A War of Proper Names: The Politics of Naming, Indigenous Insurrection, and Genocidal Violence During Guatemala’s Civil War. Juan Carlos Mazariegos Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2019 Juan Carlos Mazariegos All Rights Reserved Abstract A War of Proper Names: The Politics of Naming, Indigenous Insurrection, and Genocidal Violence During Guatemala’s Civil War During the Guatemalan civil war (1962-1996), different forms of anonymity enabled members of the organizations of the social movement, revolutionary militants, and guerrilla combatants to address the popular classes and rural majorities, against the backdrop of generalized militarization and state repression. Pseudonyms and anonymous collective action, likewise, acquired political centrality for revolutionary politics against a state that sustained and was symbolically co-constituted by forms of proper naming that signify class and racial position, patriarchy, and ethnic difference. Between 1979 and 1981, at the highest peak of mass mobilizations and insurgent military actions, the symbolic constitution of the Guatemalan state was radically challenged and contested. From the perspective of the state’s elites and military high command, that situation was perceived as one of crisis; and between 1981 and 1983, it led to a relatively brief period of massacres against indigenous communities of the central and western highlands, where the guerrillas had been operating since 1973. Despite its long duration, by 1983 the fate of the civil war was sealed with massive violence. Although others have recognized, albeit marginally, the relevance of the politics of naming during Guatemala’s civil war, few have paid attention to the relationship between the state’s symbolic structure of signification and desire, its historical formation, and the dynamics of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity during the war. Even less attention has received the affective and psychic dynamics between proper naming, state violence, and the symbolic formation of the Guatemalan state. This dissertation addresses that relationship and dynamic. Following a historical-anthropological perspective, I argue that, from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s decade, prior to the beginning of the civil war, the Guatemalan state took the form of a finca-state. The Guatemalan finca-state functioned by inscribing, in the form of proper names, lineages and inheritance of colonial and post-colonial origin that came to signify wealth, whiteness, renown, and surplus of pleasure or jouissance, in the form of White- European patronymics, by virtue of which, indigenous proper names were forced to occupy the position of loss. This form of inscription, I argue, produced the foreclosure of the indigenous other. For the indigenous pueblos, nonetheless, state enforced inscription established forms of interpellation that de-subjectivize the conditions of their own institutions of proper naming by turning them into mere objects of identification. The politics of pseudonymity and anonymity that proliferated between 1979 and 1981, especially among indigenous people of the Guatemalan highlands, was a refusal of a form of state that excluded the possibility of their recognition beyond identification. In a deep sense, anonymity and pseudonymity enabled revolutionary militants to become truly others, a condition that disorganized previous forms of state identification. In their inability to respond to a sense of crisis under conditions of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity, the Guatemalan army responded with massive violence as an attempt at eliminating their sense of threat. I pay particular attention to the Ixil region, where the UN sponsored Guatemalan truth commission concluded that the Guatemalan army perpetrated acts of genocide against indigenous communities of Ixil descent. This dissertation is based on extensive archival research conducted between the months of October 2014 and May 2015, extensive collective and individual interviews carried out between 2004 and 2007, and ethnographic observation in the Ixil region between May and October of 2015. Its methodology follows the routes of collaborative research, archival reading, and ethnographic participant observation. Table of Contents List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………….………..v Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….…………….vi Dedication………………………………………………………………….…………………….. x Introduction……………………………………………………………….……………………….1 Contextualizing Antecedents and First Problematizations: From Indigenous Peasant Unrest to a Historical trial.…………………………………………………………………… 3 Towards the Elaboration of an Argument and its Hypothesis..……………………………….12 Theoretical Considerations: Survival, Proper Naming, Rhetorical Figures, Foreclosure….. 16 Theoretical Antecedents: Anthropologies of War, Violence, and Revolution in Guatemala………………………………………………………………………………….30 Methodology: Between Archives, Collaborative Research, and Participant Observation….. 38 Overview of Contents..………………………………………………………………………..45 Chapter 1: Ancestral Lands, Originary Accumulation, and the Excess of the Archive: Politics and Predicaments of Dispossession and Debt..…………….……………………………51 Introduction..………………………………………………………………………………… 51 When the Finqueros Arrived in the Ixil Region……………………………………………….55 Ancestrality and the Power of the Archive: “These Lands are Ours Since Times Immemorial”..…………………………………………………………………..58 i Ancestrality, the Excess of the Archive, and the Internal Limits of the State.……………….. 66 The Gift of Theft.…………………………………………………………………………….. 71 Finca Encroachment and Land Concentration ………….……………………………………74 Predicaments of Debt and Labor: Originary Accumulation in the Ixil Region ………………..77 Disavowing a Revolutionary Past or How a Historical Victory was Forgotten…………….. 85 Conclusions.…………………………………………………………………………………..95 Chapter 2: On Ixil Proper Naming. Ancestrality, Patronymics, Traces………….………………98 Introduction…………………………………………….……..………………………………98 The Politics of a Signature or What Makes an Ixil Laugh.………………………………….. 99 The Economy of a Proper Name: Ch’exel, Ancestrality, and the Trace of a Trace.……….. 105 Indigenous Patronymics and the Names-of-the-Father..……………………………….……110 Of (Not) Knowing One’s Sins: the Unknown, the Inscrutable, and the Real of the Name……………………………………………….…………………………………120 Conclusions……………………………………….…………………………………………129 Chapter 3: On the Subject of Finca Labor and the Madness of the Finca Economy..…………132 Introduction.…………………………………………………………………………………132 Double Displacements, Labor Subjection, and Super-Exploitation…………………………134 The Violence of the Letter: of Workbooks, Certificates, Payrolls, and Finca Receipts…….. 139 Name, Number, Disavowal: Contar or the Jornalero’s Pharmakon………………………… 154 ii Racializing Currencies: White Patronymics, Finca Numismatics and its Libidinal Economy……….……………………………………………………………… 162 Conclusions……………………….…………………………………………………………177 Chapter 4: The Politics of Anonymity and the Insurrection Against the Master Signifier.…….180 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….180 Tactile Readings: When the Many See Themselves Returning the Gaze…………………… 183 A Little History of Indigenous Pseudonyms or How Not to Respond to the Law’s Interpellation…………………………………………………………………….……195 Of Being Possessed by Other Names..………………………………………………………197 The Aporias of Anonymity and the Apparition of the Specter……………………………… 208 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………….215 Chapter 5: In the Name of the Poor. Of Dreams, Miracles, and Revolutionary Futures……….217 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….217 From Mis-Recognition to Incorporation…………………………………………………….221 Catholic Action Comes to the Ixil Region.…………………………………………………..228 From the Ixil Region to the Ixcán, Back and Forth.…………………………………………231 Dreams that Allow to Speak of Miracles…………………………………………………….233 The Future, the Prescriptive, and the Caesura of a Revolution.…………………………… 237 The Past and Futures of Poverty: Reading as an(other) Mediation, Interpellation, and iii the Promise of the Poor.……………………………………………………………………. 242 In the Name of “the Poor:” Naming the Event and a Disruptive Real…………………….. 246 Antinomies of Not-Knowing: Ur-Faith, Iterability, and “the People of God”…………….. 250 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………….254 Chapter 6. On Violence: Selective Violence, Massacres, Sacrificial Logics.…………………..257 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….257 Militarization, Crisis, Ghostly Apparitions: Revolutionary Aspirations and Counterinsurgent Responses (1979-1981)…………………………………………………..258 The Dialectics of Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence in a Finca-State: the Ixil Region Before 1982………………………………………………………………… 270 Undoing the Symbolic Structures of Local Power: Insurgent Dramaturgy or the EGP Arrives in Nebaj……………………………………………………………………280 From Selective to Massive Violence: Sovereignty and Sacrificial Logics (1981-1983)……..285 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………….299 General Conclusions: The Secret of a Revolution-to-come……………………………………303 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………312 iv List of Illustrations Map 1. Guatemala showing the most important municipalities………………………………… xi Map 2. Guatemala showing the three Ixil municipalities..………………………………………54 Map 3. EGP’s areas of operation by 1982..….…………………………………………………182 Figure 1. Diagram of Ch’exel system in Chajul………………………………………………..117 Figure 2. Finca workbook………………………………………………………………………141