible and radical indigenous citizens, and for emphasizing the precise limits to what indios permitidos could expect to accomplish in the realm of local governance. In truth, many community leaders, particularly those who did not perceive their communities as negatively or directly affected by Cementos Progreso, were glad to finally have a voice in local government and happily accepted “development” projects for their communities, some of which

Cementos Progreso paid for. But at the same time, the COMUDE seemingly legitimized a depoliticized conception of development, framing it as a static condition that could be remedied with concrete projects, increased funding from the central government and foreign donors, and even greater integration into the global economy—a prescription that did not necessarily make sense given the reality of San Juan Sacatepéquez’s local economy and population. By contrast, I argue that a more accurate understanding of development challenges and their solutions would have to be couched in the historical processes by which indigenous people (including those from San Juan Sacatepéquez) became racialized subjects, were marginalized from the state and nearly all rights of citizenship, and were forcibly removed from lands on which their livelihoods depend—a

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process that was not only historical, but was being reproduced explicitly in the communities directly opposing Cementos Progreso, and implicitly in the meetings and barriers to membership of the COMUDE. The communities opposed to the mine, in their weekly meetings, did sometimes discuss these deeper historical and racial undercurrents to their problems. But such discussions were absent from the COMUDE.

In San Juan Sacatepéquez, citizen participation was bracketed. On the one hand, the local government was happy to engage civil society in questions over such things as community development projects and budget allocations. Municipal officials and employees were accessible and information more or less flowed freely. In sum, the

COMUDE and Development Council System really were participatory. This underscores the fact that to exert control in Guatemala today, the state can no longer simply exert force (though it often does), but must (also) exert control democratically. In Gramsci’s terms, the state clearly saw citizen participation as a mechanism for constructing a local hegemonic order based on consent, not coercion. However, consent in this case was not uniform. Residents of twelve communities clearly believed that the COMUDE and

Development Council System had been constructed as a tool to oppress them. Moreover, many community leaders and civil society organization representatives who willingly participated in the Development Councils simultaneously criticized the participatory system as limited. This was because, though participation was significant and unprecedented, it did not touch what Gramsci called “the essential”: capitalist power

(Gramsci 1971: 161).

“The essential” in San Juan Sacatepéquez featured central in major decisions about the municipality’s future development—particularly, how to manage natural

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resources and whether or not to accept Cementos Progreso. These questions were considered technical ones to be determined by policy experts rather than political ones that should be subject to transparent democratic debate (Ferguson 1990; Li 2006). The question of natural resource management and Cementos Progreso/mining-as- development were issues directly affecting indigenous peoples and the lands on which they live, and thus should have been subject to a process of obtaining Free, Prior and

Informed Consent (as per ILO 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous

Peoples). This is precisely what had occurred in both Tecpán and San Juan Ixcoy

(polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship, respectively). In San Juan

Sacatepéquez, I argue, the COMUDE could have been an ideal space in which to promote free and informed discussion over the merits of Cementos Progreso’s plans and possible role in promoting development in the municipio. But there were no indigenous entrepreneurs present in the space to promote such a discussion; they had been locked out by elites.

In Tecpán, community leaders, through the Development Council System, sought to re-define the relationship between community and state, though this reconceptualization was contested. In San Juan Ixcoy, indigenous entrepreneurs put forth a new brand of citizenship that respected community autonomy, affirmed municipal autonomy (vis-à-vis the central state), and encouraged communities and individual citizens to recapture their culture and use it as a tool for socio-economic development and combatting racism. In both municipios, many indigenous citizens became cognizant of their identity and the special rights they bared. By contrast, none of this is present within the participatory spaces in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Indigenous identity and culture were

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never problematized as something uniquely valuable for solving challenges of governance and development. Indigenous citizenship—in its identity and substance—was depoliticized. Indigenous people had become citizens, but within a strictly liberal citizenship regime, and stripped of their identity-based rights.

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CHAPTER FIVE

POLARIZING INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP: TECPÁN, GUATEMALA

On a cool June morning in 2010, I sat on the stoop next to César’s home. My neighbor in Barrio Patacabaj was recounting the political developments in Tecpán in the months I had been away. The barrio had recently held elections to change the leadership of the Community Development Council. Two of the previous leaders were close friends with the Mayor and many in the barrio believed they were more interested in furthering the Mayor’s interests than in representing the community’s needs. There was an abrupt golpe de estado, as some called it, and now César was not only the new President of

Patacabaj’s COCODE, he was also leading the rest of the municipio’s COCODE leaders and alcaldes comunitarios in a battle against the local government officials, over the management of the municipal forest. Patacabaj had recently acquired the label

“conflictive,” César explained. In Guatemala this term has a particular pejorative, ethnically infused connotation. An indigenous activist, community or organization making rights claims or challenging entrenched power often wins that label. “I told the

Mayor that he had to respect our right to organize ourselves in a way that makes sense for us. That we are exercising our right to self-determination.” César shook his head and smiled: “The Mayor, he didn’t know what that means.”

In truth, the term “conflictive” aptly characterizes Tecpán. Since the application of the Development Council Law ten years ago, local governance has been contested and relations between the local state and civil society have been rocky, contributing to a polarizing indigenous citizenship regime. People like César assist their communities in

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exercising their rights as citizens and explicitly indigenous peoples, seeking to transform the local state in order to better account for community-based norms of authority and decision-making. Yet, the local government and some in civil society seem to prefer a less participatory brand of citizenship that disregards explicitly indigenous rights and instead favors the traditional political party system and official state power.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs and Elites

In Tecpán, indigenous entrepreneurs organized the local population into a movement to democratize the local state and include indigenous people and communities as citizens. Strong and unified, they made a strategic decision to utilize the decentralization laws rather than electoral politics to effect change, and managed to capture the decentralization process in Tecpán. In contrast to San Juan Sacatepéquez, it was indigenous entrepreneurs who led the process of constructing the COCODES,

COMUDE, and most importantly the Second Level COCODE that, in effect, institutionalized an emergent local movement that encompassed all rural and urban communities in the municipio. Having captured the participatory spaces, indigenous entrepreneurs and this local movement have been a constant and powerful force in the municipio.

However, political and economic elites here (both Ladinos and indígenas) also wield considerable power, especially compared to the case of transformative citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy (Chapter Six). By elites, I refer to politicians and the various proprietors of restaurants, hotels, and textile factories with whom they are allied. I also include (Ladino) landed elites, many of who are also business owners; land distribution is

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fairly unequal in Tecpán, with a .619 Gini coefficient (Sandoval 2009b: 18).119 Fischer, writing before the decentralization reforms were applied, observed the influence of elites in Tecpán. He described local politics here as “based on a fluid and complex system of partisanship that involves kinship ties, barrio associations, class allegiances, and ethnic positions. One gains the impression that there is much backroom maneuvering among local ladino elites” (Fischer 2002: 54). He further wrote that when Tecpanecos talk of local political leaders, they:

…often speak of other nonelected individuals—sometimes named, more often not—who hold the ‘real’ power and call the shots for those in pubic office. Somewhat cynically, it is assumed that many, if not most, political decisions reflect such partisanship, and thus local politics are often fraught with personal animosities (Fischer 2002: 54).

Elites in Tecpán are not as strong as in San Juan Sacatepéquez, but they have managed to keep indigenous entrepreneurs and COCODE leaders in check, even as the latter have become a political force to be reckoned with.

Accounting for elites and their ingrained behind-the-scenes political practices helps explain why one finds in Tecpán a seeming paradox: despite a high level of autonomous community organizing, during election years, people tend to go their separate ways.120 Cada uno por su lado, as many would say. Complicating the varied political allegiances described by Fischer above, many Tecpanecos are rumored to develop clientelistic relationships with political parties. For example, in the months before the municipal elections in 2011, political insiders rumored that the Mayor’s party,

119 A Gini coefficient of “0” would correspond to perfectly equal land ownership, “1” to perfectly unequal. The Gini coefficient provided here is based on 2003 agricultural census data. 120 This is not unique to Tecpán. A similar situation exists in the municipio of Totonicapán, where a tiny ladino elite has controlled the local state under the auspices of right wing parties for years, but indigenous communities are the best organized in the country, electing a parallel state apparatus that controls no government funds but still holds the “real” power in the municipio.

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Partido Patriota, was offering homeowners 1,000 quetzales (roughly $133) to allow the party to paint the front of their house with a closed fist on a bright orange background

(the party’s symbol and color)—an image that gradually became ubiquitous in the town center. In a similar vein, the civic committee (local party) Tecpanecos Unidos had formed an alliance with the President’s Unidad Nacional Esperanza (UNE) party, and although they received no money to “buy votes,” they were able to take partial credit for the many development projects that the UNE was increasingly doting upon poor rural communities in the months before the elections.121 While there is no way to ascertain how such gifts affected voting behaviors, they undeniable have made it more difficult to transform citizenship and local governance in a cooperative and productive manner, as one finds in

San Juan Ixcoy.

Polarizing Indigenous Citizenship

As described in Chapter Two, the governing institutions that democratic decentralization often brings might not function smoothly in non-Western contexts like indigenous communities and municipalities, where customary modes of organization, authority and decision-making already exist (e.g. Cook 2005; Korovkin 2001; Kohl

2003). Decentralization can produce conflict when the political institutions of the dominant culture are imposed on indigenous populations (Larson 2008), and when local configurations of power and identity politics mediate the effects of decentralization reforms, empowering formerly weak groups and effecting both democratic and undemocratic outcomes (Tyson 2010; von Benda-Beckmann 2001). Tecpán confirms these findings, as vibrant indigenous identity politics, powerful political coalitions and

121 According to confidential insider reports.

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decentralization reforms intersected to produce a polarizing indigenous citizenship regime.

Since 2002, when the Development Council institutions were created in the heat of a contentious battle with the former Mayor, the Second Level COCODE has consistently demanded government transparency, a voice in local decision-making, and general accountability of government officials. People here have been taught their individual and collective rights are as citizens and indigenous people(s), and how to exercise them using official channels and legal arguments, as well as through contentious action. Many community leaders in Tecpán have successfully utilized the spaces of the

COMUDE, Second Level COCODE, and the COCODES in rural and urban communities to debate what policies, regulations, and projects will best enable their communities to achieve their visions for development. They have also gained access to information about municipal government that they never had before, and have been able to thwart projects and programs that they felt were not in their interest; for example, the installation of a

Juzgado de Asuntos Municipales (Municipal Issues Judge) and various projects related to the Astillero Municipal (Municipal Forest). COCODE leaders from the twenty or so communities in the center of the municipio even initiated a Saturday evening radio program to educate the population about what was happening in the local government, and how citizens can exercise their rights in such matters.

In the era of decentralization (post-2002), relations between the local state and civil society—specifically the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE—have been highly contentious, partly because Mayors have been reluctant to fully engage citizen participation. One COCODE leader who was particularly active in demanding

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government transparency confided that the Mayor in 2009 had issued him an implicit death threat. The previous mayor (2004-2008), who was reportedly more open to participation, went to prison in 2011 after being convicted of robbing nearly two million quetzales (roughly $266,666) from the municipal government. This clearly revealed the

COMUDE’s inability to oversee the municipality’s finances and hold local government officials accountable while in office, and also reflected the oppositional stance the local government had taken towards the COMUDE and COCODES. One of Tecpán’s indigenous entrepreneurs summed it as such:

There is a direct attack, on the part of the politicians, towards the system of Consejos. There are strategies for destabilizing the Consejos. We have seen in this process three governments, choosing one or more strategies that they develop and organize in order to destabilize the Consejos. In the case of Tecpán, it [the Consejos] is a strong system and we believe it is not easy to destabilize. [The politicians] can try what they want but it is not easy to do it because the people are conscious of their participation and have understood that through participation you will achieve much more than you will in asking favors.

Yet, Tecpán presents more than a story of an active civil society facing reluctant local state officials. At times, the outside observer might question the logic of the political strategies civil society—namely the COMUDE and COCODES—employs in

Tecpán. Civil society contention has occasionally led to political gridlock, where potentially beneficial projects are blocked, and COCODE leaders and communities exercise rights seemingly for the sake of demonstrating that their rights are indeed legitimate and can indeed be exercised. Foremost among these rights is indigenous peoples’ right to be previously consulted on projects that may affect them or their territories (or in legal terms, the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, FPIC), a right that proved particularly key for the anti-mining struggles in the cases of transformative

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and depoliticizing indigenous citizenship (San Juan Ixcoy and San Juan Sacatepéquez).122

The analysis herein suggests that for many current and former COCODE leaders in

Tecpán, exercising rights appears as a way to not only gain control over local development, but also to assert the value of indigenous identity. In effect, the empowerment of indigenous civil society through the Development Council System, coupled with their simultaneous distrust of and participation in local government and party politics, has given way to a latent fight over basic questions about legitimate authority, power, and government practices. Indigenous civil society, particularly through the vehicle of the COCODES and COMUDE, has put into debate key questions about citizenship and local governance:

• Who are the legitimate authorities—the COCODE leaders, the alcaldes comunitarios, or the Mayor and Concejo Municipal? Are the COCODE leaders part of “civil society” or are they “authorities”? • What kind of power do legitimate authorities possess? • How should decisions over governance be made? Can the Mayor make autonomous decisions for Tecpán, or must he gain permission from civil society first? To what extent does the right to consultation reach? Should that right actually be construed as consent, that is, the power to veto? This is a debate that has seeped throughout the municipio and even reaches down to the level of intra-community governance. In recent years, rural and semi-urban communities throughout Tecpán have asserted local territorial autonomy through use of their COCODE and other national laws and international indigenous rights conventions.123 Indigenous communities throughout Guatemala have always maintained customary law systems that allow for resolving disputes without the interference of police or Guatemalan law. But in Tecpán, local autonomy in many communities now translates

122 The ILO Convention 169 and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples support FPIC. 123 Though, importantly, they do not utilize the term “autonomy.”

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into communities themselves controlling rights to use and sell land and natural resources, and often using the law to justify these moves. At the level of the municipality, community leaders have collaborated to similarly employ the law in order to make collective, binding decisions absent interference by their elected municipal authorities.

Positions on the three sets of questions raised above thus tend to fall along two lines. On one hand, legitimate authority, substantive power and modes of decision- making can stem from a belief in the political party system, official state, and official juridical system. But alternate conceptions are grounded in a particular interpretation of indigenous-framed community norms, authority and decision-making that exists outside the political party system. In this majority indigenous municipio, this is not a polarization of Ladinos versus indígenas. But it is, I argue, a polarization that reflects two opposite processes of indigenous identity (re)construction: mayanization (becoming more

“Mayan” and hence more “authentically” indigenous) and ladinization (losing indigenous identity markers and instead taking up those of the dominant Guatemalan/ladino culture).

I further explain these processes later in the Chapter.

Though I argue that indigenous citizenship is polarizing in the above manner, many individuals (and community collectivities) in Tecpán might identify themselves in a grey area between Maya and Ladino, and might simultaneously participate in both the official political (party-based) system and the alternate system based on indigenous community norms (and rooted in the new civil society institutions). Yet, many do so with some reluctance. In informal conversations, COCODE leaders sometimes lamented that they and other community leaders mostly look to the needs of their communities and cooperate together in the space of the COMUDE, but when it comes to election time,

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they often go their separate ways and may support candidates who are solidly committed to the political party system and official modes of governance. Even indigenous entrepreneurs who dreamed of reconstructing local governance in order to eliminate political parties and instead assert a more democratic, community-based system of government, still were drawn into party politics once every four years, out of necessity.

Party-based and community-based perspectives on local governance emerged gradually in interviews with current and former COCODE leaders from rural and urban communities, local officials, COMUDE members, and representatives of local civil society organizations and political parties. These perspectives also were evident during

COMUDE and COCODE meetings, and manifested in specific local policy debates.

Towards the end of this Chapter, I focus on one public policy question—the management of the municipal forest—to illuminate how debates over power and authority play out in

Tecpán, resulting in a polarized regime of indigenous citizenship.

This Chapter proceeds by first providing Tecpán’s demographic and geographic context, before illustrating and analyzing the roots of civil society and citizen participation in the municipio. I next discuss who the indigenous entrepreneurs are in

Tecpán, and analyze the process by which these activists organized the local population into a social movement, and captured the process of constructing spaces for citizen participation through the decentralization laws. The Chapter then moves to analyze the polarizing conceptions of legitimate authority, decision-making and rights that pervade

Tecpán. Finally I demonstrate how these conceptions played out in conflicts over how to manage and conserve the municipal forest.

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Setting the Scene: Tecpán, Guatemala in Demographic Context

Iximche—Tecpán’s name in Kaqchikel—is considered the first capital of

Guatemala, carrying the illustrious history of being the first city conquered by the

Spaniards, in 1524. At that time, the local indigenous population put up great resistance, something that still lurks in the backs of local residents’ minds today, as many struggle against a form of “internal colonialism,” themselves occupying “the role of a colonized people,” and the new Guatemalan state and national society carrying on the role of the colonial state and society (Stavenhagen 1965).

Indigenous resistance in Tecpán persists against a backdrop of verdant forests, smallholder agriculture, and local textile industry. In this mid-sided (population 59,859) municipio, ninety-two percent of residents self-identify as Kaqchikel.124 Located high in

Guatemala’s western altiplano, many urban residents travel the moderate one-and-a-half hour trip to Guatemala City daily for work. But the majority who live in the more than sixty rural communities scattered throughout the mountains make their living off of subsistence crops of milpa (corn and beans) and also grow vegetables like broccoli, peas and cauliflower for local sale and increasingly, international export (Fischer and Benson

2006). In fact, seventy-five percent of all households work primarily in agriculture

(Municipalidad de Tecpán, Guatemala n.d.). This diverse agricultural production, and the municipio’s convenient location along the Pan-American Highway that connects the two largest cities in the country (Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango), draws thousands to the municipio’s bustling regional market on Thursdays and Sundays.

Yet Tecpán is a relatively poor municipio, lagging behind San Juan Sacatepéquez but wealthier than San Juan Ixcoy. According to the government agency SEGEPLAN

124 Numbers obtained from a Census 2002 dataset provided by the Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas.

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(2008), Tecpán has a “medium” quality of life, ranked at 163 out of the 333 municipios

(“1” being the worst). Seventy-one percent of the population is considered “poor,” and twenty-nine percent is “extremely poor.”125 Thus, similar to the case of San Juan Ixcoy,

Tecpán could also be considered a hard case for citizen participation. Yet, among the three municipios analyzed in this dissertation, Tecpán presents the most contentious expressions of citizenship.

Roots of Local Civil Society and Citizen Participation

In the early to mid-1970s, Tecpán was an important site for indigenous organizing, and young Mayas founded two groups, both of which focused on “promoting ethnic pride and creating a sanctioned public space for Maya culture in Tecpán and

Guatemalan society more broadly” (Fischer and Hendrickson 2003: 73). However the internal conflict silenced this activism and many of the activists themselves fled Tecpán for safer areas of the country. Later, in the post-war period but before the decentralization reforms were passed, political protest and demanding rights were not part of Tecpán civil society’s “repertoire of contention” (Tilly 2006), and moreover there was very little organized civil society to speak of. In a monograph on Tecpán published around this time, Fischer and Hendrickson (2003), discussing the development of Maya cultural activism in the municipio, reported that there was little grassroots activism around identity issues, and that only “a few grassroots groups have formed to promote cultural activities and political activism, with very modest results” (Fischer and Hendrickson

2003: 76). The lingering psychological effects of the internal conflict created barriers to engaging in politically oriented associational life.

125 Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas 2002, cited in Ibid.

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In contrast to both other municipios in this dissertation, during the internal conflict, Tecpán suffered significant violence. Tecpanecos can recall numerous terrifying incidents, such as one night in the late 1970s, when the pulled seventeen young men from their homes for questioning. They were never heard from again, until a clandestine grave was discovered in 2011. The Guatemalan army occupied a block of the center of town for ten years (from the early 1980s to early 1990s), in large part a reaction to guerrilla actions in the municipality: in 1981, unknown guerrillas blew up the Municipalidad

(Town Hall), with all the municipal employees and local officials inside it (Fischer 2002:

58-59). In the 1980s, some residents fled to safer parts of the country, only to return years later when peace talks were imminent. During the war, as in most places, Civil Self-

Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Auto-Defensa Civil, PACs) replaced existing forms of community organization and authority in Tecpán. Also similar to other indigenous municipios, Comités Pro-Mejoramiento existed but had no political character, since meetings of even two people were prohibited. The only mandate for these committees was to carry out development projects like fixing a road or building a schoolhouse, on the rare occasion that project funding appeared. In some places, special committees were formed to address specific problems or to execute particular projects. After the project was finished, the committee would be dissolved.

Just as intra-community organization was weakened during the internal conflict, organization between communities never flourished. Because of the mountainous topography of this sprawling municipio, many communities are located more than two hours from the town center, and up to five hours away from one another. It was only in recent years that any inter-community auto transportation existed. Thus, although

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Tecpán’s residents share a common language and culture, residents from different villages knew little of one another until recent years. Before the recent establishment of the Development Council System in Tecpán, there was little civil society to speak of because even after the internal conflict had settled, residents of distant villages had little contact with one another, except perhaps through kinship ties.126

In understanding the development of civil society in Tecpán, perhaps the most important actors on which to focus are the alcaldes auxiliares, today called alcaldes comunitarios here, signaling their role as servants of the community, not of the Mayor. As

Chapter Three explained, the alcaldes auxiliares were instituted during the colonial period, but gradually were appropriated by indigenous communities as a new form of community-based authority. During the internal conflict, this figure had little importance in the communities in Tecpán, but as the war died down in the 1990s, the alcaldes comunitarios were gradually seen again as the maximum authorities in the communities, and whereas the Mayor had often appointed them himself, the communities reclaimed their power to elect their own leaders at this time. By 2001, all communities were choosing their own alcaldes comunitarios, and when the new Municipal Code was approved by Congress in 2002, they could exercise this as a formal, legal right.

The alcaldes comunitarios are particularly important actors in Tecpán’s recent political history because before the Development Councils were established, they were the main (and often only) link between communities and the elected government, and were the only individuals to be networked with other communities. Both of these relationships were established through “mandatory” (according to informants) meetings

126 In the wake of the internal conflict violence, indigenous people could more easily hold meetings within their villages, yet since this associational life was community-based, I do not consider it as existing within the realm of “civil society” and having any direct impact on municipal government.

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that the Mayor would convoke twice a week. Informants argued that the Mayor, particularly in the 1998-2002 period, controlled and intimidated the alcaldes comunitarios in these meetings, often obligating them to carry messages to their communities on behalf of the Municipal Government and local businesses, at their own expense. But there was little organization or unity among the alcaldes comunitarios themselves; just as there was no organization throughout the municipality. As one longtime community leader said, before 2002:

There was not a lot of communication because the structure itself did not allow for much participation. Before, there were committees, but these did not have any strength, they were not broad enough to work on development. A committee is just a group of poeple, but the COCODES, it is the representative voice of the community.

In sum, during this time, and in stark contrast to the present-day, there was no public space in Tecpán for discussing issues of supra-community importance or for networking and sharing information between communities. The organization that did exist within the communities, the Comités and alcaldes comunitarios, were mainly focused on solving problems within the community.

Conflict Erupts: The Impuesto Unico Sobre Inmuebles

It was through meetings with the Mayor that the alcaldes comunitarios and their base communities, in 2002, learned of a new Guatemalan law that would affect them deeply, permanently transforming local governance and citizenship in Tecpán. The central government in 1998, as part of a process of fiscal decentralization, devolved the collection and partial spending of property taxes, known as the IUSI, to the municipal

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governments.127 It was left to municipal governments to take the initiative in collecting this tax. Thus, in 2001, former Mayor José Santos Morales Xet (from General Ríos

Montt’s right-wing party, Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, FRG) initiated steps to collect the IUSI in Tecpán. One day in January 2002, he called the alcaldes comunitarios to a meeting and explained to them the new tax that all Tecpanecos would have to pay.

As he explained in an interview, he believed that, as Mayor, it was his job to implement the fiscal decentralization of the state within his municipality. The alcaldes comunitarios followed the Mayor’s directions, and returned to their communities to inform their families and neighbors that they would all have to register their properties with the municipal government and pay taxes on their small plots of land and humble homes, for the first time ever. The municipal government used the community radio station and local churches to further spread the news. Devolving this tax was conceived as integral to

Guatemala’s democratization process, particularly because it would target elites and large landholders, who in turn protested it (Chavez Miños 2000: 54). Yet in Tecpán it had the effect of revealing fissures between indigenous people and the state.

At that time, most communities in Tecpán were akin to what O’Donnell (1993) called “brown spots”: areas of low socio-economic development and weak state penetration, and thus places where people had never paid any taxes to the state. Now, the

Mayor was arguing that paying the IUSI was an obligation, and moreover that it would allow the cash-strapped municipal government to afford new public works projects.

However, most rural indigenous communities had never received anything from the local state, and had little confidence that they ever would. Thus the Mayor’s plans caused great concern and even ire among the population. One longtime community leader explained:

127 Ley del Impuesto Unico Sobre Inmuebles. Decreto 15-98, Congreso de la Republica de Guatemala.

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It was in 2001 that the people began to feel that discontent. We cannot say that it was a revolution, but it was a very great discontent. Like I said, [the Mayor] took on attributions, he took on power in this time. He wrote a document to the Ministry of Public Finances, asking for the devolution of the IUSI to the municipality. He wrote in the document that Tecpán was ready to collect this tax.

Tecpanecos soon discovered that the Mayor had taken these actions unilaterally, without even consulting the Concejo Municipal. “He practically did everything under the table,” the community leader said, and further elaborated:

What the people said was this: first, we said, sir, I am sixty years old and sixty years of life is many years in my land. And in those sixty years, you tell me— what benefit have I received from the central government? Where is it? What benefit have I received from the municipal government? Where is it? What guarantee are you going to give me now if only a miserable twenty percent [of the IUSI taxes the Municipality will collect] are going to stay here? That I’m going to have better things…

As this quote illustrates, Tecpanecos were skeptical that life would improve upon paying the IUSI. There was no indication that the government would ever do anything to benefit them. But moreover, the idea of paying this tax was problematic also because most

Tecpanecos had lived in their rural villages their whole life, as had their parents, grandparents, and ancestors. As they saw it, their small plots of land were theirs and there was no good reason to have to pay a tax on it, particularly to a state that appeared so foreign to them and that historically, in both its colonial and post-colonial manifestations, had violently pushed indigenous peoples off their own lands. Above all, people in poor rural areas simply could not afford to pay property taxes.

Agitation among the communities gradually grew, especially since they were also facing other problems including a conflict over water provision in one large community and the possibility of being evicted from their land in another (Aq’ab’al 2004). Moreover,

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the Mayor was generally perceived to be corrupt.128 One municipal official said at that time, “I do not discount that the mayor was robbing money from the pueblo… Look, he didn’t have a car before he assumed office and just afterwards he has a new, nice car, one of the nicest in town (a red BMW).”129 Similarly, a community leader recalled that the initial impulse to organize at a trans-community level (discussed below) was prompted by the actions of the municipal authorities. There was “Lots of bad investment, lots of authoritarianism, lots of…what would I call it?... the other word is, lots of estafa de bienes de la municipalidad,” stealing from the public coffers. Another community leader said that people viewed the Mayor as prepotente (arrogant), and were frustrated at his poor treatment of Tecpanecos. Community leaders recall that the Mayor spent much of his time in Guatemala City, was reluctant to attend to the people when they needed him, and often intimidated them by, for example, carefully placing his revolver on his desk as he sat down to discuss matters. The Mayor’s perceived character flaws, smaller state- community conflicts in the municipio, and the overall impression that the government was corrupt added to the more specific problem of the IUSI, and together fueled discontent among Tecpanecos.

Gradually, a movement to oppose the IUSI emerged, first through the organization of the alcaldes comunitarios—the key individuals who had initial knowledge of the IUSI and were networked with one another through participating in the

128 In an interview, former Mayor Santos recognized that many people maintain this impression of him, but he emphatically denied any wrongdoing, and argued that as Mayor, he had failed to secure central government funding for municipal and community development projects because he refused to cooperate with his own party’s higher up officials in a “skimming” operation (i.e. where party officials would overestimate the cost of public works projects and pocket the difference when such projects were funded by the government). 129 Excerpt from interviews conducted by anthropologist Peter Benson in June-July 2002. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/fischer/tecpan/peter_benson.htm (Accessed online August 15, 2012).

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Mayor’s meetings. Some of the alcaldes comunitarios began meeting independently of the Mayor and in early 2002 formed what was arguably the first (post-war period) organized body of civil society in Tecpán, the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales (also called the Asamblea de Autoridades Comunales, CAC henceforth). This organization was the precursor to the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE assembly. Yet, a full understanding of the process by which the CAC was created, exercised new citizenship rights, and permanently transformed local governance in Tecpán, can only be comprehended by examining the role indigenous entrepreneurs played as leaders in this process.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs and the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales

The ideological and organizational roots of indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán emerge from various sources. Most generally, this is a historical site of indigenous resistance, and two key guerilla organizations were active here during the armed conflict: the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC) and the Frente Indígena Nacional (FIN). In recent years, Tecpán’s accessibility and rich history have made it an ideal location for hosting key indigenous movement events, such as the CUC’s 31st anniversary conference

(in 2010) and the Continental Conference of Indigenous Peoples “Abya Yala” in 2007, a week long event that thousands of indigenous activists from North and South America attended. Moreover, although it is the site of the Guatemala’s first Catholic Church, today

Tecpán is home to a rebirth of Mayan spirituality and a growing community of Mayan priests. The archeological ruins of Iximche are a sacred site for these practitioners of the

Mayan cosmovisión, who recently fought a contentious battle with the Guatemalan state

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to retain unobstructed access to the site, which is officially managed by the Guatemalan

Tourism Institute, INGUAT.

Tecpán is also often considered the “cuña” (cradle) of the Mayan movement. As the violence of the internal conflict quieted down in the late 1980s and the Pan-Mayan cultural movement emerged on the national stage in Guatemala, many of the movement’s most notable intellectual leaders came from small rural villages in Tecpán (key leaders included Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil, Narciso Rodríguez, Demetrio Rodríguez Guaján, and José

Serech). As described in Chapter Three, these individuals and other Pan-Mayan activists like them have advocated a more ideational struggle, and sought to avoid politically contentious actions (e.g. protests) and demands (e.g. land reform), in order to build the movement and avoid possible repression. Importantly, they engaged in debates over indigenous rights and culture at the national level, in the national public sphere, and have not been involved in Tecpán’s local politics (Fischer and Hendrickson 2003: 76-77). Yet, many of their ideas about revalorizing Mayan culture and identity have resonated in

Tecpán, especially in recent years, seeping into the local public sphere through networks with family and friends. Many activists who have been key actors within the movement to establish the Community and Municipal Development Councils and hold local officials accountable are friends or family of well-known Mayan intellectuals—even though they and many Tecpanecos might be quite critical of the Pan-Mayan activists who left Tecpán to “make money” or become “celebrity Indians” in Guatemala City (Fischer and

Hendrickson 2003: 77). One of the key indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán, for instance, criticized the Mayan intellectuals, calling them “indios permitidos,” and accusing people like pre-eminent Maya intellectual Demetrio Cojtí of being disconnected from the reality

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of the pueblos. Yet the ideas of Cojtí and other Mayanistas had clearly influenced this and other indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán.

The key indigenous entrepreneurs here had a direct relationship with one of two organizations: Asociación Vida and the Defensoría Indígena Wajxaqib’ No’j. The first is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that works in issues of health, local governance and citizen participation, and is based out of a neighboring municipio, Patzun. However, indigenous Kaqchikel activists from Asociación Vida originate from Tecpán and thus over the years have expended considerable effort not only in Patzun but in Tecpán, too, educating community leaders about their legal rights as citizens and as indigenous people(s) and accompanying them in their interminable struggles with the local state.

Their goal, an Asociación activist said, is to achieve “a type of community development where the communities really are the protagonists, where they are the ones who really can promote their development… within a framework of legality, democracy—a real, participatory democracy.” They see the decentralization reforms and indigenous rights accords as tools towards this end. In comparison to the Defensoría Indígena, their approach is more pragmatic and less focused on issues of Mayan cultural revitalization.

On one hand, “the situation of our pueblos, especially our pueblos indígenas” is a primary motivation for their work in local development and citizen participation, because

“we have more than 500 years of being a community that is excluded from social and political life and our community has been hurt.” But, the “purpose is not to provoke revolution, it is not to go against the politicians or those who govern, the government; rather, the real purpose is to ensure that nuestros pueblos are listened to and are taken account of.” To that end, this activist said, they seek to cooperate with the state

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authorities: “the idea is that together, we can strengthen and overcome.” However, despite their goal of collaborative governance, more than one local government official and even some former community leaders (paradoxically) expressed their contempt for

Asociación Vida, seemingly because it has so actively assisted community leaders in exercising their rights, vis-à-vis the state.

Yet, though Asociación Vida has had a constant presence in Tecpán, it was activists from the Defensoría Indígena who played the leading role in organizing

Tecpán’s communities when no organization yet existed. This indigenous movement organization had (and continues to maintain) operations in numerous regions of

Guatemala, including the Department of Chimaltenango, to which Tecpán belongs.130 Its main function is to provide legal counseling to indigenous people and communities, and to mediate conflicts within and between communities and municipalities, using indigenous customary law and cultural norms whenever possible, in lieu of (though sometimes in complement to) the formal legal system. For activists within this movement organization, who themselves identify as indigenous (specifically, “Maya”) and usually identify with the same ethno-linguistic group (and often the same municipality) of the conflicts they mediate, eschewing formal law for customary law is reasoned as a more economical way to resolve conflicts, and contributes to their overall goal of revitalizing and revalorizing indigenous culture and socio-political organization. The Defensoría

Indígena’s loftier goal has been to reconstruct the system of Alcaldías Indígenas in municipalities where this indigenous governing structure has been lost over the years, and to unite these structures at a trans-municipal level.

130 The Defensoría Indígena also has a presence in the Departments of Sololá, Quiche, Baja Verapaz, Chichicastenango, Jalapa, Uspantán, and Huehuetenango.

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A few of the Defensoría Indígena’s self-identifying “Mayan” activists were from communities in Tecpán and thus became leaders in organizing the CAC.131 They had links not only to the Defensoría Indígena but also to other national indigenous movement organizations like the CUC. They were also networked with activist-intellectuals from the

Pan-Mayan movement, including those from the well-regarded social movement/academic think tank CEDIM (Centro de Educación y Documentación

Indígena Maya). These networks provided indigenous entrepreneurs with resources including knowledge about national and international laws affecting indigenous peoples, as well as skills in how to organize a social movement. The networks also supplied ideological resources, namely the discursive tools to symbolically frame struggles as indigenous, thus lending those struggles increased legitimacy and helping promote the valorization of indigenousness and the community within the municipio. For instance, the name “Asamblea de Autoridades Comunales” or “Consejo de Autoridades Comunales” can be understood as carrying symbolic political leverage through the term comunales, which, in the Guatemala socio-political context, connotes indigenous identity, local authority, authenticity, and thus legitimacy. That indigenous entrepreneurs use these discursive frames in Tecpán does not, however, mean that this is a merely instrumental strategy. Rather, as with the indigenous entrepreneurs in San Juan Ixcoy (Chapter Six) and the mining-affected communities in San Juan Sacatepéquez (Chapter Four), indigenous culture and identity is used as a strategy for attaining practical political and development goals, as well as more long term, ideological and value-based goals of

131 The Defensoría Indígena continues to assist Tecpán today, however the activists that were with the movement in the early 2000s left to form their own smaller movement, the Consejo de Comunidades Mayas (COCOM), which also now assists communities in Tecpán. COCOM activists have worked at the community level in numerous municipalities in the departments of Chimaltenango and Quiche, and in Tecpán in 2002 they applied those skills to the Municipal level.

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combating racism and ethnic exclusion, and valorizing that which is indigenous and

Mayan—whether the latter is interpreted by observers as “true” indigenous culture and identity or something that is partly invented in light of current socio-political context.

In helping organize and educate the communities of Tecpán, Defensoría Indígena activists worked with an ideology that stressed the value of “indigenous” and “Mayan” culture and identity, the value and authenticity of the localized community, the foreignness and exclusivity of the official state, and ultimately, the necessity of changing the latter to reflect the former values. Jorge, a former Defensoría Indígena activist who continues to work in Tecpán and surrounding municipios through a splinter movement organization (Consejo de Comunidades Mayas, COCOM), explained their political strategy, which is arguably more radical than Asociación Vida’s, but also more sophisticated:

We had then and continue to manejar the following concept: We come from a history of confrontational struggle against the state. That is, we are in theory anti- systemic, meaning that in order to confront the state we need to change the state, and so we arrive at this idea: if we want to change the state, we must get to know the state.

Since the initial intervention of Defensoría Indígena activists in 2001-02, many community leaders and activists in Tecpán have participated in diploma programs, trainings and workshops, offered by Guatemalan universities and institutions, as well as

Asociación Vida, in order to “get to know the state” better. They read the laws: the

Constitution, the Municipal Code, and the Development Council Law among other national legislation, as well as the ILO Convention 169 and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Says the activist quoted above, “Our goal is to be conscious of the need to change the state.” The change they seek is one that would transform the state in

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order to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples and the validity of what they consider to be “indigenous” (or “Mayan”) conceptions of politics and legality. Broadly, they view their present struggle as a continuation of historical confrontation between indigenous people and the Guatemalan state. Theoretically speaking, it is a strategy for overcoming internal colonialism.

However, in 2002 this ideology did not come as easily to the community representatives in the CAC, especially since for many of them, the community, and the

Mayor at most, was the closest they had ever come to “seeing” the state. Most had little understanding of what “rights” were. Thus while leading the CAC in a struggle with the local state, the Defensoría Indígena gave trainings and workshops to community leaders to teach them about the laws, their rights as indigenous citizens, and how to organize collectively. In sum, the indigenous entrepreneurs led the CAC through a gradual process of indigenous identity-based civic education, so that the community leaders could learn for themselves and through experience what the state “looked” like, so to speak, and how to make it work for them, incorporating culturally specific norms and knowledge. Jorge elaborated,

If I go right now to a community assembly and I tell them about the need to change the state, they are not going to accept me. Thus what I do is teach them to use the law. I teach them to use the due process that is in the law. And how the law is made for those who have more money and more influence, and who use the law for their interests, manipulate it for their interests, and how the pueblo is not able to manipulate the law like that, for their interests. But if I teach them that path, of utilizing the due process, first we have to make a public struggle or a denuncia, to ask for tal cosa and wait until they [local state officials] resolve it or do not resolve it. Then I tell them, ‘Look, now you’ve reached the end. There is no way out.’ Then the reaction of the people is going to be ‘So what is el camino?’ There are two options. One way is to take the established route; another is to begin to struggle in order to change the established route. And if I begin to struggle to change the established system in this country, necessarily I revert back to what I have. And what I have is the derecho ancestral that I carry within me.

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Thus, there we have our own method of creating awareness. And that is exactly what we did in Tecpán.

In speaking of “derecho ancestral,” Jorge was referring to customary legality, including commonly held norms and rules that guide conduct, authority and decision-making in indigenous communities. By describing this law as “ancestral” and something that he

“carries within” himself, Jorge frames this legality as not only indigenous, but something seemingly material, embodied, inherited, and contained within indigenous peoples, and thus unquestionably authentic, opposed to the official legal system and state that stands outside of indigenous people. This discursive positioning of indigenous, authentic, and valuable versus official, foreign and exclusionary is a theme that informed the Defensoría

Indígena in the initial stages of organizing the CAC and, as this Chapter will demonstrate, continues to be a dichotomy around which local political struggles are enacted.

Organizing the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales

In the initial stages of organizing opposition to the IUSI, activists from the

Defensoría Indígena collaborated with other community authorities (initially the alcaldes comunitarios) and convoked them to a meeting. Though only a couple communities were involved in the first meeting, one of the initial leaders in the CAC explained that they actively grew the movement:

We began there and in all the aldeas, we went to all the aldeas and went to coordinate ourselves, we created a group like a committee and had assemblies in all the rural areas, we had assemblies in all the barrios, in all the colonias, we convoked the community and made them aware of this new tax. And the people indeed were very angry, very annoyed. And they said, ‘and when did they (the Mayor and Municipal Corporation) ask for this? They didn’t tell us about it,

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didn’t advise us, didn’t tell us anything!’ And it was the Mayor’s and Concejo Municipal’s responsibility to convoke the pueblo about this issue.

Gradually, as more communities learned about the problem with the IUSI through the community awareness campaign described above, and with each additional meeting of the alcaldes comunitarios, more participated, and quickly a majority of the (then) 60 communities were participating.

However, despite this broad-based participation, many communities were experiencing internal conflict because their alcaldes comunitarios were in favor of the

Mayor’s position with regard to the IUSI, arguably because of intimidation or bribing.

Informants recall that some alcaldes comunitarios simply did not want to get involved in contentious action. In one community, the residents had heard of the growing social movement, and replaced their alcalde when he refused to participate. It emerged that many alcaldes comunitarios were not consulting their community bases about whether or not they should participate in the movement of the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales.

There was also disagreement within the CAC over political strategy, which reflected deeper disagreements over what precisely their struggle was about. Defensoría

Indígena activist Jorge recalled that many community leaders directed their objections against the Mayor as a person and wanted to punish him, arguing that he was a thief and would rob the people of what little they had. But others argued that the problem was not personal but rather political: it related more to policy and local government structure, and therefore the strategy should be to first issue a formal, written legal complaint (a denuncia) against the municipal government’s actions. This was a strategy that would exhaust the tools of the official state and legal system before resorting to contentious action. The CAC could not reach agreement, and since there were concerns about the

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legitimacy of each of the community leaders, the CAC took measures to ensure that all were all accountable to their base communities. This was the first step in creating a democratic culture within the municipio’s budding civil society.

The CAC required that each leader return to his community and convoke an assembly, at which the community would elect two representatives to the CAC, the idea being that two representatives would mitigate the effect of one possibly becoming

“bought off” by local authorities. After their election, the two representatives were required to bring to the CAC the Acta (minutes) of the meeting at which they were elected, signed by all community members, as proof of their legitimacy within their communities. Fifteen days later, when the CAC reconvened, most of the community representatives were new. Some were members of their community’s auxiliatura (i.e. the alcalde comunitario and his team of helpers), but many were not, because the alcaldes comunitarios already were obligated to meet with the Mayor twice weekly, and were receiving intense pressure to support his plans and not organize with the CAC. Many were fearful, in part because they believed that their community’s inclusion in the municipality’s development plans was conditioned on their support for the Mayor. Thus, it was easier for many communities to elect additional, new leaders to participate in the

CAC.

This process arguably had the effect of broadening participation in local civil society and strengthening the accountability of community leaders in their communities.

Once democratically elected leaders from a substantial majority of communities were involved, the CAC was able to organize and plan a political strategy with more legitimacy. Before reaching a majority, some members had wanted to stage a protest, but

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the movement held off from doing so. They wanted to prevent the municipal authorities from organizing the rest of the communities against them, or argue that a small minority was trying to cause conflict. They thus built the size and strength of the movement first.

“These are the types of things that have given us the possibility of seeing our legitimacy, as representatives of the people,” Jorge explained. It gave them confidence that they could rely on the population should the CAC decide to challenge the local government or plan a protest. “The fact that we had all these leaders who were now named by their communities to represent them in this movement, this was a very significant achievement for us. Here the communities understood that they needed to legitimize the leaders.” In total, all sixty communities in the municipio elected two representatives each, for a total of 120.

Democratizing the Local State: initial steps

Having re-organized themselves, the CAC submitted the denuncia and then sought information directly from the Mayor. A community leader who participated in the

CAC in 2002 recounted that they went to see the Mayor and asked, “Why is this being done, charging the IUSI tax to the entire pueblo of Tecpán? …[T]his one, the Mayor in the year 2002, never gave us any detailed information like that, so that we could inform the people.” The implicit assumption in this former leader’s words is that people legally had a right to information. Through the process of pan-community organization, and learning about the how the state works by getting to know it, the people became “awake,”

“alive,” and “ready,” as another community leader put it. They resolved to refuse to pay

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the IUSI. But the CAC also developed a broader list of demands, which in sum was call to democratize the local state (see Box 5.1).

Table 5.1: Demands of the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales 1. That the Municipal Government put a halt to its request to the Ministry of Finances, for the transfer of collecting the IUSI, without previously consulting the communities.

2. That the collection of the IUSI be returned to the Ministry of Finances, and

that the poor, who have historically paid all the taxes in the country, no longer be punished.

3. That Mayor José Santos Morales’ arrogant, discriminatory, and authoritarian actions towards the community leaders end. 4. That the pressure put on our alcaldes comunales to force the population to raise the prices of their properties and pay the IUSI end, especially since the rich have not been charged this tax. 5. That receiving a project our communities not be conditioned on opposition to the collection of the IUSI from the poorest of our municipio. 6. That the community organization, and the dignity and integrity of our community authorities be respected, as dictates Article 66 of the Constitution, ILO 169, and the Peace Accords. 7. That the pueblo be previously consulted about any municipal-wide decisions that will directly affect the majority of the population, as dictates the ILO 169, the Municipal Code, and the norms of the indigenous communities. 8. We urgently demand the constitution of the Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo (COMUDE), with participation of twenty representatives from the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales, which are already constituted by the organized communities. 9. And the assignment of a permanent home for the Consejo de Autoridades Comunales, within the Municipalidad in Tecpán.

Source: Aq'ab'al (2004)

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It was challenging for the CAC to all agree on these demands, particularly the fifth. Jorge recalls that it was difficult to convince community leaders that communities have a right to a project, and that the municipal government cannot simply hand out projects at will. “It is an obligation of the state and thus if the Municipalidad follows through with its threat to not approve a community’s project or suspend a community’s project for participating in the struggle, that constitutes a violation of the rights of the people.” Thus this list of demands reflects a process of coming to understand the content and extent of the rights communities and individuals hold, in the ambit of the local state.

The CAC presented these demands twice. They first requested a meeting with the municipal authorities, which was granted but ended up being unproductive as the CAC representatives were met with “disdain and insults,” a former CAC member remembers.

In response, they submitted the demands to the municipal government in writing. This was in mid-April, 2002. According to Article 28 of Guatemalan Constitution, the municipal government has thirty days to respond to citizens’ written demands. More than a month later, the Mayor rejected the CAC’s demands.

When the CAC learned of this negative response, their initial response was worry and confusion. They had exercised their rights, but to no avail. Defensoría Indígena activists told them that there were now two paths for moving forward. The first one, the one they were using, was the legal or “official” path. But in order to continue down that path and challenge the municipal government, they would need to hire a lawyer. Jorge recalls telling them, “That means to go back to our communities and ask the people for money in order to pay the lawyer,” and to prepare for a legal battle that could last two years. The other option was an “act of pressure,” which was “valid and legally

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established,” Jorge taught them. The CAC wanted to do whatever was easier, and thus voted to apply pressure and engage in contentious action. The people had seen and interacted with the state, had concluded it was not theirs—it did not exist to serve them— and that they needed to change it. They would begin a strategy of “double militancy”

(Beckwith 2000): engaging in contentious politics when formal political channels become blocked. Thus, the CAC agreed to organize a large political demonstration in June 2002, but first they held a press conference in Guatemala City. The leftist political party Unidad

Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) helped organize the event. The CAC wanted to give the municipal government another opportunity to respond to their demands and make clear to the government and the general public that their aim was not to create conflict or violence but to peacefully solve the problem using proper legal means. In sum, the goal was to frame their struggle and the future protest as legitimate and legal, and the Mayor and municipal government as non-responsive and breaking the law.

On June 10, 2002, all the communities of Tecpán participated in the protest in the center of town. A community leader recounted, “The population rose up and asked the

Mayor for the information, that he give us this information publically, and not only publically but also in writing.” No one knew if the IUSI was a national mandate or just something created by the Mayor. Finally, the Mayor told them it was the law, but the community leaders insisted that Tecpanecos could not be obligated to pay the IUSI without being “consciente,” that is, without having clear information about what the tax was and how the money would be spent. In this way, then, the protest marked an important point in the community leaders’ transformation into an educated civil society

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that would demand respect for its rights. As one community leader related, “up until then… the people learned… that we did indeed have a right. It was then that the people woke up and saw that indeed, based in the law, there is a right that, that we had and that was, let’s say, hidden. Because no one knew anything, nothing.”

The protest was covered by the Guatemalan media, and received great attention among indigenous activists from outside of Tecpán. Thousands of Tecpanecos participated—accounts range from 10,000 to 35,000. Youth and elderly, women and men, and even the emerging Mayan spiritual community all played their parts in the “historic, huge demonstration,” as one community leader described it. However, what was meant to be a peaceful political protest soon turned violent. Local businesses were looted, buildings were damaged, the Mayor’s house and car were burnt down, and the Mayor had to be evacuated from Tecpán by a police escort. To this day, it is still not clear whether the protestors became angry, or if a group of youth unconnected to the movement initiated the violence.132 The protestors maintained that they were trying to deal with serious political issues, but local government officials offered a different interpretation.

The Municipal Secretary said, “The campesinos were misinformed and misunderstood the process.”133 Years later, in 2011, Mayor Morales reasoned that he only wanted to bring the caja fiscal to Tecpán, so that there would be more money for the Municipality.

In an interview with me, he emphasized that he simply tried to implement the fiscal decentralization of the state in Tecpán, but it was impossible:

132 For example, see press coverage such as El Diario de Hoy ,“Policía arresta a campesinos por disturbios en Guatemala” (12 June 2002). (http://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/2002/6/12/internacionales/inter1.html) (accessed online August 15, 2012); also see the interview transcripts collected by anthropologist Peter Benson, available online: http://www.vanderbilt.edu.AnS/Anthro/fischer/Tecpán/peter_benson.htm (accessed online August 15, 2012). 133 Quote from Peter Benson’s interviews, (http://www.vanderbilt.edu.AnS/Anthro/fischer/Tecpán/peter_benson.htm).

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No les gustó, los politicos. Los politicos organized the demonstration against me. It was all a manipulation. A political manipulation. There were bad intentions. They burnt down my house, my car, forced out all my family. I lost one million quetzales.

Despite this violence, in end the CAC did achieve its goal of pressuring the

Mayor and Concejo Municipal to accede to their demands. After the protest, additional actors became involved in resolving the conflict: the SCEP (Secretaría de Coordinación

Ejecutiva de la Presidencia), MINUGUA (United Nations Verification Mission in

Guatemala), the Ministerio de Gobernación, the office of the state Human Rights

Defender (PDH), and the Congressional Commission on Indigenous Communities. The

Commission declared that the CAC’s demands were legitimate and that the municipal government must attend to them. Jorge argued, “To not comply would be a violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples.”

Grassroots-led Appropriation of the Development Council Law

Arguably, the most significant achievement of the previous struggle was the

CAC’s appropriation of the Development Council Law, which lent it legal legitimacy.

However, doing so took special effort and knowledge of the limits of the law. The

Development Council Law states that in municipalities with more than twenty communities, a Second Level COCODE must be formed. In Tecpán, sixty communities could imply the construction of three Second Level COCODES. This is generally how the development council system was established in San Juan Sacatepéquez (Chapter

Four), which has a similar total number of COCODES.134 Indeed, in Tecpán in 2006, a team of political science students from the Rafael Landívar University conducted a study

134 In 2009, both Tecpán and San Juan Sacatepéquez had eighty-two COCODES.

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and tried to convince the communities to change their organizational structure to fit more closely with the law. But many community leaders had doubts about the legitimacy of this aspect of the law (Costop-Xuya 2007). According to Jorge, “We said, it is not correct because for us there is a concept of direct democracy. Mi comunidad llega directamente a participar en y no atraves de.” Within the CAC, debate ensued over the nature and principles of the law, and they decided to keep their single Second Level COCODE, in order to maintain the unity of the communities.

Drawing on a stipulation in the law allowing for modification based on an indigenous community’s norms and traditions, the CAC remained the same in structure and organization but changed its legal name to “Second Level COCODE.”135 In accordance with the law, each of the sixty communities formed a COCODE, registered it with the municipal government, and elected representatives to participate in the Second

Level COCODE. However, following their own customs, they did not send only the

COCODE president, as the law prescribed, but instead sent two representatives (one of whom may or may not be the President) to represent them in the larger assembly.

Allowing the communities themselves to decide who would attend the Second Level

COCODE helped them to better distribute labor among various individuals, possibly preserving longer-held norms of (obligatory) authority within communities, particularly rural ones. Finally, requiring the communities to send not one but two representatives

135 Article 15 of the Ley de los Consejos de Desarrollo states that a Second Level COCODE should be integrated by the members of the coordinating bodies of the COCODES in the municipio, and its own coordinating body should be established according to the peoples’ “own principles, values, norms and procedures, or their statutory norms,” or simply in accordance with the law (which then lists a set of strict procedures). This vague wording opened the door to allowing multiple representatives of each COCODE to participate, and to regulating specific ways for choosing the coordinating body and representatives to participate in the COMUDE.

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was a measure designed to prevent political cooptation and maintain the autonomy and unity of the Second Level COCODE.

I asked one longtime community leader (and original participant in the CAC) why they did not organize their Second Level COCODE more in accordance with the law, or more similarly to the way San Juan Sacatepéquez is organized (i.e. with four separate

Second Level COCODES). He responded that some “government institutions” did try to instruct them on the proper way to organize the COCODES. But, “the way we organize has more participation of the communities. It is a better form of organization for civil society, but not for government.” Another leader concurred: “We base ourselves in conformity with the law—it gives us the faculty to have the Second Level Assembly.”

Regardless of the degree to which the organization of the Development Councils in

Tecpán actually deviates from the law, many current and former COCODE leaders view their modes of organization as grounded in local custom, and supported by law that respects indigenous rights. For instance, at a meeting of the Second Level COCODE in

September 2009, one participant stated that the law “gives us the right to organize in our own way, according to our normas. The ley tradicional [Guatemalan law] has not helped us much, it has helped others.”

The Second Level COCODE’s organizational unity and broad inclusionary structure has facilitated new networks and information-sharing among communities located far from one another, and has helped them identify and solve problems that affect not just singular communities or regions of the municipality, but the municipality as a whole. Before implementing the Development Council law, the people of Tecpán attacked problems in a way that was very “sectorizada,” as one community leader put it.

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But, “now we see the situation and the problems from the level of the municipality.” The conflict over the municipal forest, analyzed later in this Chapter, illustrates this tendency to own and solve problems collectively.

The COMUDE in Tecpán

Under pressure from above and below, including from the Departmental

Governor, the Mayor also established the COMUDE but did not follow the dictates of the law in terms of including participation of public institutions or other civil society organizations in the municipality (though neither did the COCODE leaders push for it).

Thus the COMUDE initially included only the Mayor, Concejo Municipal, and twenty

COCODE representatives (elected by the Second Level COCODE). It emerged as a space of negotiation between the communities and the local state (Figure 5.1 illustrates how the

Development Council Law was applied in Tecpán). Analytically speaking, the COMUDE has been a political interface of community-oriented and party-oriented authority and decision-making, as well as an intermediate space where the lines between state and civil society become blurred—illustrating the problems in analyzing civil society as a sphere completely separate from the state (Baiocchi 2011: 246). Indeed, interrogating community-civil society-state boundaries becomes quite useful for understanding the polarization of indigenous citizenship in Tecpán.

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Figure 5.1: The Development Council System in Tecpán, Guatemala136

COMUDE (20 COCODE representatives participate)

Second Level COCODE (All 82 COCODES send two representatives each)

COCODES COCODES COCODES

In sum, the COMUDE, a new space for citizen participation and for channeling demands from the communities to the local government, was established at a critical moment, in reaction to the Mayor’s failure to consult the population about the IUSI. This was the first time that Tecpanecos had exercised their rights as citizens and demanded consultation on projects, laws or policies that could affect them. Indeed, Tecpanecos were pioneers in exercising this indigenous right in Guatemala—only three years later, indigenous communities in many more municipalities began exercising the right to be previously consulted over mining projects, as one sees in both the cases of depoliticizing and transformative indigenous citizenship, San Juan Sacatepéquez and San Juan Ixcoy, respectively. In Tecpán, the process of exercising the right to be consulted and establishing a formal and permanent space for citizen engagement with the local state, I

136 In 2002, the Second Level COCODE included representatives from sixty COCODES. Since then, new communities have formed and the number has risen to 82, as depicted in Figure 5.1.

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argue, generated a local political culture of contention that became polarizing. As this

Chapter will illustrate, the COCODES and Second Level COCODE have continued to demand consultation over any and all projects or plans for Tecpán’s development, though they tend to interpret the right to consultation as a veto power—thus raising questions about the limits of their power versus the power of the elected municipal authorities.137

Soon after the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE were established, the

COCODE leaders chose one of themselves to run for Mayor in the 2003 elections, using the leftist URNG party as the vehicle. However, this run was unsuccessful, partly because of an interpersonal conflict between the COCODE leaders and local URNG loyalists

(who had not participated in the CAC movement). After the brief alliance with the

URNG broke down, people went their separate ways, likely engaging in political maneuvering within what Fischer described as “a fluid and complex system of partisanship that involves kinship ties, barrio associations, class allegiances, and ethnic positions” (Fischer 2002: 54). With the COCODES not unified in election time, they failed to occupy the local state (as indigenous entrepreneurs and a local movement did in

San Juan Ixcoy).138 Yet after the new Mayor and Concejo Municipal took power in early

2004, COCODE leaders regrouped and continued pushing for collaboration, transparency, and a type of governance that is based in community norms rather than party politics.

137 In Guatemala and in Tecpán, indigenous peoples draw from national laws and the ILO Convention 169 as the legal basis for their right to be previously consulted. The ILO has explicitly stated that this right is not to be interpreted as a right to “veto” (International Labor Organization 2003: 16, 40). 138 They failed again in the 2007 municipal elections; instead the right-wing Partido Patriota took office.

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Polarizing Visions of Citizenship and Local Governance

Only two of Tecpán’s Mayors since 1970 have been Ladino and in the post-war period, the government has been controlled entirely by the Kaqchikeles. Few Ladinos even work as employees for the municipal government, and only one or two have been

COCODE leaders in recent years. But the fact that Kaqchikeles dominate local governance says little about the role ethnic identity politics plays in Tecpán.

As early as the 1930s and 1940s, scholars of Guatemala posited the ladinization of indigenous people in Guatemala (Adams 1994). In sum, this theory argued that as indigenous people migrate to urban areas, they will gradually drop the cultural markers that make them “indigenous”—such as language, dress, and other customs—and take on a new identity as Ladinos, adopting the norms of the dominant culture. Ultimately, this will result in demographic and cultural shift whereby the indigenous population will become increasingly smaller. Yet in recent years, especially since the mid-1990s and perhaps earlier, it has become difficult to speak of this as an inevitable trend, given that an opposite trend has taken place: mayanization (e.g. Bastos and Cumes eds. 2007;

Bastos, Cumes and Lemos 2007). The Pan-Mayan movement, which grew out of the writings and organizing of a small cohort of Mayan intellectuals, has gradually influenced the minds of many indigenous people throughout Guatemala. As noted earlier, many of these intellectuals originate from Tecpán, and thus ideas of Mayan identity revitalization have taken on particular prominence here. These intellectuals rarely suggested how Mayan identity would or could re-materialize in the realm of local governance. Indeed, one prominent intellectual, in a private conversation, criticized the movement—himself included—for not addressing these questions. He pointed to a 2007

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monograph (Cojtí Cuxil, Son Chonay, and Rodríguez Guaján 2007) as the first major publication to address the need for changes in the local, not just national state. The case of polarizing indigenous citizenship in Tecpán, however, as well as San Juan Ixcoy’s transformative indigenous citizenship regime (Chapter Six), offers one a glimpse of how

Mayanness may be politicized in local politics, by local actors. At the same time, one sees a process of ladinization, particularly in the urban barrios. One self-described indígena ladinizada, who was a member of the COMUDE in years past and continued to be active in local governance, spoke of Tecpán as a place where there are two opposing groups: Mayas on the one hand and indígenas ladinizadas on the other. Speaking of these as “groups” is probably inaccurate and glosses over the often-fluid nature of ethnicity.

However, if one imagines a spectrum of possible ways that indigenous people might inwardly and outwardly express their identity, then “Mayan” and “Ladino” occupy opposite poles of that spectrum, attracting people by different forces. In the local space of

Tecpán, one thus encounters the clash of two simultaneous socio-ethnic processes of identity construction and their attendant worldviews, ladinization and mayanization, and begins to see how their encounter translates into conflict within local governance.

This section of the Chapter examines relations between civil society and the state, drawing from interviews with actors from both of those realms. In one sense, this is a tense relationship mirroring any tense civil society-local state relationship in a mono- ethnic municipio. But I argue that crosscutting this relationship are differing perspectives on legitimate authority, power, and democratic decision-making that reflect the polarizing processes of ladinization and mayanization.

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Civil Society and an Intransigent Local State

Today, COCODE leaders arrive at meetings of the COMUDE and Second Level

COCODE armed with well-worn copies of the Constitution and trilogy of decentralization laws, and sometimes carry copies of the ILO Convention 169 and the

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They are prepared to defend their rights as citizens and indigenous peoples to public information, consultation, and participation. Meetings are known to be loud and animated. In Tecpán, COCODE leaders have sought to extend their power to govern as much as possible, often tackling issues that are arguably outside their legal purview.

In August 2009 I observed my first COMUDE meeting. Towards the end, a

COMUDE member approached me. Mateo, who was President of his COCODE and involved in local civil society since the dawn of the CAC, was apprehensive but curious.

He wanted to know what new knowledge about politics, government and rights that I might impart on him. I eventually obtained for him and other COCODE leaders free copies of the ILO 169, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a popular education book for learning the basics of the Development Council Law. It was only many months later that I understood the irony in this exchange. Mateo could have written that book; he was, and likely still is, much more knowledgeable about

Guatemalan law and local government than I am, having lived it himself. He first read the trilogy of decentralization laws and the Guatemalan Constitution years ago, his copy of these documents now dog-eared and riddled with notes. Mateo is typical of many community leaders who have been active in their COCODES, the Second Level

COCODE, and the COMUDE in Tecpán. They know and demand respect for their rights.

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They might participate in a political party during election time—temporarily weakening the COMUDE—but mostly they work collaboratively to balance the power of elected officials who, nearly all community leaders here say, are always lazy and corrupt, no matter how honest or hardworking the politician was before he entered office.

One community leader explained that at first they could not work to their full potential, because the law is vast and there is much to learn. Yet as they learned more, things in the municipio changed. “There is a lot of difference. Now the communities are well organized, they have their assembly days, they analyze problems in the community.

There is an agenda, where the vecinos consult and propose needs. So now the communities are better organized. And the result of the organization is: they are more informed about all that is being worked on, with more transparency.” This political and legal knowledge and assertiveness is evident in meetings of the Second Level COCODE and COMUDE. For instance, during a Second Level COCODE meeting in September

2009, a municipal employee presented information on the municipal budget, namely in- take and spending. COCODE leaders aggressively demanded more details. One stated, “It would help us if you would provide more detail, because this is very general. We want to know the quality or type of projects, not just the quantity spent. For example, if it is a drainage project, we want to know, how many meters?” This leader continued, requesting information about a specific project under discussion: “Regarding the Escuela 25 de

Julio, did the Padres de Familia contribute any money for the roof?”139 During the same discussion, another COCODE leader reminded the assembly why it was important to ask for this detailed information. “We want to be informed, to see where the money is going, and to be able to make good suggestions to the COMUDE for the budget. And comply

139 Every school in Guatemala has a parents association, called Padres de Familia.

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with the law.” In general, COCODE leaders perceive themselves as holding considerable influence over municipal governance, as the following interview responses suggest:

Community Leader A: “It is not yet 100 percent. But when the Muni makes a bad decision that we see will affect the municipio, we interrupt those activities. And there, yes, I can tell you that we have been successful about seventy percent of the time.” Community Leader B: The Corporation Municipal no longer has 100 percent of the power. It cannot decide for itself because now there exists the COCODEs and COMUDE. Community Leader C: “We have achieved more or less forty percent of the rights of civil society.”

However, there is a general lack of interest on the part of the elected local government

(the Mayor and the Concejo Municipal) to encourage participation, coordinate with the

COCODES and COMUDE, and share power and governing responsibilities with them.

Indeed, it was common to hear that over the past few years (and especially in the 2008-12 period), most of the power the COCODES and COMUDE share has been spent blocking different Mayors’ projects and policies rather than creating concrete plans for the municipality’s development.

Es una lucha. This was the general sentiment among most COCODE leaders, when asked about their ability to get things done in municipal governance. More than one leader said that the Mayor and Concejo Municipal see the COCODES as the “enemy,” when they should really see them as partners. Even representatives of one of the central government institutions that has participated in the COMUDE in recent years noted that when it comes to citizen participation with the local government, “casi no les interesa,” the government is just not interested in it. A COCODE leader further explained:

No mayor is going to inform the COCODES of their rights. The COCODE es lo que exige. You’re never going to see a mayor say, ‘hey come here to participate!’ You need to demand it. If the citizens or the indigenous peoples never demand

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their rights, the government is happier. I heard that many years ago the government didn’t even want them to be able to read. …For the government, it’s better if the people don’t ask for their rights.

Another COCODE leader echoed, “in Tecpan, we are a long way away from the

COMUDE becoming the voice of the pueblo, because the Mayor does not permit it.”

Two points can be made here. First, considering the amount of power that the COCODES do appear to exert in Tecpan (as will become increasingly evident in this Chapter), the fact that many leaders still see themselves battling an intransigent Mayor and local government, I argue, reflects the polarization of views on legitimate authority and decision-making. But, second, evidence does suggest that the local government (since

2001-02) has not taken a great interest in citizen participation, at least in comparison to the cases of depoliticizing and transformative indigenous citizenship (San Juan

Sacatepéquez and San Juan Ixcoy).

One simple measure of a Mayor’s interest in citizen participation is the effort that he or she puts into his or her legally mandated role as Coordinator of the COMUDE.

Whereas some former community leaders expressed that the former Mayor, Romelio

Cua, did try to coordinate with the COCODES, almost all leaders interviewed said that the Mayor of 2008-12, Longino Jiatz, had little interest in working with the COMUDE.

He rarely attended COMUDE meetings, which became a point of contention in 2010 and

2011, when COCODE leaders sought to coordinate with the Mayor to manage the municipal forest. In May 2010, COCODE leaders reported that the Mayor had

“suspended” the COMUDE. They continued to meet, however, and did not consider it suspended. In Spring 2011, they interpreted the Mayor’s failure to attend COMUDE meetings as a strategy to destabilize their own power and unity. Mayor Jiatz would

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usually appoint a Concejal or the Síndico (both members of the Concejo Municipal) to lead the meetings in his absence; but this person would often just bear the brunt of

COCODE leaders’ anger and frustration with the Mayor.

Mayor Jiatz also did not convoke representatives of most public institutions (i.e. local offices of national government agencies and ministries) or local civil society organizations. In 2009, a representative of the Centro de Salud (the Health Center and local office of the Ministry of Health) regularly attended COMUDE meetings, and occasionally members of the National Police and the Ministry of Education would attend.

The local Justice of the Peace and National Police officers were reportedly collaborating with some COMUDE members in a committee on citizen security. But in 2011, none of these actors were present in meetings. In fact, the National Police representative had not been invited to a COMUDE meeting for many months, and the Justice of the Peace did not attend COMUDE meetings at all. Similarly, most civil society organizations were not invited to participate in the COMUDE, even though there were many non-governmental organizations and other associations active in the municipality. For example, the Catholic

Church and Evangelical churches, which often belong to a municipality’s COMUDE (as in the cases of both depoliticizing and transformative citizenship), were never invited to send representatives to the meetings. Other organizations were similarly absent: the association of Mayan spiritual guides, development organizations and cooperatives, or women’s groups. I was able to verify the occasional participation of only one development NGO, and the local association of midwives. Summing up the situation, a

COCODE leader said, “According to Article 11 [of the Development Council Law], the

Mayor is the coordinator of the COMUDE. If there is no Mayor, there is no COMUDE.

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Thus he needs to call together all the institutions. But if the Mayor heads the COMUDE, he should [promote participation].” From what this leader had seen, Mayor Jiatz had never attended a meeting of the COMUDE.

Many COCODE leaders complained of a general lack of transparency and low information sharing about budget and financial issues, and about policy in general. For example, while it is possible to verify how much money the Municipality received from the central government (because this information is available from central government sources), COCODE leaders were never certain how much money the municipality took in from local taxes and fees, how much it spent, and how much the Mayor and other municipal employees earned as a salary. I, too, could not obtain such information. An opposition party Concejal argued that it was the Mayor’s strategy to keep such information secret. “The Office of Municipal Planning is capable [competent], but someone is giving them orders to not give me the information.” The “cabeza” (i.e. the

“head,” the mayor) must be giving the order to not provide information:

You see disorganization but they make it look that way. They do not want to give it. You go for the information and they say someone else has it. You go to that person and they send you to someone else. You ask for the jefe and they say he didn’t come in today, but really he’s sitting ten feet away.

Former Mayor Romelio Cua, although he was more open to participation, also did not maintain a transparent government. In 2011 he was convicted of embezzling public funds during his term as Mayor (2004-08) and went to prison. These experiences lead most

COCODE leaders to concur that, in one leader’s words, “There are issues the Mayor doesn’t want to inform the people about.”

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Competing Visions: Legitimate Authority, Power, and Democratic Practice

Relations between the local state and the Development Councils are tense in

Tecpán. But a full understanding of this relationship, and of the polarizing citizenship regime in Tecpán, must acknowledge that two governing systems have emerged, marked by a struggle over legitimate authority, the power invested in that authority, and democratic practice. One of these systems is supported by the official state, official law, and political party system. The other is informed by Mayan-indigenous identity politics and rests on community-based and indigenous community-framed forms of authority and decision-making, as interpreted by indigenous entrepreneurs who have exerted influence in Tecpán over the past ten years.

The first indication of this struggle is in how people describe the COMUDE.

Mayor Longino Jiatz, the target of much criticism, argued that:

The COMUDE does not function here. The COMUDE is supposed to include the COCODES, the Municipalidad, and the Public Sector. But in the COCODES there are some who say to them, ‘You must dominate.’ So the public sector suffers and hardly attends. We lose time in the COMUDE. The COCODES try to be the most important and say that all the rest are no good. At times there are discussions but they are in Kaqchikel, and the public sector representatives do not understand this language.

Similarly, a former COMUDE member and public sector representaive said that the purpose of the COMUDE is “to receive all the information from the COCODES (the projects that they want), make corrections, and send them to the Muni in order to see if they approve them or not. But this is not how it works. The COCODES do not allow the

Muni to do the work it needs to do.” Among members of the local government,

COMUDE, and the COCODES, most agreed that a key purpose of the COMUDE was to prioritize development projects for the municipio’s communities and coordinate between

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the COCODES and the Municipal Government to get these projects funded and executed.

There was also loose agreement that the COMUDE should address issues that affect the entire municipality; that is, not only address issues that affect a few specific communities.

But many COCODE leaders were insistent that the role of the COMUDE and

Second Level COCODE was much broader. One COCODE leader said:

[The COMUDE] is not just to debate about projects. That is one part of what it is for. There are sixteen functions, according to the law, and the projects are among them. But Article 3 says that the COMUDE is to organize and coordinate the public administration. Organize, and coordinate, oversee the public administration. And what is public administration? It is not just the Municipalidad, but also all the state institutions that manage state funds. … Many believe that the COMDUE is just for projects. But really the number one function is to fiscalizar.140

COCODE leaders frequently complained that their efforts to fiscalizar, oversee the finances of the municipal government and public institutions, were blocked. Another leader said that when the COCODES ask for work plans from the public sector representatives, they are refused information:

But we have “control social,” according to the law. For example, with the hospital. We should know what is going on with the quality of service, if there are enough medications etc. We can fiscalizar but they say we cannot. But they are public servants. We need to fiscalizar so we can support the good that is happening and identify and solve the problems. Now we are only working with the Justice of the Peace and the Police, we have created a Citizen Security Commission, where we learn about police activities, problems, etc. The rest of the institutions don’t want to participate in this way.

This community leader emphasized that one purpose of the COMUDE was to represent all the COCODES. But, a second purpose was to “struggle to try to respect the

Development Council Law,” and prioritizing projects was only one part of this. As a leader quoted earlier did, he took out his copy of the law and pointed to Article 3, which

140 Fiscalizar refers to the process of overseeing public finances including tax collection and other sources of income, and all the types and details of public spending.

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lists “organize and coordinate the public administration” as an objective of the

COMUDE. “That says a lot,” he remarked. He also noted that the law states the

COMUDE should form public policies. “That tells us many things,” he argued.

Other leaders similarly saw that the law “tells us many things.” A longtime community leader said that for the COCODES and COMUDE, “Our objective is to achieve development, transparency, and that the population be consulted, that we decide and not that others decide for us.” This demand to be consulted, or rather the demand that the right to be consulted be respected, was a recurrent theme among COCODE leaders who had developed their own internal norms of consultation. Leaders saw the COMUDE as the “spokesperson” (portavoz) of the communities:

The COMUDE is not the one that mandates, but rather it executes the actions that the [Second Level COCODE] Assembly decides. The community must be consulted if there is a problem. The community authorites have to do what the community decides. But here, what does the municipal government want? They want the COMUDE to make decisions in favor of the municipal government.

COCODE leaders and municipal government officials viewed proper decision- making as working in very different ways. For COCODE leaders, the proper mode was for the Mayor to inform the COMUDE of an issue, and then for the twenty COCODE leaders who participate in the COMUDE to present this issue to the Second Level

COCODE. Depending on the weight of the issue, the latter would consult each of their communities and then come to a decision, either by holding individual community assemblies and aggregating the results, or by voting in the Assembly of the Second Level

COCODE. This would be the final decision, which the municipal authorities must accept.

COCODE leaders expressed frustration at the municipal government’s unwillingness to accept this practice, especially since the law allows them to organize “according to our

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usos y normas,” one leader said, a direct reference to rights that indigenous communities hold. In sum, this perspective, which, I argue, emerged in Tecpán from the influence of indigenous entrepreneurs and mayanization, characterizes legitimate authority in the following way:

1. Base Communities 2. Second Level COCODE 3. COMUDE 4. Mayor and Concejo Municipal

Authentic, legitimate authority rests with the communities at one end, and at the other end are the municipal authorities who must execute the will of the communities.

Consultation structures relationships of accountability between the four levels of authority. However, the process of consultation, and the long debates and discussions in the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE that characterized it, frustrated some members of the local government, public institutions, and even some former COCODE leaders. These criticisms were often couched in characterizations of the COCODE leaders as “conflictive” and “negative,” manipulated by certain individuals, poorly informed or even ignorant of the law, and generally blocking development and progress for Tecpán.

As Mayor Jiatz put it:

The people do not really know exactly what the law says. Here there are eighty- two COCODES, we are well organized. But because of ignorance or maybe the form in which they have become prepared, they are mistaken in what they think their roles are. The COCODES exaggerate their importance. The Mayor has his autonomy too.

Mayor Jiatz saw this confusion over proper authority and decision-making as a long-term problem that had affected the previous mayor, as well. He argued that the COCODE leaders’ demand to be the decision-makers—in essence to be able to veto the Mayor’s

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decisions—was not recognized by the law. He believed they needed better training in the law:

I have tried to tell them that things are not supposed to be like this. I brought Dr. Cardona here—he wrote the law—to explain to them how the law works. But it has not been easy. There are people who want to manejar. There is an NGO from Chimaltenango that gave them an incorrect orientation.

The NGO from Chimaltenango that Mayor Jiatz referred to was the Defensoría Indígena.

Indeed, indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán were linked with the Defensoría Indígena and taught their fellow Tecpanecos that they did have the right to manejar—to run things in the municipality. They took a much broader interpretation of the law than did municipal authorities.

Former Mayor Romelio Vasquez Cua (2004-2008), who had reportedly been more open to coordinating with the COCODES, leveled similar criticisms. In terms of the

COCODE and COMUDE members, “In Guatemala there is no formación so that they can fulfill their function. They block the work of the Mayor.” Those in the COMUDE, he continued, “want functions that do not belong to them.” He gave the example of water provision. When he was Mayor, Cua wanted to raise the monthly fee to five quetzales per household. It had been one quetzal for forty years, and with a large increase in population, there was a greater need for water and for financial resources to improve water provision. Moreover, household incomes had increased such that it seemed fair to ask people to pay more. The COMUDE refused this increase, and settled on a lower one of three quetzales per month. Cua saw this as a result of a “lack of knowledge and analysis.” Overall, “within the COCODES and COMUDE, they want to monopolize a space that is not in the law.”

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Former Mayor Jose Santos Morales Xet (2000-2004) similarly argued that the

COMUDE oversteps its role and violates the power of the Mayor and Concejo Municipal.

The role of the COMUDE, he said, is:

To search for the development of the communities. The COMUDE is like the right arm of the Mayor, for executing projects. But the Mayor and the Concejo Municipal—it is an autonomous entity. Thus… the COCODES and COMUDE cannot interfere. They want to mandate, but they cannot, it is not one of their functions. They are entities of support and fiscalizacion. But they cannot make decisions. They cannot mandate. The COCODES here usurp the role of the Muni. They say they are the authorities… but they are not representatives of the pueblo, only of their communities. They are confused. They are a link, but they cannot mandate.

In fact, Mayor Morales saw the COCODES as disrupting the correct authority structure in the municipio. The alcaldes auxiliares (significantly, he did not use the term comunales or comunitarios) are the true authorities of the communities, he said, and he would rather have received project requests from them rather than from the COCODES. As he saw it, the correct line of authority in the municipio should be:

1. Mayor 2. Concejo Municipal 3. Alcaldes Auxiliares 4. COMUDE 5. COCODES

The contrasting ways legitimate modes of authority, power, accountability and democratic decision-making are conceived in Tecpán reflects not just the clash of an active civil society and intransigent local government. Rather, it illustrates the complicated effects that state decentralization processes can have among indigenous populations when national decentralization laws intersect with identity politics—i.e. indigenous entrepreneurs—and localized norms of authority and social organization.

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Moreover, former Mayor Morales makes a valid point when he argues that the alcaldes auxiliares (or comunitarios) are the primary leaders of the communities and should thus be the ones to interact with the municipal government. In the process of appropriating the

Development Council System, indigenous communities have been given greater decision- making power within the municipality, but the power of the alcaldes comunitarios has in some ways been supplanted by the power of the COCODE leaders, both within communities and at the level of the municipality. Since the law stipulates that COCODE leadership rotate every two years, but local custom dictates that alcaldes comunitarios only be in power for one year (with no possibility of re-election), it is rare that the

“maximum” authority of a community—the alcalde comunitario—would also be the

President of the COCODE. Moreover, the characteristics that inform a community’s decision to elect their alcalde comunitario are often not the same ones that would make for a good COCODE President. The latter must be able to read, write and speak in

Spanish, and must be capable of frequent travel to the center of town. But an alcalde comunitario often (though not always) is someone who is older and revered in the community. Thus in Tecpán, to a certain extent the empowerment of civil society through the institutional framework of the Development Councils has significantly affected pre- existing authority structures within communities.

Rarely did COCODE leaders raise as a problem this transformation of local authority; though the indigenous entrepreneurs (from the Defensoría Indígena) who were involved in the organizing the CAC years ago did criticize some of the more recent actions of the COCODE leaders. These Mayan activists wished to strengthen “authentic” community governance systems that included the COCODE as only one element, and

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saw the alcalde comunitario and council of elders (consejo de ancianos or principales) as the ultimate expressions of indigenous organization and authority, only after the collective voice of the community. At the same time, some COCODE leaders (many of them retired from their positions at the time of interviewing), who could be considered ladinized, criticized the role that most COCODE leaders had taken on in Tecpán’s governance.

One former COCODE leader and local businessman said that the Development

Council Law is “good, but it cannot be applied” because there need to be people who will support the municipal government officials. However, here, “they are always against the

Muni… it is a choque [clash] that the Municipalidad has with them.” He named

Asociación Vida as a particular actor that had been manipulating the people, in order to change their way of thinking. Similarly, a former COCODE leader who had been accused of conspiring with the Mayor for personal gain, said the COCODES are too conflictive and aggressive, disrespectful not only of the Mayor as a human being but also of his position as the maximum authority in the town. He argued that “harmony” was a key word in the law, and that “you need to be polite, sit down and dialog with the authorities.” In sum, be civil. He argued that the COCODES here yell, scream and are aggressive with the authorities:

If you speak loudly, with anger, then you lose respect. The Mayor is the maximum authority of the municipio. But here the situation is reverse. … The COCODES say that they are the authorities and the Mayor is an employee! But it can’t be like that! The function of the twenty (in the COMUDE) is to suggest and propose, but not to impose.

He, too, disagreed with the assistance the COCODES had received from Asociación

Vida.

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A Concejal from an opposition party also argued that the COCODES sometimes abuse their function. Recalling a 2010 meeting at which the Concejo Municipal, the

COCODES, and alcaldes comunitarios were all present, he noted that one COCODE leader (who was also linked with the Defensoría Indígena and upheld the Mayan ideology) stood up and told the alcaldes comunitarios, “you are the maximum authorities.

The Concejo Municipal is here because we voted for them.” This, the Concejal said, reflected “a choque, a contradiction.” He disagreed with the premise that the COCODES or alcaldes comunitarios were the true authorities in the municipality and supported the

Mayor’s legitimacy even though he did not support the Mayor’s political positions and was quite critical of the Mayor’s record. He simply saw the constant political conflict in the municipality as unproductive and inefficient. He represented a political ideology that held up the legitimacy of the official state and political party system. Analytically, he fit within the socio-ethnic category of indígena ladinizada.

A former COMUDE member who represented a public sector institution also fit within this category. He commented that Tecpán is “conflictive,” mainly because

COCODE leaders obstruct any kind of “good development” from happening and prevent the Mayor from doing his job. This informant argued that Mayor Jiatz did wish to engage citizen participation, but the COCODES made that impossible, by fomenting conflict with the Mayor. Echoing Mayor Jiatz, he said that Asociación Vida had given the

COCODES a “bad orientation.” Thus, during COMUDE meetings, “There might be a good development project, but they will oppose it.” The COCODES “want competencies that don’t belong to them. They want to get involved in managing the money… there are groups that oppose and have done much damage.” He noted that many COCODE leaders

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“know the laws like a Senator, but do not put them into practice.” Yet, paradoxically, he perceived that the Development Council Law was “like a straightjacket on the Mayor.”

COCODE leaders and many Tecpán residents counter that these types of negative comments are made when COCODE leaders demand and exercise rights to public information, to oversee the finances of the municipal government and public institutions, to be consulted on issues that impact the municipality, and to make binding decisions through their own democratic processes. One COCODE leader argued that it was not the

COCODES but the municipal government that does not comply with the law: “They don’t like us because we affect their interests, because we want to work with the law.”

Yet, in truth, COCODE leaders often stretched the law when it came to their role in the municipality. On the one hand, a longtime COCODE leader, when asked why local civil society organizations are not part of the COMUDE, asserted that the COCODES are civil society. The implication was that there is no legal or logical need for the COMUDE to include other sectors of civil society—e.g. women’s organizations, churches, or cultural, business or development groups. Taking this one step further, other COCODE leaders asserted that they are not representatives of civil society, but rather “community authorities,” because the communities elect them. They consider themselves authorities not only within their communities, but within the municipality at large, too. Even those who had not reached such a radical conclusion agreed that the proper way to govern

Tecpán at the very least involved sharing power between the COCODE leaders and the

Mayor.

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These differing conceptions of legitimate authority became particularly clear in relation to the question of municipal autonomy.141 Mayor Jiatz interpreted municipal autonomy to apply to the Municipal Corporation (i.e. the Mayor and Concejo Municipal), but COCODE leaders saw autonomy as much more encompassing, applying to the collectivity of the municipality, rather than to its elected leaders. These differing conceptions of legitimate authority and decision-making, and autonomy more broadly, inform nearly all relations between the municipal authorities and COCODE leaders and characterize the overall regime of governance and polarizing indigenous citizenship in

Tecpán. The final section of this Chapter uses an ongoing conflict about how to manage the municipal forest (the Astillero Municipal) as a lens for viewing how these conceptions materialize in practice.

The Astillero Municipal: Site of Conflict, Power, and Ethnic Resistance

Situated towards the west and clearly visible from the town center is the Parque

Regional Municipal Astillero de Tecpán.142 The Astillero surrounds urban neighborhoods in a swath of thick green, covering an area of 1,706.25 hectares. It directly flanks seven rural communities (one of which belongs to the neighboring municipality of

Chichicastenango) and eight private fincas, comprising a total population of roughly

12,000. The National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP) declared the Astillero a

“Protected Area” in 2000, thus limiting the activities and development that can be undertaken there. Although “Protected Area” status gives the national government

141 As referenced in Article 253 of the Guatemalan Constitution and Article 3 of the Municipal Code. 142 Basic information about the Astillero is taken from the Municipal Forestry Office’s “Master Plan,” obtained from the Municipal Forestry Office, and the ACAX/CATIE funding proposal to the FCA (obtained from CATIE).

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(CONAP) legal control over the Astillero, Tecpán’s municipal government administers it in practice (Thillet 2003: 183-259). However, historically most of this land was managed collectively and was considered communal property, until President Manuel Estrada

Cabrera awarded the local state formal control in 1900 (Thillet 2003: 360-361). Since then numerous conflicts have arisen, particularly over the boundaries between the

Municipal-owned land and private fincas. Today it is common knowledge, and a common complaint, that many years ago, the municipal government gave the ladino owners of

Finca Santa Elena temporary use of part of the Astillero, but has never regained control.

That the municipal government so easily gave up this land and now cannot re-possess it seemed to inform COCODE leaders’ positions during recent debates over how to manage the Astillero.

During the past few years (at least since 2007), conflict over the Astillero

Municipal was heightened and, I argue, speaks to the power that COCODE leaders hold

(and perceive themselves as holding) vis-à-vis the local state. It also demonstrates how differing conceptions of legitimate authority and decision-making manifest themselves in practice. Struggles over natural resources present an opportunity to politicize indigenous identity and can result in new configurations of local power and emergent conceptions of legality, local territorial autonomy, and citizenship. This results as indigenous activists utilize national and international legal instruments recognizing indigenous peoples’ rights over land, territory, and natural resources.

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The Ecotourism Project: an elite power-grab?

In recent years, communities and COCODE leaders have blocked two major projects that would have ceded partial control over the Astillero to NGOs allied with the municipal government. The first conflict came to a head in late summer, 2009. An unknown NGO, Asociación de Servicios de Desarrollo Forestal, Salud, Educativos,

Infraestructura y Varios (ASEDAFASEIVA), had received permission from both former

Mayor Cua and the current Mayor Jiatz, to develop an eco-tourism project in the

Astillero.143 Notably, the NGO mainly represented the economic elites in the municipio, many of them ladinos. This included the Tecpán Tourism Council (CAMTUR) and owners of the nicer hotels and steak house restaurants that brought wealthier

Guatemalans to visit from the Capital on weekends. The project would involve fixing roads that lead into the Astillero, building cabins, and clearing trees. The NGO Director argued the project was justified, based on the Municipal Forestry Office’s Master Plan, which listed ecotourism as an objective for the Astillero.144 However, even if the Master

Plan was developed in consultation with community leaders—that is, the COCODE leaders and alcaldes comunitarios—the NGO’s project was never publicized. Through the town’s rumor mill, COCODE leaders learnt of the project in early 2009 and began investigating. Most information about the project, including the extent of the municipal government’s relationship with the NGO, was kept secret. However it soon was clear that local authorities were in close communication with the NGO.

143 Legally in Guatemala, ASEDAFASEIVA was not a “NGO” but rather an Asociación Civil No- Lucrativo. 144 Section 2.5, Objective 7 states “desarrollar el potencial turistico, con el fin de garantizar beneficios economicos para las comunidades locales.”

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In spite of these obstacles, the COCODE leaders used the space of the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE to a) pressure the local government to provide information, b) compile that information with the bits of information that each community leader had personally collected, and c) develop a plan of action, which was to carry out community consultations. Each community held an assembly, and residents voted on whether or not they approved of the eco-tourism project. The results were recorded in each COCODE’s

Libro de Actas, and most communities turned in to the Municipalidad a photocopy of their Acta. A majority of the communities voted to reject the project, arguing that it would deforest the area, contaminate their water, and benefit only the owners of the expensive restaurants and hotels in Tecpán. Moreover, they viewed the project as an underhanded move to privatize control over the Astillero. As one former COCODE leader expressed:

We didn’t want it. Because only the people that we know have restaurants, hotels, and many things of value, [those would be the people who would benefit]. They want to mandar from above. But the Astillero belongs to the municipio—they are the owners. … The Municipalidad said it was just going to reforest but we went up there and saw ranchitos [little cabins]. And that they had cut down trees and built baños ciegos [dry latrines]. There was contamination. So we opposed the project because here it’s going to contaminate and perjudicar [damage] us.

Under pressure from the Second Level COCODE, the Mayor suspended this project.

However, he was also involved in a separate project with virtually the same people who were collaborating in ASEDAFASEIVA. This project had a more clearly benevolent function— environmental conservation—but resulted in an even greater conflict than the ecotourism project.

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Reforestation and Conservation: an attempt at “rendering technical”

The second project was aimed at reforestation, soil conservation, and maintaining the natural water sources that emerge from the Astillero. Although it is a protected area, the Astillero is poorly policed and has suffered increasing deforestation over the years, as residents of Tecpán’s rural communities (and even urban neighborhoods) cut down trees to sell as firewood. According to engineers in the Municipal Forestry Office, in 2008, seventy hectares had been deforested. And, in May 2010, tropical storm Agatha left parts of Tecpán devastated, as deforested mountain slopes and soaking rains produced dangerous mudslides that destroyed houses, schools, roads, and water services. All agree that deforestation is a problem in Tecpán.

From an outside perspective, this project seemed a pristine opportunity to address this problem. It was well developed, fully funded by external sources, and supported by the municipal government. The project was a product of collaboration between a Costa

Rican NGO with operations in Guatemala, Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Ensañanza (CATIE), and various organizations and individuals in Tecpán who grouped under the Asociación Civil Ambiental Xayá (ACAX). CATIE had a strong track record in

Guatemala of working with local populations on projects involving coffee, forestry, water, and food security. Their goal in all projects was to involve civil society, municipal governments, the private sector and communities in the sustainable management of natural resources. Since their involvement in a project is always temporary, they seek to train local actors to make projects sustainable for the long-term. ACAX appeared to include all the actors that CATIE would want to work with, and thus was as an ideal association with whom to partner. Specifically, ACAX included local businesses

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(CAMTUR and the businesses it represents), private stakeholders (large landowners bordering on the municipal forest), the local government (the Mayor was President of

ACAX, and the Municipal Forestry Office would be a key actor in the project), the

Instituto Nacional de Bosques (National Forestry Institute, INAB), CONAP, the Ministry of Environment, and (ACAX leaders claimed) local communities. Significantly, ACAX members insisted that they had sought and obtained participation of the COCODES.

ACAX leaders initiated the idea of developing a reforestation project, and then sought out CATIE for technical assistance. Since one of CATIE’s environmental engineers worked in the Municipal Forestry Office a few years ago, the collaboration came naturally. Together they developed a funding proposal and eventually secured nearly 1.5 million quetzales (over $200,000) from the Fondo de Conservación de

Bosques Tropicales (FCA), a granting agency funded by the United States Agency for

International Development (USAID), Conservation International, and the Nature

Conservancy, among other institutions. The twenty-month project began in November

2010. Yet at that time, and throughout the entire process of planning the project,

COCODE leaders were never involved or even informed of what was happening, and argued that they were denied their right to consultation.145

For this reason, many questioned whether the goals and results of the project would in fact be reforestation. In Spring 2011, rumors abounded in Tecpán. At a community assembly in Barrio Patacabaj in May 2011, a COCODE leader warned

145 Records of COMUDE meeting minutes from February 2009 indicate that a representative from ACAX presented the project idea to the COMUDE, but there was no sign that any collaboration (or future communication) between ACAX and the COMUDE resulted. The minutes also state that ascertaining legal land tenancy (of the Astillero) would be part of the project—to possibly recuperate public land upon which private large landholders had encroached. But this element, so important to COCODE leaders, was absent from the project that was funded.

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neighbors, “A big monster has come, that wants to take advantage of our resources, which is our Astillero… Let’s be conscientious about what’s going on.” Many were convinced that the Mayor wanted to concede the Astillero—the “pulmones de Tecpán,”

(Tecpán’s lungs)—to a private company for fifty years, and maybe longer. They said he planned to sell all of Tecpán’s water to Guatemala City, while many families in Tecpán still lacked water. Some believed he was going to cut down all the trees and get rich selling the wood; it required little stretch of the imagination, since many past Mayors were believed to have done the same (Fischer 2002: 56-57). And given the broader political context in the country, where the central government was conceding sub-soil rights to transnational corporations, many assumed Tecpán was falling a similar fate— that is, that the Mayor would bring mining operations to Tecpán. A former COCODE leader described the situation as a “war against the Municipalidad.” People were worried because even if they did not know the technical, scientific reasons why the Astillero was important, they knew that it kept their air fresh and provided them with water, and that they needed to protect it.

The aspect of the project that produced intense conflict was thus not substantive but procedural: who would participate in the project planning, execution, maintenance, and evaluation, and what would this participation entail? By not consulting the Second

Level COCODE and COMUDE, CATIE and ACAX had “rendered technical” the management of communal lands. As Li writes, “to render a set of processes technical and improvable an arena of intervention must be bounded, mapped, characterized, and documented; the relevant forces and relations must be identified; and a narrative must be devised connecting the proposed intervention to the problem it will solve” (Li 2006: 126).

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Reforestation and conservation of the Astillero Municipal was conceived as a clear-cut problem that could be solved with technical solutions devised by experts; even community participation would only occur with the intervention of experts who would teach proper conservation procedures (Table 5.2 lists the main project activities, indicating those that were completed). In rendering forestry management a technical activity, rather than a complex social and political one, CATIE and ACAX had removed it from political debate and democratic control. Whereas efforts at rendering technical a mining project were successful in San Juan Sacatepéquez (where indigenous citizenship had a depoliticizing character) in Tecpán such efforts failed, as COCODE leaders forced an open debate over the reforestation project. This debate, and the overall conflict over the project’s procedures—that is, the who, what, and when of the project’s planning, execution, maintenance, and evaluation—reflected differing perspectives on legitimate authority, power, and correct democratic practice in Tecpán. These perspectives, I argue, also corresponded to processes of mayanization and ladinization.

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Table 5.2: CATIE-ACAX Reforestation Project Activities • Reforestation: with a goal of covering 70 hectares (this was partially completed) • A study on the prevention and control of forest fires (never completed) • A plan for the management of the forest (completed) • Soil conservation, to prevent mudslides (never completed) • Strengthening of the Municipal Forest Office: to better equip it for preventing illicit cutting down of trees (never completed) • Creating Escuelas de Campo—this aspect of the project would take place in nine communities closest to the forest. The communities would choose leaders who would learn about environmental conservation from CATIE; then these leaders would administer workshops in their own communities. (never completed) Responsibilities: Finances: CATIE Execution of Project Activities: ACAX, Municipal Forestry Office

Although the written project proposal indicated that the COCODE leaders were members of ACAX and key participants in the project, not one of them was actually participating. The Mayor and ACAX members who were interviewed insisted that the

Second Level COCODE had named two representatives to participate, yet there was no evidence of this. A former member of the COMUDE’s three-person Environmental

Committee said someone came to them to talk about the project. This individual was never invited to be part of ACAX, but after that meeting the other two members of the committee joined the project as representatives of the COMUDE and COCODES, without the approval of the rest of the Second Level COCODE. These two individuals were widely seen as friends of the Mayor, and as purposely pushing his positions to the

COMUDE. Moreover, ACAX never presented the project to the Second Level COCODE assembly, “which is where we make decisions.” Other COCODE leaders similarly

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complained that no one had told them anything about this project. At a Second Level

COCODE meeting (May 10, 2011), COCODE leaders voiced their disapproval. One said that the engineer from CATIE was trying to make the project sound so good, “But why were we not told anything of this years earlier? It is molestante [very bothersome] that so many years afterwards they are informing us of this, it is a lack of respect.” Failing to include the COCODE leaders in the project from the beginning led many of those leaders to vehemently oppose the project.

Yet, the reasons for their opposition did not make sense to those who wanted the project to go forth—the Mayor, members of ACAX and CATIE. The engineer from

CATIE, in a Second Level COCODE meeting, argued that it would be illogical to reject this project, since in the past the COMUDE’s Environmental Committee had presented a list of activities that are included in this project, like soil conservation and reforestation.

CATIE representatives said Tecpán was fortunate that an organization wanted to work with them on this project, and that most Mayors had no interest in supporting reforestation. ACAX members were frustrated because it was quite difficult to secure funding for these kinds of environmental projects and they had been successful after much hard work. In frustration, they tried to understand the reasons for the COCODES’ opposition. An employee in the Municipal Forestry Office thought it was for political

(party) reasons and that “bad leaders” had urged others to oppose it. A former COCODE leader said it was the COMUDE’s responsibility to develop a plan to protect the Astillero, but until now they have failed—so why do they want to reject this project, which is already funded? Some suspected that COCODE leaders had a “hidden agenda” and opposed the project for personal interests.

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These frustrations emanated from a key disagreement over what constituted legitimate authority, power, and correct decision-making in Tecpán. An ACAX member complained that the COCODES say they are the ones who “mandar” but since this is a protected area, it belongs to CONAP, not the municipio and not the communities. The

Sindico (3rd in command in the municipal government) complained that the COCODES always focus on the “negative” and never the positive aspects of projects. Exasperated, he asked in the May 10, 2011, Second Level COCODE meeting, “Does every NGO have to come here for permission to work?” He pointed out that there are many NGOs working in

Tecpán and the COCODES rarely have a problem with any of them.

Many COCODE leaders, however, believed this project and NGO were different because they intervened in local governance: the project’s very goal was to govern how the forest was managed, and the process by which the project was developed dictated who would be included in that management. To further develop their legal and substantive critique, the twenty COMUDE representatives met together and planned out a response. They argued to the Second Level COCODE assembly, that ACAX was

“usurping the role of the COCODES and community representation system. It is robbing us of our own form of organization and decision-making.” The main objective of the project, they said, was to “take away the rights of the communities to their lands and natural resources.” They argued that the project was being executed in a forma viciada,

“corrupt form.”

More generally, they argued for a form of decision-making and mode of legitimate authority that was based in the communities and community-level democracy, and not in the Municipalidad or any other organization. One former COCODE leader said

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that the project “sits apart from the communities and from the municipio. The project is not good for us because it is not going to benefit the pueblo. It is good to protect the forest, but they are trying to take the territory away from the community. Because these are tierras comunales.” That is, they are lands that are collectively held and managed by indigenous peoples. This right to tierras comunales is protected in the ILO 169, and more loosely in the Constitution.

COCODE leaders pointed out that “the law gives us the right to be consulted, but there was never a consultation.” Another COCODE leader emphasized this point, as well as the importance of the education in their rights that they had received from indigenous entrepreneurs.

If the COMUDE representatives were not prepared, through Asociación Vida which gives capacitaciones to all the COCODES and communities, so that they know their rights—this has helped a lot. The Astillero is a jewel, a mine. Why? Because there are 150 water sources that go to various municipios—Quiche, Sololá, San Andres Semetebaj, Santa Apolonia, y Balanya. But what has happened? When the COCODES did not exist, the Municipalidad sold all the water sources… Ahora, ya NO. If a water source is sold, immediately you have to tell the people—hay que consientizar. My abuela told me that before, there was a lot of forest, but there were no autoridades comunales in the forest, so [the municipal government took advantage]. The communities need to agree to the projects. If not, it will be three or four people making decisions for everyone. We want participation, consultation, and not particular interests deciding things

COCODE leaders also leveraged the law to argue why the project’s entire premise was illegal. A former COMUDE member said that what ACAX was doing was based on the Protected Areas Law, which gives CONAP control of the land, and even to cede control to other institutions.146 “And that is what is going on right now, even though that part is not included in the proposal. It’s hidden. Here is the thing: la comunidad has never accepted that CONAP would have control of the Astillero.” This leader, and many others,

146 See: Ley de Areas Protegidas, Decreto No. 4-89; and Reforms to the Ley de Areas Protegidas, Decretos 110-96 and 117-97.

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said the government in Guatemala often makes laws without consulting them, and this was just the latest example. He continued:

We as indigenous peoples have the right to be consulted. There was never a consultation so for us, this is not a protected area and thus CONAP cannot do anything. If it were by another way… We want to work on reforestation, but that it be the community that manages the resources. It is good when the communities manage the resources. We have never accepted that this is a protected area. In no moment were the communities consulted. There is no Acta, no agreement, no nothing to show that we were consulted.

Similarly, a current COMUDE member argued that the Astillero “does not belong to

CONAP. Because there are international tools that support us.” He flipped through his copy of the Constitution, to article 46: “International human rights conventions that

Guatemala has ratified have prevalence over national law. Thus the ILO 169 is previous to the CONAP law…Before the COCODES, this did indeed exist! But they never informed us about what activities they wanted to do.” He argued that neither the local nor national government in Guatemala respects the law, and considered international rights covenants, including ILO 169, to be the law.

This community leader expressed a sentiment echoed by many: “We don’t want other institutions administering the Astillero. In Sololá it is the Municipalidad and the

Alcaldía Indígena that administer the forest.” Sololá is a nearby Kaqchikel municipio where indigenous traditional authority and leftist parties have controlled local power together for years, and where strong mechanisms of democratic accountability are in place, making managing natural resources a more collective affair. But COCODE leaders in Tecpán noted that ACAX was a private association and, they argued, private associations should not be working in communal lands. A COCODE leader summed up

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their sentiments: “We are the owners here in Tecpán, and not those who come from outside.”147

The idea that authority over the forest should be based in communities and not from outside was so strong that, for many, it outweighed any environmental benefits the project might bestow. One COCODE leader argued, “Póngale: Here we can talk about up to 100 million dollares for reforesting the mountain. But you can know well the consequences when the pueblo no longer has any voice of vote.” He reiterated their fear that an outside institution would take over control of the Astillero, arguing that it does not matter how much money this reforestation project is worth, or how it might benefit the environment, because it if disrupts local authority over the Astillero, then it is worthless.

There was precedent for this line of reasoning, and many Tecpanecos likely shared it. In

Tecpán, the archeological ruins of Iximche, an historical site and sacred place within

Mayan culture, used to be accessible to everyone, but in 1960 was appropriated by the central government and later turned over to INGUAT.148 Now Tecpanecos must pay a fee to enter, and can only enter during business hours. The reforestation project threatened a similar fate for the Astillero.

COMUDE leaders, who included at least one activist from the Defensoría

Indígena, argued these very points to their fellow leaders in the Second Level COCODE.

They described ACAX as a “Super NGO” that claims to represent the pueblo, but in truth only represents “special interests.” In fact, they characterized all the organizations involved as representing “special interests,” and not truly interested in environmental

147 This was not the first time actors from outside of Tecpán, both state and non-state, had come to manage the forest by applying technical knowledge. See Thillet (2003: esp. 222-223). However, in the past, the population was not organized enough to resist. 148 Congreso de la Republica de Guatemala, Decreto Número 1360.

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conservation. For instance, they criticized the Municipalidad’s participation in the project. The Mayor was President of ACAX, which they saw as a conflict of interest. Yet, arguably, his participation in the organization was a main reason why CATIE partnered with them and the FCA funded the project. Moreover, it would arguably not make sense for a reforestation project to not include the Municipal Forestry Office as a key partner.

Yet, for many community leaders, it was impossible to believe that the Mayor had a true interest in reforestation. They also worried that the employees of the Municipal Forestry

Office would personally profit from the project.

Ultimately, the COMUDE and Second Level COCODE converted this project from one that had been “rendered technical” to a question of “indigenous” rights. Their proposal, presented in the Second Level COCODE, was to reject the project, and instead create a “Consejo Comunitaria Indígena,” which would be charged with formulating policies and projects for managing and conserving of the Astillero.149 They argued that there was a strong legal basis for this proposal, citing:

• Article 109 of the Municipal Code (regarding tierras comunales of indigenous peoples and the right to previous consultation) • Articles 66 and 67 of the Constitution (“Protection of ethnic groups” and “Protection of indigenous lands and agricultural cooperatives,” respectively) • The Peace Accords: The Accord on Socio-Economic Aspects of the Agrarian Situation and The Accord on Identity and Rights of the Indigenous Peoples • ILO Convention 169, Part 2, articles 13-19; dealing with indigenous land rights and the right to previous consultation

The COMUDE delegated one of their members to present these ideas to the Second Level

COCODE assembly on June 7, 2011. In the presentation, this leader emphasized the connection between the conflict they were facing and the struggles of indigenous peoples

149 This was an idea that was brewing in Tecpan for years, as evidenced in a document written by unnamed COCODE leaders in 2004, proposing “El Consejo Indígena de Protección de los Recursos Naturales.”

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throughout the world. Standing in front of the assembly, he waved in the air a document from the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. “The United Nations has published some bulletins, and they safeguard and watch over the interests and rights of the indígenas and ladinos pobres.” He noted that now there are international organizations that “support our form of organization. That support our costumbres. The

United Nations supports us so we can continue our practices, and backs up our right to be consulted.” He ticked off on his fingers the many indigenous peoples that live in the

Americas—Mayas, Mapuches, Aymaras, among others—and reiterated that the United

Nations protects the rights of all these peoples. “We can auto-determinar. We can make our own decisions,” he concluded. The concept that as indigneous peoples, the people in

Tecpán have the right to decide for themselves what kind of development they want, and to make these decisions through their own procedures and with their own forms of authority and legitimation, informed many COCODE and community leaders’ thinking about local governance, especially when it came to the reforestation project in the

Astillero. For many, the decision of whether to approve the project had little to do with whether or not it was a good project, substantively, and everything to do with the effect this project might have on a) their right as indigneous peoples to collectively control their territory, and b) local governance and the relationship between civil society (qua communities and their leaders) and the state.

Exercising the Right to Consult

The Second Level COCODE meeting of June 7, 2011, was to culminate in a final decision. COCODE leaders and alcaldes comunitarios from communities throughout

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Tecpán attended, as did representatives from Asociación Vida and the Defensoría

Indígena—both had been assisting the community leaders in this conflict. Members of the Consejo Municipal, the Municipal Forestry Office, ACAX, and the Mayor attended, as did representatives of CATIE. The latter wished to explain the project again and answer all questions, explaining that consultation is part of their overall work plan.

After hours of presentations, arguments, and deliberation, the Assembly prepared to vote. During the previous Second Level COCODE meeting, leaders had resolved to hold consultations within their respective communities (as had been done in past consultation processes). However, those community consultations had not yet taken place, and thus an ad-hoc consult process began. One COCODE representative from each community, and all members of the Concejo Municipal who were present, voted by secret ballot. COCODE leaders asked me to take photos and video of this “democratic process,” as they excitedly referred to it.

One by one, COCODE leaders from each community came to the front of the room, and received a small slip of paper on which they wrote one word: si or no.

Concejales did the same. All the ballots were placed in a placed in a plastic bag. When all the voting was done, the Assembly chose one COCODE representative and one alcalde comunitario to count the votes at a table in the front of the room, where the Mayor sat, powerless. Thirty-one voted in favor, forty-two voted against, and one abstained.

The consultation process raised many questions about legitimate authority and democratic practice. First, why did Concejales vote? Why were their votes kept secret, given that they are elected municipal authorities? Second, what was the role of the alcaldes comunitarios in this process? They were not given the right to vote—nor did

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they openly demand it—but they are otherwise considered the maximum authorities in their communities. Defensoría Indígena activists who assisted the COCODES in the process were particularly critical of the way the alcaldes comunitarios had been mostly shut out of the decision-making process. Finally, why were COCODE leaders’ votes kept secret? Most did not hold community assemblies before the consultation; now that their vote was secret, no one would ever know if they had followed their community’s will.

Overall, the consultation process was meant to be a democratic mechanism for holding the local government accountable, but it actually led to a breakdown in accountability.

Defensoría Indígena activists who were indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán since 2002 criticized what they saw as a negative turn in local politics; they would have preferred to see the alcaldes comunitarios more involved, and for communities to have held assemblies, culminating in a more democratic process.

Similarly, an Asociación Vida activist in conceded that a process based on individual community assemblies would have carried a lot more weight. But he also argued that “the people already know what is happening above,” so it was not necessary to hold formal consultations in all the communities. While it is not certain why the assembly decided to hold the consultation immediately in that meeting, it was deemed necessary to make the voting secret out in order to protect those who voted against the project from possible retaliation by the Mayor and other municipal officials and employees.

However, many COCODE leaders voted for the project, clearly seeing it as a step forward. An inside source revealed that seven of the nine communities that would have been “direct” beneficiaries of the project, voted in favor. In sum, for thirty-one COCODE

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leaders, the cost of potentially altering local governing power relations, and in turn affirming the legitimacy of the Municipal authorities and the Municipal Forestry Office, was a fair price to pay for gaining important skills and resources to combat environmental degradation. It is also possible that some of those leaders believed they could reform the project to include their participation. More than one leader had openly expressed that if the COCODES were given control over the project, they would approve it. In response,

CATIE had suggested various ways to directly involve the COCODES, including completely removing the Mayor from the project and handing over the Presidency of

ACAX to the COCODES, or even replacing ACAX with the Second Level COCODE.

They invited COCODE leaders to form a commission that would oversee the project’s finances, ensuring its transparency and providing an opportunity to learn how to properly fiscalizar a large project—a complex task that the local government had never allowed the COMUDE to fulfill.

In the end, it was clear that the conflict over the Astillero was not about whether or not reforestation and soil conservation made sense. First, it was about differences in legitimate authority and decision-making. Many of the COCODE leaders, as well as the

Defensoría Indígena and Asociación Vida, believed that the Astillero must remain under communal control at all costs. Even though all agreed that reforestation was a necessity, and there was already a fully funded plan in place to do this, many COCODE leaders wanted the communities or at least the Second Level COCODE to be the ones not just to execute but also to create a plan for the Astillero’s sustainability. They objected to

CATIE and ACAX’s efforts to “render technical” the management of the forest. Instead, they viewed the forest management as an inherently political question—one that would

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require debating and deciding among conflicting alternative projects (Mouffe 2005: 10).

For them, a true expression of indigenous self-determination would have to eliminate

ACAX and CATIE and allow the communities to control the entire reforestation process.

A general distrust of official state authority also helps explain why many opposed the project. For example, COCODE leaders only reluctantly allowed municipal officials to be present at their meetings—which took place on municipal government property.

And, in one of the many Second Level COCODE meetings convened to discuss the reforestation project, leaders pointed out that in the past, Mayors have presented projects and have cut down tress; so why would this time be any different? The authorities here, one leader said, have never sat down with us “in good faith.” More generally, “They sit down and sign documents, without a care if they violate our rights.” Community leaders were distrustful also because of the way that the municipal authorities had gifted tracts of forestland to large ladino landholders many years ago. Their anger at these transgressions, and their worries that private large landowners’ involvement in this project would result in more private land concessions, came through frequently in the

COCODE meetings and in private conversations.

Even given CATIE’s numerous concessions to the COCODES, many still opposed the project, because it would involve the municipal government through the

Forestry Office—which they viewed as inherently corrupt, regardless of who worked there. They did not want an NGO working in the Astillero unsupervised, but they also did not want that NGO to cooperate with the Municipal Government, including the Forestry

Office—whose main legal mandate was to manage the Astillero. They believed that one way or another, the Mayor, Concejo Municipal, and ACAX would personally benefit

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from this project. Even if the Mayor were the best qualified for a job that the project required be filled, they did not want him to have it.

The night after the consultation, I sat in on a small meeting of COCODE leaders in the center of town. Doña María had missed the consultation and enquired how it went.

Carlos replied: Calidad! Translation: “It was awesome.” Still puzzled, I asked why they rejected what could have been a good project. Carlos responded, “Pardon me, Jenny, we know you are here with good intentions. But—and please do not be offended—you were not born in Tecpán. You do not understand how corrupt the government here has always been.” He listed all the reforestation projects over the years that have never worked out or become sustainable. He complained about the water tubes getting destroyed after

Tropical Storm Agatha (in 2010), and the Mayor not having any interest in fixing the problem—“but somehow he has the time and volition to work on his political campaign and form ACAX!” All the reasons for opposing the project seemed to point to one general sentiment: Many COCODE leaders saw the local state—not only the particular people in the local government—as inherently corrupt, and saw community-based governance, which was removed from political parties and was a more direct and arguably democratic form of decision-making, as truly legitimate.

Conclusion

In Tecpán, indigenous entrepreneurs were key agents in leading a local social movement to appropriate the Development Council Law in order to democratize the municipio and build a community-based form of governance that, they argued, reflects indigenous (and specifically “Mayan”) norms and values. In turn, community leaders

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became educated on the technicalities of the law (including those that support

“indigenous” rights), and many adopted the indigenous entrepreneurs’ goals of infusing local governance with significance that is framed as indigenous and sometimes as Mayan.

Principally, this meant focusing on the legitimate power of the communities to make decisions. As institutions, the COCODES, Second Level COCODE, and COMUDE became powerful and influential in the municipality’s governance. But neither these institutions nor the concept of indigenous community-based governance became hegemonic in the municipio because political and economic elites remained quite powerful. This produced what I argue is a case of polarizing indigenous citizenship.

Why use the term ‘polarizing’? Because, the central feature of Tecpán’s citizenship regime since the application of the decentralization laws has been a bifurcation of legitimate authority, substantive power, and democratic decision-making.

This bifurcation exists both in practice and conceptually, in people’s minds. In practice, there is a clear struggle between the (majority of) COCODE leaders on one hand and the

Mayor and Concejo Municipal on the other, over who is the authentic legitimate authority in the municipio, what powers that authority holds, and what limits to its power exist.

This polarization characterized general perceptions about what the COCODES and

Mayor could or could not legitimately do and decide. Constant struggles over the governance of the Astillero Municipal provided a lens through which this bifurcation became clearer.

Yet, the nature of polarization runs deeper than a simple conflict between civil society and the local state. Many COCODE leaders and COMUDE members, though part of “civil society” in Tecpán, wanted to see the constant conflict end and the Mayor have

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more power. But moreover, I argue that this struggle is also imbued with ethnic politics and reflects polarizing processes of ladinization and mayanization. It is a struggle over indigenous community-based democratic ideals, versus the official state and political party system. Many who criticize the COCODE leaders and even the Development

Council Law itself, argued for placing more legitimacy in the official state and Mayor.

By contrast, many current and former COCODE leaders believed the official state needed to be radically transformed. Some proposed creating an Alcaldía Indígena—a system of authority that would be based entirely in the communities, with no relationship to political parties. Indigenous entrepreneurs—especially those who were linked to the

Defensoría Indígena today and in the past—saw this as an ideal that would translate a vision of Mayan culture into reality in the realm of local governance.

Tecpán also demonstrates the complicated, sometimes negative effects that decentralization can have when implemented in places with pre-existing indigenous institutions. Ironically, as indigenous entrepreneurs empowered communities through the

Development Council Law, they simultaneously weakened community-based authority institutions. Here, the maximum authority figure within indigenous communities has always been the alcalde comunitario.150 However, conflicts between customary and official law mean that the alcalde comunitario usually cannot be President of the

COCODE. This creates a situation whereby the COCODE, as an institution, supplants traditional authority structures. The consequence of this reconfiguration of community authority was evident in the conflict over the Astillero. Many indigenous/Mayan activists—especially those from the Defensoría Indígena and splinter movement

150 Except during the internal conflict, when the army created Civil Auto-Defense Patrols in indigenous communities, ripping apart their own organizational structures (as discussed earlier in this Chapter).

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organization COCOM (Consejo de Comunidades Mayas)—view this as problematic and in recent years have refocused their efforts on strengthening community-level organization, which they view as more authentic and legitimate.

Finally, Tecpán’s polarizing indigenous citizenship regime carries observable consequences in terms of governability and development: it appears nearly impossible to achieve basic development goals and implement projects (aside from community-based ones), because there is so little cooperation between the state and civil society. The silver lining, however, is that there has been a clear break with the dirty politics of the past.

While political and economic elites are still powerful and relevant, no longer do unnamed

(and often ladino) elites “call the shots for those in public office,” as Fischer (2002: 54) reported was the case ten to fifteen years ago. A polarizing indigenous citizenship regime is at least a more democratic one.

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CHAPTER SIX

TRANSFORMATIVE INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP: SAN JUAN IXCOY

Ronaldo manages a Q’anjob’al radio station that promotes the culture, language, and rights of San Juan Ixcoy’s people and communities. He is a former member of the

Municipal Development Council (COMUDE), having represented the community radio station as part of organized civil society. One early morning in April 2010, he explained how the COMUDE was formed in San Juan Ixcoy. The COMUDE did not emerge from the decentralization process, he insisted. Rather, it was the way the “abuelos pasados”— their Mayan ancestors—communicated and made decisions.151 “That is how it was from the beginning. But when the invaders came to this country, when they came to invade, the philosophy of the abuelos was undermined. They militarized people’s minds,” and looked for ways to divide them. “For that reason, the COMUDE was terminated for a long time,” and instead politicians and governors made all the decisions in the municipio.

They were the “owners”—“it wasn’t the people anymore. Years passed, years and years.

The people lost the abuelos’ way of thinking.” During the internal conflict, he said, even more was lost—but they never forgot entirely. Ronaldo continued:

…we came, thinking, thinking, thinking, about the story of our abuelos. So, we took advantage when the Peace was signed in Guatemala… and where it says in the Accords, rights of the indigenous peoples, the identity of the indigenous peoples—that is where we base ourselves. Thus we began talking, talking and talking. That is why the current municipal government is working for the people. A united people. Revolutionary. Guatemalan. With these two periods, with [the Mayor] who is here now, now the change is visible. That is it…. the formation and valorization of the COMUDE was achieved.

151 Abuelos pasados means “grandparents from the past.” It is a term that refers to Mayan culture, and specifically to the Mayan spirituality, where ancestors are revered. In Mayan spiritual ceremonies, participants will ask the abuelos for wisdom and guidance.

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Ronaldo is an indigenous entrepreneur in San Juan Ixcoy. Like other indigenous entrepreneurs, he saw the COMUDE as a way to rescue elements of Maya-Q’anjob’al culture that had been decimated in the past. Those elements included “ancestral” methods of social organization, community authority, and legitimate (democratic) decision- making. He explained the COMUDE as a cultural form that had always existed, but had been weakened by centuries of colonialism, internal colonialism, and violence. Now, in the post-Peace era, Ixcoyenses had the opportunity to reconstruct that cultural form— open, participatory, democratic decision-making. Granted, the COMUDE, even in the way it has taken shape in San Juan Ixcoy, is likely far from a replica of the abuelos pasados’ communication practices. As with many aspects of Mayan identity politics, idealized conceptions of the abuelos’ cultural practices are best understood as reconstructions of history in light of the present. But for indigenous entrepreneurs in San

Juan Ixcoy, making that link between the COMUDE and the abuelos served a two-fold purpose. First, it helped them promote participatory democracy in the municipio, down to the level of individual rural communities, by arguing that it is something inherent to the local culture and should naturally and logically be adopted and strengthened. Second, it served as an ideological construct for revalorizing Maya-Q’anjob’al identity and culture and combatting persistent racism, which is often internalized by individuals. Indigenous entrepreneurs have also used Q’anjob’al culture and identity to promote sustainable development. Engaging in projects to improve agricultural production and (hopefully) expand to new markets, purchase fewer processed foods, utilize medicinal plants for health care, keep the land clean and clear of trash, and include women, youth and children in all community decisions and activities, are initiatives that the indigenous

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entrepreneurs have promoted as strategies for development and a way to rescue the practices of the abuelos, lending renewed value to their culture.

In sum, San Juan Ixcoy presents as a case of transformative indigenous citizenship, marked by cooperative governance between civil society and the local state.

As such, it exemplifies the positive end of the possible outcomes multicultural policies like decentralization can have when implemented on the ground. Here, the sense of having a right to participate in political decisions, and actually exercising that right, has become an engrained practice, similar to the case of polarizing citizenship in Tecpán.

More specifically, community leaders and representatives of organized civil society expect to coordinate with the municipal authorities to make decisions about budgets, policies, and projects in a participatory and collaborative manner. But in contrast to

Tecpán’s polarizing citizenship regime, the local government here expects and actively encourages this participation, integrating it into their overall governing agenda.

Decentralization reforms effectively broadened the space for political participation in a way that also valorizes indigenous culture and identity—even if sometimes only through discursive means. It is not always clear what “true” indigenous culture or traditions are in

Guatemala, and in San Juan Ixcoy, community organization and authority structures were mostly dismantled during the years of the armed conflict. The decentralization process therefore presented an opportunity to give new life to community organization, in a way that is both decolonizing—by recognizing and valorizing local knowledge and seeking to overcome gender discrimination—and productive, by linking it to the municipal government. Indigenous entrepreneurs creatively appropriated decentralization and other legislation that affirms indigenous rights in order to take as much advantage as possible

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of the financial and other resources of the Guatemalan state, while simultaneously asserting local autonomy over territory and governance, and even paving the way for individual indigenous communities to assert agency and autonomy over their localized development and governance practices.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs and Weak Elites

San Juan Ixcoy is a small, isolated, poor, and nearly 100 percent indigenous municipality; perhaps surprisingly, is the place where Guatemala’s most radical changes in indigenous citizenship are happening. This Chapter analyzes the transformation of indigenous citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy by focusing on the role played by indigenous entrepreneurs in implementing the decentralization laws to favor citizen participation and indigenous rights, working from their position as part of both civil society and the state, at times seeming to fuse the two. Indigenous entrepreneurs, connected for years through the local Presbyterian Church and through local and regional (ex)guerrilla networks, in

2002 organized a small social movement that sought to democratize the local state.

Similar to the case of polarizing citizenship in Tecpán, the indigenous entrepreneurs successfully mobilized the local population to push the local government to implement the decentralization reforms just as they went into force in mid-2002.

They were able to do this relatively easily. First, indigenous entrepreneurs here are quite knowledgeable, especially with regard to laws dealing with local government and indigenous rights, and have rich experience in political activism, due to their long- term connections with the guerrilla and the regional and national indigenous movement.

Their resources helped them to organize effectively and take the decision to utilize the

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decentralization laws to effect change in local citizenship. But just as important, compared to Tecpán and especially to San Juan Sacatepéquez, political and economic elites here are weak, if non-existent. Opposition mostly exists in the form of local manifestations of the powerful, national political parties. There is little local industry, and few Ladinos. During the Liberal Reform period (1871-1944), Ladinos seeking labor for large plantations in the west coast of the country made inroads into rural communities in

San Juan Ixcoy in order to proletarianize the residents, sometimes stripping them of their lands and sending them into debt (McCreery 1988). Since then, some of these lands were returned to communities during the agrarian reform in the 1950s, and a few years ago, labor migration ceased. Today, land inequality is relatively low compared to both San

Juan Sacatepéquez and Tecpán.152 In sum, there is relatively much less elite opposition to political change in this municipio.

Consequently, in the municipal elections of Fall 2003, indigenous entrepreneurs used the leftist URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca) political party as a vehicle for wining power in the municipal government, and sustained it for two terms

(2004-12). This was quite a feat in Guatemala’s volatile political climate and weak political party system. In Tecpán, the inability of indigenous entrepreneurs to gain power in the official state spurred a polarizing regime of citizenship. By contrast, in San Juan

Ixcoy, occupying the local state provided indigenous entrepreneurs an unprecedented opportunity to push Van Nieuwkoop Van Nieuwkoop Van Nieuwkoop their vision of culturally pertinent participatory governance, especially since winning municipal elections in Guatemala means taking the seat of the Mayor and half the Concejo

152 The Gini coefficient for land inequality is .54 (Rodríguez 2006: 17, calculated from the 2003 Instituto Nacional de Estadistica’s Agropecuario Census)

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Municipal (the Town Council), the other half to be split among the many remaining parties, who in many cases never amount to a unified opposing force.

For eight years, indigenous entrepreneurs occupied the local state, but at the same time remained in civil society—as COCODE leaders, alcaldes comunitarios, religious leaders, Mayan spiritual guides, and activists within civil society organizations in the municipio. Rather than a typical political party, the URNG—at both the national level and in its local incarnation in San Juan Ixcoy—is best understood as a “social movement party,” the political arm of a social movement (Heller 2001). Effective social movement parties strike a “delicate and workable balance between the requirements of institution building and grassroots participation” (Heller 2001: 133). Like the parties that Heller writes of—the African National Congress, Communist Party of India–Marxist, and

Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Brazil—the URNG used its position of power to

“initiate fundamental reforms in the character of local government” (Heller 2001: 133), while also maintaining close ties to the local civil society organizations and base communities in the municipio. URNG elected officials assumed the role of leaders, sometimes making executive decisions about important matters, such as requiring communities to be well organized and prepared before they could receive funding for certain types of development projects, supporting indigenous collective rights (including aspects of the law that support indigenous traditional authorities), and forcefully enacting policies and programs to serve the most vulnerable sectors of the population—women, youth, and children. But their executive decisions were always based on general policies and goals that community leaders and members of civil society had collectively prioritized through the space of the COMUDE.

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Transformative indigenous citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy thus rests on a carefully equilibrated “synergistic” relationship between state and society (Evans 1996). As such, it in many ways mirrors the experiments in “empowered participatory governance” of which Fung and Wright (2003) wrote: “real world experiments in the redesign of democratic institutions, innovations that elicit the energy and influence of ordinary people, often drawn from the lowest strata of society, in the solution of problems that plague them” (Fung and Wright 2003: 5).153 What differentiates San Juan Ixcoy’s experiment is that it is a new, transformative regime of citizenship and local governance that seeks to work with the Mayan culture of the local population in order to strengthen the participation of communities and individuals, with the overall goal of reforming the state from below.

The Chapter proceeds by first briefly contextualizing San Juan Ixcoy within

Guatemala, geographically and demographically. Next, I address the identity of the indigenous entrepreneurs—where did they emerge from? What is their particular ideology? With what other movements are they networked? This discussion sets the stage for examining the municipio’s political history, and the involvement of the indigenous entrepreneurs in that history—including the quality of local citizenship prior to the decentralization process, and the process whereby indigenous entrepreneurs and an emergent civil society pushed the local government to form the COMUDE, in 2003.

Next, I examine the process by which the COCODES and COMUDE as new spaces for citizen participation and local governance became further institutionalized, as the

153 The empowered participatory governance experiments included neighborhood governance councils in Chicago, habitat conservation planning under the United States Endangered Species Act, Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting process, and panchayat reforms in West Bengal and Kerala, India (Fung and Wright eds. 2003).

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indigenous entrepreneurs took over the municipal government. I then illustrate the ways that the local government, in concert with the COMUDE, solidified citizen participation in the municipality since 2004. Finally, I address how culturally infused citizenship and local governance has been more deeply implemented in San Juan Ixcoy since 2007, in order to promote culturally pertinent and sustainable development, inclusive democratic practices, and intrinsically valuable cultural revitalization.

Demographic and Geographical Context

San Juan Ixcoy is located in the Department of Huehuetenango, in the northwestern region of Guatemala, nestled among the Cuchumatanes mountains. The town center is located in a picturesque valley, made verdant with forest, rivers, and fields of corn and vegetables. Spread over an area of 224 square kilometers, some of the municipio’s fifty-five communities experience sub-tropical weather, while others are located high in the mountains, almost above the tree line. Overall this is a much more rural municipio, when compared to Tecpán and San Juan Sacatepéquez. From the center of town it takes roughly two hours to reach the departmental capital, Huehuetenango.

Residents must buy food at the twice weekly market (Sundays and Thursdays), since there are virtually no opportunities to purchase food during the rest of the week, especially if one lives in one of the many villages that are located up to two-and-a-half hours from the town center.

In the 2002 Census, San Juan Ixcoy’s population measured 19,367; the National

Statistical Institute projects it grew to 25,847 by 2010 (Camposeco, Thomas, and

Krenmayr 2008: 16). In 2002, the last time the census was counted and detailed statistics reported, over ninety-six percent of this population self-identified as indigenous

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(Camposeco et al. 2008: 18). Of this indigenous population, most speak Q’anjob’al; however one rural village speaks Akateka, and three speak Mam. Amid such multiculturalism, there is little to no conflict of an ethnic nature. In 2008-12, the Mayor was Q’anjob’al and the Vice-Mayor was Mam.

Compared to the other two municipalities analyzed in this dissertation, and compared to the country as a whole, San Juan Ixcoy is very poor. In terms of quality of life, a government study ranked it the twenty-second lowest among 333 municipios, “very low” (SEGEPLAN 2008). Although the government since 2004 has been firmly committed to progressing in the areas of education, health, and production (mostly agricultural), indicators in these areas are low. The United Nations Development

Program reports that eighty-five percent of San Juan Ixcoy residents are poor, and thirty- two percent are extremely poor (PNUD 2007: 17). Residents here survive on migrant remittances (almost always from the United States) and agriculture, mostly subsistence— though some products are grown for the local market. Bringing products to and from the market is a challenge, given the narrow dirt roads that connect rural communities with the center of town, and the dearth of vehicles available (there is no regular public transport).

Communities located high in the mountains face additional challenges. The harsh climate and high altitude means they can grow only potatoes and have little access to water during the dry season. This lack of agricultural production and potable water produces even higher rates of poverty than found in the rest of the municipio.

Primary schools exist in all villages, but it was only during the past eight years that rural villages obtained access to middle school, and the first high school was recently built in the town center. In 2007, forty-three percent of adults were illiterate (in Spanish),

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and this number jumps to forty-nine percent among women (Camposeco et al. 2008: 21).

However, with the increased access to education, these numbers may have improved over the past four years. Finally, health care is scarce. In 2010, the municipality opened a new small hospital, but there are not enough doctors, nurses, and medicines to fill it, and most medical professionals speak only Spanish. Traditional healers and midwives, using inexpensive homeopathic remedies, provide most health care in rural areas. The municipal government in 2008 began work to train natural health promoters in all villages, help villages grow community medicinal plant gardens, and provide all villages with medicine chests.

In sum, San Juan Ixcoy is a poor and largely uneducated municipio, and a place where the costs of citizen participation would tend to be quite high. This makes it even more remarkable that such a radical transformation of citizenship and local governance has occurred, though it also presents great challenges for making this new citizenship regime lead to a greater quality of life.

Indigenous Entrepreneurs

Within this context, indigenous entrepreneurs emerged from three main sources of social organization: the leftist guerrilla insurgency, national indigenous activist networks, and the Presbyterian Church. In fact, San Juan Ixcoy is somewhat unique in terms of the degree of networks between local residents and regional/national indigenous movement organizations.

During the armed conflict, San Juan Ixcoy experienced considerably less violence compared to neighboring municipios. However, many in San Juan Ixcoy sympathized with the Marxist guerrilla insurgency (or at least with its leftist ideals) and even

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participated in it. Through the guerrilla, many of these people became important leaders in the town, and even in the nation, participating in the peace talks in the 1990s.

Of the indigenous representatives in the post-Peace Accords joint commissions

(Comisiones Paritarias) that were charged with creating legislative proposals to put the

Accords into practice, two were natives of San Juan Ixcoy. Saturnino Figueroa (Mayor from 2008-12) chaired the Mayan delegation to the Commission on Reform and

Participation, which wrote draft proposals for the three laws that are now the foundation of the country’s decentralization process.154 This made him especially well qualified to help interpret the decentralization laws to the benefit of the indigenous people in his municipio. Another San Juan Ixcoy resident represented the indigenous organization

Tecum in the peace talks, and after the Peace Accords were signed, became part of the

Comisión Permanente del Pueblo Maya, which sent him as a delegate to a joint commission on Mayan language officialization. Active participation in national-scale political debates to solidify the peace process connected these activists and others from the municipio with the discourse, ideas, and resources of indigenous rights activism that was flourishing in Guatemala at that time.

Both of these activists and others in the municipio have also been involved in the

Academía de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (Guatemalan Academy of Mayan

Languages, ALMG), an autonomous government institution founded in 1990 and dedicated to promoting Mayan languages and culture. It is not a social movement organization, and as an institution subject to government funding it cannot participate in political projects. But it has served as a means to network activists from different parts of

154 Half the membership in these commissions was indigenous activists, the other half were government representatives.

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the country who might in turn form their own social movements. This is precisely what occurred among ALMG-linked activists from the northern municipios of the Department of Huehuetenango who speak Q’anjob’al, Chuj, and Akateka.

Since the early 1990s, these activists had begun meeting and discussing their peoples’ problems and possible solutions. In 1993-94, they formed an organization called the Coordinadora Maya Q'anjob'al Chuj. This organization had little impact beyond bringing together indigenous cultural and rights activists from different municipios.

However, these new networks eventually resulted in a more organized regional movement in 2003 (and perhaps as early as 2000, according to one informant), called the

Parlamento Q’anjob’al’ana, or Patq’um in Q’anjob’al. “Pat” refers to a “house” where discussion and analysis takes place, and “q’um” refers to the process of searching for answers, in solidarity with one another.

Saturnino Figueroa explained that in their discussions, and especially after the results of the 2002 Census were released, they were able to see precisely the level of poverty that their people experienced—among their municipios, about eighty-seven percent lived in poverty. They connected this to the local state. On the one hand, “we began to understand that there was a divorce, there is a separation, between the municipal governments, and the unorganized civil society.” But on the other hand,

we also began to believe that there are many proposals of the indigenous peoples that can rescue the present-day civilization. Because the civilization… it is in crisis. It is not just a financial crisis, and that’s that. It is also an ideological crisis, a political crisis. It is a crisis of values, verdad, Western civilization. Thus when we see that there is a human race that is at the point of becoming extinguished, verdad, from global warming, from destroying nature, it’s that when we see all of this model, then we begin, as well, to see that the pueblos originarios, there are proposals, there are values that can rescue the civilization that is in crisis.

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They thus saw Patq’um as a model that they wanted to “rescue,” and one that would promote “analysis and discussion, let’s say, of proposals and values” that can be used to confront a crisis of civilization that is not only a local, nor a Guatemalan crisis, but a global one.

A Patq’um activist from another municipio explained that in many ways this amounts to answering the questions: How can we transform the state? And, How can we do it based on our own forms of organization? He argued that it would be impossible to do so utilizing the political party system and the constraining Guatemalan state. But in

San Juan Ixcoy, where indigenous entrepreneurs linked with Patq’um won the municipal elections in 2004, they built upon the exiting state in order to promote “a new model of organization that departs from how it was before,” Figueroa said. At the regional level,

Patq’um activists hope to one day develop a semi-autonomous regional government among the Q’anjob’ales, Chujes, and Akatekos in Huehuetenango. As this Chapter will illustrate, many of the leftist ideals of the guerrilla, and cultural ideas of the Mayan movement that were developed in the Patq’um, were combined and diffused in San Juan

Ixcoy through the activities of the municipal government from 2004-2012.

A final important basis of indigenous entrepreneurs was the Presbyterian Church.

Evangelical churches, often established by politically conservative U.S. missionaries, have played an important role in depoliticizing indigenous people in Guatemala in general, and in San Juan Ixcoy more precisely. Evangelical pastors often urge their congregations to eschew both party politics and community governance and instead “look to heaven” for an eventual escape from their poverty. One of the most visible evangelical churches in Guatemala, the Presbyterian Church has often (though not always) had a

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depoliticizing impact (Samson 2007). However, in San Juan Ixcoy, it was an important actor in organizing the local population to combat their poor living conditions, and had the indirect effect of creating the basis for a civil society that would seek to democratize the local state and work for sustainable development. In fact, both URNG mayors (from

2004-08, and 08-12) were from communities where the Presbyterian Church was active.

According to key informants, the U.S. missionaries of the Presbyterian Church arrived and began working in San Juan Ixcoy in the 1980s, during the height of the civil war. The influence of the church grew, and today there is a network of ten Presbyterian churches—a main one in the center of town, and the rest scattered throughout rural communities. The Pastor of the church in the center of town explained that in 1986, the church began working on desarrollo integral (comprehensive development) and organized people to work on projects to improve their lives, especially agricultural projects. In explaining the ideology of the church in San Juan Ixcoy, the Pastor said, “We always think not only of the Church but also of the community. We think about the orphan, we think about the widow, we think about poverty, and everything.” The church here thus saw its mission in a much more broad sense, one that considers life on earth.

The Pastor asserted “when there is food, when there is clothing, thus it is Glorious. You have to take advantage of what you have now, that is Glorious.” They looked to the teachings of Jesus and the Bible in order to justify taking actions to improve their lives:

“We see that Jesus has done a project, when he fed those 5,000 people when they emerged from the desert.” Today, the Presbyterian Church studies the Bible, but relates it to reality, and to their Mayan culture, imparting new value and legitimacy on it. “The

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Mayas have done much, much, work. Thus, there is unity. And Jesus, what does Jesus want? He wants unity!”

A leader from a rural community where the Presbyterian Church first worked explained that during the height of the civil war in the 1980s, the Church worked in programs for agricultural production, health, and education, and gave community members training in these areas, just as the municipal government is doing today. It is likely that these activities, which would naturally involve some sort of organization, were possible only because they were conducted under the auspices of an evangelical church.

In the 1990s, members of the Presbyterian Church became organized in San Juan Ixcoy under the name COSPREC—Presbyterian Christian Service Committee (Comité de

Servicio Cristiana Presbyteriana). Many leaders in communities, organized civil society, and the municipal government mentioned this organization as an important actor in San

Juan Ixcoy for years.

Surprisingly, then, the Presbyterian Church and the guerrilla insurgency had much in common in terms of their greater goal of improving the lives of the poor peasants, even if they diverged in their means for achieving that goal. Many indigenous entrepreneurs who led the process of implementing the decentralization reforms and more generally democratizing the local state, drew their ideology from these two sources. And, although many individuals may have participated in both the guerilla and the Presbyterian Church, there were surely some who were not part of both, or whose histories were more complicated. For instance, Andres Rafael López, who began organizing for democratic change in the 1990s and was elected Mayor in 2004 under the URNG party, had an ideological basis in the Presbyterian Church, and possessed an ideology that could be

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considered both leftist and Mayanista. He once said he would like San Juan Ixcoy to write up a “Reglamento Indígena” that would essentially codify a set of customary laws for the municipio, as well as establish a greater degree of political autonomy from the local state. Given this guiding ideology, it might be surprising that he was not a guerrilla sympathizer and led his community’s Civilian Self-Defense Patrol during the 1980s.

In sum, though San Juan Ixcoy is geographically isolated, many residents were networked with the Marxist guerrilla, indigenous activists from throughout the country, and a progressive version of the Presbyterian Church. These indigenous entrepreneurs thus held a sophisticated ideology that blended a practical Marxism with anti-racism and a Mayanista cultural worldview. They possessed knowledge of the workings of the state and laws, as well as activist knowledge on how to lead and mobilize people. And, they were skilled in how to frame problems and solutions with Mayan culture and identity.

Political History in San Juan Ixcoy

Historically, local governance here was characterized by a high degree of community autonomy, with little relationship with the official state in the municipio or beyond. This changed during the internal conflict, when the army penetrated deeply into community life. But as the country emerged out of the conflict, space opened up for political change in the municipio. Below, I elaborate on each of these aspects of San Juan

Ixcoy’s political history.

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Community Organization before 2003/04

As in other municipalities, alcaldes comunitarios existed to oversee internal problems and conflicts within families or between neighbors. These were the leaders of the communities, along with other traditional leaders like Mayan spiritual guides and midwives. In some communities, guardabosques and guardafuegos also existed and continue to exist, to prevent the illicit cutting down of trees and uncontrolled forest fires, respectively. Also, development committees existed in all villages for decades before the

Development Council Law was passed. Initially they were named Comité de Desarrollo

Integral, and then later changed to Comité Pro-Mejoramiento. Importantly, development committees were not seen as the main source of authority in the communities. Whereas alcaldes comunitarios are elected annually, according to local custom, members of development committees were elected but might in their posts for up to ten years. A community leader explained that especially during the armed conflict, “There was no democracy in that time. There was violence and militarism in that time, when those of the

Comité Integral were serving their posts. They worked a little dangerously because there was no peace.” But similar to the COCODE, their purpose was to work on community

“development”: find assistance for projects to improve the community. A project might be a new school classroom, potable water access, electricity, or building or widening a road connecting the village to the center of town. Like in other municipalities, the municipality had very few funds, so occasionally a community would receive assistance for improvement projects, but most of the time they had no help. As one community leader explained, “It’s because there was no money. They didn’t send any money, the

Congress. It is not like in the United States, where there are roads everywhere. The

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government did not help the indigenous people in that time.” If a community obtained project assistance, it was usually thanks to an institution of the national government or international cooperation.

In fact, in the past the municipal government maintained virtually no relationship with many communities, especially those most removed from the town center. Before the

COCODES and COMUDE were established, the Mayor and Town Council made all decisions alone, absent consultation with community leaders or civil society organizations. There was no way for community leaders or anyone else to participate in decisions about projects, budgeting, or plans. Community leaders reported that the Mayor hardly communicated with their villages in the past, although if one wanted a project, it was necessary to speak directly with the Mayor, as he made all decisions. It was clear that clientelistic relations between the municipal authorities and the communities were historically the mode for deciding where community projects would go. If the Mayor were to “look well” (dar una buena vista) upon a community, they might receive assistance. Moreover, no one had any information about the municipality’s finances, and many said there was a lot of “corruption” in the past. As described later in the Chapter, the population’s frustration with local government corruption and the mayor specifically, was the key factor motivating a the local social movement, led by indigenous entrepreneurs, to pressure for the implementation of the Development Council law.

Impact of the Internal Conflict on Community and Municipal Life

The internal conflict left an indelible imprint on San Juan Ixcoy. As already noted, many residents were tied to the guerrilla, specifically the Guerrilla Army of the

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Poor (Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres, EGP), but the guerrilla’s impact here went further than influencing future indigenous entrepreneurs, as described above. Part of the

EGP’s strategy was to destroy town halls in all municipalities in Huehuetenango: “The guerrilla saw the municipal governments and town halls as symbols of state power and argued that the municipal registers helped to maintain the system of land tenancy that did not favor the poor peasantry” (Kobrak 2003: 57). Thus in October 1981, the EGP murdered San Juan Ixcoy’s Mayor, and in May 1982 destroyed the Town Hall. The guerrilla’s presence could be seen in other incidents as well. For instance, on separate occasions in 1982, guerilla forces destroyed a road and burned various vehicles and buses

(Kobrak 2003: 56).

The municipio suffered at the hands of the Army, as well, but less so than nearby municipios where entire villages were extinguished. Although there were killings— including ones that residents recounted in interviews—the Army’s impact here was more psychological and cultural.155 As in most indigenous municipios, social organization was prohibited. “No one could get together, no one could have meetings, no one could be together. [The soldiers] prohibited it,” recalled one community leader. People lived in a constant state of fear. Youth were forcibly recruited into the army and then upon returning to their communities, served as leaders of the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civiles

(PACs)— as Chapter Three explained, the PACs were Army-imposed community self- policing units that prevented meetings and subversive action. The imposition of the PACs weakened existing forms of leadership, organization and decision-making in the communities, and replaced it with a coercive and hierarchical order. PAC members were

155 Likewise, the Commission for Historical Clarification (1999) reported few incidents of violence in San Juan Ixcoy.

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experienced in the military culture, but not in their own culture, Mayor Saturnino

Figueroa (2008-12) emphasized: “Maybe it would have been better to kill us than to have this psychological damage.” Today, the ex-PAC commissioners are often Presidents of the COCODES, carrying on their role as leaders in the community. However, the

COCODE as an institution, with its requirement that leaders be chosen and decisions be made democratically, is actually helping destroy hierarchical leadership patterns in the communities. Later in this Chapter, I explain how the municipal government and

COMUDE have sought to break down the socio-organizational remnants of the PACs.

Politics and Municipal Government, 1990s-2004

In the years leading up to the signing of the Peace Accords, and as Guatemala slowly transitioned to a democracy, engaging in political activity in San Juan Ixcoy became more viable. As described above, the Presbyterian Church and the guerrilla appeared to share important aspects of their ideologies, particularly the need to concentrate on combating poverty through concrete actions. Likewise, certain activists from both of those camps were also involved in national and regional indigenous activism networks. Collectively, these indigenous entrepreneurs became involved in local politics, with the idea of cleaning up the local state and promoting their development projects and anti-poverty agendas at the municipal level, using government funds.

However, accomplishing those goals posed an enormous challenge, given the unfavorable local political climate at the time.

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Community, civil society and government leaders recounted a history of political corruption and citizen exclusion in San Juan Ixcoy. Former Mayor Andres Rafael López

(2004-08) explained:

In the 1990s, San Juan Ixcoy was always a very abandoned municipio. There was no citizen participation, no participation of women, there was a lot of corruption. …We were excluded. Only the municipal authorities—they were only seven and those seven people, it was only they who would make decisions, without consulting the population [to see] if they needed some type of project. When projects were planned by the municipal government, there would often be no concrete evidence that the money had actually been invested.

Former Mayor Ismael Juan Puac allegedly would buy votes, and in 1993 he went to jail for fifteen days, reportedly for robbing the town. As some put it, he was “corrupt” and “was laundering dirty money.” In response, there was a social uprising and frequent political demonstrations in the center of town, some of which threatened the Mayor’s life.

As former Mayor López put it, “in those days, there were problems. There were problems, there were demonstrations. People came from different communities to demonstrate in the park. They criticized the Mayor and treated him badly.” After that, there was increasing pressure on the local government to operate more democratically.

In 1995, indigenous entrepreneurs formed a Civic Committee (Comité Cívico

Ixcoyense)—that is, a local political party that legally exists only in the municipality and for the present election cycle. With the Civic Committee, they won one seat on the

Concejo Municipal in 1996.156 In the words of one informant, they “wanted to have a mayor who would do something for the community.” Many perceived that mayors tended to promise things but never deliver. The Civic Committee was a response to this sentiment. Although they lost the Mayoral election, they continued organizing and gradually more people joined. In 1999, the indigenous entrepreneurs leading the Civic

156 Their candidate for Mayor, Andres Rafael López, would win years later, in 2004.

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Committee dropped it and instead latched onto a left-leaning national political party, the

Frente Democratica Nueva Guatemala (FDNG), in the hopes that with a national party’s strategy and resources they might be more successful. However, they lost to the right- wing Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG) candidate, Edwin Díaz, in 2000. It was during Díaz’s administration that frustration with corruption would reach an all-time high, and decentralization reforms would provide a path towards citizen participation and local government reform.

Informants recalled that people were frustrated with Díaz’s general lack of transparency and disregard for the greater needs of San Juan Ixcoy. One explained that partly because Díaz was from the right-wing FRG party, he acted in a very authoritarian way. Since the FRG had a majority in Congress at the time and was thus a very powerful party, Díaz “felt like he could do whatever he wanted.” But it was one particular move on his part that generated the greatest ire among the population.

In order to win the 2000 election, Díaz made an offer to landless peasants living in one of the municipio’s mountainous communities, Chanchocal: he promised them the legal titles to the municipal-owned land on which they were squatting. However, when he won the election and had not yet given them the land, the villagers came to town and slipped him 40,000 quetzales (between $5,000 to $6,000). As one informant put it, it was a mordita—a bribe. But this mordita was also recorded in the meeting minutes of a neighborhood association in the community, and thus became public knowledge. Slowly people in the rest of the municipio discovered what was going on—that is, that the Mayor was selling public lands without consulting the people (as required per the Municipal

Code) and was pocketing the profits. Conflict erupted in Chanchocal, sometimes

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resulting in violence. As one person described it, “there was practically a war in

Chanchocal. People died, blood was shed.” Another recalled the population’s anger at the

Mayor: “they were going to throw him out. They were going to burn down his house. It’s that he did not administer well.”

This social conflict served as a political opportunity to seek structural change in

San Juan Ixcoy. Not only people in the affected village, but many Ixcoyenses, too, were now angry with the Mayor, and were actively staging political demonstrations. A former

COMUDE member argued that the people were finally “awake” and ready to keep an eye on the local government. He attributed this new political action as the factor that prevented Mayor Diaz from “stealing the money” from the municipal government. The realization that there was no space for citizen participation, no “freedom” for participating as citizens, as this informant put it, emerged just as the Guatemalan

Congress was preparing to pass a trilogy of decentralization laws that would address these problems of local governance. At that time, most residents of San Juan Ixcoy did not know very much about rights or the law. But those activists—the indigenous entrepreneurs—who had been organizing together through the Civic Committee and later the FDNG in the late 1990s, met with Mayor Díaz to discuss opening up the local government to citizen participation and forming the Community and Municipal

Development Councils.

Among these activists, some were well acquainted with the decentralization legislation that would soon go into effect, and pressured for its application. A member of this small movement explained that the leaders from the left were “looking out for the common good of the society.” They saw that the laws had been passed, and then: “We

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forced it. If it had not been for the rise of the left here, we would not be working with the

COMUDE today.” Pushing to form the COCODES first, and later the COMUDE, meant holding many cabildos abiertos (open town meetings) and traveling to rural communities to spread the word. However, they faced opposition from the local government. For example, former Mayor Andres Rafael López (2004-2008) was a leader in his rural community at the time, and recounted that after trying to form the COCODE:

The Mayor refused me. He would say it is being planned or there is no time, and ‘we will let you know.’ Much time passed, but we wanted it. When this law went into effect, we organized the COCODE. But in the end, we organized this group and well, what happened? Now we are organized. The law gives us the faculty to organize. Good. Although, he (Díaz) did not want it. But with the pressure of groups and leaders, the COCODES were getting organized.

“No quiere, no quiere, y no quiere!” As López said above, even faced with citizens who were educated in the new laws, Mayor Diaz was not interested in opening up the municipality to greater participation. Likewise, upon asking informants how the

COMUDE was formed in San Juan Ixcoy, the phrase “Díaz did not want it” (no quiere!) almost always figured into their response. One said, “The Mayor did not want other people to come and mandar [give orders] or put forth other ideas. The Mayor was the one who made decisions about how he was going to govern the people, the municipio. That was the form of governing in that time.” Another longtime activist elaborated:

The Mayor in that time was a mayor… maybe not prepotente [arrogant] but, he was not liked because we—I as a leader and other leaders too—we had to get together to go and talk with the Mayor so that he would organize the COCODES. We had to implore him various times, until finally he accepted, because he did not want the COCODES to be organized, for one simple reason: Because he knew that if the COCODES were organized, they would always be able to do a social audit.157 Precisely because of this, he didn’t want it, he didn’t want it.

157 A social audit—auditoria social—is when the citizens collectively and transparently audit the Municipal Government’s income and spending.

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When Diaz finally capitulated to the pressure of civil society and allowed the

COCODES and COMUDE to be formed, little progress was made. The local government made no effort to provide information or assistance to communities that sought to organize their COCODES. All organizing and educational work was done by the indigenous entrepreneurs who had pushed for the implementation of the Development

Council Law in the first place. When, in the run up to the 2003 elections, they joined the

URNG political party to run candidates for local office, establishing and strengthening formal arenas of social organization and citizen participation in local government was the crux of their campaign. This dovetails with the overall URNG party platform, which emphasizes expanding and deepening democratic participation and respect for indigenous, women’s, and human rights. As the political party manifestation of the former guerrilla insurgency, the URNG now seeks to transform the Guatemalan state not through armed combat but through political participation. Moreover, whereas the URNG and the four guerrilla armies that formed it tended to push issues of ethnicity and culture to the sideline during the internal conflict, since the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, those issues have become more and more central to the party’s ideology. In San Juan

Ixcoy, as the Chapter will gradually demonstrate, government by the indigenous entrepreneurs in the URNG addressed both issues of indigenous culture and identity, and socio-economic problems, treating them as inextricably linked.

The municipal elections at the end of 2003 was thus a crucial moment in San Juan

Ixcoy’s political history, for it presented indigenous entrepreneurs an opportunity to

“capture” the COCODES and COMUDE, effectively turning them into open spaces of public deliberation and coordination with the local government. A central premise of this

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dissertation’s analysis is that the COCODE and COMUDE, as institutions, are extremely malleable. Whereas in some places they have been used by the Mayor to construct a clientelistic web or, as in San Juan Sacatepéquez, to depoliticize important questions about development, in other municipalities—such as Tecpán—they have served as spaces for revolutionary change. Thus in San Juan Ixcoy, citizen participation and local government coordination, always part of the indigenous entrepreneurs’ ideology, could be institutionalized using the Development Council Law. Further, the COCODES and

COMUDE could be used as tools through which to promulgate a heightened awareness and appreciation for Maya-Q’anjob’al culture, and link the latter to conceptions about how governance should work, and how socio-economic development should be pursued.

According to current URNG sympathizers in San Juan Ixcoy, other political parties in 2003 argued against forming the COMUDE, while at the same time using the

URNG’s legacy as an armed guerrilla insurgency to sway people away from the party.

But election results demonstrate that residents were convinced by the URNG. The party won thirty-nine percent of the vote; this was not an absolute majority of the vote, but it is worth noting that in a field of eleven political parties, the party to come in second place only garnered thirteen percent of all votes. Once the URNG and the new Mayor Andres

Rafael López were in power, the hard work of strengthening citizen participation and governance through coordination with civil society began. In this moment, civil society began to fuse with the local state.

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Institutionalizing the COCODES and COMUDE

The Municipal and Community Development Councils in San Juan Ixcoy were first formed in 2003, but at that time, still under Mayor Diaz’s administration, only a small handful of COCODES were formed. Moreover, without the full participation of the communities, the COMUDE—first convened in May—was not fully functioning. The

COMUDE meetings during 2003 were thus aimed at institution building: constructing a space for citizen participation and coordination with the local government. Meetings often focused on planning and financing training and workshops for the COCODES that were being organized in the municipality’s many communities. Indigenous entrepreneurs were present and important leaders at these meetings, but they were not as successful as the indigenous entrepreneurs in Tecpán (or the political elites in San Juan Sacatepéquez) at increasing participation. At some meetings, less than twenty people attended; and some meeting records revealed much disorganization and no meeting agenda. At this point (in

2003), serious efforts to include participation of all communities and sectors of civil society, and establish effective coordination between the latter and the local government, had not yet begun.

Most community leaders asserted that the process of organizing their community’s COCODE, and the COMUDE itself, really happened in 2004, when the

URNG assumed power in the municipality. For instance, upon being asked when the

COMUDE was formed, a community leader responded that it was “when we managed to get this Mayor, this revolutionary, in the Municipality. Only then did we manage to organize ourselves. It is because of this revolutionary that we are now awake.” Another community leader similarly credited former Mayor López as:

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…the one who gave training to the COCODES, about production, about education, about health, and about the regulation of the COCODE. How there are regulations and how it works, what functions it has, how it’s organized. The COCODES began to be organized in every community, because [with] Don Edwin, apparently only eighteen communities were organized, but when Andres entered, then all the communities, all the caseríos have COCODES. And every month we have an ordinary meeting. Every month.

As this community leader’s words suggest, and as will be described below, the indigenous entrepreneurs, through URNG and the municipal government, used their political power to set into place a system of participation and overall governance that reflected the values that they had been developing since the 1980s. Former Mayor López recalled that installing this system of participation, and in particular forming the

COMUDE, was quite challenging, not only under Díaz, but even when he and the rest of the indigenous entrepreneurs were in the government:

Ahh… Yes, yes. [It was] difficult. Difficult because as I told you, the laws are made hasta allá [over there], and only afterwards come here. We had to analyze well, we had to read well. We had to make sure the community leaders understood: what is going to be the result, what is going to happen and where, where does this law come from… That is very difficult because today we talk about one thing and already tomorrow it is another thing in the communities. We asked for Actas,158 we asked them to meet, we asked them to form thirteen people, and then… Other information gets to them! ‘NO! That is a lie! That it’s this and that and the other thing…’ You know? So, it took us a lot of effort to find out how to organize according to the law, you know? We did not make the law. Rather, the law was made over there, then it just comes here and at times we are ignorant of it, you know? But the community leaders, the women, the women are going to have participation in the COMUDE. For many it is so much effort, you know? So, they take it as if its not so important. So that yes, it is a lot of effort.

In sum, creating and institutionalizing new forms of citizen participation and participatory governance was a difficult process. In the first place, even after the 2003 elections completed, certain local actors from other political parties tried to obstruct this process. This is what López referred to in describing the way communities would receive

158 An “Acta” refers to the meeting minutes from the communities’ COCODE assemblies.

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alternate information about how to organize. But second, they did not write the law, but rather it was “made over there,” as López said, in the Congress of Guatemala City.

Despite the fact that the process of drafting the decentralization law proposals included participation by representatives of indigenous organizations, the final result did not include all of their suggestions. Moreover it was written in Spanish technical legal language. It was a law of the Guatemalan state, and not created for or by the Q’anjob’al people, but it was one that they would need to follow. This is why Mayor López emphasizes the analytical and educational work they had to, in order to implement the law—a process not unlike the one that Tecpanecos undertook as they “got to know the state” in order to transform it (as described in Chapter Five). They needed to read it well, to understand it, and find a way to make it work given their local needs, knowledge base, and capacity for organizing. Understanding how to mobilize the law in favor of indigenous peoples’ rights was key to San Juan Ixcoy’s success in organizing civil society and the communities. This was just as true in 2004 as it was four years later, when Saturnino Figueroa assumed the Mayor’s office. As Figueroa commented to me, “I always tell other mayors, the laws are not complete, you have to expand them. The mayors need to contribute, to make a good reality.” He believed that there was much opportunity to use the decentralization laws as a springboard for improving socio- economic development and deepening local democracy, all while valuing Maya-

Q’anjob’al culture.

The first year of López and the URNG’s administration in the municipality was dedicated to strengthening the COCODES and COMUDE. From the first meeting of the

COMUDE in February 2004, promoting citizen participation was a priority, as all agreed

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to use the local radio station to educate the population about their rights and obligations under the new Development Council Law. Further meetings in 2004 were geared towards building the participatory institutions and educating the municipality’s community and civil society leaders, as much as approving projects, making plans for the municipio’s future, and making budgetary decisions.

Providing constant education to COMUDE participants and COCODE leaders was a commitment of the URNG’s government from 2004 to 2012; residents in San Juan

Ixcoy have probably received more legal training over the years than their counterparts in

Tecpán, and definitely much more than residents of San Juan Sacatepéquez. Their education took multiple forms. One was formal workshops. For instance, from 2006 to at least 2010, an Italian NGO, in coordination with the municipal government, made regular visits to a series of rural communities in order to train community residents to use the

Development Council Law for improving the community’s well being. Similarly, the municipal government in 2008-2012 embarked on an ambitious program of community organization, described later in this Chapter.

Just as important as training workshops has been education through experience, led by the Mayor during the COMUDE meetings. Although I was not present to observe

COMUDE meetings during Mayor López’s 2004-08 Administration, I did observe

COMUDE meetings led by Mayor Saturnino Figueroa in 2010 and I interviewed him on multiple occasions. His position—the position of the URNG in San Juan Ixcoy—is that it is important that the communities and civil society (that is, representatives of civil society organizations who participate in the COMUDE) learn to govern—both at the level of the municipio and within individual communities. To this end, he used the office of the

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Mayor in order to lead and teach in the COMUDE meetings. For instance, in 2011 the

Guatemalan Congress was nearing approval on a new version of the Municipal Code that might affect the municipio’s communities, depending on how they are registered with the official state (as an aldea, caserío, barrio, or cantón, for instance). He used this possible legal change as an opportunity to educate COMUDE members about the role of Congress and its stance towards indigenous communities—the new legal change, if passed, would undoubtedly be harmful to indigenous communities. He then explained the possible strategies that the communities of San Juan Ixcoy could take in response to the law.

Similarly, at the inauguration ceremony for the municipality’s new hospital, Mayor

Figueroa used his speech as an opportunity to teach about the connections between citizen participation, budgetary decisions, and the usefulness of taxes. He asked the crowd, “Did we buy this land, yes or no?” “YES!!!!” people shouted back (the COMUDE had approved the land purchase and the decision to build a hospital). He then cited the articles of the Constitution and various laws, in order to teach people what can be done with local taxes, and explain why it is important to pay fees and taxes in the town— because the money can fund things that everyone has identified as a priority need, in this case, health care. It was also an opportunity to instill a sense of pride and dignity in citizens, by encouraging them to take ownership of this accomplishment, the new hospital.

The Solidification of Citizen Participation

URNG Concejal (and indigenous entrepreneur) Pascual Bernabé Velásquez, argued that “The COCODES here work because the Mayor gives them the possibility to

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do their own development, gives them rights and opportunities. At times in municipios there are no opportunities to participate. But here they have participation.” Indeed, most community leaders and civil society members interviewed (in 2010) agreed. Community leaders stated that the COMUDE here serves multiple purposes. It is where communities bring their project requests, and where debate ensues over which projects should be prioritized and funded for the current year. As one community leader put it, “The central objective is that everyone who attends, we look to all the needs of the communities, for the development of everyone.” The COMUDE is seen as a space for planning strategies for development and improving the quality of life in the municipality. Another community leader elaborated, the purpose of the COMUDE is “look for the strategy for the development for all the communities of the municipio,” so that the communities can strengthen and improve.

Community leaders reported that in the past (prior to 2004), the Mayor and

Concejo Municipal would make decisions on their own, and did not share information about the local government’s finances. In contrast, today it is understood that the

COMUDE is an institution that makes decisions and can keep a check on the actions of municipal authorities and the municipal budget. One community leader said:

The COMUDE serves us at the end of the year, and at the beginning of the year, and in the middle of the year, when the Mayor presents the budget to us. We decide. We decide who will benefit with projects. The other thing is that it allows us to raise many issues. If the Mayor is not working well, we can put him in his place.

Another community leader emphasized that all the members of the COMUDE, all the

COCODES, keep a close watch over the municipal government, so that government funds are spent correctly.

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The COMUDE is also seen as a space for dialog and consultation among community leaders, organized civil society representatives, and local government officials. The COMUDE representative for the organization of evangelical churches explained that the COMUDE exists “So that there is participation with the authorities….

So that there is a force, so that the authorities have a relation with the community, to work socially.” An indigenous entrepreneur and former director of the Office of

Municipal Planning (2004-09), Andrés Pablo Escobar, argued that this participatory dialog and cooperation between the municipal government, communities (i.e.

COCODES) and civil society is a part of Mayan culture. When the COMUDE makes decisions, they always try to arrive at disenso—though the direct translation in English is

“dissent,” in the indigenous context in San Juan Ixcoy the term takes on a different meaning. Escobar explained that if there are seventy-six COMUDE members, and on a particular decision thirty-nine voted ‘yes’ and thirty-seven voted ‘no,’ they do not stop discussion there, with a simple majority vote—that is the “Western” way of doing things.

Instead they engage in “deliberation”:

The thirty-seven that said no, we try to dialog with them, so that they can come to agreement with the majority. And this is what we call disenso. This is a Mayan theme. Let’s suppose that you are not in agreement. The other person, your friend, is going to try to talk to you and convince you. You have to get everyone to agree. That is what we’ve tried to do…. In our case, we reach the point where if we still are not all in agreement in this meeting, then we go to a second meeting, and a third….

Evidence from community interviews suggests that this is a fairly accurate portrayal of

COMUDE meeting practices. In this sense, citizenship as practiced in San Juan Ixcoy is not unlike the ideals that deliberative democrats theorize and research in places such as

Porto Alegre (Baiocchi 2005), or the cases of empowered participatory governance that

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Fung and Wright (2003) reported. But, Escobar’s commentary also illustrates the sophisticated way in which indigenous entrepreneurs in San Juan Ixcoy argue for the validity and value of Maya-Q’anjob’al practices, when compared to “Western” practices that have been imposed on them, historically. In this way, the COMUDE and overall new regime of participatory citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy can be understood as truly transformative, a break with past cultures of corruption or Ladino domination, towards a more open and inviting local state that is “theirs” rather than from the “outside.”

The transformation in relations between the local state and citizens is also reflected in citizens’ expectations that local authorities will coordinate with them on decisions affecting the communities and municipio. “The majority [of municipal decisions] are decided in the COMUDE. We have always been consulted and the decisions are implemented,” said one community leader. “It’s not just the mayor who decides,” reported another community leader.

However, a minority of community leaders were unhappy with the degree of participation in the COMUDE. On certain decisions, they wanted to be consulted more— for example, on planning for the municipio’s annual festival in June, or on the details of the new market building and hospital that the municipal government financed in recent years. Community leaders and civil society representatives did participate in planning these projects, but the COMUDE did not make the definitive decisions on them, when it came to details. There were also some community leaders who expressed frustration that their community had not received “a project” and had even gone to see the mayor about it, though they also admitted that most project allocations were decided by all the communities, collectively. For example, one COCODE leader, after lamenting his

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community’s project was rejected, pulled out a notebook that included a list of more than ninety projects for which communities had sought funding the previous year. Very few of the projects were funded (based on budget constraints in the Development Council

System). Neither of these types of complaints—the lack of consultation on certain decisions or the inability to get certain community projects—resulted in an effort to overturn or delegitimize the local state, as occurred in Tecpán (Chapter Five). Instead, a general cooperation between civil society, COCODEs, and the local authorities has been established as the appropriate way to govern the town. In fact, I would argue that it has practically become hegemonic.

Another result of the close coordination between government and civil society in

San Juan Ixcoy is that participation in the COMUDE is unusually broad. Whereas the law dictates that only twenty COCODE representatives should participate in the COMUDE, since 2009, all fifty-five communities’ COCODES have been represented in the

COMUDE (See Figure 4.1). The decision to broaden COMUDE participation was made during a meeting of the COMUDE and all COCODE Presidents in May of that year.159 In interviews, community leaders explained further that when only twenty COCODES were represented, information from the COMUDE would not always reach all communities, and at times those participating in the meetings might not represent the interests of all the communities, only their own. They therefore decided that “all should have participation.”

Mayor Figueroa justified this deviation from the Development Council Law. “Hay vacíos en la ley,” he said—there are vaguely written parts of the law that permit creative interpretation. He further explained that the Código Municipal says that customary law is the most important: that is, the indigenous peoples’ decisions about how to organize take

159 COMUDE Libro de Actas, 07-2009.

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precedence over stipulations of the formal, written law. Accordingly, he concluded that there is a legal basis for restructuring the COMUDE so that all can participate, not so differently from Tecpanecos’ decision to structure their Second Level COCODE according to their own norms and customs (Chapter Five).

FIGURE 6.1: The Development Council System in San Juan Ixcoy

COMUDE Presidents of all 55 communities’ COCODES participate with voice and vote

COCODES There are 55 COCODES

Participation in San Juan Ixcoy’s COMUDE, as in San Juan Sacatepéquez, also extends to “organized civil society.” Records show that in 2010, fourteen civil society organizations had a voice and vote in the COMUDE. Six more organizations that work in

San Juan Ixcoy but are from outside the municipality have a voice but no vote in the meetings. This is in stark contrast to the COMUDE in Tecpán, where a polarizing citizenship regime and reluctant Mayor virtually eliminated non-community-based organizations (i.e. non-COCODES) from participating. It is also a broader form of participation than one finds in San Juan Sacatepéquez, with more COCODES and more civil society groups participating. But, without a Second Level COCODE, there also is the question of whether communities have a space and place to organize apart from the

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municipal government. However, no COCODE leaders suggested they wanted to establish a Second Level COCODE,.

The municipal government and women leaders in San Juan Ixcoy have also sought to organize the participation of women, within the COCODES and apart from their communities, by creating a network of women leaders from all over the municipio.

Since the initial days of the COMUDE, women have participated through a Women’s

Commission. Although this participation was limited (in number), there was at the least an active and ongoing effort to improve it—an initiative that figured into the overall platform and ideology of the indigenous entrepreneurs of the URNG. In 2004, they began forming women’s groups in many of the villages. Then, according to one woman leader,

The COCODES began to realize that the women have value, too. Now there are aldeas where the women have entered the COCODES. Maybe not as Presidents, but in other cargos [leadership posts]. Now, the women are manejando leyes [using and understanding the law]. It is a big step. Now things are developing, building. Before, there were no women.

Indigenous entrepreneurs’ relationship with the Presbyterian Church—and particularly their connections with the Church in Cincinnati, Ohio—was an important factor in improving women’s participation as citizens and in the government itself (many URNG municipal employees are women). A representative from the Cincinnati Presbyterian

Church, Ron Cowgill, explained that their Presbytery regularly sends missionary groups to San Juan Ixcoy, and in 2003 and 2004, delegations from San Juan Ixcoy visited the

Presbytery in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Presbytery required that women participate in the delegations to the U.S., and showed them how in the Presbyterian Church in

Cincinnati, women are just as capable as men. The visitors from San Juan Ixcoy, Cowgill recalls, learned they were only using half their capability if they did not include women.

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One should not paint an overly rosy picture, here. Women’s participation is still small—and in some communities they are alienated from participating. But it is growing, particularly since 2008, when the municipal government began requiring that any

COCODE that wishes to be officially recognized must have at least one woman member.

There is also an ongoing effort to organize women at the level of the municipality, collaboratively led by women’s activists in civil society and the indigenous entrepreneurs in the government. For instance, a daylong meeting at the Town Hall in June 2010 was designed to bring together women who are leaders in their communities and in civil society organizations, in order to elect a representative to the COMUDE. And, at the community level, the municipal government of 2008-12 encouraged all communities to organize commissions to ensure the participation of men, women, children, youth, and elders. Employees of the municipal government’s Office of Vulnerable Sectors (which focuses on women, youth and children) visit the rural communities in order to help the women organize themselves.

Planning for Development

The municipal government has sought cooperation with the COMUDE and

COCODES, and more precisely has encouraged participation at both the community and municipal level in constructing 1) Public Policies, 2) Programs, 3) Plans, and 4) Projects.

Mayor Figueroa noted that communities usually just want “a project”— maybe a school room, better water access, road repairs, etc. This was no different than communities I had visited in other municipalities, and reflects a depoliticizing culture of asistencialismo that is prevalent in Guatemala (and was particularly visible in the case of depoliticizing

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citizenship in San Juan Sacatepéquez). With the idea of changing that culture, the municipal government wanted communities in San Juan Ixcoy to reflect on the greater sources of their problems—just as indigenous entrepreneurs themselves had done while supporting the guerrilla or during the Peace Process. They wanted people to move beyond short-term bandages to their problems, and brainstorm bigger, longer-term solutions into which a specific project would be just one of many components. Even if those long-term solutions might be (financially) beyond the municipal government’s current or future resources, the idea was to become cognizant of the greater, structural problems that faced

San Juan Ixcoy, in order to identify creative ways to solve them. As Figure 4.2 illustrates, the government saw individual projects as comprising larger plans, plans as making up programs, and programs as fitting into more broadly conceived public policies. The first big step in participatory planning was in 2005, when the COMUDE cooperated to draft a long-term Strategic Plan for San Juan Ixcoy.

Illustration 6.1: San Juan Ixcoy’s Planning Process (as depicted in a Municipal Government Powerpoint Presentation, 2010)

PROCESO DE PLANEAMIENTO

POLÍTICA PÚBLICA

PROGRAMAS

PLANES

PROYECTOS

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The Strategic Plan

Table 6.1: Goals of San Juan Ixcoy’s “Strategic Plan”

Mission: Contribute efficiently in order to realize the goals and objectives of the Strategic Plan for Development. Vision: Be a municipio whose inhabitants are healthy, have a profession, and are productive. Strategic Objective: Improve the quality of life of the inhabitants of the municipio.

For municipalities in Guatemala, a “Strategic Plan” that identifies a municipality’s strengths and weaknesses, and maps out long- and medium-term goals and corresponding paths to completion, can be an important tool for future socio-economic development. It also demonstrates to the non-governmental and international organizations that finance development projects that the municipio is organized and has effective leadership in both the government and civil society. As a former URNG

Concejal and indigenous entrepreneur put it, “If there is no Strategic Plan, not one institution is going to help us.” Constructing the Strategic Plan—and in particular, doing it through a democratic, participatory, and transparent process—was the indigenous entrepreneurs’ strategy for ensuring that progressive ideas about social, economic, and cultural development were put into writing by the people themselves and institutionalized, in case a government less interested in such development were to assume power in the future. As one URNG civil society activist explained, it was a preventive measure: “all the future mayors must respect it.”

Constructing a Strategic Plan was a central activity of the COMUDE in San Juan

Sacatepéquez, too (Chapter Four). But there, participation was much weaker and more

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superficial, and residents and community leaders who did not participate directly in the

COMUDE knew little about it. By contrast, San Juan Ixcoy employed a highly inclusive process so that all could take ownership of the Plan, to ensure the best results. Although active planning for constructing the Strategic Plan began in the summer of 2005, and possibly earlier, the bulk of the work of writing up its contents was done during one week in early December, 2005—roughly two years after the URNG had assumed power in the municipal government. Participation was broad and included members of the municipal government, representatives from civil society organizations, and five representatives from each of the fifty-five communities in the municipality. Before that week, a series of development themes were identified—such as health, production, and culture—and during the planning week, participants broke up into groups in order to brainstorm, discuss, and elaborate a diagnosis of the municipality’s current status on the theme, identify goals, and suggest courses of action. As Table 4.1 illustrates, the themes that were identified as important in San Juan Ixcoy’s participatory planning process begin from issues that were considered part of “development” in San Juan Sacatepéquez’s

COMUDE: industry, commerce, electrification, education. But in San Juan Ixcoy, citizenship—and development—were not depoliticized in the manner that one finds in

San Juan Sacatepéquez, and indigenous entrepreneurs were involved in the planning process, resulting in a conception of development and governance that extended to culture, political formation (e.g. citizenship), human rights, social organization, and cooperativism.

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Table 6.2: San Juan Ixcoy’s Strategic Plan Thematic Committees (2005)

Culture Political Impact Sports Ecotourism Health Municipalization Tourism Education Urbanism Political Formation Human Rights Self-Management Recreation Agriculture and Land Tenancy Cooperativism Livestock Art and Culture Justice Social Organization Commerce Production Industry Communication Childhood and Adolescence Electrification Mayan Art Craftwork Source: Administración Municipal 2004-08, “Participantes del Plan Estratégico de Desarrollo San Juan Ixcoy, Huehuetenango”(2005). Document obtained from municipal library archives, San Juan Ixcoy

Since the initial construction of the Strategic Plan in 2005, different people have rotated in and out of community and municipal leadership positions. However, the Plan continues to be the basis for most government actions at the municipal and community level. For instance, the seeds of the municipality’s new hospital (the Centro de Atención

Permanente), which was officially opened in April 2010, were planted in the Strategic

Plan under the “health” rubric. But also, as former Mayor López recounted, women’s participation in the process of writing the Strategic Plan resulted in a hospital that now provides services directed towards women’s needs in town. In Guatemala, many public hospitals do not provide sufficient services for women, especially for prenatal care and birthing. But now in San Juan Ixcoy, pregnant women can come to the hospital to give birth, accompanied by their midwife. Although most indigenous Guatemalan women give birth with the assistance of a midwife, most health centers do not allow midwives to enter, because they are deemed non-scientific or non-medical, and because of ethnic discrimination. Thus Strategic Plan, and specifically women’s participation in it, had

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important impacts on health care—making it work better for women, in a culturally pertinent manner.

Looking to the community level, most leaders referenced the Strategic Plan at least once in order to frame their community’s plans and actions for improvement. For instance, in one community, leaders of the Community Health Council explained that their efforts to keep a clean environment, teach and practice good hygiene, and look after their children’s health are all based in the Strategic Plan. And, at a more general level, the

Strategic Plan serves as a written compact between the communities, civil society, and the local government, for unrolling a local governance and development model that moves beyond conceptions of development as infrastructure and easily visible projects, to a more holistic conception that focuses on the importance of Mayan culture, political formation, and human rights.

The Strategic Plan has now passed through a number of revisions, yet the content remains the same. At the start of the second URNG Administration in 2008, the municipal government categorized the development areas identified in the Plan under three headings: Social (culture, education, health), Economic (land, production), and

Political (political formation, training, municipalization; see Table 4.2). Beyond this, the municipal officials, in concert with the COMUDE, named health, education, and production as the three development priorities for the municipio—most funded projects fit within one of these categories, although culture and inclusive participation are constant themes that are addressed in all projects. This reorganization of the Plan, which was approved by the COMUDE in 2008, was mainly done in order to simplify it and streamline efforts to achieve the Plan’s goals. But it was also partly linked to the new

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Mayor’s cooperative relationship with the Japanese government’s international development agency, JICA. Mayor Saturnino Figueroa received a scholarship from JICA to undergo training in participatory governance and strategies for achieving local development outcomes. Focusing on the basics—health, education, and production—was a requirement. But, it also merged well with goals that had already been identified since

2005.

Table 6.3: San Juan Ixcoy’s Strategic Plan: Thematic Contents (2008 version)

Social issues Economic issues Political issues Health Agriculture and Livestock Human Rights Education Traditional Crafts Social Participation Sports Tourism and Eco-Tourism Citizenship Formation Mayan Culture and Art Cooperatives Institutional Modernization Children, Adolescents, and Communication and Community Self- Youth Electrification management Recreation (public spaces) Land Tenancy Business Development

The next section of this Chapter details how the municipal government, often in concert with the COMUDE, has implemented the Strategic Plan in a holistic fashion— complementing “concrete” projects with efforts to increase the participation of and benefits for “vulnerable sectors”: women, children, youth and the elderly, and the very poor. In a sense, this is an effort to promote endogenous, culturally pertinent, participatory and sustainable socio-economic development. The remainder of this

Chapter describes the process by which the Municipal Government, in concert with the communities and organized civil society, has sought to do this. In particular, indigenous entrepreneurs, working from the dual positions of local government and civil

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society/communities, have infused select interpretations of Maya-Q’anjob’al culture into the discourse and practice of local governance.

Culturally-infused citizenship and local governance

As noted above, a participatory process led to the inclusion of “culture” and

“Mayan art and culture” as development themes in the Strategic Plan. Gradually these were subsumed into other aspects of the municipio’s development plans, such that all development projects or plans should be “culturally pertinent.” For example, the Public

Policy on Natural Resources, a collaborative effort of the COMUDE, municipal government, and community authorities, lays out plans for managing the municipio’s natural resources in a “culturally pertinent” manner—that is, a way that is in tune with the customs and worldview of the local population. When the Policy was formally approved in a COMUDE meeting on May 21, 2010, Mayor Figueroa emphasized the need to ensure that this Policy, and moreover any policy, project or initiative, “makes sense with our culture.” Similarly, the municipio’s Public Policy on Childhood, Adolescence and

Youth was designed to be culturally pertinent. The current municipal government has implemented the cultural aspect of the Strategic Plan in a variety of ways, at times in coordination with Guatemalan and international NGOs that agreed to support San Juan

Ixcoy’s culturally pertinent governance and development strategy.

More than simply promoting citizen participation and coordination with local government, the indigenous entrepreneurs who occupy the municipal government or are leaders within civil society and communities have worked to revitalize Maya-Q’anjob’al

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culture within the municipality.160 Often, this has involved tying that culture—a grounded but also essentialized version of it—to practices of citizenship and governance at the municipal and community levels. Particularly during the URNG’s second period in power

(2008-12), the local government pointed to places in the law that allowed for the recognition of “traditional” indigenous authorities and expression of indigenous culture.

For instance, as described above, the reorganization of the COMUDE to include the participation of all fifty-five COCODES and communities was justified as an expression of indigenous organizational culture, which must be respected by the law (principally the

Municipal Code and Development Council Law). However, other examples include the municipal government’s support for the Alcaldía Indígena, socio-political organization to control mining and assert territorial autonomy, and most importantly, the current government’s “ICHMAM” program for participatory, culturally pertinent, community- oriented development and self-governance.

Alcaldía Indígena

The Alcaldía Indígena has a strong tradition in San Juan Ixcoy, based mainly in

Mayan spirituality rather than political or social organization. However, this was not always the case. A former Alcalde Indígena—the position rotates every two years— explained that years before, the Alcalde Indígena had more power and authority than the official mayor. He would “give order to whatever project, whatever task; he was the one who would give orders. He regulated some things, or would deal with some people who were fighting. El Alcalde would settle their problems.” That is, the Alcalde Indígena

160 Note that the program was also inclusive of Mam and Akateka culture, but since most of the municipality is Q’anjob’al, I refer simply to “Maya-Q’anjob’al” culture, as did most people in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

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oversaw communal work projects, imposed regulations, and adjudicated problems between people. Until the 1940s, current members of the Alcaldía Indígena recalled, the

Alcalde Indígena would apply justice in San Juan Ixcoy. Then, authority shifted to the official state and mayor, who for a long time was always a Ladino.161

Traditionally, most communities would delegate representatives to the Alcaldía

Indígena, even though it was a spiritual institution, rather than a governing one.162 Today the Alcaldía Indígena has no governing authority. Though it maintains networks in many communities, it lacks an organizational structure that permeates throughout the entire municipality.163 However a significant portion of the town’s residents today practice the

Mayan spiritual customs.164 During the internal conflict, Mayan spiritual practices were persecuted, seen as evidence of subversion. After the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, the Alcaldía Indígena was able to practice the “costumbres”—Mayan spiritual ceremonies—more openly. Now, the Alcaldía Indígena promotes Mayan spirituality, maintains important customs and traditions, and participates in the municipio’s governance.

A representative of the Alcaldía Indígena has participated in the COMUDE since its inception in 2003, and COMUDE meeting minutes revealed that there was a collaborative effort on the part of government, organized civil society, and communities, to strengthen this historical institution. The 2008-12 municipal government was particularly supportive of these efforts. In particular, it provided public financing for the

161 The population of San Juan Ixcoy, many years ago, was a bit more diverse, and Ladinos controlled the official government. 162 Though from the Mayan perspective, making such a stark dichotomy between religion and state is less common. 163 Compared to stronger Alcaldías Indígenas in municipios such as Sololá or Totonicapán. 164 Informants believed it was around thirty-five percent of the population, many of who would also practice Catholicism.

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construction of a building on Municipal land, where the Alcaldía Indígena can now hold meetings and perform ceremonies, offer educational workshops and trainings, and house overnight visitors from the rural villages. At the April 15, 2010, inauguration of the building, named the Casa de los Abuelos,165 Mayor Figueroa said he wanted this to be a place where the Alcaldía Indígena could “reintroduce the work of giving counsel and orienting the pueblo.” He and other representatives from the Municipal Government reported that the municipality had provided 41,670 quetzales (about $5,500) to construct the Casa, and that this was legally justified in the Municipal Code (Article 55). This was the first time that any municipal government had supported the Alcaldía Indígena in San

Juan Ixcoy. A visitor from a neighboring municipality spoke at the event, noting that in his municipality, there is no support for the Alcaldía Indígena or the Mayan spirituality, and so they are forced to hold ceremonies on the side of the road as cars stream by.

Similarly, the former Alcalde Indígena in San Juan Ixcoy explained that in the past, the

Alcaldía Indígena received very little support from the municipal government. But “right now we are good with them. We are united with them. [The Mayor] helps us, he helps us work, he gives us the projects that we ask for.”

Mining: The Good Faith Community Consult

In both the cases of depoliticizing and polarizing indigenous citizenship, communities organized local democratic referendums—dubbed “Good Faith Community

Consults”—to make decisions about mining (in San Juan Sacatepéquez) and communal forest management (in Tecpán). Likewise, in San Juan Ixcoy there was an organized

165 Translated literally, “House of our Grandparents.” However, as previously noted, the abuelos are important figures in the Mayan spirituality, ancestors who impart wisdom on believers.

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process of community consultation over an important territorial development initiative: open-pit mining, imposed by Guatemalan elites and transnational corporations and backed by the Central Government, which distributes licenses to explore and extract minerals. However, San Juan Ixcoy’s experience with the community consult process differs from both other cases presented in this dissertation because it was organized through a concerted, collaborative effort among the municipal government, the

COMUDE and other civil society organizations, the Alcaldía Indígena, community leaders, and schoolteachers. A number of outside organizations also assisted with the process, among them AGAAI, CEIBA, CEDFOG and Madre Selva.166 Upon first learning that the Ministry of Energy and Mining had issued licenses to explore for minerals on an area of territory that included parts of San Juan Ixcoy, municipal government officials informed residents in a cabildo abierto.167 At that time (2007-08), mining in indigenous territories was quickly becoming a concern across the country and in nearly all sectors of the indigenous movement, including ones that some municipal government officials and other residents were networked with—such as AGAAI and

Pat’qum. In particular, indigenous entrepreneurs were linked with the Asamblea

Departamental Por la Defensa del Territorio- Huehuetenango (Departmental Assembly for Defending Huehuetenango’s Territory), a movement that now encompasses all the municipios in Huehuetenango that have formally rejected mining and natural resource

166 In 2009-10, Mayor Figueroa served as President of AGAAI (the Guatemalan Association for Indigenous Mayors and Authorities); the Association has supported the Community Consults in many indigenous municipios. CEIBA and Madre Selva are environmental social movement/non-governmental organizations; CEDFOG is a left-leaning indigenous-oriented applied research institution in Huehuetenango (Centro de Educación y Documentación de la Frontera Occidental de Guatemala). 167 Cabildo Abierto: open town meeting.

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extraction projects, through the vehicle of the Good Faith Community Consult.168 They base their opposition in a claim to Mayan territory and (in some cases) autonomy.

Indigenous entrepreneurs were thus keenly aware that mining problems could come to San Juan Ixcoy. As a URNG Concejal who was deeply involved in the indigenous anti-mining movement explained, they “always knew” that mining might become a problem here, and when the municipal government informed COMUDE members that the central government had issued licenses without informing San Juan

Ixcoy residents, people were “very worried” and began to organizing a response. That was in January, 2008. In the five months that followed, the local government, communities, and civil society organizations coordinated a series of educational workshops on the benefits and risks of mining and the details of their rights under the law. They unrolled a public awareness campaign in all communities of the municipio, and planned for a series of Good Faith Community Consults that would take place in May.

Eleven commissions were formed to deal with such issues as communication, public awareness, logistics, meals, transportation, and documentation. This lengthy planning process, and the actual the day of the community consults, were jointly financed by the municipality (sixty percent) and the communities themselves (forty percent).

The consults took place in all communities on May 13, 2008. As has been the custom in other municipalities that have held community consults (see Chapter Three), all residents participated—men and women with and without a cedula, and all children.169

Indigenous activists in Guatemala and in San Juan Ixcoy explain this process as reflecting indigenous culture in a couple of ways. First, the act of holding the consults openly, at the

168 Also see Chapter Three for an explanation of the legal supports and strategy behind the community consults. 169 Government-issued identification card, which is necessary in order to register to vote.

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community scale—rather than having a municipal-wide referendum by secret ballot— reflects the fact that the community is the basis of Mayan culture, not the individual.

Second, having all residents participate is an argument for a more participatory type of democratic decision-making that rejects Western conceptions of citizenship as beginning at a particular age and as needing official state registration. In total, 12,011 participated in the consults and all but three voted to reject mining.

The community consults in San Juan Ixcoy were preemptive. Would the mining licenses ever amount to anything? And if so, would mining truly pose a threat to San Juan

Ixcoy? This is hard to know, since the only information made available to both the government and citizens was the fact that the Ministry of Energy and Mines had issued licenses to private individuals and companies from outside of the municipio, and that in other places in Guatemala (such as San Juan Sacatepéquez), mining was causing social distress and great environmental damage.170

Instead, it is better to understand the community consults as a move of territorial defense, and an implicit call for local autonomy, framed in the trappings of indigenous rights. In some communities, leaders were hesitant to speak with me until I convinced them I was not working on behalf of a mining company. Community leaders throughout the municipio reported feeling worried that mining would endanger the natural environment, pollute or dry up water sources, and cause sicknesses. More generally, many community and civil society leaders insisted that the “madre tierra” (literally, mother earth) is theirs, and that the central government wants to take away the

170 General knowledge in San Juan Ixcoy, and even throughout Guatemala, of the Canadian company Goldcorp’s infamous gold mine in the Department of San Marcos, looms large in peoples’ minds. This mine has been the site of numerous human rights violations and environmental problems. See: van de Sandt (2009). Dougherty (2011) argues that the community consults that have now occurred in over sixty municipios often take place without full knowledge of the benefits and risks of mining.

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communities’ rights. Mayor Figueroa argued that mining companies needed to be respectful of the will and sovereignty of indigenous people: “Although the law says the contrary, the population is sovereign, the decision of the pueblo is sovereign.” The

Municipal government, in coordination with the COMUDE and anti-mining indigenous environmentalists from outside the municipio took steps to institutionalize this territorial defense by encouraging each community to form a Land Defense Committee, to defend their territory (as they put it), protect their natural resources, and work towards environmentally sustainable development (at the time of research, this was a work in progress, as only a handful of communities had established their committees). This defense scaled up to the regional level in November 2009, when the Mayors, community leaders, and civil society of San Juan Ixcoy and eight additional municipios declared northern Huehuetenango “Free of Mining” and asserted local control over “their” territory. The Declaration was framed in the discourse of Mayan culture and identity and indigenous rights to ancestral lands, with specific references to the ILO Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and other national legislation on indigenous peoples’ collective rights.171

Ichmam: “an initiative for local development with cultural pertinence”172

A key component of the 2008-12 Municipal Government’s agenda was the

Ichmam Development Model, a program to promote sustainable and participatory socio-

171 “Declaracion de los Pueblos: Akateko, Chuj y Q’anhjob’al. No a la Mineria. Region Norte de Huehuetenano “Libre de Mineria.” 24 November 2009. Document obtained from the Municipal Library, San Juan Ixcoy. 172 Quote from the head of the Office of Vulnerable Sectors, Municipality of San Juan Ixcoy.

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economic development within communities and at the scale of the municipio. Ichmam is a compound word in the Q’anjob’al language that literally means “man” (ich) and

“woman” (mam). But, it carries a greater connotation in that it refers to the daily life practices of the Q’anjob’al men and women from years past. As one informant explained

“Ichmam quiere decir que vamos a traer desde los abuleos”—“Ichmam means that we are going to bring back from our ancestors.”

This definition highlights the two main premises of the Ichmam development model: that Mayan cultural ideology can be used to 1) achieve development according to the goals set out in the Strategic Plan, and 2) to reintroduce into daily life the practices, principles and values of “our ancestors.” In this way, cultural revival is presented as a survival strategy, as well as intrinsically valuable in itself. The idea is to create a virtuous feedback pattern of broad and active community- and municipal-level citizen participation, coupled with government response and coordination, using the logic of cultural revitalization as a practical and discursive tool. The municipal government argues that inclusive participation in community decision-making is how things worked

“before” (that is, before Spanish colonization).

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Illustration 6.2: “The Ichmam Model,” as depicted visually by the Municipal Government of San Juan Ixcoy

EL MODELO ICHMAM

The municipal government implemented the Ichmam model through the Office of

Vulnerable Sectors, a branch of the Office of Municipal Planning, and an institutional element that is unique to the government of San Juan Ixcoy.173 They explain that the roots of this program go back decades. More precisely, they argue that the basic ideas of the

Ichmam Model were part of the guerrillas’ leftist ideology during the internal conflict. As indicated earlier in the Chapter, many of the indigenous entrepreneurs who became leaders in civil society and (eventually) the municipal government through the URNG, were guerrilla sympathizers. In a powerpoint presentation that the Office of Vulnerable

Sectors used to present the Ichmam Model to communities, the following questions were raised:

173 “Vulnerable Sectors” included women, youth, children, and the extremely poor.

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• What can the ex-insurgency movement do in local power and in extremely poor indigenous territory? • How did we dream of the future, when we got involved in the armed struggle? • What were we trying to do when we got involved in the guerrilla? • Why did we struggle? • What model of society did we aspire to?

The answers offered were:

• Change the structures of the system. • Take power in order to implant a different system—one that is not racist, with equality for all men and women, that will bring about, promote, and facilitate development for all the population in general, from the campo to the city. • Convert our culture into the fundamental pillar of our development. • Eradicate malnutrition and poverty in general, using our resources in a reasonable and equitable manner [equilibradament]. • Reform the offical education system so that it is founded in Mayan philosophy. • Re-establish the system of ancestral authorities of our communities and pueblos.

In truth, the guerillas’ ideology mostly ignored issues of culture and ethnic identity, and was rooted in a Marxist class-conflict worldview.174 As mentioned in

Chapter Three, a key characteristic of Guatemalan civil society has been the stark division between the Leftist and the Mayanista lines of social critique and activism, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, if less so today (see Warren 1998b). Thus the insinuation by the local government that the leftist insurgency’s proposals incorporated elements of Mayan identity or culture is likely a reconstruction of history, in light of the present. Importantly, it demonstrates the degree to which Leftist and Mayanista ideology have merged in San Juan Ixcoy in recent years as indigenous entrepreneurs linked to various movements—the guerrilla, Mayan activist networks, and the Presbyterian

Church—have collaborated to construct the local URNG governing platform. This fusion

174 But see Konefal (2010), who identifies important ways that certain elements of the guerrilla departed from the class-conflict framework and addressed issues of indigenous identity and culture.

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of class and identity concerns also reflects a similar ideological turn within the national indigenous movement.

Practically speaking, the Municipality’s efforts to implement the Ichmam Model were focused along two lines of action. First, all fifty-five communities in the municipio were taught about the Ichmam program in meetings held in the Town Hall, which community representatives attended. Additionally, the government utilized the

COMUDE to encourage all communities to form numerous councils that would be linked to the COCODE but include the participation of greater swaths of the community population. Thus all communities formed councils on health, education, and production, as well as women’s councils and (in some communities) councils of youth and children.

A premise of the program was that in order to achieve the development goals that everyone had identified in the Strategic Plan, each community would need to be well- organized, with broad and significant participation of all sectors of the population. The small, male-dominated development councils and committees that were so common years ago, and that had persisted in some communities where former PAC commanders led the

COCODE, were inadequate. Even children’s inclusion was important, because it

“ensure[s] that the children learn from a young age how to participate, so they are not afraid to do so,” explained Mayor Figueroa. Representatives from each type of council came to meetings held in the center of town, to learn about ways to strengthen organization and activity around their council’s focus. For example, in April 2010, representatives from the Community Production Councils attended a two-day training on how to enact community-level reforestation projects and possibly take advantage of the

National Forestry Institute’s (INAB) community reforestation program to finance it.

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The second line of action was to develop cooperative partnerships with eighteen communities that were open to fully implementing the Ichmam model. Municipal officials looked out for community leaders who regularly attended attendance COMUDE and other meetings, and sought out those communities first. Participation in Ichmam was diverse, and included Q’anjob’al, Mam, and Akateko communities. Also, both communities that had supported and opposed the URNG in the last election participated.

In sum, there was no political or ethnic discrimination. Rather, the main criterion for participation was that there be community interest in working with the Ichmam program—that is, though it was a program that the municipal government sponsored, in the end, it was really up to the communities to participate.

Mayor Figueroa explained that a team from the municipality visited the participating communities to assist them in talking about their development-related challenges and goals. They would split the community into groups—children, youth, women and men—so that all could easily participate. They discussed issues such as food and nutrition, and used creative methods that do not require literacy, to get people to think about what they have and what they would want to have. For example, in one community visit, the municipal field team had the community’s children sit down with paper and crayons, and draw a picture of their house and the food that is in it. Then they had them draw a picture of their house with the food they would want to eat. After these small group activities, everyone came back together for a community-wide discussion.

These exercises were designed to expand participation and strengthen organization in the community—helping counteract a culture of authoritarianism that was inculcated in the communities by the army during internal conflict. But it also helped them move closer to

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forming real development plans for the community—plans that could go beyond short- sighted project requests to broader, medium- and long-term strategies for improving the community members’ quality of life. It was a matter of asserting the community’s

“capability” (Sen 1999) to define its own development goals, and identify realistic paths to fulfilling those goals—paths that would draw from the community’s own resources, and also respect the community’s culture and lived reality.

I visited some of the communities that were working directly with the Ichmam

Model, as well as others that were not, in order to assess how it was being adopted on the ground. All communities in the municipality were forming their various councils, though some communities were better organized than others. In some communities, leaders were not very knowledgeable about the Ichmam program and had only organized their various commissions because of instructions from the municipal government. Though they had participated in at least one or two workshops on Ichmam, they were not able to clearly describe the goals of the program.

However, many community leaders articulated an elaborate explanation of the

Ichmam model. They highlighted that it was a “Mayan” idea, and involved looking to the abuelos (grandparents) or antepasados (ancestors). Leaders of one community said that the municipal government workers who visited them:

…talked a lot about the culture of before. For example, before, before, before, the people here, well they did not buy things like sodas or juices, or soups and other little things like what they sell in the little stores. …And also before, we didn’t use chemical fertilizers but rather pure organic ones. Before, the people only cultivated everything that they ate, and so here they would plant all classes like this… not all classes of hortalizas and vegetables but they planted other classes of vegetables that the land gives here. Like we said a bit ago, beans, there are many classes of beans…

Me: And you are trying to return to this kind of lifestyle?

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Yes. The Municipalidad (i.e. municipal employees) is coming here to explain, so that we will no longer go to buy in the markets, but right now we are not bringing anything to sell, we are just going there to buy. We have to recuperar, plant and not buy anymore, but rather, it is our turn to sell products.

This community’s explanation of the Ichmam model reflects the ways that Mayan cultural ideas are being combined with strategies for survival in a market economy. This community wants to “recuperar” or recover the practices of the “abuelos,” the way people lived before, which has been framed as inherently better, more valuable, more healthy, and more economically sustainable. For communities, this translates to not purchasing foods from the store because they are both costly and lack nutrition. But it also means trying to improve agricultural production in order to sell products in the market and reinvest the profits in local agriculture. However, this last goal, improving production for sale in markets, has proven difficult. First of all, environmental factors constrain a community’s ability to take on new agricultural projects. For instance, the high altitude of some communities precludes experimenting with growing tomatoes or other warmer-weather crops. But second, even for communities that are successful at growing new vegetables, finding and transporting the products to markets requires money and business connections.

However, many aspects of the Ichmam model can be implemented even with scarce resources. A leader from a different community said that his community was very interested in adopting the Ichmam Model, and rationalized it as follows:

We have already spoken with [the rest of the community]. They were very surprised, let’s say, because we are already forgetting our Ichmam culture. In the first place, when it’s time, the date for planting, we are forgetting. Why? Because a long time ago, our fathers, they had a date to plant, they did not use chemicals. Because the date, the planting—they respected it. Like a child. Like a women and her baby. If nine months are completed, you see a very nice baby. But if only

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seven months [are completed], it will not even be six pounds. Thus, there we realized that, if we are forgetting, why? Because we throw chemicals in the crops and our land is getting burnt.

In this passage, the community leader points to traditions in agriculture that are slowly being lost—a certain day to plant, certain rituals that go along with that date, and the absence of chemicals—and connects this loss to the failure to reap good crops. He continued:

The Ichmam model…. They did not buy ice, they did not buy cement, they did not buy anything. They made their adobe, they collected the material that is the earth itself and they made it. Thus they helped one another. They were not used to paying, or earning. At least, if a compañero were going to build a house, then I have to go and work with him, to help. That is what we are remembering. But what is happening now? What are the people doing? We eat cement for hundreds of quintales, iron for hundreds of quintales, and there is nothing to eat.175 By contrast, before, the Ichmames, they had their very simple little house but inside it was full of food. There was corn, wheat, potatoes, meat, and everything! But now there is nothing. That is what we are realizing, that yes, there is an Ichmam Model.

As this community leader makes clear, the idea of the Ichmam Model is to connect the practices of the “abuelos” with what would be best practices for sustainable socio-economic development: return to simplicity, respect the earth, and work together.

One example of this reconnection, many community leaders pointed out, would be to use organic fertilizer instead of chemicals. Organic fertilizer is safer for the earth, healthier, and cheaper because it can be made on one’s farm or in cooperation with one’s neighbors. And, it is what the “abuelos” always did, since they did not have access to chemicals. Similarly, the use of medicinal plants (for healthcare, especially in rural villages) is framed as part of the Ichmam Model because on the one hand it is what the abuelos used to treat health problems, and on the other hand it is cheaper than going to the hospital. The municipal government has been promoting the use of medicinal plants

175 A quintal is equal to 100 pounds.

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by providing training to the health and women’s councils in the communities, and by providing communities with the materials necessary for starting community medicinal plant gardens.

Related to the theme of sustainable development, but not directly mentioned in the examples above, is that the Ichmam Model emphasizes respect for the environment,

“madre tierra.” The abuelos, one is told, revered the land, water, air, and all that was nature. This respect can be practiced in numerous ways: substituting chemical for organic fertilizer, using natural medicines, and refraining from purchasing processed foods like bottled sodas, instant soups, or Tortrix (a corn chip popular with children). Respect for the environment also translates into anti-littering campaigns,.176 Keeping trash at bay, some communities learned, helped prevent water-borne illnesses.

An additional way in which the communities and municipal government were reviving the practices of the abuelos was through communal work—the basis for realizing the many projects and initiatives that form the Ichmam Model. As one of the quotes above mentions, the abuelos would “help one another” when a family needed to build a house, for instance. A community leader and Concejal in the 2004-08 period similarly explained:

When it’s time to plant the milpa, in one day perhaps they plant twenty or thirty cuerdas but asi (like this) with their neighbors.177 That is the Ichmam Model. Also, in the construction of houses, and in changing the roof, then too all the neighbors get together and begin to work.

A return to harmonious community life and communal work. A clean environment. And a home filled with all the nutritious food one could eat. Was life really

176 Litter tends to be a serious problem in Guatemala. 177 Milpa refers to crops of corn, sometimes interspersed with black beans and squash. This is the staple diet of indigenous peasants in Guatemala. A cuerda equals .28 acres.

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like this for the abuelos, prior to the Spanish conquest? It seems reasonable to assume that the vision of the Ichmames is less a clear statement of reality and more an ideal of how life could be in San Juan Ixcoy. Again, the program is best understood by looking to the social, economic and political context in which the municipal government must operate. One element of that context is racism, both institutionalized and interpersonal. In response, Ichmam teaches people to value their identity by looking at all the positive things that were attached to it in the past. “Identity,” even if a reconstructed one, is posed as a solution. A second element is financial reality.

The Ichmam program is premised on the fact that the municipal government has scarce financial resources. If communities work together to solve problems and execute projects, then the government to direct more money to a greater number of projects and communities. The current norm is that community labor will be used in projects like building a new schoolroom, for instance—in truth, this tended to be the norm in many rural municipios. Additionally, the government is providing seed money for productive agricultural projects which will be taken on by organized groups who are prepared to work cooperatively (though, the group can of course decide to divide the funds among its members, and work mostly individually). By 2010, projects had included greenhouses for growing tomatoes, and new varieties of mushrooms that are in demand in regional markets—the ultimate goal was to sell to those markets, but in 2010 products had only reached the large Sunday market in San Juan Ixcoy. The hope is that through communal labor, the communities will be able to sustain working on new agricultural initiatives, gradually making them more profitable. However, doing so will likely continue to prove difficult for many communities. First of all, environmental factors constrain a

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community’s ability to take on new agricultural projects. For instance, the high altitude of some communities precludes experimenting with growing tomatoes or other warmer- weather crops. But second, even for communities that are successful at growing new vegetables, finding and transporting the products to markets requires money and business connections.

No one denies these challenges. Yet the belief is that with the Ichmam Model, even the poorest communities can improve their quality of life. Leaders of a community that is particularly well-organized under the Ichmam model explained it thus:

The idea of the Ichmam Model is that the people know how to use their own resources, everything that they have in their reach. And what we lack is assistance from other people in order to continue improving what we have. That is the idea of the Ichmam model. As we do not have money, then you have to put a lot of importance on what we have in our reach, our own resources. Continue improving them. For example, we have here, sheep, potatoes, vegetables, and medicinal plants. And creating good leaders so that [the community] can continue improving. And so it can be a model community in the municipio of San Juan Ixcoy. For that same reason, we have organized… or rather, [we have organized into] sectors which are men, women, youth and children. That is the goal of the Ichmam Model.

Communities that have begun implementing the Ichmam Model, or that plan to, tended to speak of the benefits of the program for the community’s development. Leaders in one community were pleased to be getting support from the local government, and insisted that the community wants to “recuperar the wisdom of the ancestors…. They would never drink Coke, they would have atol.178 We are realizing that this wisdom has better things for us.” They expressed enthusiasm at using medicinal plants more, because it would help them spend less money on health care and the ancestors used them a lot.

Many communities recognized they had few resources, but desperately wanted “a better quality of life,” and saw Ichmam as possibly a path toward that goal. They looked

178 Atol is a hot drink made from corn, the basis of indigenous Guatemalans’ diet.

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forward to implementing new communal agricultural projects, and had seen a marked difference in their community’s participation and organization. As one community leader said, they decided to implement Ichmam:

Because it brings us benefits… For example in production, other aldeas are producing mushrooms, tomatoes… And they [the municipal employees] can teach us how to communicate and help the teachers in the school. In health, too, they are teaching us. Before this we had no idea about health, education, and production.

There have been significant challenges in implementing the Ichmam

Development Model in many communities. For some, there can be significant costs to participating (White 1996) as time spent in meetings or doing communal labor is time away from one’s own work, and money or food lost. Some communities, particularly those that are very poor and rural, found it difficult to participate in the program because it requires that community representatives attend meetings in the town center—some that take up an entire day. As one community leader explained, “not all the communities are interested in working on this because the municipal government asks for so many things.”

Others have criticized the program for its focus on providing agricultural productive projects for groups, rather than individuals. More than once, the municipal government transferred a project from one community to another when the intended community could not organize well enough to execute the project, often because residents wanted individual projects and did not want to work together. At least one community leader wanted the management of these projects to be more participatory. The municipal government—the Office of Vulnerable Sectors, in collaboration with the elected officials—decided the destinations of most projects. While there was a participatory process (in the COMUDE and in the Strategic Planning process) for coming

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upon the idea of providing such projects, the details were removed from participatory decision-making, even if the criteria, and the eventual spending and outcomes, remained transparent—the Municipal Government provided detailed reports on a quarterly basis, and was always available for meeting with citizens.

In truth, however, few criticized the municipal government’s plans, likely because there were ample opportunities to raise one’s criticisms directly, in the space of the

COMUDE or with municipal officials themselves. However, there were criticisms that I did not hear directly but were conveyed by supporters who knew well the debates in the municipio. Specifically, these criticisms spoke to the partisan aspect of local government, which one might find in anywhere: political parties inherently covet power, and the parties that were out of power, especially the UNE (Unidad Nacional de Esperanza) and

PAN (Partido de Avanzada Nacional), were critical of the URNG-controlled government. But the criticisms also speak to the conflicts that can arise when identity politics is so deeply infused into local governance. One community leader said:

It’s like I told you before, that there are politicians. Apart from the political words, there are politiqueros, there are lots of politiqueros.179 At least, what the Mayor, who we voted for, says right now is that he wants us to do the Ichmam Model. And many say that the Ichmames before did not use shoes, or cal.180 Thus now the politiqueros are saying that no, this way is no good because ‘they want us to get rid of our shoes.’ That is how they are advising the people. That is why they do not want the Ichmam Model. But that is not what we are talking about. Rather, the Ichmam Model… how have they lived? How have they planted, cultivated their land? That is what we are talking about. But many have not talked about how [the municipal government officials] don’t want to carry us backwards, they don’t want us to not use shoes, or to not use pants. Those are lies.

179 Politiquero has no direct English translation, but is a term with a negative connotation that generally refers to politicians and political operatives who make false promises and spread lies in order to garner votes. 180 Cal is an ingredient for making tortillas.

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As this community leader’s words illustrate, critics from competing political parties accused the government of encouraging people to “retroceder al mil anos atras”—to go back thousands of years, and drop all the accouterments of modern life that Mayas today use: shoes, cal for cooking tortillas, among many other items (cellular phones, cars, electricity). At its root, the critique is that Ichmam is not only about reaching back; rather, it is about moving backwards. This community leader was frustrated because what the

Ichmam project actually asked people to do was to selectively (re)appropriate certain practices that, it is argued, were part of the Maya-Q’anjob’al culture years ago, but that are needed again today in order to overcome modern problems. The premise that the municipal government hoped to communicate is that the culture of the ancestors is not

“backwards,” but instead is a valuable source of wisdom for solving problems that, they argue, are Western in origin.

A similar delegitimizing critique came from the Catholic Church and some

Evangelical Churches. One informant explained, “Look here, those who have religion… there are some who understand, if they are in agreement. But many people say that [the

Ichmam Model] is making us go backwards again. Thus, there are some who are not in agreement.” Another argued, “Only we Mayas understand. But the Evangelicals do not understand. ‘Why don’t we talk about a Christian model?’ they say.” This critique emerged because of certain similarities between the Ichmam model and Mayan spirituality. In both, the abuelos are viewed as containing sage wisdom that can help people today. Though the Ichmam project was designed and implemented in a secular manner, some Christians saw it as a threat to their own religion. The indigenous entrepreneurs—both those who were currently in the government, and those in civil

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society—responded that a Christian model of government, citizenship, and development had been imposed on the country since Spanish colonization, so promoting a Mayan one now should not be seen as a threat. The religious critique also underscores the challenges that indigenous entrepreneurs faced in trying to convince people to embrace their identity and culture as Mayans.

In truth, few of community leaders and residents interviewed in San Juan Ixcoy were critical of the municipal government or the Ichmam project. Even communities that supported a different party in the last election (by their own admission) had little criticism.

Transformative Indigenous Citizenship: Pushing the Limits to Culturally Pertinent Democracy and Development

In San Juan Ixcoy, knowledgeable and experienced indigenous entrepreneurs, working from the spaces of civil society and the municipal government—and undeterred by weak elites—captured the decentralization process, won power in the municipal government, and put into practice a locally-defined version of what development practitioners refer to as “ethno-development” or “development-with-identity.” The approach “builds on the positive qualities of indigenous cultures and societies-such as their sense of ethnic identity, close attachment to ancestral land, and capacity to mobilize labor, capital, and other resources for shared goals-to promote local employment and growth” (Van Nieuwkoop and Uquillas 2003: 3). Though it can vary in practice, ethno- development at its core “treats indigenous culture as a flexible and dynamic resource, as the basis for creative thinking outside the standard ‘box’ of development solutions”

(Laurie, Andolina, and Radcliffe 2005: 472).

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This model, like the ubiquitous participatory budget that one also finds in decentralized Guatemala, has been promoted by NGOs and international institutions, including the World Bank, as a best practice for working with indigenous populations

(Davis 2000).181 Ethno-development initiatives became quite common in Guatemala after the signing of the Peace Accords, when a flood of international aid arrived, mostly to work with indigenous communities (Palenzuela and Jordi 1998, 1999; Morales and

Bá’Tiul 2009). Indigenous organizations too, experimented with using identity as an economic development tool (DeHart 2010).

In San Juan Ixcoy, indigenous entrepreneurs explain their strategy as one of development and democracy “with cultural pertinence.” While it generally fits the ethno- development paradigm, it is clearly a strategy specific to San Juan Ixcoy, and also reflects the (national) URNG party’s emphasis on participatory democracy, promoting indigenous collective rights, and reconstructing “democratic territories” that better reflect socio- political, ethnic and historical borders—essentially, they pose a brand of ethno- development that seeks to reform the nation-state from below, and challenge the liberal citizenship regime by calling for much greater local autonomy for indigenous peoples

(URNG 2011). In fact, although San Juan Ixcoy has benefited from extensive assistance from international actors—including JICA (Japan), CEFA (Italy) and the European

Union—in 2008, when the URNG government won its second term and became more stable, it asked all international actors to leave if they were not willing to work directly with the municipal government to support the latter’s own plans for culturally pertinent

181 Plant (1998) writes that the ethno-development approach came into vogue especially after the World Bank’s “watershed” study on indigenous peoples and poverty in 1994. On the global replication of Porto Alegre’s groundbreaking participatory budgeting process, see Baiocchi (forthcoming).

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democracy and development—one that would be inherently political, focusing on indigenous peoples’ collective rights to govern themselves and their territory. Out of a total of twenty-seven institutions working in the municipio, only two remained:

Movimundo (a Guatemalan NGO) and CEFA.

In San Juan Ixcoy, ethno-development, though it was spearheaded by a cadre of indigenous entrepreneurs, became an ingrained mode of governance. Citizenship was transformed as communities began to assert themselves as collective political actors vis-

à-vis the local state, in the space of the COMUDE; a mode of collaborative governance became engrained in practice. A few communities even asserted local autonomy by codifying their customary laws in writing, and supporting those efforts with legal arguments (see the introduction to Chapter One). And most recently, through the Ichmam program, participation within communities broadened and deepened as women and youth began asserting themselves as citizens within their communities and in the municipio, and as residents began collaborating on basic community governance in the areas of health, education, and agricultural production. The municipio as a whole also challenged the existing liberal citizenship regime by demanding to be recognized as an ethnically defined collective authority that can make binding decisions about how to govern its own territory. They did this through efforts to empower traditional indigenous authorities (the

Alcaldía Indígena), and through the Good Faith Community Consult, to reject mining activity. For these reasons, development with indigenous “identity”—even if it was a reconstructed and essentialized one—served the purpose of imparting positive value on being Mayan. And it served to transform indigenous citizenship.

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Ethno-development has its drawbacks, however, even when it is built organically.

While indigenous entrepreneurs can call attention to racial inequalities and urge

Ixcoyenses to embrace their identity, there is always the question: to what ends? As a tool for economic development, the model, stripped of its cultural motifs, advocates self- development. Granted, this is a right that indigenous activists fought for and is recognized by international rights conventions (Davis 2000). But practically speaking, self-development is limited and cannot address the structural issues that inform poverty in

San Juan Ixcoy: national ethnic and socio-economic inequality, and the country’s weak position in the global economy (Plant 1998: 33). Such large issues are beyond the municipal government’s control.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the progress made in transforming citizenship practices and participatory, collaborative governance, the limits to indigenous

“autonomy” in light of the economy, racist state, and restrictions of decentralization are clearer. The municipal government can build more school buildings, but filling them with bilingual teachers is a challenge, and constructing a school curriculum that is truly bilingual and culturally pertinent is merely a dream—there is no money for paying and training the teachers or producing new curriculum materials. San Juan Ixcoy’s rivers are strong enough for a hydroelectric dam that could make the municipio energy self- sufficient. But there are no funds for a publically owned and operated dam. Such financial shortcomings left community leaders’ frustrated when they did not get “their project,” and even produced apathy in some cases. This all reflects the lack of government funds for vital infrastructure like roads and potable water. Overall, Mayor

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Saturnino Figueroa said in 2010, the government does not invest in the pueblos indígenas.182

But, comparatively speaking, this transformative citizenship regime has produced much more tangible results for indigenous people than the case of Tecpán, where polarization prevents the formation and execution of development policies, plans, and programs. And compared with San Juan Sacatepéquez, individuals and communities are treated as full citizens: there are no distinctions between “permitted” and “radical” indigenous citizens. In San Juan Ixcoy, communities, civil society, and the state work collaboratively towards goals similar to those of the “uncivil” in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

Especially when viewed in comparative perspective, citizenship here became transformative.

182 As noted in Chapter Three, municipal income comes from a devolution of 10% of the central government budget and the collection of certain local taxes. Limited infrastructure projects can be funded through the Development Council System. But the central government itself also distributes additional funds and infrastructure projects unequally, according to political criteria and, Mayor Figueroa discovered, according to ethnic criteria.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSION

Indigenous people for centuries had been treated as less than citizens in

Guatemala. In the 1990s, towards the end of a thirty-six year violent internal conflict, altering the terms of citizenship finally emerged as a real possibility. Indigenous activists and organizations proposed reconfiguring the nation-state to include asymmetrical autonomy for indigenous peoples. But these proposals were quickly dismissed as untenable. Instead, decentralization became the fulcrum of a multicultural democratization process. Indigenous citizenship would be transformed through a series of laws that would expand the opportunities for citizen participation, and award indigenous communities and municipalities greater formal autonomy over local affairs, including processes of budgetary and governance decision-making. But, since laws are not always applied evenly or at all, especially in developing countries, this dissertation investigated if, how, and why indigenous citizenship was transforming within the new decentralized state institutional context, in three municipios. I discovered a fascinating variation of outcomes, which I have typologized as depoliticizing, polarizing, and transformative indigenous citizenship regimes.

I anchored the dissertation in a conceptual framework centered on citizenship.

Indigenous social mobilization in Latin America, it has been argued, is motivated by a desire to challenge existing liberal citizenship regimes that are grounded on the individual rights-bearer and the idea (or myth) of universal citizenship (Young 1989; Yashar 2005).

This post-liberal challenge requires “a new political arrangement, implying a redefinition

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of national political, administrative and legal space” (Sieder 2002: 8). Though it is not entirely clear what shape such a project would take, in its simplest sense it would create new collective political subjects out of indigenous communities, allowing them greater autonomy. Such changes naturally require recognizing identity-based rights. However, doing so can invite conflict and contestation over the definition of authentic indigenous identity, resulting in differential abilities to benefit from indigenous rights (Sawyer and

Gómez 2008; Engle 2010). Given the challenges of identity-based cultural rights, understanding how citizenship transforms required focusing on the struggles over identity, meaning, and power that bring life to such rights in specific local spaces. I thus advocated approaching citizenship as a relational, instituted process that is based in practices (Somers 1993). That is, within particular social, political, legal, and institutional contexts and constraints, citizenship is constructed and transformed by the practices of citizens themselves. This conceptual approach informed my choice of ethnographic methods, and allowed me to illustrate how indigenous peoples, particularly as collective actors, were constructing new expressions of citizenship and reconfiguring relationships between individual, community, and state.

To explain variations in indigenous citizenship, I developed an analytical framework grounded solidly in my data but also in key insights from literature on social movements, ethnic identity politics, and political sociology. I argued that the impact of decentralization on indigenous citizenship would result from the complicated mechanisms by which identity is made political within local governance. By the term

“political,” I wish to call attention to the ways that identities are split into “we” and

“they,” with accompanying political demands and overarching projects. Accordingly, I

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identified indigenous entrepreneurs as a specific category of indigenous actor that could perform this task. Building on Brubaker’s (2002) “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” and

Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) “international norm entrepreneurs,” I conceptualized indigenous entrepreneurs as activists who mobilize people on the basis of indigenousness, in order to deepen democracy and impart new value on indigenous culture, including indigenous-framed modes of organization, authority, and decision-making. To do this, they draw on resources including identity (its discourses, symbols, and practices), legal knowledge, and activist networks. Indigenous entrepreneurs must always navigate local politics and power relations in order to successfully impart their vision and convince others to accept it. At the same time, the cases in this dissertation also demonstrate that indigenous entrepreneurs often made strategic and consequential decisions that cannot simply be explained by looking to the political balance of power. That is, even within the enabling or, by contrast, constraining environment that powerful elite actors created, indigenous entrepreneurs still had opportunities for effectively exercising agency, which they sometimes exploited and other times missed. In sum, emergent indigenous citizenship regimes result from both local structural conditions and the agency of indigenous entrepreneurs.

I further demonstrated that decentralization reforms were a new political opportunity in local contexts (cf. Tarrow 1998; Baiocchi 2006) that could be captured by elites or, alternatively, by indigenous entrepreneurs. The first actors to successfully capture the decentralization process, including the new spaces of participation, would more easily maintain influence in the realm of local governance. Yet, initial capture was dependent on two factors: (1) whether and to what extent indigenous entrepreneurs could

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organize a social movement to democratize the local state, and (2) the overall configuration of power in the municipio or, in other words, the power and organization of elites. I developed this analytical framework to explain variation in citizenship in three municipios: San Juan Sacatepéquez; Tecpán, Guatemala; and San Juan Ixcoy (see Table

7.1, below). While the municipios differed significantly in terms of the analytical factors just delineated and the substantive citizenship outcomes, they largely shared important characteristics: a majority indigenous population, an indigenous mayor for at least the last three elections, and a fairly weak civil society prior to the implementation of decentralization reforms.

Table 7.2: Analytical Framework

San Juan Sacatepéquez Tecpán, Guatemala San Juan Ixcoy

Powerful & organized, are Moderately organized, Low first actors, and Elites collaborate with organization collaborate with municipal municipal government and power and central government Strong organization, High organization, first actors, Low and territorially strong local assume power circumscribed Indigenous movement, first actors, in the local organization, low Entrepreneurs strong voice and state; unified influence; missed influence; sometimes and very important opportunities disagree over strategy knowledgeable, creative, and resourceful Outcome: Transformative Indigenous Depoliticizing Polarizing Indigenous Citizenship Indigenous Citizenship Indigenous Citizenship Citizenship Regime

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Constructions of Indigenous Citizenship

To what extent can demands for post-liberal, culturally differentiated citizenship be met under decentralization? The three cases in this dissertation suggest that the answer is highly contingent on the local socio-political factors I have identified above. In each municipio, indigenous communities challenged the individualist precepts of liberal citizenship by asserting local autonomy to govern and control natural resources. But those efforts were moderately successful in only two places (polarizing-Tecpán, and transformative-San Juan Ixcoy). Moreover, even in those cases, there surfaced clear limitations in terms of the tangible developmental outcomes that one could expect from these new local citizenship regimes.

Depoliticizing Indigenous Citizenship

In San Juan Sacatepéquez, indigenous citizenship was depoliticizing. Explicitly

“indigenous” voices were largely excluded from the local state decentralization process, including the process of constructing the new participatory spaces—the system of

Municipal and Community Development Councils (COMUDE and COCODES). Instead, this process, and arguably the substance of participation within the COMUDE itself, was captured by elites: a tripartite alliance of the local state, central government, and the business Cementos Progreso, which was building an open-pit mine and cement factory in the midst of rural indigenous communities. Indigenous entrepreneurs were not as visible or as organized in San Juan Sacatepéquez, compared to the other two cases in this dissertation. They were the leaders among the twelve communities in the southwestern region of the municipality that sought to democratize local development and assert

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territorial autonomy in response to the Cementos Progreso mining project. But this localized movement failed to expand to additional geographic regions of San Juan

Sacatepéquez. This was partly because they lacked networks with other communities in the municipio, and partly because they were intently focused on the territorially circumscribed effects of Cementos Progreso. Moreover, their adversary was not just the local state (as in the cases of polarizing and transformative indigenous citizenship), but a local state that was allied with the central state and capital interests. They sought to transform citizenship through elections, and never directly considered the decentralization laws or new participatory spaces as a possible solution to their problems.

Elites did.

Political and economic elites were the first actors to harness the decentralization process, mostly for their own interests. They implemented the law without regard for indigenous identity or consideration of what would be an effective way for indigenous citizens to organize themselves. In fact, one finds that multiple Second Level Community

Development Councils were constructed in a manner that blocked the formation of trans- community networks across the municipio, and thus hindered open discussion and identification of problems affecting the municipio as a whole—problems such as how natural resources should be managed. By way of comparison, in Tecpán and San Juan

Ixcoy, all communities had a presence in either the COMUDE or Second Level

COCODE, and could thus identify and discuss the costs and benefits of sweeping development projects such as reforestation or mining. Strong and broad representation of communities and local civil society organizations in those municipalities allowed for balancing the power of the local state and elites; in both cases, communities had a say in

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how the municipio should be governed. In San Juan Sacatepéquez, however, the process of implementing and maintaining the spaces for citizen participation was captured, seemingly with the goals of a) generating local acceptance of Cementos Progreso’s mining operations; b) silencing opposition, both real and potential; and most generally, c) fostering a (big) business-friendly climate and strategy for achieving socio-economic development. In many respects, this agenda was successful, though never entirely, because many COCODE leaders and civil society actors silently questioned the

COMUDE’s raison d’être, and residents of the twelve communities closest to the mine saw the COMUDE as a tool of oppression against them.

Lines were drawn implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, between good and unacceptable indigenous citizens. The former, indios permitidos, took part in the

COMUDE, accepting deceptively limited opportunities for participation, even if they often did so quite reluctantly. The latter—radicals, uncivil, and ungovernable—partly rejected and partly were excluded from the participatory spaces, largely for trying to exercise their collective rights as indigenous peoples, to oppose Cementos Progreso.183

This separation of indigenous citizens into two camps was one aspect of depoliticization in San Juan Sacatepéquez. Building on Wendy Brown’s work on depoliticization (2006), indigenous citizenship takes on a depoliticized character when an “indigenous” citizen’s identity and rights are removed from both the power relations that produced and reproduce the indígena-Ladino binary, and the history of colonialism and internal

183 Specifically, they asserted the right to give or withhold “Free, Prior, and Informed Consent” over development initiatives slated for their territories. The ILO Convention 169 and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples support this right, though national legislation does not (unless one engages in some creative legal interpretation).

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colonialism that stripped indigenous individuals and communities of their lands and rights.

Citizenship was depoliticized in a second aspect, as well. The very questions that many citizens wished to raise in the realm of local government—especially questions relating to legitimate authority and territorial and economic development—were construed as beyond the limits of participation, and instead subject to technical interventions of political and policy experts (c.f. Ferguson 1990; Li 2006). While there was indeed democratic participation, and while this was something entirely new and significant for the municipio, it never touched “the essential”: capitalist power, and in this case, Cementos Progreso (Gramsci 1971). By contrast, the “uncivil” indigenous communities located closest to the Cementos Progreso mining site regularly met and communicated, gradually developing counter-discourses on mining, development, and indigenous rights.184

Polarizing Indigenous Citizenship: Tecpán, Guatemala

In Tecpán, vibrant indigenous identity politics, powerful political coalitions and decentralization reforms intersected to produce a polarizing indigenous citizenship regime. Initially, indigenous entrepreneurs organized the population into a movement to democratize the local state and include indigenous people and communities as citizens.

Strong and unified, they captured the decentralization process in Tecpán. Most importantly, they used the Second Level COCODE as way to institutionalize their emergent local movement, which encompassed all rural and urban communities in the

184 By “counter-discourses” I seek to reference Nancy Fraser’s (1990) concept of the subaltern counterpublic.

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municipio. Having captured the state-sanctioned participatory spaces, indigenous entrepreneurs and this movement remained a constant and powerful force in the Tecpán.

However, political and economic elites (both Ladinos and indígenas) also wielded considerable power, and managed to keep indigenous entrepreneurs and COCODE leaders in check.

Since 2002, when the Development Council institutions were created in the heat of a contentious battle with the former Mayor, community leaders consistently demanded government transparency and accountability, and a voice in local decision-making.

People learned of their individual and collective rights as citizens and indigenous people(s), and how to exercise them using official channels and legal arguments, as well as through contentious action. Many community leaders successfully utilized the

Development Councils to debate what policies, regulations, and projects would best enable their communities to achieve their visions for development. They obtained unprecedented access to government information, and thwarted projects and programs with which they disagreed, especially various projects slated for the Municipal Forest.

However, Mayors were consistently reluctant to fully engage citizen participation, and community leaders responded by more aggressively asserting their rights not just to participate, but also to govern. They refused to succumb to technical policy interventions, and demanded consultation on every aspect of local governance. For many COCODE leaders, and especially for indigenous entrepreneurs, exercising such rights was also a tool for asserting the value of indigenous identity, and was informed by grander visions of transforming local governance to conform to particularistic conceptions about how

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indigenous “Mayan” governance should look. In the end, this produced political gridlock and limited tangible development outcomes.

The empowerment of indigenous civil society through the Development Council

System, coupled with a simultaneous distrust of and participation in local government and party politics, gave way to a latent fight over basic questions about legitimate authority, power, and government practices. In the public sphere, key questions about citizenship and local governance circulated: Who are legitimate authorities and what powers do they possess? How should decisions over governance be made, and who should make them? Positions on these questions fell along two lines. On one hand, legitimate authority, substantive power and modes of decision-making stemmed from a belief in the political party system, official state, and official juridical system. But alternate conceptions were grounded in a particular interpretation of indigenous-framed community norms, authority and decision-making that fall outside the political party system. This polarization reflected opposite processes of indigenous identity

(re)construction: mayanization (becoming more “Mayan” and hence more “authentically” indigenous) and ladinization (losing indigenous identity markers and instead taking up those of the dominant Guatemalan/Ladino culture). In sum, the lack of collaborative governance in Tecpán resulted from these polarizing positions over whether or not governance should reflect demands to (re)insert community norms, values, and procedures into the local state or, more generally, to recognize collective rights.

Transformative Indigenous Citizenship: San Juan Ixcoy

In San Juan Ixcoy, indigenous entrepreneurs were extremely knowledgeable, creative, and numerous, perhaps even more so than in Tecpán. They organized a small

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local movement to democratize the state and demand the application of the Development

Council Law. Elites were relatively unorganized and powerless—in truth it is difficult to clearly identify organized elite interests in the municipio. This better enabled indigenous entrepreneurs to win municipal elections in 2004 and hold onto formal power for two terms (eight years). During that time, they worked from their positions as both elected officials and members of civil society, to transform indigenous citizenship.

The idea that citizenship for indigenous people should be participatory, culturally relevant and collaborative became hegemonic in the municipio. Decentralized participatory institutions were shaped in order to reflect local organizational culture, broaden participation to include formerly excluded sectors, and facilitate coordination with the municipal government. The local state was democratized in a culturally pertinent manner, and local governance became the product of a cooperative, synergistic relationship between civil society and the state. Together, they constructed policies and plans for deepening citizen participation in indigenous communities and in the municipality at large, and for achieving basic socio-economic and human development goals, particularly in the areas of education, health, and agricultural productivity. Astute in the symbolic and practical uses of culture, indigenous entrepreneurs promoted a particular interpretation of indigenous identity and culture—the “Ichmam Model”—as a rationale for making democracy more inclusive (especially of women and youth) and for achieving sustainable development. But indigenous culture was also promoted as a goal in and of itself that is intrinsically valuable, especially to activists concerned with cultural revitalization and combatting institutionalized, interpersonal and internalized racism.

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Citizens here were knowledgeable about their rights, including indigenous identity-based rights, and exercised them regularly. They applied their knowledge not only to participate in planning the municipal budget, but also in order to assert local autonomy over sub-soil natural resources (minerals) at the level of the municipio, and to formalize indigenous customary law in some communities. San Juan Ixcoy pushed the limits to local autonomy, making indigenous citizenship truly transformative, by actively questioning the relationships between indigenous communities, the municipality (as a larger indigenous community), and the official state.

However, San Juan Ixcoy also illustrates the limits to indigenous citizenship under the current decentralized state regime in Guatemala. While they used their resources wisely in order to combat poverty, those resources were thin. Participation was sometimes frustrating in the absence of money to fund projects, some of which (water for instance) were vital to some communities’ survival. Moreover, even though culturally pertinent development was prioritized by state and civil society, there are no resources to put into practice many of the municipio’s goals.

Theoretical Implications

This dissertation provides detailed accounts of citizenship transformations in local spaces, building on a growing body of scholarship that examines citizenship as something that is actively practiced, or as I put it, constructed by citizens themselves (e.g., Somers

1993; Ong 2006). I move beyond previous studies by providing an analytical framework to explain those transformations, and I challenge scholars to take a bottom-up approach to understanding both citizenship and the effects of decentralization reforms, especially in

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the developing world context where central states lack the capacity (and often the will) to implement or enforce laws, particularly outside of major urban areas. Rather than view this lack of state capacity as an unquestionable weakness, I suggest it might also be beneficial for subaltern actors who can then create binding local citizenship regimes that better match local cultural conditions.

In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I also raised a number of concerns that informed my study of decentralization and indigenous citizenship, including the wave of state multicultural reforms in Latin America, the lack of understanding about how democratic decentralization conceived in the Western context might play out among indigenous populations, and the overarching question of whether decentralization is a suitable solution for constructing multicultural democracies. I also premised my analytical framework on the likely positive role that civil society can play in local democracy. Below, I take up each of these points in turn.

State Multiculturalism

This dissertation built on the literature on state multiculturalism by demonstrating that multicultural policies can have varied effects in a single country, and developed an analytical framework to explain that variation. When states first began passing legislation to recognize indigenous rights and incorporating multicultural reforms into their

Constitutions, there prevailed a distinct optimism that Latin America had broken away from its tortured past of forced cultural assimilation and denigration of indigenous people to the rank of second-class citizens (Assies et al. eds. 1998; Van Cott 2000; Mayberry-

Lewis ed. 2002). Yet no sooner had the ink dried on those legal reforms than evidence of

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their practical shortcomings began to pile. Hale famously critiqued state multiculturalism as merely a new form of racial domination, this time less overt (2002; 2006). The new multiculturalism, he argued, was far from revolutionary. To the contrary, it was

“neoliberal” in that it privileged individual over collective cultural rights, allowing elites to feign support for indigenous rights while maintaining intact the basic power relations that structure economy and society. This dissertation joins scholars like Horton (2006) and Assies (2010) who argue that true effects of state multiculturalism are mixed, and their emancipatory potential much more conditional.

San Juan Sacatepéquez’s depoliticizing citizenship regime closely typifies Hale’s ominous assessment. Many indigenous citizens graciously accepted the invitation to enter into the fold of “civil” civil society, while numerous indigenous activists and communities remained isolated in their attempts to exercise collective rights over territory—rights that are guaranteed by the UN and ILO but do not figure explicitly into any national legislation. In the public sphere, elites framed culture and identity in folkloric terms, dismissing the validity of collective indigenous rights.

By contrast, in Tecpán’s polarizing citizenship regime, community leaders used multicultural legislation—the decentralization reforms—to reframe relations between indigenous communities and the official state, ultimately seeking to supplant the latter with a mode of governance based in the former. In some sense they succeeded, especially in asserting communal control over the municipal forest. However, since theirs was one of two main perspectives in a bifurcated citizenry, they were ultimately unsuccessful in fully transforming the local state and citizenship. While this was partly due to the power of indigenous and Ladino economic and political elites in the municipio, it also resulted

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from the complicated ways that modern indigenous individuals conceive of their ethnic identity and personal and political interests. “Ladinized” indigenous citizens remained committed to the institutions of the official Guatemalan local state and the political party system. Mayanistas wanted to surpass it.

Finally, San Juan Ixcoy’s transformative citizenship regime in many ways fulfills the promise of state multiculturalism. Indigenous identity became a pillar of local citizenship and development as indigenous entrepreneurs took full advantage of the decentralization reforms’ many references to indigenous rights. Citizens were encouraged to learn and exercise collective rights at the community and municipal scale, and to assert their identity proudly and as a tool for social and economic development. In contrast to both other municipios, here the local government collaborated with civil society actors and communities in order to carry out community consults to reject mining on the municipio’s territory. Not long afterwards, San Juan Ixcoy joined a group of nearby municipios in order to declare their “territory” “free of mining,” legally grounding their claim in internationally sanctioned indigenous rights accords. The Guatemalan state views these declarations and community consults as non-binding, illegal. But if one approaches citizenship as a historical process based in local practices, then transformations in San Juan Ixcoy are not only locally significant, but also possible harbingers of change to come one day at the national level.185

185 Somers (1993) similarly demonstrated that in England, socio-economic rights were exercised in particular local contexts many years before they were institutionalized in the modern welfare state.

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Democratic Decentralization and Indigenous Peoples

In most of the literature on democratic decentralization, an implicit assumption is that findings should easily transport to non-Western contexts. Relatively little scholarship directly examines the impact of democratic decentralization on indigenous peoples. This dissertation addresses that shortcoming by explicitly questioning whether decentralization reforms conceived in a Western context can function well among non-Western populations. Indeed, I show that the answer is quite conditional on local factors.

Indigenous community traditions in Guatemala, though they are “traditions”— customary practices, norms and values that in many ways emanate from Mayan spiritual beliefs—tend to adhere to certain unwritten rules that prevent authoritarian actions. The alcalde comunitario (community mayor), we found, is nearly always chosen on a yearly basis, according to community norms. Assuming this post is an obligation (not a right), and there is no possibility of re-election. In some places (such as the municipio of

Totonicapán), procedures even exist for re-calling the alcalde comunitario and all community authorities, when their performances are unsatisfactory. Gender discrimination, though it exists in practice, is in no way inscribed in customary laws—to the contrary, many Mayan culture stalwarts insist that the “true” Mayan culture does not discriminate against women, and consider pervasive machismo an unfortunate side effect of Spanish colonization.186 In sum, Ribot’s fear of empowering traditional authorities, lest they engage in undemocratic, authoritarian practices, finds little support in Guatemala

(Ribot 2011). Instead, as Tecpán’s polarized citizenship regime showed (for example), basing local governance on indigenous community norms does not “diminish the public

186 I do not mean to suggest this is an accurate socio-historical narrative, but rather to underscore the point that gender discrimination is not a “formal” element of indigenous customary law and governing traditions, even if it tends to happen in practice—both in indigenous and non-indigenous society.

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domain” and “shrink the integrative space of democratic public interaction”; rather, it expands it (Ribot 2011: 11). At the same time, the need to adhere to certain stipulations in the Development Council Law—stipulations that limited local autonomy—had the effect of crowding out traditional authorities (the alcaldes comunitarios) and empowering a new non-indigenous community authority, the Community Development Council

(COCODE) President. This serves to underscore Ehrentraut’s observation that “for decentralization to benefit indigenous peoples, powers relevant to the challenges these groups face… must be devolved to institutions controlled by their communities

(Ehrentraut 2011: 110, my emphasis). However, it should also be noted that in the case of transformative citizenship in San Juan Ixcoy, community governance traditions were so badly damaged by the Army during the internal conflict (especially in the 1980s), that the

COCODE served as a tool for re-democratization within indigenous communities.

Moreover, indigenous entrepreneurs, from their position as municipal authorities, stretched the limits of the decentralization laws in order to create new forms of community governance (various “councils”) that would re-embed the state in (a particular vision of) indigenous community culture—comparable to the way Polanyi (2001) advocated re-embedding the market in society, in order to protect the latter from the destructive tendencies of the former. In these ways, the dissertation builds upon Tyson’s

(2010) and von Benda-Beckmann’s (2001) assessments of decentralization in Indonesia: under certain conditions, decentralization can facilitate the revival of indigenous culture and customs and alter existing power relations.

More generally, however, examining the transformation of indigenous citizenship in the context of state decentralization illustrates that decentralization does indeed create

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spaces in which indigenous individual and collective citizens may “make” themselves.

And in contrast to much scholarship that warns of the pervasive danger of elite capture, the cases in this dissertation clearly show that examining local governance and citizenship from the “bottom up” can provide a better understanding of how elite capture happens, and when subaltern (or indigenous) “capture” might instead take place.

Civil Society: Conducive to citizenship?

My selection of municipal case studies assumed that civil society—the sphere of association separate from the market, state, community, and family—was fairly weak prior to the implementation of decentralization reforms, primarily because associations, and especially political action, was prohibited for most of the 1980’s and in some places, the early 1990s as well. My premise for holding this factor constant was that an active civil society that is autonomous from the state should facilitate democracy (and citizenship) and improve state-society coordination in local government (c.f. Avritzer

2002; Baiocchi et al. 2011). That is, it should be a basis for the transformation of indigenous citizenship. Yet this is far from a universally accepted premise (Foley and

Edwards 1996; Carothers 1999/2000) and is also one I qualify here.

Political scientists have been notably reluctant to assign an unquestionably positive role to civil society. Adherents to the “demand overload” thesis believe that an overly active citizenry can place too much pressure on democratic governance, leading to political instability (Huntington 1968; Crozier, Huntington and Watanukie 1975; Olson

1982). The recommendation is that political parties be the appropriate channels for political participation. Clearly, such an argument makes little sense in the context of

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developing countries like Guatemala where the political party system is unconsolidated and almost entirely dominated by Ladino elites, leaving indigenous people little possibility for exercising political voice through those institutional channels.187 To presuppose political participation as party participation and voting also clearly rests on a strict conception of liberal democracy that indigenous movements have explicitly challenged. For indigenous peoples, participating in their communities and civil society are much more viable avenues for exercising voice in the public sphere and in local governance.

There is then, however, the question of whether a strong civil society can actually lead to non-democratic outcomes. Heller, while demonstrating civil society’s importance for democratization, adds the caveat that civil society can also promote “particularism that fosters rent-seeking lobbies and exclusionary identities” (Heller 2000: 498). Socio- economic, cultural, and political inequalities may make participation in civil society easier for some groups than others. Chatterjee (2004), for example, argues that civil society in India is a space only for elites; he assigns little agency to subalterns. My findings partly confirm these suppositions, but only if one accepts elite definitions of

“civil society” as the realm of “civil” participation, where “civil” is whatever elites deem it to be. In the case of San Juan Sacatepéquez-depoliticizing citizenship, participation in state-sanctioned spaces of “civil society” was delimited to “civil” indigenous citizens who agreed not to raise issues of identity-based rights and follow the rules of conduct laid out by elites. However, I also found participation in civil society—the realm of association distinct from state, market, community, and family—beyond these elite-

187 In Guatemala, the lack of party consolidation means that normally more than twenty parties compete in any given election season.

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captured spaces. The communities who protested the mine, though they had no voice in

San Juan Sacatepéquez’s governance, formed part of a subaltern counterpublic that successfully exercised voice within the national public sphere, within social movement and solidarity networks, and even in the international realm, as they sought to publicize their story to foreign human rights NGOs and international institutions, including the

United Nations. These were all efforts at exercising rights, with the ultimate goal of redefining citizenship to include local democratic control over territorial development.

Finally, if San Juan Sacatepéquez illustrates the possible depoliticizing nature of elite- conceived civil society and “invited” participation (Cook and Kothari eds. 2001;

Cornwall and Coelho 2007), then it also represents its limits. In both the cases of polarizing and transformative citizenship, when indigenous entrepreneurs were able to capture the state-sanctioned participatory spaces, citizenship was demonstrably inclusive and deep. This underscores the importance of being first movers when it comes to participating in state-constructed “invited” participatory spaces.

Lastly, some argue that a thick associational life (defined in the

Toquevillian/Putnam tradition) is not necessarily conducive to democracy.188 As

Berman’s (1997) influential study of Weimar Germany demonstrated, it can lead to support for fascism. Importantly, associational life in that case was marked by exclusionary participation in organizations that reinforced pre-held identities, rather than by efforts to bridge group identities and build civic solidarity. Berman’s findings imply that in Guatemala, for indigenous citizenship to be democratic and transformative, a careful balance should be struck between individual, community, civil society, and state, ensuring that community autonomy be simultaneously respected but not infringe on the

188 See Putnam (1993) and Tocqueville (1988).

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rights of other communities.189 This might become a contentious issue in cases such as

Tecpán, where a polarized citizenship regime was marked by distinct visions of how local governance should work—visions that rested on very different value systems that were rooted in self-conceptions of ethnic and cultural identity. But, following Mouffe

(2005), rather than viewing civil society as a space where such identities vanish under some sort of deliberative democratic consensus, the case of indigenous identity politics in

Tecpán should push us to recognize the “agonistic” dimension to these inherently political struggles. The most democratic outcomes, and most emancipatory possibilities for indigenous citizenship, would be grounded in an “ ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted” (Mouffe

2005: 3).

Decentralization as a Tool for Constructing Multicultural Democracy

This dissertation began by questioning whether decentralization could truly address indigenous demands for a differentiated post-liberal citizenship regime, and more broadly, whether it could form the basis for building an inclusive multi-cultural democracy. Indigenous peoples in other countries have demanded and sometimes succeeded in establishing asymmetrical autonomy. Bolivia, for instance, has recently embarked on a process of redrawing internal state boundaries to construct an ethnic-based asymmetrical federalist regime. Decentralization laws in Guatemala do confer on indigenous peoples limited rights to self-government. But they fall drastically short of an asymmetrical autonomy arrangement that would allow indigenous peoples to exit the political party system of local governance (for instance), and award them control over

189 The question of individual rights is clearly also an issue.

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territory, including sub-soil natural resources. These tend to be the most common issues that are the subject of indigenous contention in Guatemala and throughout Latin America.

Consequently, decentralization’s contribution to multicultural democratic deepening in Guatemala rests in its opening of new spaces by which indigenous peoples can engage the state. In the case of polarizing citizenship in Tecpán, they “got to know the state,” and saw that it was not theirs and should be transformed. In San Juan Ixcoy’s transformative indigenous citizenship regime, indigenous entrepreneurs took power over the state and, by working collaboratively with civil society, successfully executed a project of local state transformation. Though the project was limited by structural forces beyond the municipio’s control—i.e. finances, the global economy, and limits to territorial autonomy—it was a project designed by indigenous people, for indigenous people. Decentralization thus opened up the possibility that indigenous peoples could more easily (though certainly not fully) exercise their right to self-determination: to construct a “governing institutional order” (Anaya 2004) that allows them to decide what kind of development they want, and gives them the freedom and capability to achieve it

(Sen 1999).

In sum, each of the municipal case studies in this dissertation illustrates how indigenous people have become political actors, made political arguments, and engaged in inherently political struggles. At this point, I want to take a step back and interrogate precisely what I mean by calling these “political” struggles and projects. French theorist

Jacques Rancière’s understanding of this term is particularly useful for interpreting the transformative projects that communities, individuals, and indigenous entrepreneurs posed in each municipality. Specifically, he eschews definitions of politics that focus on

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the state, government, or particular contentious actions, and instead focuses on the intent within those actions. Baiocchi and Connor (forthcoming), summarizing Rancière, write that political acts are those “that challenge dominant relationships by presenting the possibility of their undoing.”190 In the case of indigenous political struggles, efforts are focused on envisioning the possible undoing of dominant race relations, dominant class relations, and even the dominant state-community relations that institutionalize the racial and class structure. Undoing these relations, however, must be a conscious effort—and often, it is.

My friend Alvaro—an indigenous entrepreneur—once said to me: “Si queremos desarrollarnos, primero, tenemos que des-arrollarnos!” His words do not translate well into English: “If we want to develop, then first we have to des-arrollarnos.” The

Larousse Spanish-English dictionary (1994) translates “arrollar” as “to run over,” “to sweep away,” or “to crush.” What Alvaro is saying then, is that if his people want

“development,” they must first undo all the damage that their culture, well-being, and individual and collective self worth has suffered at the crushing hands of Spanish colonialism, Ladino internal colonialism, and general racial and socio-economic marginalization. The inherently political project that he and many others posit is one of decolonization—an undoing of internal colonialism. Is decentralization the answer to decolonization? Assuredly, I argue, it is not. But by broadening and deepening participation in indigenous communities and municipalities, it increases the possibilities that indigenous peoples will get to know the state and that consequently such decolonizing narratives can develop and take hold. In this sense, the involvement of indigenous entrepreneurs in local governance has been crucial.

190 See Rancière (1999).

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Further Questions

This dissertation’s findings raise unanswered questions that are worth briefly addressing here. First, as the previous discussion of decentralization and multicultural democratization alluded to, if an ethnically defined asymmetrical federalist regime would better incorporate indigenous peoples as citizens and better address glaring ethnic/racial and socio-economic inequalities, then why have we not seen the indigenous movement in

Guatemala articulate demands for ethnic-based territorial autonomy? Indeed, though I interpret many of their struggles—especially the ones over natural resources—as struggles for local autonomy, rarely is that term employed by indigenous actors themselves. Answering such a question would provide key insight into the evolution of indigenous identity politics in Guatemala, especially compared with other countries where autonomy demands have arisen, such as Bolivia, where ethnic autonomy has been the centerpiece of indigenous demands since the 1990s and is now the guiding framework for re-configuring the nation-state. At a broader level, this question speaks to the role that subaltern actors can play in transforming the nation-state.

Second, the dissertation’s findings also contribute to an emergent literature examining the creative ways that subaltern actors can make use of the law in combination with contentious politics (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavíto 2005; Goodale and Merry

2007). Indigenous actors within communities and municipalities have mobilized national and international law, often creatively, in order to stake a claim to community and municipal territorial autonomy (even if they avoid that term).191 Their experiences, which were only partially successful, raise questions about both the limits and emancipatory possibilities of official law in terms of allowing indigenous people as collectivities to

191 Also see Sieder (2010).

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pose “counterhegemonic projects.” And specifically, their creative use of the law in order to exercise the right to give or withhold Free, Prior, and Informed Consent over natural resource development projects, combined with the state’s continued push to spur economic development through natural resource extraction, raises questions about the tangible political consequences of creative legal strategies, both within and beyond

Guatemala.

Conclusion

In this dissertation I investigated new constructions of indigenous citizenship within the context of state decentralization, and found great sub-national variation. I constructed an analytical framework to explain that variation, clearly demonstrating that transformations in indigenous citizenship are dependent on both identity politics and local power relations, a varying balance of structural constraints and agentic possibility. I further argued that this framework can help explain how and why other multicultural state reforms impact indigenous peoples’ rights and well being.

Indigenous citizenship at the level of the individual and community, and even local citizenship regimes, have transformed under decentralization, even if this transformation is limited in many ways. In the end, it would need to be superceded if indigenous people are to fully define and achieve their own visions of development. But, decentralization and the opening up of participatory spaces in local government provide new opportunities for indigenous peoples to understand the state and their relationship with it, and to begin developing proposals for an alternative political project that can one day decolonize the state and society.

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APPENDIX A

INTERVIEWING AND OBSERVATION STRATEGIES AND DATA SUMMARY

This dissertation draws from interviews and observational data that was both during the period of primary dissertation field work (in 2009-2001), and in the summers of 2006, 2007, and 2008 (though work in 2008 was very limited).

During the summer pre-dissertation research, I completed interviews with indigenous activists from campesino (peasant) organizations that were mostly focused on problems of land access and agricultural challenges as they affect indigenous and

(sometimes) poor Ladinos. I also interviewed cultural rights activists who have been part of the Mayan movement to resuscitate and (re)valorize Mayan culture, and create a pan-

Mayan identity that can link together people from the twenty-one Mayan ethno-linguistic groups in the country. I attended meetings, conferences and political and cultural events that were staged by activists and organizations from both groups. At this stage of research

I was concerned with understanding how indigenous identity-based activism was evolving, and in particular how and why different actors and organizations that form part of the general indigenous movement in Guatemala would frame and utilize “indigenous” and “Mayan” identity as a representational and political strategy. I also began researching the ways that indigenous activists and organizations were utilizing Guatemalan and international law as a political tool for controlling land and territory. Finally, I began exploring the possible ways that indigenous people were using decentralization as a strategy for constructing local autonomy. In sum, I conducted formal interviews with fifty

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individuals (most of whom were representing thirty-two indigenous and campesino organizations) as well as many additional informal interviews.

Dissertation field research included much more extensive participant observation and interviewing. Interviews were conducted in numerous formats. Within municipalities, some interviews were with individuals, while others were with small groups (two to three persons), medium-sized groups (eight to ten persons), or with entire village assemblies. A main goal of the research was to understand how the decentralization process had impacted indigenous communities. My strategy was to seek an interview with one or a few current and former community leaders. If they agreed to the interview, I would usually travel to their community to meet with them. Occasionally only one or two people would show for the interview. More often, a group of five to ten current (and sometimes former) community leaders (members of the Community Development

Council and Alcalde Auxiliar/Comunitario) would be waiting. A few times, a large group of roughly fifty people were present for the interview, though only a few would speak. In indigenous communities, especially rural ones, decisions about whether or not to participate in a research study such as mine must be submitted to a collective vote, at least among the community leaders, and in some places the entire community desired to observe and sometimes participate in the actual interview.

Other types of interviews conducted at the municipal level tended to almost always be one-on-one. This included interviews with current and former government officials, representatives of local civil society organizations and churches, indigenous rights activists, Mayan spiritual leaders, and community leaders who were involved in the initial process to organize the Municipal Development Council and could thus comment

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on the history of politics and government in the municipality, and explain how and why things have changed.

Because I also engaged in participant observation, some of my interview subjects became key informants and friends with whom I had countless informal conversations, some of which continue by distance, over, the Internet. These conversations and relationships are impossible to quantify but they inform the results of this study.

Engaging in participant observation also meant that many informal (and sometimes short) conversations and interactions with community leaders, municipal officials and indigenous activists were not recorded as official interviews and thus not quantifiable, but they do inform the three narratives of indigenous citizenship depicted in this dissertation.

The same can be said of research that qualifies as “national scale.” Certain interviewees became key informants and important gatekeepers to a multitude of further interviews. Some of my key informants became friends with whom I engaged in countless conversations about local governance and indigenous rights. Additionally, many informal conversations and queries that took place while attending an event are not included in the total interview count. Table A.1: Dissertation Research Interviews, is an effort to quantify the interviews conducted, however one should understand the true numbers to be signficantly higher.

Table A.1: Dissertation Research Interviews*

Interview Type Number of Interviews National 38 San Juan Sacatepéquez 46 Tecpán, Guatemala 50 San Juan Ixcoy 38 Total 172 *does not include informal interviews or multiple interviews with the same individual

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The individual was not the unit of analysis in this study, and most interview subjects were not human subjects but instead were treated as key informants. But, because of the often sensitive and political nature of the questions asked, almost all names have been withheld or changed.

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APPENDIX B

SAMPLE QUESTIONNAIRE FOR INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY INTERVIEWS

I conducted semi-structured community interviews with present and former community leaders, or people who could comment on how the decentralization process had affected their community, how local governance within the community and municipality had changed over time, how the community’s relationship with the municipal government had evolved over the years, and how the new participatory spaces

(Municipal and Community Development Councils) had affected governance in the municipality and in their community. I developed questions early in the field research process, with assistance from knowledgeable indigenous rights activists. I regularly adjusted and refined the questionnaire in order to generate better responses.

Questions were modified for each municipality, in order to address conflicts or challenges specific to each locale. In Tecpán I queried community leaders about the conflicts over the Municipal Forest. In San Juan Sacatepéquez I questioned communities about the role of mining/Cementos Progreso in the municipality and how or if this issue had been debated in the COMUDE or COCODE. In San Juan Ixcoy, I asked community leaders to explain how and why their community was (or was not) participating in the many initiatives for culturally pertinent development that the municipal government was promoting.

At times I did not ask all questions, depending on how the interview had progressed—especially since I conducted the interviews in as informal and open a manner as possible, in order to allow community leaders to speak freely and feel

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comfortable. Many of the questions listed in the Community Interview Guide were not posed verbatim, but served as a list of topics that helped me guide the interview. Below I have presented an English-language version of the Community Interview Guide, as modified for the communities in San Juan Ixcoy.

COMMUNITY INTERVIEW GUIDE (as modified for San Juan Ixcoy)

Basic Information about the Community

Name and type of community (aldea, caserio, canton, barrio)

Population

Languages Spoken

Ethnicity (do they identify as indigneous? Is there a mixed population?)

What religions are there in the community? Do some practice the Mayan spirituality?

Distance to the center of town (and how much time, by public transport)

Economic base of the community (what do they plant? In what trades do they work?)

What party did the majority of the population vote for in 2007? Why did they vote for this party? Did any candidates make promises to the community?

History of Organization and Authority in the Community

When was the community founded?

Years ago, how were problems resolved in the community? (For example, conflicts and challenges on issues like education, transportation, water, etc.)

Were there committees? Organizations?

Who were the leaders? (what types of leadership posts existed and what kinds of persons would fulfill them?

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Also, many years ago, what were relations like between the community and the municipal government? Has the municipal government helped here with any kind of project? Have you solicited support from the municipality? How was that experience?

In the past, many years ago, did the community have any kind of relationship with the Alcaldía Indígena?

I understand the internal conflict affected many communities in this area of the country. What was the situation like in this community?

Organization and Authority in the Community Today

Community Development Council

When was the COCODE inscribed in the Town Hall for the first time? Has the COCODE always functioned, or were there times when it did not function?

Why have a COCODE?

Who are in the COCODE? (e.g. are there women, younger community members, etc.?) How are leaders chosen?

Does your community participate in the COMUDE?

Does the community have… • A community health commisioner? Education commisioner? Production commisioner? • A Health Council? Education Council? Production Council? o [If YES: When was it formed? What kind of work is it doing/how well is it functioning? Has it begun any kind of project? o [If NO: Does the community have plans to name a commissioner and/or conform the Council?]

What is the opinion of the community, on the strengths and weaknesses of the COCODE and COMUDE?

Are there other important forms of organization or leadership in the community? If yes, what are they, and what do they do?

Do the different organizations in the community work together or are there divisions and conflicts? Explain.

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Auxiliatura/Alcaldía Comunitaria

How are the members of the Auxiliatura chosen? What qualities does the Alcalde Comunitario have?

What is the relationship between the Alcalde Comunitario and the municipal government?

What kind of relationship does it have with the COCODE? Do they meet together or separately?

What is the role of the Alcalde Comunitario in the community?

What kind of relation does the Alcalde Comunitario have with with the Alcaldía Indígena? • What role does the Alcaldía Indígena have in the municipio? • Would you like the Alcaldía Indígena to have more power?

Community Law

Are there norms or rules that guide community life? What kinds? Fines? Obligatory community work? Have you written down any of your norms or are you thinking about doing so? For example, sometimes norms are written in the COCODE’s or Auxiliatura’s Libro de Actas (translation: record of meeting minutes).

How does the community deal with problems? (i.e. internally, with the police, judge?)

Participation in the Community

How often do you have community assemblies? Who attends? What do you do to get people to attend the assemblies?

When/how often does the leadership of the COCODE meet? What about the Community Councils? (Health, Production, Education, Women, and Youth Councils)

Are there unwritten rules or norms in the community that require members to take on cargos? (translation: obligatory services, jobs, leadership posts)

How does the community make decisions about issues that will affect the entire community?

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Assistance with Community Organization

1. Projects: Have any outside organizations helped the community with a project in the past few years? Describe.

What help, in terms of projects—small or large—has the community received from the Municipal Government? (especially in the last few years)

2. Training and Workshops Did the community receive any assistance, in the past, in forming the COCODE? Describe.

Have people in the community received training about rights, laws, production, education, or health? Who came to give the trainings?

How have these trainings/workshops helped your community? For example, do you have a more unified community? Is there more participation, especially of women and youth? Are you moving forward with some of your community goals (for health or education or production)? Are community members familiar, at least in a basic sense, with laws that protect their rights? With the ILO Convention 169?

3. ICHMAM Is your community implementing—or thinking about implementing or learning about—the ICHMAM Development Model that the municipal government is promoting through the Office of Vulnerable Sectors? [ask for elaboration].

The Struggle Against Mining

What has been the role of the COMUDE, as regards mining in the municipality? For example, has it written any notice, manifesto, or something within the Libro de Actas? • Was mining discussed in any meeting in the municipio, at any time? • Do you know how the mining company obtained the license to work here?

Were the community consults (held in this community and throughout the municipality) legal? Why or why not?

Was there any conflict or difference of opinion in your community, over whether to say yes or no to mining?

Now that you’ve done the community consult, what is the next step to protecting your territory and natural resources?

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What is the difference between the development that mining offers, and the development that your community wants? What are the alternative strategies for achieving “development”?

The COCODES, the COMUDE, and the Concejo Municipal

In the eyes of the community leaders, what is the central objective of the COMUDE?

How much influence do the COCODES have over municipal level issues? (specifically, what kind of influence can the communities exert through the COMUDE?)

Can the COMUDE make decisions? About what kinds of issues? Does the municipal government listen and comply with the COCODES’ decisions and demands?

I would like to know if, in the COMUDE or in the community, the following issues are discussed:

• The Strategic Plan for the Development of San Juan Ixcoy (and maybe give me a description of the process of creating this Plan: o Cultural sector? o Focus on environmental protection, and organic agriculture o How were all the sectors identified and prioritized? o Why are Health, Education, and Production the priorities now? • How to define “development” for the municipality—ad how to define what is not development. • Projects for the communities o Before the current administration, if a group of community residents wanted to do a new productive (agricultural) project, what did you have to do? • Projects for the municipality—the new Hospital and the Market building • Mining

Why do you have Health, Education, and Production Community Councils? Where did the idea to do this come from?

Is there a “rendición de cuentas”? (translation: municipal government’s proof of spending, income, and results). What did you all think of this? Have you always received this information from the municipal government? Do you want more information? Is there some kind of information that you want, but the municipal government refuses to give?

Why are all communities represented in the COMUDE? Is making decisions difficult, when there are so many people in a meeting?

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At times, do you receive trainings in the COMUDE? About what? [i.e. about the ILO Convention 169?] If YES:: who organized the trainings?

What is done to assure that important information from the COMUDE is communiciated to the rest of the leaders and residents of the community?

Is the community currently working on a project from the municipal government or CODEDE? If YES, what project?

In general, how are current relations between the community and municipal government?

In the past, especially before 2004, did the municipal authorities have any interest in citizen participation, or in informing the people about their rights as citizens and indigneous peoples?

Conceptions of Development

What does “development” mean to your community?

What does the community need to do in order to “develop”?

What role does the environment play in “development”?

What role does culture play in development?

Are there different ideas of what is development and how to get there in San Juan Ixcoy? What are those different ideas? Where do they come from?

What plans does the community have (short-, medium-, and long-term plans)? Or: how do you imagine the future of the community? • How and why did the community decide upon those plans? • How did the Mayor react to those plans? • How can you achieve those plans? (are there other ways to achieve your plans?)

Conceptions of Citizenship

What does “citizenship” mean? What does it mean to be a “citizen”?

What community does a citizen belong to?

Which rights can people in your community exercise? Which do you lack?

What are cultural rights? Indigenous Peoples’ rights?

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APPENDIX C

LEGISLATION IN SUPPORT OF INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

International and Guatemalan Laws

The list presented here is not comprehensive, but covers the main legal instruments that are discussed in this dissertation.

International Rights Accords • International Labor Organization Convention No. 169 on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries: legally supersedes national law because was ratified in 1996, (according to Article 46) • United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007): Guatemala voted in favor of the Declaration in the UN General Assembly

Guatemalan Legislation • Constitution of the Republic of Guatemala (1986) • General Decentralization Law, Decreto 14-2002, and its Regulation, Acuerdo Gubernativo 312-2002 (2002) • Municipal Code, Decreto 12-2002 (2002) • Urban and Rural Development Council Law, Decreto 11-2002, and its Regulation, Acuerdo Gubernativo 461-2002 (2002)

Elements of Guatemalan Laws

Below is an outline of the elements of Guatemalan listed above that explicitly support indigenous rights, particularly in the realm of local government (descriptions of articles are sometimes paraphrased).

General Decentralization Law

• Article 4, “Principles,” point ‘1’: An “orienting principle” of the decentralization process is “respect for the multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual reality of Guatemala.”

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Municipal Code

• Article 7, “The municipio in the juridical system”: The municipio will carry out its rights and obligations “in conformity with its multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual characteristics.” • Article 8, “Elements of the municipio”: Lists the basic “elements” of the municipio, including authority exercised by “the traditional authorities of the communities” located in the municipio (8.c), and the systems of customary law (derecho consuetudinario) (8.f). • Article 18, “Organization of residents (vecinos)”: Residents may organize themselves in community associations, as per their “own traditions.” • Article 20, “Communities of Indigenous Peoples”: “The communities of the indigenous peoples are forms of natural social cohesion and as such, they have the right to recognition of their personalidad juridical (legal status in the eyes of the state), and must inscribe themselves in the civil register of the municipal government, with respect to their internal organization and administration it will be in accordance with their own norms, values, and proceedings, their respective recognized traditional authorities will recognized by the State, according to constitutional and legal dispositions.” • Article 21, “Relations between communities of indigenous peoples”: The forms in which indigenous communities relate with one another and organize themselves together will be respected and recognized, according to criteria and traditional norms or the dynamics that the communities themselves generate. • Article 35, “General Competencies of the Concejo Municipal,” point ‘m’: The Concejo Municipal will preserve and promote the rights of the residents and communities to their cultural identity, according to their values, languages, traditions, and customs. • Article 55, “Alcaldías Indígenas”: The municipal government must recognize, respect and promote the Alcaldías Indígenas, when they exist, including their own forms of administrative functioning. • Article 56, “Alcaldías comunitarias or alcaldías auxiliares”: The Concejo Municipal, in agreement with the customs, norms and traditions of the communities, will recognize the alcaldías comunitarias or alcaldías auxiliares, as representative entities of the communities, especially for making decisions and as a link with the municipal government. • Article 57, “Duration of the cargos (posts) of the alcaldía comunitaria or auxiliar”: The community, in an assembly, will decide the duration of the posts, as long as they do not exceed the term of the Concejo Municipal. The community’s decision will be based in its own principles, values, norms, and procedures. • Article 58, “Attributions of the alcalde comunitario or alcalde auxiliar”: Lists the duties of the alcalde comunitario/auxiliar.

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• Article 59, “Salary of alcaldes comunitarios/auxiliares”: Each municipality will regulate salary for the alcaldes comunitarias/auxiliares.192 • Article 65, “Consultations of the indigenous communities and authorities in the municipio”: When the nature of an issue particularly affects the rights and interests of the indigenous communities or their own authorities, the Concejo Municipal will carry out consultations at the request of the indigenous communities or authorities, applying the indigenous communities’ own criteria in accordance with their customs and traditions. • Article 108, “Community Lands”: The municipal government must consult with community authorities in order to establish mechanisms for guaranteeing that communities can use, conserve, and administer the community lands whose administration had traditionally been in the hands of the municipal government.

Urban and Rural Development Council Law

• Article 1, “Nature” of the law: The Development Council System is the principle mode of participation for the Maya, Xinca, Garífuna, and non-indigenous populations, in order to carry out democratic development planning, taking into account the principle of national unity and the multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual character of the nation. • Article 2, “Principles”: The guiding principles of the Development Council System include respect for all cultures (a); harmonious intercultural relations (b), equal opportunities for democratic participation of Maya, Xinca, Garífuna and non- indigenous populations (d); conservation and maintenance of environmental equilibrium and human development, based in the cosmovisiones of the Mayan, Xinca, Garífuna and non-indigenous populations (e). • Article 5(g), “Integration of the National Development Council”: Will include four representatives of the Mayan pueblos, one Xinca, and one Garífuna. • Article 6(l), “Functions of the National Development Council”: Promote the awareness with respect to the identity and rights of the indigenous peoples. • Article 7(f), “Integration of the Regional Development Councils”: Will include on representative of each of the indigenous pueblos that live in the region. • Article 9(e), “Integration of the Departmental Development Council”: Will include one representative of each of the indigenous pueblos that live in the Department. • Article 13, “Integration of the Community Development Councils”: The Coordinating Organ will be integrated according to the community’s own principles, values, norms and procedures, or according to the existing municipal regulations.

192 In practice, the alcaldes comunitarios/auxiliares serve their communities for free, out of obligation. I have encountered no cases of payment for such services.

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• Article 14, “Functions of the Community Development Councils”: Elect the members of the Coordinating Organ and fix the length of the terms, based in the community’s own principles, values, norms and procedures, or according to the regulations of this law. • Article 15, “Second Level Community Development Councils”: In municipalities where there are more than twenty COCODES, the COMUDE will be able to establish Second Level COCODES, whose Assembly will be integrated by members of the Coordinating Organs of the COCODES. The Coordinating Organ of the Second Level COCODES will be established according to the population’s own principles, values, norms, and procedures, or according to this law. The Second Level COCODE will have all the same functions as the COCODES. • Article 16, “Integration of the Coordinating Organs of the COCODES: The alcalde comunitario is to preside over the Organ, and the Assembly can elect a maximum of 12 additional representatives. • Article 23, “Indigenous Advisory Councils”: Indigenous Advisory Councils can be constituted in the communities, in order to offer assistance to he Coordinating Organ of the COCODE and the COMUDE, where there exists at least on indigenous community. The Councils will be integrated by the indigenous communities’ own recognized authorities, in accordance with their principles, values, norms and procedures. • Article 26, “Consults of the Indigenous Peoples”: Until there is a law regulating the consult of indigenous peoples, consultations of the Mayan, Xinca, and Garífuna peoples, about development measures that the Executive Organ proposes and that directly affect those peoples, will be able to be done through their representatives in the development councils. • Article 28, “Education”: The Development Council System, in coordination with the Ministry of Education, will also work to ensure that information about the structure and functioning of the Development Council System is included in educational programs in the languages of the Maya, Xinca, and Garífuna peoples. • Article 35, “Publication and Dissemination”: The Executive Organ will disseminate this law using all mediums of social communication in the country, in the languages of the Maya, Xinca, and Garífuna peoples.

Regulation of the Urban and Rural Development Council Law

• Article 2, “Definition”: The Development Council System is a multiethnic, multilingual and pluricultural space for relations and encounters among citizens. The system respects, recognizes and guarantees the exercise and development of Maya, Xinca, Garífuna and non-indigenous peoples’ material, social, and spiritual values and forms of organization.

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• Article 3, “Attributes of the Development Council System”: among the attributes of the Development Council System is the pluricultural character of the nation. • Article 10, “Accreditation of the representatives of the indigenous peoples”: for the accreditation of the indigenous peoples’ representatives in the Development Council System, it will be enough that the delegates present the documents or other materials • Article 43, “Call for Participation”: The COMUDE must include indigenous peoples’ own authorities, where there is at least one community in the municipio

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