stakes for social movements in guatemala and that's the what happened in a place called tilton upon last october on october fourth of last year the indigenous the indigenous authorities of the forty eight communities of total make up on call the protest against high energy prices against a constitutional reform proposal and against changes to teaching career teaching curriculum for the teaching revealing for for high schoolers basically who are going to become future teachers reform proposals that had not been calm have not been const consulted with indigenous meeting with the government in guatemala city and then without any negotiation the police attacked demonstrators in the fighting that followed as people tried to defend themselves from the police and also from security guards from a private company that opened fire on the on the demonstration a pull a military patrol arrived at the site and soldiers fired on the crowd eight people were killed six of them were shown later to have been killed by bullets fired by the arm on army soldiers to the others may have been killed by private security guard this was the largest massacre in guatemala committed by the military since the one thousand nine hundred six peace accords and marks i think a watershed moment for polarization between  grassroots social movements and the government in in guatemala guatemala the reaction to that was immediate and extremely vocal a large groups across civil society condemned the government called for the removal of the interior minister and other government officials who had responsibility for the security forces on that day and since then the soldiers who fired on the crowd have actually been arrested in are being processed but no higher ups in the chain of command have had any repercussions for the killing of unarmed protesters and i think some thirty people at least were injured as well reactions to the massacre also included several weeks later at the october twentieth revolution day protests which is usually peaceful civil society march activists covered shoes in red paint in spilled them out in the street in front of the interior ministry headquarters which is the former headquarters of the national police of torture facility for generations that's in the middle of the city and there was damage done to the installations of the interior ministry and i mention this because similarly to what folks here in the northwest of facing for acts of property damage there has been a manhunt for activists who were involved in those protests in guatemala and i think what is important to note about that there's also been closing of ranks amongst social movement in human rights organizations to say criminalization of social discontent is not the answer when the army and police are in an article titled habits of counterinsurgency and liberal dogma the objective of this unrestrained violence is not just to put a stop to discontent until to make up on but to spread the terror that is necessary to disarticulated growing protest against open pit mining hydroelectric dams cement factories highways and crops like african palm and i want to ask i want to interrogate this thesis because what we know about the vents are actually that the military patrol that shot at the protesters had had been told by police that they weren't needed at the at the demonstration and they actually  military went against police orders when they arrived there and shot of the protestors and there's not not week we can say that there's proof that these actions are specifically done with the intention to generate this kind of terror but in the context of the experience on the ground as it's lived by communities that are affected by things like mining their reality is one of low level state terror and that's what we're going to sort of look at in in this in this presentation as well and i want to start by just giving a basic overview of of guatemala long history beginning with the fact that it's territory that was invaded by colonizers some five hundred years ago when the spanish invaders arrived in guatemala they found a dense network of cities states and communities and proceeded to subjugate them through divide and conquer tactics from the spanish conquest to the seventeenth century the population of central america was reduced from about two million to one hundred twenty eight thousand through disease slave and that's the foundation for as we know all the modern nation states in the western hemisphere guatemala became independent from the spanish  massacre in tone upon last october the next sort of main moment in the ongoing process of genocide in guatemala could be located in hundred one in what's called the liberal reform which is when the liberal elite of guatemala basically decided to modernize the economy around an agricultural export model so based on bananas based on coffee based on cotton and other primary commodities and carried out a second wave of displacement of the indigenous population from the best agricultural land in the country day the best agricultural land is the south coast and also there was a lot of settlements of in this area also in which the population was displaced from the land in order to establish the ma exist and the state used to the fullest it's repressive powers to ensure an economy based on the subjugation of the majority indigenous maya population so through things laws which said anyone who doesn't have a registered employer in your id card you'll be put to work for x amount of months a year on the road building you have to have given a certain amount of days work to up to a boss every year otherwise you'll be conscripted into government into government servitude set up a model of seasonal migration to plantations and the majority of the indigenous population a general strike ousted the dictator who was on the one hand a fascist on the other hand was a was very submissive to the united states gave huge concessions to the united fruit company for example which was on the previous slide and in that relationship we see the roots of today's neo liberalism giving tax exemptions giving all these investment incentives raising the minimum wage including legalizing labor unions and independent political parties including the communist party and passed an agrarian reform law which purchased from  large landowners their unused land in united fruit company held actually about eighty percent of the land that it that it had in held at fallow just as accumulated land and they bought the land from united fruit company at the value of any democratic space for political change was one of the factors that led to the beginning of armed struggle with a rebellion of progressive military officers in the one nine hundred sixty s who were inspired by the model of the cuban revolution and also incensed by the fact that guatemalan territory was used as the launching place for the bay of pigs invasion and i include these photos by john marie simon who's that and mazing photographer who was in water during the eighty's and who embedded with the korea movements because they i think speak very eloquently to the amount of risk that people took  and in making the decision to engage in arms struggle you have the you know the young the young man in the urban guerrilla movement in his childhood bedroom it looks like you have the indigenous members of the guerilla army of the poor training with sticks and for thirty six years the internal armed conflict basically ruled existence in the country after the counter revolution the cia provided lists to the military of labor and political leaders to be disposed of and i think importantly there is a transition from sort of the personal list strongman dictatorships of the forty's and earlier to an elite military oligarchies pact in which the military was even more clearly a tool for economic  for economic control the response of the military to the possibility of an armed uprising particularly once the movements moved into indigenous regions of the country  individual massacres this is based on an inversion of mao's statement about guerrilla warfare that the people are the sea in which the in the revolutionary swim they go on military decided well if you can't kill the fish then you drain the sea and so the logic was to attack the civilian population which was a potential support base for the for the area rather than just attacking people who were specifically members of the revolutionary movements this is in the picture from from that time of what scorcher to look like burning everything in a community killing old people women children destroying crops homes and it's created more than a million displaced people throughout the country this next photo is is a hard one to look at this interrogated and killed and buried in mass graves today they discovered more than five hundred remains inside a military base that remains in use today for u n peacekeeper training missions and u s humanitarian missions it also included the concentration of the population in what were called model villages which was based on the strategic hamlets strategy used by the united states in vietnam to bring the population together basically in rural concentration camps where speaking of indigenous languages was prohibited where even gentle christianity was imposed on the population where people were forced were  counterinsurgency strategy that are key to understanding the genocide one was that the strategy never was to eliminate one hundred percent of the mayan population that of course would be absurd because then who would migrate seasonally to the plantations to provide to provide labor the strategy was a seventy percent thirty percent beans and bullets campaign so you control seventy percent of the population by giving them food and development and you kill the other thirty percent of the population that are the potential support base for revolution and there's a military document called operation which is she'll which was based in  instituted by soldiers trained and assessed by the us military military aid was suspended in one nine hundred seventy nine by carter but reinstated by reagan i also want to show this is from some excerpts from  a document called the death squad dossier which is a list of activists who were put under surveillance detained and executed by the guatemalan military these are two people whose remains actually have been identified in a military base outside guatemala city and you can see on each of these cards has a code here this is three hundred which was code for that person has been executed and so over thirty six years  outcome in numbers of this is more than two hundred thousand some say up to a quarter million victims the majority of whom are or mine people some of the other numbers i've already mentioned forty thousand people were forcibly disappeared  which is to say detained by the security forces and never heard from again and ninety three percent of violations were determined by the commissions to have been carried out by military and state paramilitary forces and maybe some six percent the number of massacres by department maps out exactly on the area of the country that has the highest percentage of a around the world is where we see the shift to new liberalism taking place and it's actually quite shocking to compare as i will in the next slides the number of killings and disappearing this is by  per month by regime so you see the real small and regime of nineteen eighty to ninety three was by far the most killings in a short period of time in sixteen months graft across the whole conflict you can see the the most the archetype of the most notorious of these is the cheap dam on the river more than a hundred million dollars in loans by the world bank were provided for this project which was directly associated with  the massacre of more than four hundred people and thirty communities that were either destroyed by scorched earth or inundated by the project and this is what folks who are facing the imposition of  dams and other kinds of mega projects today have in mind is their example of what these kind of projects bring thirty years later the communities of rio negro have not received any reparations although there have been a number many agreements that say they should receive reparations and the folks who live closest inside the dam story would have electricity and this is the biggest dam in guatemala it's like two hundred some megawatts the war ended officially in  six but the peace accords are generally seen to have failed to address the root causes of conflict which are that race a structure of society and rampant inequality what the conflict left among other things was a legacy of impunity in which ninety seven percent of violent crimes go without investigation the government was described by amnesty as a corporate mafia state in two thousand  things like military intelligence structures that were never fully dismantled moved from the state into organized crime but maintained influence within the state and there's  so part of the transition in the economic and political structure of guatemala that occurs basically from the seventy's to the present day is that the elite families  says blood the flavor of water maula that's they have the beer monopoly in guatemala and also our pepsi manufacturers and distributors have a long history of labor rights violations and this stab of business lobbies for example is an influential one that was found to have more loyalty from congress members than their own parties and so can dictate a lot of the terms of  political decisions and i want to read a kind of long dry political economy quote for you and your political economy fans out there from a guy named william  robinson and i was always read this and continue so it was the threat of revolution from the popular classes that led to us intervention from the mid one thousand needs on us policy makers policy makers begin to redefine ad hoc fashion the objective of interventionism from military defeat of the revolutionary forces to a more political and economic restructuring of the region the link to emergent global structures include a shift to democracy promotion as a means to neutralize the revolutionary threat through incorporation these changes in u s strategy helped to accelerate the articulation of alternative political ideological discourse and projects among sectors of the dominant groups that would gradually go here in the new new right elite so this is the a stream only brief description of the way in which the elite in guatemala itself has been transformed through its linkages with the global economy in this state itself and so his coming to power represents an attempt to institutionalize that vision of the military as a central actor within the state imposing proposals without any kind of consultation previously and has led to as i said earlier more and more polarization between civil society and the state as well as in into intensification of the concession of natural resources to transnational corporations and in one of tax policies and other measures to that are intended to favor investors so i want to stop looking at trying to describe the structure of the elite and of the end of the state and move to talking about social movements which is probably why we're all here and one first question would be how do we define social movements unification behind a cause what kind of cause any cards ok so it could be any group of people who work together through let's mean by by social movements one definition that i've been interested in recently is from a guy named role see betty who talks about not social movements but societies in movement so saying that the strongest social movements that exist for example in latin america are actually sectors of the society that are excluded from the dominant means of power and have to move from their inherited place in society in order to in order to continue existing in order to survive and so this definition thinks about how social movements exists as relationships between actors involved in a struggle in a common cause as opposed to looking at just the idea of what demands are we making to the state so what what was what you were talking about who was talking to how to go she happens so is a social movement just the mass of people who are blocking the highway while the leaders go and talk to the government about what their demands are or is the social movement something is that and also something broader than that and i'm going to try to talk about two of the i've already talked longer on this section and i wanted to but movements for justice in memory and for territorial defense these are the movements that have led to the genocide trial that began today i'm not going to turn a time on reviewing the the details about how these cases have  come about but in the shortest way possible we could say there have been it's been thirty years since the massacres it's been ten years since the cases were launched in the judicial system there is a ten year it's been more than ten years twelve years at least ten years of investigation which was held up by non cooperation of the legal system and by the defense lawyers of the generals there's been a year of waiting for the trial to begin and now the trial has started and it could be over within a few because this this phase of the trial could be over within a few days and there will be appeals and on and on i think what i would argue about the genocide cases is that they're not just the they actually represent the result of a social movement of victims survivors of the genocide that have moved from their inherited place as victims into a place of protagonist as survivors and as actors who have moved from the struggle for justice into things like territorial defense and struggles for for other causes some photos of people who have made that possible including both members of the legal team that supports the survivors association and members of the association for justice and reconciliation which brings together folks from five regions of the country today left the court hearing and went back to the military hospital claiming health issues so the strategy of the defense for the last ten years has basically been to put as many legal obstacles as possible so that the and the trial for genocide includes both command responsibility for the massacres that took place as well as the population control measures that i talked about earlier including the rural concentration camps etc and this is a quote from one of the representatives of the survivors association from last year when it began to become clear these trials are going to happen and i just want to talk about one part of it which is we feel as if we could give eternal life to our loved ones because finally they're putting the person who is responsible for the massacres of our loved ones on trial and so i think that you know in the context of living in a mass incarceration society in the united states we often are very skeptical about what justice in the state means but i think we should also listen to folks like the survivors of genocide in guatemala who are articulating what justice means to them in that context and as far as what this could mean for  on society i think one of most important things that could happen is is just another validation that genocide actually occurred in guatemala it's the policy of the current to deny the genocide occurred and this is incredibly important for understanding the current social and economic situation of the of the country whether we accept or deny that genocide occurred  as would be the case for the united states and other north american nations yeah the press coverage is always a little bit bit spotty i think more so than just the coverage of what's happening which has been ok and it's you know front page news a lot of the time has been sort of the opinion columns and discourse around it especially around things like a total massacre for example on the one hand a huge outpouring of support for indigenous communities and the struggles that they're u ndergoing and you know space within the national press to express that and also a counter current extreme extreme racism that gets nice not just in the comment pages online which are awful  but published by guatemalan newspapers things like saying that the protestors of children upon are the beast and that the military fired on them in self defense and things like that there is a pretty intense campaign actually that might be the next one the next slides about the right wing reaction against the cases this is a photo from a march was done by the military high command in their families saying thanks to soldiers and not reporters we have these that this reaction has mostly taken place using the same civil society mechanisms as the movement for justice so through nonviolent marches through opinion columns through public discourse also intimidation and surveillance in a court appearances and orchestrated by groups who are known to have ties with both current and former military and military intelligence groups but generally has been a a reaction that's attempts to show itself as symmetrical in a lot of ways to the stroll for justice which i think is a strategic decision by the military and supporters not to just resort to the tactics of the past because the rules of the game have changed under the current system which is a bit when trying to explain by talking about the shifts associated with neo liberalism following the conflict just a really quick overview of what previous convictions for crimes of the past have occurred so the genocide trial doesn't come out of nowhere and there's been a broad movement by survivors of state terror to hold to hold accountable the material and intellectual authors of of those crimes other than genocide trials the only intellectual or other intellectual authors of the person who high military officials have been convicted as intellectual authors and there are other cases that are pending including a case that is historic on a world scale the first case in which the future is to if the cases like genocide for example are able to put the high command in prison that there may be a move down the chain of command to try to identify some of the mid level authors which is going to have a whole new set of threats for people engaged in those kinds of struggles i mentioned the government's denial the genocide occurred this is how the current president stated it last year or two years ago and  well we're going to we're going to see if it's proved or not by the courts just a quick overview apparently his resume which i think isn't relevant including things such as being chief of the  special forces school which are the soldiers whose motto is we are killing machines and who carried out many massacres he basically trained at the very least trained the people who carried out the massacres it's known that he was chief of the military base in the region during the period of population control in the model villages it's not publicly known where he was during the scorched earth massacres and actually the bottom on minister of defense just a couple weeks ago published an order saying that they would give information about the nine hundred eighty two chain of command to the judge in the genocide case but would reclassify it so it's going to be hard to figure out for example where he was i also want to talk about in addition to the indigenous survivors young people particularly in urban areas whose who are the sons and daughters of people who are disappeared or exile who are underground in the green movement who were attempting to organize human rights organizations and i think what i the main thing i want to talk about about what the host can come together from different political perspectives to work for common causes so the genocide survivors organization is association for justice and reconciliation he hosts says we don't believe in reconciliation they say neither forgiveness and reconciliation nor forgetting and yet they work together with the other survivors organization during the trials to support them with you know the media support they do tons of political support their incredible incredible levels of solidarity despite having a different discourse and just another way of articulating what i was talking about about reconsidering what what justice means and this is an excerpt from a poem by a member of the hosts and i'll read the first part says today i went out with rage at the world and i call for punishment i call for jail stinking dark and cold so that time without the sun will rot the bones of the murderer the general who gave the order who accepted an automatic silence who did nothing to stop barbarism and this is an organization that is profoundly influenced by the legacy of the revolutionary movement and also so in attempts to uphold the value of that struggle but is also influenced by anti authoritarian tendencies but that has found a way to express that while also working to support groups working more within the system so i think just trying to point out that there's not necessarily doesn't have to be a struggle within the base of a social movement around those kind of questions in order to together reach  important goals they've also forged really important urban and rural alliances both for justice and against militarization using basically militant street protests to halt military day celebrations and last year they moved that protest into into a more rural environment in solidarity with communities that were rejecting opening a military base outside their territory where there's a big struggle over the construction of the cement plant dogma in saying that formal democracy is in itself a strategy for domination because that has not resulted in being a franchise moment in any real sense of the majority of the population and has in fact resulted in the intensification of projects that threaten the very existence of those communities the idea of memory itself as a disputed territory is something that has been very important in articulating the continuity of genocide among other niamh ix and this is been developed by grassroots groups working with survivors of genocide to analyze and understand their experience of how it was lived on the ground so this is a two groups historical  loose collective of activists who are both international and water mall and urban and rural who meet with representatives of communities that are had that survived genocide and that are working on the process of defending their communities in the present day coalition called peoples resistance that have developed these maps of territory that show the extent of  of plans for extractive industry and other projects and i think what one of the things that i learned as an as a company or in that company movements have had to  react to is the is that communities who we have accompanied for years and as part of the struggle for justice have started to say well actually our biggest concern isn't whether the general goes on trial but whether or not they're going to build a dam that will destroy our community so the existential threat to communities into existence is not in the immediate frame that they'll be attacked by the army because they're struggling for justice but that their land will be sold out from under them and they'll be displaced by economic development projects and so these movements for territorial defense have basically grown out of that concern for the very terms of survival whether communities have access to land and water and other natural resources that are being bought up  one of the ways this is been done is through movement for a consult does for a popular consultations about these kinds of projects and this is been a movement across the highlands particularly of guatemala and i think what is interesting  important about this is the is the fact that communities are saying well if this international law exists that says the government has to consult us about any project that will affect our territory the government's not doing that so how do we ourselves from the bottom up implement division of international law as we understand it and so they work through local governments to basically obligate local municipal governments to carry out consult does saying to the population the mine for example and then voting on it using traditional methods which may include you know voting by hand or ballot or whatever and across the spectrum in the more than sixty consultations they have been held in every case a vast majority says no and have had the participation of majorities of the people in the in the territory west or carried out the constitutional court has said th constitutions are legal but non binding so you can do every want but we don't have to listen to you and this is what is also behind the movements for indigenous rights across the hemisphere this is behind what is happening in canada with i don't know more movement and what i think is really interesting about what's happening guatemala is that it's a bottom up appropriation of international law saying that this is how we're going to carry it out and then there will be a longer struggle to make sure that it's respected and i think that that's a step towards decolonization in a way to t ake the structures that exist and say the way that they're understood by the dominant force is not the right way but that we're going to implement them in the way that we believe as communities and that's express think quite clearly in this quote from a member of the keech a people's council which is an organization that has carried out several consultations on this another image that shows just the extent of the amount of the country that could be affected by this is just mining in two thousand and eight this is a draft of requests for mining licenses that were granted or requested at that time and you see that it's a huge section of the country if you private companies the amount of the extent of consul to the consultations you can see there they're mostly in missouri indigenous areas of the country some areas of the country have been declared free of mining followed for example following these consultations and they've been met by significant amount of intimidation by military and by local powers that are not favorable to the territorial defense and why are people concerned i mean i think a lot of the reasons are maybe clear  besides harms to the environment there are harms to health including for example physicians for human rights found that people living downstream from the marlin mine in san marcos had significantly higher concentrations of potentially toxic heavy this is a picture of don't close who has literally his entire property was surrounded by in fenced off by a mine except the part that he refused to sell and beyond just the extremely direct example of enclosure just the whole change  in land markets that occurs when there's so much pressure to buy those up and also securitization as companies bring in private security which have been responsible for things such as the killing last may of community leaders in barrios who are resisting  the implementation of actually very small hydroelectric dam ten megawatts but some local leaders who refused to sell their land and who were involved in the territorial defense organizing were killed by security guards of the dam company and i want to point out in this in this photo the cross says here is where francisco medio was murdered and says yes to life no to death here and martyr and that slogan might seem but knowledge a certain way just yes to yes to life no to death but really i think it captures the what the terms of the struggle are which are for survival of communities that are faced with these projects and that's how people see it that's how it's all come from community community expressed yes rivers for life not for death in the case of da ransacked more than a dozen political prisoners prisoners were a dozen leaders were arrested and were just released last year some seven months later and people saw this as a return in many ways to the dynamics of the counter insurgency but as i said earlier sort of more low level state terror as opposed to outright scorched earth but with the same eventual objective to pacify and control dam well one of the proposed projects the shiela law dam would be the second largest in the country one hundred eighty one megawatts it would have a reservoir of more than fifteen square miles affecting more than fifty eight communities and the government has just announced again that it plans to open bidding for that project next year they already did in two thousand and eight but it failed because no no company actually wanted to take on the responsibility of having to consult with communities that are already said we don't want to project so the government has done a whole series of social studies which they claim have consulted the population but actually company didn't in these communities and the folks there had not had any contact with government representatives consulting them about this project that they say they're going to be putting up for bidding next year this is a picture of dam construction a few years back and another site and actually these pictures were of the change in three years between this picture is one that was taken when i visit i did in two thousand and eight and this three years later after dam construction began a stream the river is totally muddy cloudy dirty people complained that it was causing skin irritation couldn't clean clothes people rely on fishing among other forms of assistance in those communities so the impact start even before construction begins and then once construction