Grass Roots Democracy in Guatemala

A municipality (like a county in the US) located in the region of Ixcan put out a call for accompaniment and observers for what they called a community consulation. Ixcan lies on the border with Mexico and it's population is mostly indigenous. There are 75,000 total inhabitants, and 12 distinct languages are spoken, other than Spanish.

This region took a big hit during the Guatemalan civil war. Because it was a region where guerrilla were located, there were a total of 37 massacres in this municipalty alone, with more than 1300 extra-judicial executions and 500 documented cases of torture. According to eyewitness accounts, the massacres and tortures were of unarmed civilians, primarily.

As a result of the massacres, many of the people fled to safer areas, only to come back and find that the government had given their land away to other landless campesinos, claiming that the territories had been abandoned. The area is currently settled by a mix of the people who were there before the war, and those who came during or after.

Simiilar to Colombia, the issue for this regional consulatation is so-called megaprojects. One important difference is that Guatemala is in a post-war situation, with peace accords signed, whereas Colombia is still in the midst of its civil war. But some of the issues are similar. The people in Ixcan have gotten wind of planned petroleum exploration and exploitation, and of plans to build a huge hydrolectric dam in their municipality. According to their information, the government plans to sell the exploration and exploitation rights to foreign companies, asking only a small percentage of the returns, which will not go to the local community but instead will go to the central government. As in Colombia, land ownership appears to mean that you own what is on top of the land, but not what is below it.

With respect to the dam, it would mean the flooding of 18 villages, with the government giving all kinds of promises of recompense. However, past experience with another dam, called the Chixoy, showed them that the government does not follow through with its promises. In addition, they are convinced that the electric power will not help them, but will be sold to outside cities or even Mexico. In short, they want to control development of their own resources.

So this week the region decided to hold a community consultation, which amounted to a county-wide voting on the topic of the dam and petroleum rights. They asked for accompaniment because there had been some threats, and one person had already been killed. Also, they wanted to have objective information, from outsiders, about what happened during the voting. Most of the observers were Guatemalan. There were a handful of internationals, and I was one of them.

After the voting, each local mayor turned in his results to the county seat, and the county seat will turn in a report to the national government about what the people want. It is not clear yet whether this will help them get what they want, but at least there is some ground to stand on in their fight.

I left Antigua on Wednesday and arrived in Playa Grande, the seat of the munipality, or county, Thursday late afternoon. It was an arduous trip over really rough and dusty roads. This place is very isolated, making the people all the more vulnerable. Because they are right on the Mexican border, many folks crossed during the war, becoming refugees in Mexico. Migrants also cross here now on their way to the northern Mexico border with the United States. This border is not particularly tightly controlled, to say the least.

We went to a meeting on Thursday afternoon giving us instructions about our role, and then set out Friday morning to villages even more isolated than Playa Grande. The first community I was supposed to observe had decided to abstain from participating. Apparently local politics got in the way, and a former mayor was telling them that if they voted against the projects, they would not get electrification and other promised benefits to their village.

I ended up in another village where the people only spoke Kekchi, and the one person in the village who had decent Spanish had to translate into Spanish for me. But I observed the process. There were a total of 43 adults present. 35 voted against the megaprojects and 8 voted for them. The voting was done by a show of hands. It took place in the community hall, and was conducted by the local mayor. After the show of hands, voters had to sign their names and provide ID numbers on forms provided by the organizers of the consulation. The organizers are an umbrella group of indigenous human rights activists. But the right to hold this type of consultation is guaranteed to them by national law. After the voting was over, observers had to fill out a form and hand it in to the organizers.

Although the voting only took a couple of hours, getting to and from the communities took the better part of three days. I arrived back to a larger city last night (Coban) and will travel back to Antigua tomorrow. My plan is to do one more week of Spanish, and then I am working out a arrangement to go to the mining region of Guatemala, where the communities are organizing a resistance to multinational mining corporations exploiting their resources---in this case gold.

Similar to Colombia, the government is ready to sell the mining rights to multinational companies, reaping some benefits for the central government, but displacing and leaving the local population landless and unemployed. I will write more about this as it develops.