MINING IN THE WAKE OF GENOCIDE: CANADIAN CORPORATIONS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GUATEMALA
Guatemala provides the quintessential backdrop to the wider Cold War narrative in Latin America: the October Revolution of 1944 inspired hope for a socialized democracy through Agrarian Reform and other initiatives; the 1954 U.S.-backed coup cut short that dream and instituted the start of a reign of terror and the concretization of a counterinsurgent state; the Left was forced eventually to take up guerrilla insurgency after all other means of political action were thwarted; and the scourge of death squads, rapes, torture, disappearances, kidnappings, and massacres, fortified by U.S.-trained and equipped central intelligence agencies, reached its apogee in the racialized genocide of 1981–1982. In 1996, with over 200,000 murdered by the Guatemalan state, the four-decade-long civil war ended with the Left vanquished, and the ideal of democratic socialism effectively crushed.317 “To write about Guatemala,” the anthropologist Carlota Mcallister points out, “is to write about twentieth-century Latin America’s bloodiest armed conflict. Rapacious agrarian capitalism, combined with systemic Ladino (nonindigenous) oppression of the Mayan majority, made Guatemala fertile terrain for struggles for radical change, but also made those struggles exceptionally punishing to fight.”318
The 1996 peace accords allowed for a concerted shift toward neoliberal economic restructuring and the consolidation of a new model of accumulation rooted in attracting foreign investment to a variety of extractive industries. It is within this context that Canadian mining companies have rapidly expanded their reach and influence in the Guatemalan political economy. As is true elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, the expansion of mining activities under the control of multinational capital in twenty-first century Guatemala has led to intensified social conflict and the slow remilitarization of politics in an effort on the part of the economic and political elite to contain unrest. Since 2003, a new wave of social protests has emerged in the country for the first time since the close of the war. Rural Mayan indigenous communities are at the leading edge of this new resistance, and opposition to mining is at the very core of their movements. With the rising level of conflict in the countryside, the response of the state, private security companies working for transnational corporations, and paramilitary groupings has been intensifying repression. A new dialectic of popular resistance from below and ferocious violence from above is a defining feature of the Guatemalan present. Canadian mining capital, and the coercive apparatuses working on its behalf, is a crucial element in this dynamic.
This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it provides a long historical backdrop of the Guatemalan social formation, emphasizing critical turning points in the country’s political economy since the mid-twentieth century, the military genocide in the context of civil war, and the transition through the peace accords to the neoliberal present. Second, it maps out the array of Canadian mining corporations active in the country, and explains their involvement in the new patterns of accumulation, exploitation, and violence. The third and final section then explains the new wave of class struggle evolving in the Guatemalan countryside, and the ways in which Canadian mining capital has become a principal target of this resistance.
Between 1931 and 1944 the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico controlled the country. Free elections in 1944 opened up a new season in Guatemalan politics, however, with Juan José Arévalo’s ascendancy to the presidency. Arévalo, who distanced himself rhetorically from both Marxism and individualistic capitalism, was a self-styled “spiritual socialist.” Through an array of modest social reforms—including the Law of Forced Rental requiring large landholders to lease the uncultivated sectors of their land at low rates, the enactment of a social security system by 1950, and the country’s first labour code allowing strikes and union organizing—Arévalo earned the dual ire of U.S. foreign policy makers and the domestic ruling class alike.319 A State Department memorandum of 1948 noted that although the reforms were not “proof of communism,” this certainly did not indicate that there was “no communist inspiration behind them.”320 The move of Jacobo Árbenz into the presidency in 1950, with 65 percent of the popular vote, seemed at first glance to offer respite to U.S. functionaries and the Guatemalan landed class. But within months, the State Department radically departed from its initial assessment of Árbenz as a moderate alternative to Arévalo, highlighting what it took to be “the ascending curve of Communist influence” in the new administration.321 It is now beyond reasonable dispute in the historiography of Guatemala that neither the regime of Arévalo (1944–1950), nor of Árbenz (1950–1954) ever posed a real threat to the sanctity of private property or the institutional parameters of liberal democracy, but this proved no obstacle to their opponents pursuing the ideological frame of a red menace.322
Among other things, immediately at stake were the considerable investments of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Within Guatemala, the company had come to own a remarkable 42 percent of the country’s farm land, against a wider backdrop of extreme land concentration by a tiny elite, and corresponding landlessness for the indigenous agrarian majority; externally, the company had unusually tight political ties to the highest echelons of the Dwight Eisenhower administration—the former law firm of the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was the longstanding legal representation of the company; the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen Dulles, had been on the company’s board of trustees; the company’s preeminent public relations officer, Ed Whitman, was married to Ann Whitman, the private secretary to Eisenhower. What influence the company could not channel immediately through these connections was purchased through the coverage of journalists’ expenses on their visits to the country, ensuring the “correct” angle in the subsequent stories in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader, among others. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1953, through which Árbenz committed himself to the expropriation (with compensation) of 234,000 acres of the company’s land, clearly had something to do with the the subsequent intervention of the CIA in the destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Árbenz regime in 1954.323
But there were wider, regional shifts in U.S. security policy in Latin America that extended well beyond the Guatemalan theatre, suggesting United Fruit’s specific material interests fortuitously overlapped with an overarching set of U.S. strategic aims. Having abandoned its relative multilateralism vis-à-vis Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s, by the early 1950s the U.S. state had explicitly stated the secondary importance of democracy in the evaluation of any Latin American government, and the primary importance of anti-Communist commitment. “Technical and financial aid provided to security forces was stepped up,” historian Greg Grandin observes, “now part of a more systemic policy of containment, which included the support and orchestration of coups and destabilization programs (Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina), and, when all else failed, invasion (the Dominican Republic and Grenada).”324
1954 marked a turning point in Guatemalan history. The stage had been set for the rise of the counterinsurgent state, the evisceration of reformist electoral projects stemming from the Left, the rise of guerrilla movements—first small bands of ladinos rooted in a foco strategy and later mass-based insurgencies with organic ties and bases in indigenous communities of the highlands—and the eventual escalation of military violence to the scale of genocide in the early 1980s. A popular narrative to have emerged out of this history is one of dos demonios, or two demons—the ladino guerrillas, on the one side, and the ladino military on the other. Trapped between was a hapless, victimized Mayan majority, devoid of agency and political intention. While it is true that the guerrilla leaderships were principally constituted by ladinos, and that there was a failure on their part to adequately incorporate and represent Mayans, the two demons thesis is nonetheless highly misleading. To “treat the Guatemalan state and its armed opposition as equally guilty of genocide,” Mcallister points out, “is not only to ignore statistics showing that state forces committed 93 percent of wartime human rights violations and the guerrillas only 3 percent, but also to occlude the phenomenon of Mayan participation in Guatemalan leftist groups, including armed ones.”325
Throughout the 1970s, demands for reform increased through an array of popular movement activity. The response from the state and ruling class was ever-escalating violence, carried out by the police, military, and death squads. Reformist parties such as the Christian Democrats, having raised expectations, were ultimately unable to win gains for their rural indigenous constituencies. As a consequence, growing numbers of Guatemalans, including Mayans, who had already been politicized in reformist political projects, joined the armed struggle.326 Alongside this process of radicalization through repression, grassroots organizations within the Catholic Church began to form Christian Base Communities as part of the eventual formation of a “Church of the Poor” perspective. These variegated religious currents fed into indigenous politicization in complex ways.327 Between 1976 and 1978, these developments led to the formation of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee of Peasant Unity, CUC), which included poor ladino agricultural workers, and Mayan peasants and agricultural workers, but with the latter taking the dominant role in leadership.328 Although the CUC was a non-military organization that transcended the boundaries of the guerrilla movement, it is nonetheless important to point out that it “was baptized on April 15, 1978, at a meeting of the EGP’s [Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, Guerrilla Army of the Poor] national leadership, and…quickly came to dwarf every previous Guatemalan indigenous political group.”329
Another factor was the changing strategic orientation of the guerrillas themselves. By the early 1970s the main guerrilla organizations had come to the conclusion that the focused, small, vanguardist strategy of the foco had not worked in the 1960s because it was overly militaristic and lacked a mass basis. One symptom of this early lack of concern with slowly accumulating a mass base had been a systematic neglect of the material, political, and cultural needs and interests of the Mayan population. By the early 1970s, as the guerrilla organizations were beginning to rearticulate themselves in novel forms, they began to reach out in an effort to build organic links with indigenous communities. The armed struggle reached its apex in the early 1980s, recruiting between 6,000 and 8,000 armed fighters, and 250,000 to 500,000 active collaborators and supporters between 1980 and 1981. As an expression of this dynamic growth and concomitant guerrilla convergence, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) was formed in early 1982, drawing together all of the hitherto divided armed organizations.330 Drawing on the many ethnographic interviews with Mayan guerrillas he conducted in the highlands of the country, Grandin makes the following assessment: “Marxism, as a theory of how to understand and act in the world, gave inhabitants in what was one of the most subjugated regions not only in Guatemala but arguably in Latin America a means to insist on their consequence.”331
In the cities, too, building on a long history of trade union struggle against state terror,332 and student activism in groups like the Frente Unido del Estudiantado Guatemalteco Organizado (United Front of Guatemalan Students), the late 1970s and very early 1980s witnessed an effervescence of left-wing militancy in myriad forms. “In 1978, shantytown dwellers, bus drivers, factory and state workers, students, and almost everyone else in Guatemala City brought it to a halt to raise wages and stop an increase in bus fares,” notes historian Deborah T. Levenson:
In mid-1979 the call for a democratic and revolutionary Guatemala was pervasive, and many people sat by their radios listening to the Sandinistas take Managua.…It did not seem unrealistic to think revolution was on the horizon. Not only did tens of thousands join the revolutionary fronts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in some areas of Gautemala these new recruits pushed the guerrilla leadership to take stronger military initiatives.333
The early 1980s registered the beginning of a tragic reversal, however. Throughout the 1970s, the increasing mobilization, and the deepening of demands for reform, had precipitated a growing unity across the state and ruling class and their array of coercive apparatuses that would by the 1980s allow for an unprecedented wave of violence from on high.334 The military, while eminently capable of repression of popular movements for many decades, took a qualitative turn in the intensity of its assault on the population. The cities were terrorized, but it was even worse in “rural Maya communities, where the military committed acts of genocide premised on its racism and its historic fear of Maya rebellion.”335 In 1981, a scorched earth campaign was initiated, leading to the murder of over one hundred thousand Mayans, and the uprooting and displacement of many more indigenous communities. Throughout 1982 and most of 1983 the army’s campaign continued. Alongside genocidal elimination, the military began to exercise a structural influence over rural life through the creation of civil patrols that forced able-bodied Mayan men to serve in local militias and participate in the killing of neighbouring communities, and sometimes their own, or be killed themselves. While often militarily ineffective, the incorporation of roughly nine hundred thousand people into the militias allowed for an incredibly deep systematization of regimented discipline, controlled movement, and dissemination of propaganda in the countryside.336
“By the time the war ended in 1996,” Grandin explains, “the state had killed two hundred thousand people, disappeared forty thousand, and tortured unknown thousands more.”337 It would be difficult to exaggerate the long term consequences of this qualitative shift in state terror and the military defeat of the Left through genocidal war for the disarticulation of popular cultures of opposition and resistance in the country. The political counterrevolution of racist militarism was what made possible the eventual shifting of gears toward an economic counterrevolution of radical neoliberal restructuring.
Indeed, the 1996 peace accords established the parameters for the deepening and consolidation of a neoliberal program for restructuring that had been unfolding in a piecemeal fashion since the Christian Democratic administration of Vinicio Cerezo (1986–1991). In early 1997, the National Advancement Party let loose a structural adjustment program of marked intensity and scope.338 It laid the basis for a thoroughgoing transformation of existing class structures, both rural and urban, and new forms of capitalist expansion and penetration into all avenues of social life.
In the countryside, the counter-insurgency efforts of the 1980s provoked a veritable tide of displaced peasants, annihilating peasant economies, and paving the way—through blood and fire—for the full incorporation of the rural indigenous population into the system of market imperatives characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. As a result of this dynamic of primitive accumulation through war, both the old latifundia (large-landholdings) and minifundia (small plots) patterns of land tenure were transformed, allowing for the first time the full establishment of a capitalist wage labour system in rural areas.339
Millions had been uprooted, fleeing temporarily into mountain areas, across the border to Mexican refugee camps or into the margins of that country’s informal economy, and sometimes, from there, onto the United States. At a conservative minimum, fifty-five thousand people internally displaced from war resettled in the poorest barrios of Guatemala City, often shedding any Mayan signifiers from their dress to escape racist persecution. These people entered an urban reserve of unemployed or precariously employed, adopting a panoply of survival strategies in both the formal and informal domains of the city’s economic life.340 Traumatized migrant youth joined the growing numbers of vulnerable cheap labourers who were being fed into the escalating drug trade. By 2000, almost 80 percent of cocaine being shipped to the United States from South America passed through Guatemala. The warring gangs of Mara-18 (M-18) and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) sunk their roots in this new “post-conflict” Guatemalan political economy after setting up base after wide-scale deportations from Los Angeles in 1996.
The violence of the narco trade flowed up from Colombia and down from Mexico, blending together with extra-legal paramilitary violence associated with multinational corporations seeking to quell insubordinate communities standing in the way of tourist development projects or mining exploration initiatives. The murder rate fell from thirty-nine per one hundred thousand inhabitants in 2011 to thirty-four in 2012, the lowest figure in a decade, but began to rise again in the first half of 2013 and continued to be high by international standards.341
At a political level, the transition to polyarchy which accompanied the peace accords proved functional to renewed rounds of capitalist accumulation which had been stymied in preceding years by the instability embedded in the insurgency-counterinsurgency dialectic. Foreign capital fleeing Guatemala in the context of war had been tailed systematically by the finances of Guatemalan capitalists who opted in large numbers to park their money in out-of-country bank accounts until the end of the war. “A change in the mode of social control and the system of domination,” sociologist William I. Robinson rightly suggests, “was the precondition for a recovery and reorganization of the process of capital accumulation.”342 As elsewhere in Central America, the changing model of accumulation in Guatemala over the 1990s and 2000s involved a sharp turn toward large scale tourist development projects, expanding extractive industry (particularly mining), biofuel plantations, hydroelectric dam developments, and cheap feminized labour in export processing zones, or maquiladoras.343
The social impact of neoliberalism in Guatemala was more devastating than the already terrible wider trends in the rest of Central America over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. By the close of the latter decade 40 percent of the population remained illiterate, with the average adult receiving only 3.2 years of education. A third of children were malnourished. Half the population lacked electricity, and 64 percent went without running water. Under and unemployment crested at near 40 percent, and 65 percent of those employed eked out a marginal living in the informal sector. Poverty spiked from 70 percent of the national population in 1980 to 87 percent in 1991.344 In the context of the global commodities boom of the early twenty-first century, annual growth of gross domestic product (GDP) averaged 4.1 percent between 2003 and 2007, before slowing to 3.3, 0.5, 2.9, and 3.9 percent in the years between 2008 and 2011 as the global crisis centred in the United States and Europe began to impact Latin America and the Caribbean.345 National poverty fell modestly from 60.2 to 54.8 percent between 2002 and 2006, while rural poverty remained close to the same, shifting from 68 to 66.5 over the same period.346 Meanwhile, inequality worsened, with the share of national income going to the poorest quintile of society receiving 3.8 percent in 2002 compared to only 2.8 percent in 2006. Over the same period, the top quintile improved its share from 58.6 to 62.6.347 Expressed in terms of the gini coefficient, which measures income inequality (where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is perfect inequality), the Guatemalan figures were 0.542 in 2002 and a worse 0.585 in 2006.348
By 2010, the situation remained dire. The average number of years of schooling for Guatemalan citizens was only 5.6, while in rural areas that fell to 3.8. Twenty-seven percent of the population was illiterate, youth malnutrition hovered at just under half the population, and scarcely 37 percent of youth of relevant age graduated from high school. Structural unemployment and underemployment afflict much of the population, while the average salary of those finding work barely covers the basic food basket. Those jobs that are available are increasingly found in the precarious corners of the informal economy.349 By 2012, more than 78 percent of the labour force survived in this sector.350
Aside from occasional populist sophistry, there has been little structural deviation from this neoliberal course across the various administrations of Álvaro Arzú (1996–2000), Alfonso Portillo (2000–2004), Óscar Berger (2004–2008), Álvaro Colom (2008–2012), and Otto Pérez Molina (2012–2015). And there is little immediate sign of a change in course coming in the near future. A country report of June 2013 from the conservative British Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) notes with satisfaction its projection for the 2013–2017 period: “The government’s overall stance will be pro-business, and macroeconomic management will remain orthodox.”351 Nonetheless, there are signs of worry for investors, which stem from the most powerful social forces within a slow and incipient rearticulation of popular movements after the long decline since the 1980s. “Rising opposition from peasant and indigenous groups has also caused delays in programmes to increase investment in the mining and energy sector,” the EIU laments. Social and ethnic tensions
will be aggravated in 2013–2017 by growing opposition (in the form of roadblocks and strikes) to mining activities and the construction of hydroelectric plants in protected or indigenous areas. Large-scale protests are a possibility if the government takes a harsh stance in pushing ahead with new projects.352
It is precisely in this sector of mining, where the new forms of violence associated with the neoliberal model in Guatemala are most advanced, and the new forms of popular resistance most insistent on making their presence felt, that Canadian capital has entered in such an aggressive fashion.
CANADA AND THE RE-EMERGENCE OF MINING IN GUATEMALA
Canada is one of the largest foreign investor nations in Guatemala, and was the second largest in 2009 and 2010, after the U.S.353 This investment is dominated by mining: as of May 2012, sixteen of seventeen active mining properties (in the exploration or production stage) in Guatemala were Canadian.354 Canadian company Goldcorp, the second largest gold producer in the world and Guatemala’s largest source of export-earnings, has become a powerful and extremely controversial force in Guatemala (as it has in neighbouring Honduras and Mexico). Goldcorp led the re-emergence of large-scale industrial mining in the country.355
While large-scale industrial metal mining was an important part of Guatemala’s developmental strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, it declined as the civil war intensified in the 1980s. But as Dougherty observes, “the neoliberal policy regime emerging from the resolution of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war in 1996, and the portentous end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement for Guatemala’s maquila sector, launched Guatemala’s quest for mineral capital.”356 The interests of Canadian mining companies have enjoyed significant advances in Guatemala since the end of the war and signing of the Peace Accords, though they have faced a considerable challenge from below and, as a result, have also experienced setbacks. Guatelama adopted a new mining law, “crafted with input from Guatemala’s nascent mining industry and foreign interests,” in 1997.357 In an effort to earn the goodwill of Canadian capital and compete with its Central American neighbours, the new law called for environmental studies, but made it easier for companies to obtain licences, relaxed limits on the size of concessions and reduced royalty rates paid to the state to a mere 1 percent. Guatemala’s Ministry of Energy and Mines also organized international mining congresses for foreign investors and made visits to Canada in the 1990s to meet with representatives of its mining industry.358 Behind the formal legislated support for Canadian companies, the latter also received informal behind the scenes support from the Guatemalan government, which, during the presidency of Oscar Berger (2004–2008), reportedly instructed officials from the Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, MARN) to accept all relevant environmental impact studies. Under such favourable conditions, metal exploration by smaller so-called junior firms increased by 1,000 percent during the 2000s and the country has become one of the lowest-cost gold-producing countries in the Americas.359
However, a moratorium was placed on the issuance of new licences (production and exploration projects continued) in 2006 by President Álvaro Colom, following a successful court challenge to the mining law by the Centre for Legal, Environmental and Social Action. The Centre argued that the law did not protect the rights of indigenous communities, including their right to prior informed consent over development projects that will impact them, as per article 15(2) of the International Labour Organization convention, to which Guatemala is a party.360 While Colom was viewed as a left-of-centre president, and gave MARN more discretion around environmental impact studies than the Berger administration, he was neverthless supportive of Canadian mining and never sought to challenge the influence of Canadian companies or defend the rights of impacted communities, as we discuss below.361 Indeed, when a new draft law on mining was introduced into the Guatemalan Congress in September 2009, activists criticized it for failing to adequately regulate water use, or require consultation with or prior informed consent from affected communities and, finally, for capping royalty rates at very low levels, between 1 and 10 percent.362
Not long after taking office, the Pérez Molina administration set to work to re-energize the mining sector, introducing several amendments to the country’s mining law and lifting the previous government’s moratorium on the approval of new concessions, which was instituted in 2008 after the Constitutional Court had declared several articles in the extant mining law to have been unconstitutional. Sixty-eight new exploration and exploitation licenses were approved by his government in its first six months. The mining proposals include royalty rates higher than what had been established in the 1990s, but which are still low, at 4 percent for gold and silver and 3 percent for base metal production. With international commodity and oil prices high, the Pérez government did briefly flirt with a constitutional proposal in 2012 that if passed would have stipulated that the Guatemalan government take as much as a 40 percent stake in new mining and oil projects. But, as a Pérez adviser reported a few weeks after the proposal was raised, “we realized it was making a lot of noise internationally and we decided to withdraw it.” With the mining industry quick to criticize the proposal, the Pérez government ultimately proved quick to demure to the whims of international capital.363
It is evident that the Canadian embassy, with the support of Ottawa, supports particular companies despite their widespread involvement in human rights and ecological abuses. Nonetheless, in the context of growing and widespread opposition to Canadian companies, embassy officials have also taken a concerted role in defending the industry as a whole. This has been most explicit when the struggle against Canadian companies heated up in the mid-2000s. Then-Ambassador James Lambert—in a textbook case of operating as “a representative for Canadian mining companies”—responded to the escalating opposition by actually writing a 2004 op-ed article for the Guatemalan daily, Prensa Libre, extolling the virtues of Canada’s mining industry. “In Canada, mining exploration and exploitation is carried out in all provinces and territories, creating economic and social opportunities for many communities, including some 200 indigenous communities,” Lambert tells Guatemalans in an assertion with which many indigenous communities in Canada would take serious issue:
Throughout our long history of nearly 150 years of mining production, our country has become one of the most “intelligent” administrators, promoters, users and exporters of natural resources in the world. Today, Canadian businesses are on the vanguard of high technology, environmental protection and social responsibility. This is why they are leaders of many of the most successful mining operations in the world.364
It would be several years before empirical analysis of global mining-related conflicts, commissioned by the Mining Association of Canada, revealed the fact that Canadian companies have the worst record in the entire world; unsurprisingly, though, Guatemalans themselves were already privy to a burgeoning mass of first-hand evidence which contradicted Lambert’s glowing review of the industry. In December of that year, the embassy organized the National Mining Forum, again with the intention of fortifying the image of Canadian mining companies as unusually responsible actors within the global industry. The forum featured Jerry Asp, an Indian Act band leader from Tahltan First Nation in British Columbia who told Guatemalans that his community initially had similar reservations about mining developments twenty-five years ago, but have since benefited from allowing the investment to proceed.365 Two months later, Asp’s office was occupied by elders from his community seeking his removal from power for selling out to corporate interests after he expressed support for the B.C. government’s controversial mining plan.366
Lambert then followed the Prensa Libre article and National Mining Forum with a nationally-televised debate defending Canadian investors. Glossing over Canada’s history of mining disasters and dispossession of indigenous peoples at home and abroad,367 Lambert argued to the national audience that
the Canadian experience can be relevant here in Guatemala as has been the case in mining countries in the process of development, where mining operations are underway…We’ve learned a lot from this century-and-a-half of activity, especially good management of environmental issues in our country.
Next, in an astucious manipulation of the facts, he attempted to mislead viewers by suggesting that “there is a series of standards” Canadian companies “must follow before proceeding with their activities at the international level.” As Lambert must well understand, there are no such mandatory standards enforced by the Canadian government domestically, nor imposed at the international level. To those community activists unconvinced by what Lambert was selling by this point in the debate, the ambassador offered the view that foreign mining investment is, in any case, an inevitable feature of modernizing economies and thus “sooner or later, indigenous communities in Guatemala have to face the reality of a global society,” implying that opponents of Canadian mining are anachronistic and parochial, rather than ecologically forward-thinking. Striking a particularly pious chord, Lambert then opined on the disquieting phenomenon of social movements refusing to roll over in the face of Canadian mining expansion, “activities that are within the legal framework of the country.” Indeed, for Lambert, while Canadian corporations were being depicted by opponents as perfidious exploiters of marginalized communities and the environment, it was rather the activists responsible for blockading mining activity that ought to have been the objects of scorn and ridicule. Their militancy “exceeds the norms of the country, and it’s worrying,” Lambert noted. 368
Given the systematic and well-documented violation of international law captured in the refusal of Canadian companies to seek prior agreement or consent from affected communities in geographic zones slated for mining development, and given the Guatemalan government’s consistent abnegation of its responsibility—or possibly sheer inability—to ensure that Canadian corporations pursue such agreement or consent, Lambert’s televised intervention would be laughable, were it not so evidently tragic. With the benefit of hindsight, the ambassador’s public handwringing about the state of law-and-order with respect to Canadian investment becomes still more precious, as repression of anti-mining activists actually intensified and spread from Goldcorp’s Marlin to other Canadian projects in the years that followed. To FAIT, however, Lambert’s vigourous defense of Canadian mining was meritorious, helping earn him an eventual promotion to Director General for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The embassy has not restricted itself to engagement in a national debate to advance the interests of Canadian multinationals. With the support of Ottawa, it has also worked somewhat less publicly to influence Guatemalan politicians and state officials. According to one official, embassy staff have “regular contact with” representatives of the Ministerio de Energia y Minas (Ministry of Energy and Mines, MEM), including the Directors of Hydrocarbons and of Mining and a ministerial advisor.369 Undoubtedly, a priority for the embassy would be the somewhat precarious state of mining in the country since the 2006 moratorium, though the full extent of this is hard to discern fully as communications between the embassy and MEM received through Access to Information are heavily redacted. As one embassy report notes, however, a planned meeting with a MEM official was to discuss “the priorities of the section [of MEM] under his responsibility, and also to talk about his attendance to PDAC [Annual meeting of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada] in 2008.”370 Attendance at PDAC, encouraged and fully financed by Canada, is a regular priority for the embassy in Guatemala, as it is in many countries in the region (and elsewhere in the Global South). Members of MEM are routinely invited to PDAC to meet with Canadian officials and mining representatives. In 2010, for example, five high level officials with the MEM, as well as a political advisor to the President, were brought by the embassy to Canada for a four-day tour starting in Ottawa. There they met with a series of FAIT representatives, including the Assistant Deputy Minister for Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as representatives from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, before heading to PDAC in Toronto, where they met separately with the head of PDAC, Goldcorp and representatives from Natural Resources Canada.371
The embassy has also analyzed, in relation to the needs of mining interests and the spin-off opportunities for Canadian capital stemming from it, the development of Guatemala’s electricity sector, noting that with its “vast expertise and experience, our industry could play an important role in the development of the electricity sector,” and that “several Canadian companies are already present in the region…which could place Canada in a preferential position to develop Guatemala’s electricity sector…as well as put Canada’s foot in the door of the Puebla Panama projects.”372 Montreal-based Dessau-Soprin had in fact already won a contract to supervise construction of the region’s first power grid, which spans from Guatemala to Panama, when the embassy was discussing other opportunities for Canadian capital opened up by the mining industry.
Goldcorp: Marlin
The flagship project of Canadian capital in Guatemala, and the Canadian project most emblematic to Guatemalans for the violent and ecologically-devastating impact of foreign investment, is Goldcorp’s Marlin mine. Receiving C$63 million from Canada Pension Plan investments and located in the highlands 130 kilometres northwest of Guatemala City, Marlin was a controversial investment long before it became operational in 2005, but the opposition has intensified since that point, with two people associated with the resistance having been killed as a result.
Marlin is one of the first major mining developments since the official end of Guatemala’s bloody civil war in 1996, and has been viewed as a test case for foreign companies looking to enter Guatemala to access its natural resources. As noted above, much of the bloodshed (over two hundred thousand people killed), caused by paramilitary death squads backed by the United States, was directed against Maya-Kiché indigenous people in the department of San Marcos, where Marlin is located, and so the foreign intrusion and security surrounding it have been unwelcome by most of the local inhabitants. There are eighteen Maya Mam and Sipakense indigenous communities directly affected by the mine, and in the years since the Marlin mine was developed Goldcorp has obtained large parcels of land in the region through fraudulent means and by exploiting the poverty and vulnerability of the Mayan communities.373
Marlin’s importance stands out not just as a symbol of the recommencement of large-scale mining in Guatemala, however, but also for its economic significance. As Peter Kent, then Minister of State for the Americas, proudly proclaimed in a speech to the Inter-American Dialogue in 2009, Marlin was the Guatemalan government’s single largest source of revenue in 2009, a fact that undoubtedly affects the influence of Goldcorp and Canada within the country.374 As we demonstrate below, Goldcorp has received considerable support from both the Canadian state and Guatemalan government.
Despite the environmental dangers, indigenous peoples say they were never consulted about the mine by original owner, Glamis Gold.375 Glamis, which was subsequently bought out by Goldcorp, claimed it organized hundreds of consultation meetings in 2003 and 2004, but indigenous activists counter that the meetings were really only promotional sessions that offered no opportunity for meaningful consultation. A human rights assessment of Marlin commissioned by Goldcorp itself states that, with respect to the matter of prior consultation, there “was a failure to respect indigenous peoples’ rights.”376
Local communities have expressed serious concern about the use of cyanide to leach out the gold (the mine contains as much as 225,000 ounces of gold). Another worry is the roughly 760,000 litres of groundwater per minute consumed in the regular functioning of the mine. Both practices threaten the sustainability of farming on which local communities rely. The potentially toxic effects of large-scale industrial mining are always considerable, but they have been compounded in this case by the lackadaisical approach to basic environmental regulation adopted by Glamis and Goldcorp. As Dougherty argues, a scientific examination of the Marlin mine Impact Assessment found there are “major deficiencies in the environmental design of the mine, including Glamis’s failure to line the tailings impoundment pond with an impermeable liner.”377 A study by Physicians for Human Rights not surprisingly finds that “people living closer to the mining site had significantly higher concentrations of arsenic in their urine,” and that “one out of five participants [in their study] indicate skin-related problems.”378 Scientific researchers from Ghent University, meanwhile, conclude that there has been “an enourmous increase in concentrations of many elements, including arsenic,” and that “arsenic concentrations in some groundwater wells around the nearby Marlin mine fall far above the WHO [World Health Organization] and North-American and Canadian health standards for drinking water.” The Ghent researchers also argue that “shallow surface groundwater is disappearing.”379 The Association for the Integrated Development of San Miguel (ADISMI) identifies the problem of water levels due to Marlin as well, complaining that ten wells in the area have dried up.380 ADISMI has also documented death of cattle on nearby farms after they drank from a creek flowing beneath the Marlin mine. One farmer says this is the first time this has happened in his thirty-five years of farming.381
Another study, conducted in 2011 by two economists for the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University in the U.S., argues that the environmental costs will be much greater than any economic benefits from the mine. This is the result of Guatemala’s low royalty rates, the money from which goes to the national government and is not guaranteed to the local community; an environmental risk that is “exceptionally high and likely to increase over the remaining life of the mine and in the post-closure phase”; and the mine “contributing little to long term sustainable development.”382 Goldcorp has provided a C$1 million surety bond to the Guatemalan government for the cleanup of the Marlin mine, nominally as a guarantee that it will close the mine in an environmentally responsible way, but one study suggests that the real cost of the mine closure will be closer to C$49 million.383 It is is not just the health of residents being jeopardized, however. According to residents of nearby communities, dynamite explosions at the mine have led to cracks in the structures of their homes.
Goldcorp has even been fined a number of times by MARN, including for a cyanide spill on the Pan-American highway near the Marlin Mine and for lacking a proper licence to import cyanide. The MARN temporarily prohibited Goldcorp from importing cyanide until it paid the fine, a directive which the company straightforwardly ignored. In the fall of 2010, Goldcorp was accussed by Guatemala’s Environmental Management Unit of the unauthorized discharge of toxic water from its tailings pond into a nearby river, which it is only permitted to do if the water being discharged is free from contamination. In response to the accusations, the company took out paid advertisements declaring that the discharge was supervised by public regulatory agencies. Environmentalists and people from the impacted communities counter, however, that the company did not previously advise the MARN nor did it have a permit for the discharge. The fines, prohibitions, and accusations have not changed the company’s behaviour, though, given the fact that as one of the most important foreign investors in the country it has been assured of the active support of the Canadian and Guatemalan states. Neither the MEM nor the Guatemalan government intervened in any of these cases to force Goldcorp’s compliance with environmental regulations or penalize the company for its legal transgressions.384
The buttressing of Goldcorp’s position within Guatemala through the direct and indirect assistance provided by the Canadian state has been especially important as controversy surrounding the mine has accelerated. Ongoing resistance by indigenous activists has drawn unwanted international attention and criticism of the mining giant and the Guatemalan government alike. In a report in early 2010, the International Labour Organization’s Committee of Experts “urge[d] the Government to suspend the exploitation in question [the Marlin mine] until…the prior consultation provided for in Article 15(2) of the Convention [relating to indigenous peoples] can be carried out.”385 This call from the ILO was followed on May 21 of that year by a Precautionary Measure issued by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), of which both Canada and Guatemala are members. The Commission calls on member states to adopt Precautionary Measures to prevent what it identifies as potential human rights violations or harms against people. The measure regarding Goldcorp included an order to suspend the mine’s operations, the concession for which, “was issued and mining begun without the prior, complete, free, and informed consultation of the affected communities of the Maya people.”386 The measure also noted that serious claims regarding human rights violations and contamination of local water supplies had not been addressed. Although keen to support IACHR decisions when it suits its interests—for example, when the leftist Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez was the subject of criticism—the Canadian government has been silent regarding the international legal condemnations of Goldcorp’s activities in Guatemala.
We met with Javier de León, a leading member of ADISMI, in July 2012, and he told us “that the exploitation of gold and silver in San Miguel Ixtahuacán is an exploitation of the patrimony of the Mam people in a way that…it is occurring without a license from the Mam people of San Miguel because a consultation process was not carried out in any way.” Echoing the position of the ILO, de León insisted that “in no way did the Guatemalan carry out the consultation according to how it should in order to see if the communities were or were not in agreement with the extraction of gold and silver.”387
The concerns of the IACHR, as well as those of the ILO, were ignored by both Goldcorp and the Guatemalan government and thus the Marlin mine continued to operate freely. Goldcorp kept to its script, arguing that despite all evidence to the contrary there were no ecological repercussions flowing from the operations of Marlin site. “The Guatemalan government’s testing and extensive Company monitoring,” Goldcorp insisted, “demonstrate that there is no evidence of adverse impacts related to mining activity from the Marline mine.”388 As it turned out, Goldcorp need not have fretted excessively about pressure from the IACHR. Not only was Marlin never shut down during the period in which the concerns raised by the IACHR were to have been investigated, but after drawing international attention to the controversies surrounding Marlin, the IACHR subsequently revised its position in late 2011. Following the release of new “evidence” by Goldcorp and the Guatemalan government, IACHR acquiesced, stating simply that Goldcorp needed to ensure the quality of drinking water in the area. Banished in the new position was the earlier and bolder IACHR stance calling for the suspension of operations in the mine.389 As Jennifer Moore from Mining Watch, a Canadian non-governmental organization (NGO), argued in response to the revision:
It is unconvincing that the IACHR would be satisfied with the evidence that the company-sponsored water committee and Guatemalan government have presented. The most recent hydro-geological study lauded by the government does not resolve the question of whether the mine is contaminating the local drinking water and its neutrality has been roundly criticized by local authorities.390
Canadian manoeuvring is lurking in the background of the IACHR’s decision to revise the measure, and for Marlin ultimately not having been shutdown down during the investigation. After the IACHR announcement in May, FAIT and the embassy moved quickly to assist both Guatemala and Goldcorp in their response. They leaned on the Guatemalan government when it looked like it might temporarily close Marlin as per the precautionary measure. It also appears very likely that they conducted behind the scenes networking at the IACHR. The full extent of the Canadian state’s role in the eventual revision of the precautionary measure is not clear; there has been no media coverage of it (in Canada or elsewhere), and pertinent documents obtained through Access to Information are heavily redacted. But there was a flurry of meetings and correspondences between Canadian, Goldcorp, and Guatemalan officials immediately after the precautionary measure was announced, with Alexandra Bugailiskis, the Assistant Deputy Minister for Latin America and the Caribbean, assuring a Goldcorp executive that “the embassy of Canada in Guatemala City will be working closely with the Government of Guatemala to encourage a comprehensive approach…so that Guatemalan authorities are equipped with all of the required information to address concerns.”391 In early June 2011, for example, the Canadian ambassador, Leeann McKechnie, met with the Guatemalan Vice President, the Minister of Mines and Energy, and the Minister of the Environment.392 Shortly after, Goldcorp met in Ottawa with the Director General for Latin America and the Caribbean, James Lambert, Minister of State for the Americas, Peter Kent, and the Minister for International Trade, Peter Van Loan. The brief written for Van Loan includes as a talking point that the government “understand[s] the very large investment made in the Marlin mine and its importance to Goldcorp,” and that the “Embassy is monitoring this issue closely on the ground.”393 Representatives of Canada’s Permanent Mission to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington also spoke informally to IACHR representatives in June according to communications between Ottawa, the embassy, and the Mission. This is also noted in a communication between Bugailiskis and a Goldcorp executive.394
The stakes were raised higher for Goldcorp when the Guatemalan government announced on June 23 that it was initiating a process to temporarily close Marlin in response to the IACHR’s precautionary measure, despite President Colom stating that the IACHR’s concerns were unsubstantiated. Canadian officials may very well have known about the decision before it was announced. At a minimum, it would be unsurprising if they were cognizant of its real possibility given the close connections between both Goldcorp—whose Marlin Mine is Guatemala’s largest export-earnings source—and the embassy, and the Guatemalan government. As noted, this more or less natural relationship of mutual interest among elites has no doubt been strengthened through the PDAC trips the embassy organizes for Guatemalan politicians and technocrats in the MEM. All of these factors together could go a long way to explaining the flurry of communications with Guatemalan officials mentioned above, and it may also be the reason that the Office of the Minister of International Trade requested on June 18, with relatively short turnaround time, that a letter be written for the Minister to sign to his Guatemalan counterpart, the content of which has not been disclosed.395 But the announcement by the Colom government certainly spawned another flurry of communications and meetings. On June 24 embassy staff, including the ambassador, met a Goldcorp vice president for the region to discuss Guatemala’s decision to temporarily close the mine.396 Also in late June, Lambert met again with a Goldcorp executive in Ottawa, and in July at the request of FAIT the embassy drew up a list of “high level authorities” in the Guatemalan government to contact, with whom Goldcorp is not already in “constant communication.”397 While the details of the meetings are unclear, what is evident is that despite initially stating it would seek Marlin’s temporary closure, the Guatemalan government never actually carried out any action against the mine.
The meetings continued into the fall of 2010 as an October 25 IACHR hearing date for the complainants and the Guatemala government approached. On October 8, the new Director General for Latin America and Caribbean in FAIT, and former ambassador to Honduras, Neil Reeder, met with Goldcorp.398 On October 12 the embassy’s Senior Trade Commissioner, Sébastien Moffett, met with a Guatemalan leader (who is not identified), while Alan Culham, the Canadian ambassador to the OAS, met with the head of the IACHR.399 It appears from the communications between Ottawa and the embassy that the Canadians were prepping Guatemalans for the hearings, while Culham, perhaps more familiar with IACHR process, deemed it necessary to explain to FAIT and the embassy that the Canadians needed to be vigilant in sustaining appearances in order not to be seen to be infringing upon the IACHR’s independence. The embassy subsequently reported to Ottawa that the “official” IACHR hearing “went well,” and was followed the same day by what it describes as a second “non-official” meeting at the IACHR, the information from which is not disclosed.400 Meetings involving Canadian, Guatemalan, IACHR, and Goldcorp officials continued into 2011, until the measure had been sufficiently watered down and the call for Marlin’s closure withdrawn.401
The litany of ties wedding the Canadian government to Goldcorp does not end there. Indeed, although passed over entirely in the Canadian press, the array of connections between the company and the Conservatives was further exposed in a trip to Guatemala by Canadian officials organized by Goldcorp executives. Among those present were Conservative MPs Dean Allison, chair of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SCFAID), and Dave Van Kesteren, also a member of the SCFAID (and vocal defender of the 2009 coup against former Honduran President Manual Zelaya as a containment strategy against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez). Also participating in the delegation were Liberal MP Massimo Pacetti and Independent MP Bruce Hyer. An email written by former Liberal MP, Don Boudria—now in the employ of Goldcorp lobbyist Hill and Knowlton—to a Conservative MP, which was leaked to Mining Watch in August 2012, discusses Goldcorp Chairman Ian Telfer and Goldcorp VP Brent Bergeron’s plans to host “a fascinating visit” to Guatemala, including travel in the country by “Goldcorp aircraft.” The visit included a stopover at the Marlin site and meetings with Guatemalan cabinet ministers. The chair of Guatemala’s Legislative Commission, Edgar Cristiani, reported that discussions with the delegation would include “different positions on mining, the experience of their country with mining, royalty payments, as well as the issue of conflicts.”402
The trip was organized to commence several months after Bergeron testified before the SCFAID, where he brazenly declared that
In Guatemala, I would like to see them modernize their mining regulations. That would add to the stability of the environment within which we deal in Guatemala. Can I go as Goldcorp and start training the Ministry of Energy and Mines? I can’t do that. The credibility behind that is not right. However, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a government institution come in to take our experience here in Canada—the Natural Resources Canada in terms of their experience—and bring that experience to Guatemala.403
Thus Bergeron, even as he urged vigilance against any deterioration in Goldcorp’s public image through a perception of overstretching its power in Guatemala, could admit that he esteemed the Canadian government’s record of facilitating corporate extraction of natural resources at home, and that it would be mutually beneficial to all involved if the government were to more aggressively export these practices abroad. This trip came, moreover, after the Pérez Molina government’s brief flirtation with a constitutional change permitting the Guatemalan government to take up to 40 percent ownership in new mining projects, discussed above. While the proposal was withdrawn, it nevertheless spoke to the climate of instability for the industry even in a country with a government that is generally viewed as having a favourable disposition towards the interests of foreign capital.
Goldcorp: Cerro Blanco
Marlin, as we have suggested, has been at the cutting edge of the wave of new Canadian mining projects. The field of Canadian investments has expanded rapidly in the wake of its successes. Such expansion notably includes another Goldcorp project, Cerro Blanco, a gold and silver property at the advanced exploration stage in the southeastern province of Jutiapa. The Cerro Blanco initiative faces opposition in both Guatemala and El Salvador, as it is located on the border. Critics point out that the proposed development poses an environmental threat to the shared Lake Güija and rivers in both countries. For Salvadorans, there is concern about seepage of mine waste into the Lempa river, upon which 3 million depend for their agricultural and livestock-raising activities. A study of Cerro Blanco by geochemistry and hydrogeology professor at Ohio University, Dina Larios, warns that toxic waste water from the mine could cause serious damage to the surrounding ecosystem.404
Skye/Hudbay: Fenix
The Fenix mine is another important example, located in the Maya Q’eqchi community of Las Nubes. Fenix has the potential to become one of the largest nickel mines in the world. The history of the property stretches back to the Cold War years of military dictatorship. Then-Canadian mining giant, INCO, together with the American company, Hanna Mining, formed EXMIBAL in 1960, four years after the military coup against Jacobo Árbenz. EXMIBAL lobbied the military dictatorship, and eventually obtained a 365 square kilometer concession in 1965 on land that had been identified for the agrarian reform proposed under Árbenz but which was annuled following the coup. Maya Q’eqchi communities argue that they have never conceded the land, nor were they consulted about the mining project. When community resistance to INCO grew in the 1970s, as Cold War geopolitical tensions in the country intensified and ultimately led to civil war and the scorched earth campaigns of the 1980s against indigenous communities, EXMIBAL and the Guatemalan government responded with repression. Death squads assassinated opponents and issued death threats to others.405 But the repression of EXMIBAL’s opponents and the company’s close relationship with the dictatorship made it a target of guerrilla forces until it ceased operations. EXMIBAL returned to the country after the war ended in the 1990s, and eventually sold the concession in 2004 to Skye Resources, whose chief executive was a former director of INCO.406 Skye kept up the tradition of violence and dispossession when its efforts to reactivate Fenix were met with opposition. Ultimately, unable to contain the negative international criticism and fierce local opposition to Fenix, Hudbay – which purchased Skye in 2008 for C$460 million in order to obtain Fenix – sold the project in August 2011 to Cyprus-based equity investor Solway Group.407
Tahoe Resources/Goldcorp: El Escobal
El Escobal is a silver mining project in the advanced exploration stage. It is owned by Tahoe Resources, which is headquartered in Nevada—likely so it can benefit from the U.S. trade agreement with Guatemala—but whose major shareholder is Goldcorp. With a total investment of C$406 million, El Escobal could soon make Tahoe one of the largest silver producers in the world.408 Despite President and CEO Kevin McArthur’s claim to a Gold conference that Escobal “is in a region that is receptive to the mining industry,” three communities adjacent to the project have voted overwhelmingly against it in community referenda. One resident in the community of San Rafael Las Flores has resisted the company’s ongoing efforts to get him to sell his land, despite it being completely fenced-in by the mine.409
Radius Gold: El Tambor
El Tambor is a gold and silver exploration project owned until recently by Vancouver-based Radius Gold.410 The site is situated in El Carrizal, between the municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo. Starting in early March 2012, people from both communities held protests at the entrance to the mine, rejecting its presence altogether. Members of the Frente Norte del Área Metropolitana (Northern Front of the Metropolitan Area), have aimed to halt exploitation and force the company and government to hold a popular consultation to decide El Tambor’s fate. Community members brought money and cooking supplies to sustain the protesters at the mine entrance. One community activist, Johana Morales, demonstrating an understanding of the devastating consequences Canadian mining has already had in Guatemala and Central America more broadly,411 noted her concerns about exploration at El Tambor being allowed to proceed, “in the future, the mine could contaminate our water supply, which could affect the health of our children, because of the chemicals they use to extract the metals. This is why we are demanding that the project cease operations in our communities.”412 Movement leaders have faced reprisals: security guards working for Radius entered the community of San José del Golfo in early April and fired shots in the air until they were physically detained by residents.
Repression intensified on June 13, 2012, when Telma Yolanda Oquelí Veliz was almost killed for her activism against the mine. “She was on her way out of the camp when her vehicle was cut-off by a car and a motorcycle and her would be assassin shot three bullets at her,” reports Canadian journalist, Dawn Paley.
One of the bullets pierced her abdomen and remains lodged inside her, too close to the spinal cord to be safely removed. Oquelí suffers ongoing pain as a result of the shooting. Her attackers, who she thinks are connected to the municipality of San José del Golfo and to the mining company, have never been identified.
Miguel Díaz Morales, an eighty-three-year-old community resident who spent numerous nights at the blockade, told Paley he was fighting for his “children, and for our land, on which they were born.…We defend our land because we have the right to do so. We’re free and we have the right to defend our lands.”413
In a visit with community residents in San José del Golfo in July 2012, we were told repeatedly how peaceful and legal protests were met with repression and intimidation. For example, Jorge López, a resident active in the anti-mining resistance, explained how the struggle the community has been carrying out has been “using legal means” such as “peaceful marches” only to be consistently dismissed or ignored. “They have not wanted to reach a solution to this problem because there have been attempts to talk with the Minister of Energy and Mines, the Minister of the Environment, but they have just stood us up.” Instead of good faith negotiation, López explains that they
have received threats, death threats, via telephone. Graffiti that indicates a warning has been painted on the houses of those of us who identify as being part of this struggle. Because there are no leaders. Here, we are one for all, and all for one.414
“Look,” Antonio Reyes Romero, another anti-mining activist in the community told us,
what we want is this. The answer is simple, but doing it is the difficult part. What we want is for there to be no more mining exploitation.…And in this case it is Radius from Canada doing the exploiting. So, the government of Canada is not going to do it [stop Radius on its own]. But the people of Canada can do it. They can demand that the Canadian government tells Radius not to come and bother Guatemala.415
DIALECTICS OF RESISTANCE AND MILITARIZATION
Canadian mining expansion into Guatemala needs to be understood in the context of the country’s transition toward a new model of accumulation, the growing popular resistance and social polarization that this model has fostered domestically, and the dramatic remilitarization of politics that the state and ruling class have initiated as a way of maintaining control and reproducing the system as a whole in conditions of growing instability. Canadian investment and geopolitical orientation toward Guatemala is deeply complicit in the devastating social consequences flowing from these new configurations of power and oppression. If the post-war dynamic of 1996–2003 was one of relative demilitarization, reduction of violence, depoliticization of everyday life, and thoroughgoing defeat and disarticulation of popular social movements and the organized Left, since 2003 a new cycle of class struggle, with a heightening intensity coming both from above and below, has been set decisively into motion.416
The political economy of this new conjuncture has been characterized by a process of soaring bank profits; reconcentration of landownership in the countryside in the hands of both foreign and national capitalists, including capital tied to narco-trafficking; a turn toward capital intensive farming of sugar cane and African palm; the construction of vast hydroelectric developments; mega-highway projects, such as the Franja Transversal del Norte (a planned highway in the northwest of the country of 330 kilometers which will traverse the departments of Huehuetengango, Quiché, Alta Verapaz, and Izabal) and the Corredor Tecnológico de Guatemala (Guatemalan Technological Corridor, which is conceived as an earthbound canal connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific via a vast highway); and, most crucially, oil and mining expansion.417 The new development strategy of the ruling class has transformed the Guatemalan territory into a space of accumulation oriented toward the interests of national and international capitals while simultaneously spiking the severity of ecological damage, displacement of indigenous communities, and the destruction of peasant economies. Other results have been increasing levels of poverty, growing numbers of unemployed, underemployed, and informal proletarians, and a surge in migrant labourers leaving the country for Mexico and the U.S. as part of an array of complex survival strategies. All of these components together have meant a concomitant uptick in social conflict.
Mario Godínez is a university professor and member of the Movimiento Nueva República (New Republic Movement), which was in turn part of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) that ran on a Left ticket in the September 2011 elections against the far-Right candidacy of Otto Pérez Molina of the Partido Patriota (Patriotic Party). In a 2011 interview with the Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi, Godínez succinctly captured the basic outlines of the new model of accumulation and the violence integral to its character:
The expansion of the capitalist model is coming at us from two directions: The growth of agribusiness, above all sugar cane and African palm, and the expansion of mining, and the privatization of water that goes along with it. At the same time, the country has been turned into a drug-trafficking corridor from the south to the United States, with a huge dispute over territory on the border between Guatemala and Mexico. All this creates a complex scenario. The old oligarchies have entered into alliances with drug traffickers and with transnationals. That annuls a state that was already weak, both in terms of citizen’s rights and in terms of security. A good part of the current violence is provoked by “guardias blancas,” as we already have 60,000 private security forces and 15,000 police. In reality, this so-called private security–legal or illegal–protects the mafias through a process of re-militarizing the country.418
The fallout from these economic and political developments has been an intensification of social discontent from the dispossessed, marginalized, and exploited communities. If a new bloc of social movements has thus far been unable to consistently project alternatives at the national level, there has nonetheless been fierce and growing defensive resistance at local and regional levels, led by a renewed militancy within Mayan indigenous communities. While the range of demands of new movements is eclectic and diverse, the most impressive and impactful have been those movements responding to the intertwined human dispossession and environmental degradation involved in the capitalist exploitation of natural resources, including, most centrally, mining, hydroelectric, and oil development projects.
In the five-year period stretching between 2005 and 2010 there were approximately 2,180 protests at the national level, with 242 in 2010 alone. The most common were demonstrations (82), road blockades (53), sit-ins (27), building occupations (15), and strikes (10). The most important protagonist and social subject in this terrain of unrest, according to Guatemalan sociologist Simona Violetta Yagenova, was the rural Mayan indigenous community.419 In 2011, spurred by an electoral contest in which the extreme Right was set to win, the number of protests expanded still further to 522. In 2012, an impressive 493 protests were carried out, with the tactical repertoire unfolding as follows: demonstrations (225), road blockades (90), building occupations (63), sit-ins (47), and strikes (28). Geographically, the protests tend to be strongest in the western region of the country, as well as in the capital, Guatemala City. However, in recent years the relatively quiescent eastern region, including Zacapa, Jutiapa, Jalapa, and Santa Rosa, has begun to experience processes of community resistance as new licenses for exploration have been granted to multinational mining companies.420
The generalized, if still incipient, process of principally rural indigenous resistance to the extractive industries has been met with an equally generalized process of militarization from the state and aligned paramilitary forces.421 The “accumulated violence” of genocidal war “wasn’t resolved by the peace accords,” according to Godínez:
Now security has been privatized with an alliance among the criminal groups that were active in the 1980s, formed by anti-communist soldiers and youths paid to destroy the popular movement. We call these paramilitary groups “guardias blancas.” They didn’t disappear with the accords. They acquired their own power, which now appears to be linked to international gangs, the maras, who are linked to emigrants in the United States and other Central American countries. There is a division of labor: violent gangs are linked to drug sales at the retail level while the trafficking is organized by the big cartels, such as the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, which has positioned itself in Guatemala. Guatemalan soldiers, elite groups such as the kaibiles, along with Mexicans make up the Zeta cartel. They were contracted by the cartel to take care of business.422
In the decade leading up to 2012 there were at least 120 reported assassinations of activists resisting mining development in Guatemala.423 In her survey of social conflicts in the country in 2012, Yagenova reports that over that year there were seven assassinations of leaders in rural community activism, the massacre of seven indigenous peasants by the military in Totonicapán at a road blockade, and an attempted assassination of one more anti-mining activist leader.424
One can also chart with ease the formal militarization of Guatemalan politics since the peace accords. In 1999, reforms recommended in the peace accords that would have removed the military from responsibility for internal security were narrowly defeated. That same year, the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) won the presidential elections. In spite of the fact that a civilian, Alfonso Portillo, took the presidency, the party was founded by a former dictator, and General Efraín Ríos Montt, responsible for massacres during the war, was re-elected to congress and remained head of the FRG.
In 2000, renewing the practice of internal security, the military returned to active duty in police patrols, anti-narcotics activities, and the guarding of prisons. In 2003, military forces began their renewed involvement in forcible evictions of peasants from land occupations initiated by small peasants, including the removal of eight hundred families in the Polochic Valley in 2011. By 2005, the armed forces had become intensely implicated in the state coercion of anti-mining activism, including the murder of one man the year after soldiers shot at a crowd protesting the Canadian-owned Marlin mine. States of prevention and emergency were declared at different intervals during the presidencies of Óscar Berger and Álvaro Colom, during which military power was increased and basic constitutional rights were restricted. These interventions were motivated, above all, by the state’s desire to repress protests against mining and electricity projects. Under Colom, in 2009 the infamous Ixcán military base was reopened, a locale that saw over one hundred massacres during the war, and is now the neighbour of a planned—and contested—highway development.
In December 2010, the first state of siege (martial law) since the end of the war was declared; followed by others in 2011 and 2012. While ostensibly motivated by a need to control drug traffickers, the geographic perimeters of the zones under martial law and the timing of the directives make it clear that these were straightforwardly efforts by the state to clampdown on social protest through unmitigated military presence and force. Perhaps the most powerful expression of the remilitarization of Guatemalan politics, however, came with the September 2011 election of retired general Otto Pérez Molina, who was responsible for overseeing the massacres of highland indigenous peasantries during the war.425 According to Godínez,
a zone of militarism is being reborn in regions where natural resources are abundant and there are mega mining projects. That’s why we can say that this is militarism at the service of big multinational firms.…We’re facing a backwards shift towards dictatorship, even though there are elections. In Guatemala they are trying out ways to protect investments by neutralizing the state.426
Canadian mining companies are deeply and directly imbricated in these overarching dynamics.427 Indeed, the latest state of siege declared by the Pérez Molina regime, on May 1, 2013, turned precisely on developments fifty miles southeast of the capital city at Tahoe Resources El Escobal silver mine, one of the five largest deposits of silver in the world, where hundreds of protests had been blocking roads and engaging in other militant forms of direct action.428 Private security guards employed by the company “shot and wounded several local residents on Saturday [April 27, 2013] in San Rafael Las Flores, on the road” in front of the mine.429 Martial law was decreed by Pérez Molina for thirty days in four municipalities surrounding the El Escobal mining project—Jalapa, Mataquescuintla, and Casillas, in addition to San Rafael Las Flores. Freedom of movement, assembly, and protest, and the basic constitutional rights of detainees and prisoners were suspended. According to reports, Alberto Rotonda, the head of security at Tahoe’s mine, was “overheard giving the order to shoot, among other comments and insults, while some injured have stated that they saw him draw and fire a weapon as well.”430 Rotonda was arrested and charged with attempted homicide after he tried to flee the country.
The latest state of siege comes in the wake of a long history of conflict over the Tahoe operation. Tahoe representatives and the Guatemalan government “are hostile towards us,” explained Oscar Morales García when we visited San Rafael Las Flores in July 2012. Morales García is a member of the Local Committee in Defence of Life, which has become an important participant leading the struggle against Tahoe:
The mining company has filed complaints in the Attorney General’s office against us for kidnapping, terrorism, and coercion. We have been accused of crimes. And this is only because we want to have a consultation in the municipality. We have received death threats. And they don’t even have the courage to do it themselves face to face. They send someone to say, “hey, they’re going to kill you.”431
The company’s obstinance towards the local communities has sparked a series of direct actions in response, including a mobilization of more than four hundred people to block the entrance to the project in January, 2012. On September 17, 2012 a transport truck carrying tubes and electrical cables along the main highway toward the mine was intercepted by community residents who confiscated the materials. The next day, deposits from the mine were burned up along with a transport vehicle. Two months later, when authorities attempted to hold a forum in the community of Mataquescuintla, enraged community residents burned down a hotel and looted dynamite from the mine.432 Amadeo de Jesus Rodríguez Aguilar has been a leading activist in the Local Committee in Defence of Life, prompting a spurious Tahoe claim that he kidnapped their security personnel after he peacefully disrupted a meeting of shareholders who were visiting the area from North America. He wanted to challenge the rosy picture of the mine’s popularity painted by Kevin McArthur, former president of Goldcorp and founder of Tahoe Resources in 2010, but the company used the incident to incite a clampdown on the activities of opponents, knowing full well that the government and its security apparatus are strong sympathizers with the Canadian mining industry.433 “Tahoe’s silver, minerals and gold in San Rafael are now stained with blood,” notes Morales García. “It may be true that the government authorized an exploitation license, but what would be called a social license for Minera San Rafael doesn’t exist here. It doesn’t exist and it never will.”434
The expansion of Canadian mining capital into Guatemala in the 2000s has been constitutive of the latest cycle of class struggle centred in the Guatemalan countryside.435 Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Marlin mine. As Marlin went into production, and inspired the rapid growth of exploration, without consultation with local communities, the anti-mining movement picked up steam and spread. Between 2005 and 2008, for example, within the wider array of social movement activities there were 1,482 protests specifically related to opposition to mining.436 The bulk of the movement is comprised of small farmers from poor indigenous communities organized to defend their land and ecologies. One of the more militant and grassroots organizations formed to resist the mining industry, the Consejo de los Pueblos de Occidente (Council of the Peoples of the West), is fighting dispossession under the slogan of “In Defence of the Territory.”437 It is devoted to community-based direct action, rather than spending its time lobbying the government and mining corporations, or focusing principally on legal challenges through the courts.438
The ongoing support Goldcorp receives from the Canadian state has translated into virtual impunity surrounding its practices vis-à-vis the Guatemalan government. It has been the mining-affected indigenous communities themselves that have organized against and directly challenged the company. Opponents have engaged in a variety of actions against the mine to try and physically stop it from moving ahead—often at great personal risk. Beginning in December 2004, protesters blocked a convoy of mining equipment destined for Marlin for forty-two days. The blockade ended when police, under orders from then-President Oscar Berger, attacked it, firing on protesters. One protester, Raúl Castro Bocel, was shot and killed, and dozens more were injured. In January 2005, a local Bishop led an anti-mine protest of three thousand people in the provincial capital, and has subsequently faced death threats as a result. The initial blockade and state response led to the formation of the Regional Council of Indigenous Authorities of the Western Highlands, which demanded respect for the indigenous communities’ territories; prior consultation with indigenous communities before any mining projects commence, including exploration; and an end to criminalization.439 These organizations of resistance persisted in the face of ongoing repression. In March 2005, for example, local resident Álvaro Sánchez was shot dead in the street walking home from a bar by a security guard working for Glamis. That same month, a vehicle belonging to an indigenous leader was torched, and he and two other anti-mine activists received death threats.440
In January 2007, representatives from communities opposed to the Marlin Mine submitted a petition to the company listing their grievances. Their complaint was dismissed by the company and, according to the community representatives, the activists were insulted by company officials. On their way home from the company offices, the community members were attacked by Goldcorp security. Rocks were thrown at them, guns were fired, and security tried to force one person into a car. The activists managed to defend themselves, but when they reported the incident to police no action was taken on their behalf. After learning of Goldcorp’s response to the petition, roughly six hundred people from towns that neighbour the Marlin mine gathered that same day and began to blockade the roads to the company’ installations. The National Civil Police’s riot squad was called, and was soon joined by upwards of five hundred Guatemalan soldiers. Despite the state’s aggressive show of force, the blockades were held for more than ten days, forcing the company to agree to negotiations. But as soon as the blockades were lifted the company declared it was no longer going to negotiate, and instead initiated penal charges against twenty-two local residents. Seven of those people had arrest warrants issued against them, and, according to some community activists, Goldcorp urged the Guatemalan government to lay charges against them.441 Two community leaders were violently detained by National Civil Police officers—transported in Goldcorp vehicles—at their home in the early morning hours. However, in a rare positive turn of events, which speaks to how outrageous the charges were, the judges overseeing the trial eventually acquitted five of the seven and put the other two on probation and levied US$500 fines.442
Despite Goldcorp’s heavy-handed approach to defending its investment, opposition to the project did not subside. In 2007, anti-mining activists in the municipality of Sipakapense spread their resistance to the electoral arena, competing in municipal elections through the Comité Cívico Sipakapense (Sipakapense Civic Committee). Led by an anti-mining activist, their “No to Mining” mandate proved popular and they defeated the well-funded pro-mining candidates. While intimidation of mining opponents did not stop, the persistence and popularity of the resistance forced Goldcorp to shift tactics slightly and more aggressively dangle their pro-mining carrots in the region. The company opened offices in five different communities and offered cash to residents for household or community projects. To counter the results of damning environmental studies conducted by multidisciplinary teams of scientists on the hazardous contaminating impact of the mine on local water supplies, the company financed an “independent” water analysis by a front organization called the Communitarian Environmental Monitoring Organization, which unsurprisingly found no contamination downstream from the mine.443 Goldcorp also paid lobbyists to go door-to-door to promote mining and encourage people to sell their land. Taking advantage of the poverty in the region, Goldcorp managed to purchase the loyalty of some residents through financial assistance or job offers, and has used this to claim they have community support and to drive a wedge into the communities.444
“Goldcorp insisted that the mine improved local welfare, since 64 percent of the 1,900 people working in the Marlin mine were said to be from San Miguel and Sipakapa,” notes sociologist Leire Urkidi. “However, increased alcoholism, prostitution and rape, division among people, and the criminalization of resistance were other social impacts that were mentioned in the area.”445 This view was born out by Florencio Yoc, a community anti-mining activist we spoke to in July 2012. “So, that’s the problem here in San Miguel,” Yoc told us, “the Marlin mine company only comes to create more division among families.”446
In spite of obstacles created through repression at the hands of private security and the Guatemalan army, as well efforts at cooptation through petty handouts on the part of Goldcorp, the resistance continued to grow. “Led by the priest and some local authorities,” the sociologist Leire Urkidi explains,
the resistance to mining spread through Sipakapa’s communities. Several leaders from Sipakapa visited other mining areas in Central America, such as Valle de Siria in Honduras, and engaged in regional networks against mining. The Central American Anti-Mining Network was a key information and discourse source for Guatemala’s incipient movement.447
In June 2008, Gregoria Pérez, a local Mayan farmer opposed to Marlin, intentionally damaged a power line Goldcorp runs across her property to feed its mill. When Goldcorp employees went to fix the line they were blocked by anti-Marlin activists. As the fight over the powerline, and the mine more generally, continued in July, Secretary of State (Foreign Affairs and International Trade) Helen Guergis visited Guatemala where she met with representatives of Canadian investors. The press release announcing her visit describes Guatemala as an important partner of Canada in the region.448
A year later, in June 2009, after its efforts to purchase land from residents failed, Goldcorp illegally brought exploration equipment and vehicles onto community and private property of the Mayan Mam population of Sacmuj in the village of Ágel. After receiving complaints from local residents, Goldcorp signed an agreement to withdraw its equipment, vehicles, and workers on June 12. At the same time, Goldcorp requested and received a police and army presence, along with private company security, to protect its workers. When the company failed to uphold the agreement, exploration equipment and a vehicle were burned.449 Tensions continued to mount after that incident, including an attempt to assassinate four community leaders in San Miguel Ixtahuacan in August 2009, when a truck tried to run them over while they were walking along a road near the ADISMI offices in Máquivil.450 On July 7, 2010 in Ágel, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, an opposition activist was badly wounded after being shot in the head in her home. The attack came after she had received several threats for her participation in anti-Goldcorp movement. Around the time of this shooting, several other activists were run off of local roads by cars.451 Then, the following September, Goldcorp again attempted to enter Sacmuj in order to expand its operations in the region.452
In San José Nueva Esperanza we spoke to Diadora Hernández, a leading Mayan peasant opponent of the Marlin mine who was shot in the face in early 2012. She now has a prosthetic eye and has lost hearing in her right ear. “I would like the company to leave,” Hernández said,
because now there are going to be more problems because they started to explore here below my land. And they [the family on the land below hers] have not planted corn, and the rumour is that they are going to sell [their land to the Goldcorp]…there is no tranquillity. I am sad.
Hernández has not been silenced, however, maintaining her role in the struggle and appealing to the government to act in the interests of the community, and against the mine, out of conscience:
And what is the government going to do? Is it going to sell us to the mine? And us? What are we going to do?…I always thought it would be better for me to go talk to the government. Why don’t they listen to us?453
As in the cases of Tahoe and Goldcorp, Skye Resources has also been a Canadian subject of anti-mining resistance in Guatemala, as well as the source of state and paramilitary repression of popular movements. Skye’s mining permit covered land that includes seventeen Maya Q’eqchi communities. In early 2007, five communities in the area were violently evicted by several hundred military, police, and company security. In Lote 8, armed forces shot tear gas at residents, who fled into the forest as their homes and crops were destroyed. When residents returned over the next week to start rebuilding, the various armed forces came back and destroyed one hundred make-shift huts and, while laying siege to the community, soldiers, police, and company security gang-raped at least five women.454 The original eviction at Lote 8 was partly captured on film by Canadian doctoral student Steven Schnoor. Schnoor’s video includes a woman protesting her eviction and still shots of the violent expulsions. When questioned about the video and violent evictions by the NGO Breaking the Silence, Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Cook, resorted to attacking Schnoor’s character with wild claims that the footage was fake: the woman in the video, he insisted, was an actor and the still shots were taken during the civil war in the 1980s. When his effort to get a retraction and apology from Cook and Foreign Affairs failed, Schnoor successfully sued them for damages, the Canadian judge finding that Cook’s comments were “defamatory” and “reckless.”455
Feeling pressure from the indigenous communities and growing international attention as a result of the violence, Skye Resources sold the project to Hudbay Minerals in 2008. But neither the resistance nor the violence abated. In late September 2009, violence and intimidation escalated against residents of Las Nubes, leading to the assassination of one Hudbay opponent. In the same period, Hudbay security forces along with police and, according to community members, paramilitary forces visited Las Nubes and told residents to leave, destroyed a community structure, and fired live ammunition at residents. Then on September 29, security forces attacked a blockade set up in front of the Hudbay complex, several protesters were badly injured, and Adolfo Ich Chub, a Maya Q’eqchi teacher from nearby La Union who had two weeks earlier denounced the Fenix mine in a public meeting, was kidnapped and then hacked to death by Hudbay security. Several hours later, in the early hours of September 30, a mini-bus carrying Maya Q’eqchi leaders was machine-gunned, leaving several people severely injured. One of those wounded, Pablo Bac, whose father organized against EXMIBAL until he was disappeared in 1981, suffered ongoing health complications and died the following March.456 Hudbay responded to the bloodshed by arguing that its security “showed great restraint and acted only in self defense.”457
This was self-evidently a message to mining opponents that mining interests are willing to employ terror strategies echoing the days of Guatemala’s civil war. Apparently without irony, the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) awarded Hudbay with its 2009 “Towards Sustainable Mining” award, which was presented to the company on Parliament Hill during MAC’s annual “Mining Day on the Hill.”458 Popular opposition persisted all the same, and in early 2011 Hudbay suffered a rare legal setback when the Constitutional Court of Guatemala agreed with one community in the permit area, Lote 9, that it had collective rights to its lands and the government must issue it a land title.459 At the same time, negligence lawsuits were being brought against Hudbay in a Toronto court by the sexual assault victims, the widow of Adolfo Ich, and another community member, German Choc, who was shot and paralyzed by security forces.460
In a throwback to Cold War ideology, it is commonplace for the mining corporations and the Guatemalan state to dismiss anti-mining protests as the phenomena of a discredited minority, little more than malcontents who have been incited by outside agitators, often international environmental NGOs. One of the more effective forms of rebutting this dismissal has been the grassroots organization of dozens of community referenda, or consultations, in which community members have been able to voice their views. Since 2005, at least sixty such consultations have been held, with Guatemalans voting decisively against future mining projects taking place in their communities. Over seven hundred thousand people, in a country of 14 million, have participated in municipal referenda and said no to mining.461 In one particularly telling indication of the explicit support enjoyed by the anti-mining movement, in the department of Huehuetenango, where the most exploration licences are to be found, all municipalities except for the capital have voted resoundingly against mining projects, with high levels of participation in the consultations.462 On one level, these referenda are based on Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which requires that prior to the implementation of legal measures or developmental projects that could impact indigenous peoples the signatory state must carry out consultations “with the objective of achieving agreement or consent to the proposed measures.” Convention 169 also requires that “relocation shall take place only with their free and informed consent.”463
On another deeper level, the consultations are rooted in activist efforts in often impoverished and historically oppressed indigenous communities to renew a sense of grassroots democratic participation, self-organization, and governance over the lives of their communities and the critical economic activities that will shape them. “We think that one main principle of the movement of consultations is that the means cannot be separated from the ends,” said one representative of the Council of the Peoples of the West:
We truly think that this is one distinctive characteristic of communitarian consultations.…We think that the first step is to organize ourselves and protest against the existing order, against the transnational consortium, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in a manner where the means are consistent with the ends, and where we could create the desired future human relationships. It means to organize ourselves without a centralized authority, without charismatic leadership, in a manner where we could create the ideal egalitarian society of the future.464
The response of both the mining industry and the Guatemalan state to these initiatives has been to dismiss or ignore them altogether. In June 2005, the community of Sipakapa organized the country’s first community referendum on the Marlin project, and the mine was rejected by 98 percent of voters. Glamis ignored the results.465 Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled that the referendum against the Marlin Mine was unconstitutional and therefore was not binding on mining companies or the government. To many, this is seen as a flagrant violation of indigenous rights as expressed in international law, to which the Guatemalan state is a party. The ILO’s Committee of Experts, discussed above in relation to the Marlin mine, has specifically targeted Guatemala’s mining regime for criticism due to its systematic violation of indigenous rights. The ILO has called on the Guatemalan government to “neither grant nor renew any licence for the exploration and exploitation of natural resources…while the participation and consultation provided for by the convention are not being carried out.”466
“I was recently in Canada and was very clear with people there that the problem is not Canadian society,” Morales García told us when we spoke to him in San Rafael Las Flores about his involvement in the resistance to Tahoe Resources and Goldcorp:
The problem is that these people, these companies, these players come to set up shop here. I don’t have any problem with Canadian society.…On the contrary, we’re friendly and we are peaceful. Our problem has a first and last name and that is Tahoe Resources and it is Goldcorp.467
These sentiments capture a generalized pattern of the way in which indigenous communities in Guatemala have been drawn into a series of unsolicited confrontations with Canadian mining capital, all of which are occurring within a wider panorama of expanding extractive industrial activity under the guise of multinational corporations.
This chapter has sought to contextualize Canadian mining expansion against the historical backdrop of Guatemala’s civil war, peace accords, and transition to a new model of accumulation and violence during the neoliberal period. At the same time, it has sought to emphasize the agency of rural indigenous social movements, fighting on the frontlines against the depredation of their communities proceeding rapidly in the interest of those extracting vast quantities of bullion for the few. These communities defy easy parables of passive victims, even if their movements are up against very real and structurally powerful external and domestic opponents—opponents clearly willing, as we have illustrated, to employ their asymmetrical strengths in military and paramilitary terms to win the day. After having mapped out the key pieces of Honduras and Guatemala in the story of Canadian imperialism and the popular resistance it is generating in the Central American corridor, the next chapter will tie up the final Central American threads through a close examination of the patterns of Canadian capital and popular struggle in the rest of the isthmus.