Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley

Author:Dawn Paley [Paley, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2014-11-10T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7:

Drug War Capitalism In Guatemala

Though Guatemala and Mexico were both subject to Spanish colonization (the first genocide), the countries’ histories have diverged dramatically since. Access to land, and land reform (or lack thereof), has put the two countries on markedly different paths in the twentieth century. Unlike Mexico, Guatemala didn’t undergo a revolution or a period of nationalizations early in the last century, instead it was in the 1940s and the early 1950s that the country experienced what some call the “Guatemalan Spring.” Democratically elected presidents Juan José Árevalo and Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán began making reforms, but both remained committed to the capitalist economic model and to a Western liberal conception of democracy.

US leaders characterized Árbenz’s main misstep as daring to expropriate land owned by American banana companies. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, “The election of Árbenz in 1951 resulted in a period of intense but brief reform beginning with the enactment of the Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) on 17 June 1952. The declared objectives of Decree 900 were to 1) eliminate feudal estates 2) obliterate all forms of indentured servitude 3) provide land to the landless and land poor 4) distribute credit and technical assistance to smallholders. The developmental goals of the reforms was to develop a capitalist economy among the peasants and in agriculture generally and to facilitate the investment of new capital in agriculture by means of the capitalist rental of nationalized land. The reform involved the expropriation of idle land and its redistribution to the landless and land-poor.”[1]

Regardless of the capitalist nature of his land-reform program, Árbenz was labeled a communist, and, shortly after, his government was overthrown in a coup d’état planned in Washington and backed up by the CIA in a mission called PBSuccess.[2] The CIA-backed Guatemalan coup in 1954 and the US government’s refusal to allow elections in 1963 in order to prevent the participation of Árevalo marked the beginning of a series of events that would push the country toward a thirty-six-year war that culminated in genocide. More than 200,000 people were murdered over this time in Guatemala, primarily Indigenous Mayans, as well as leftist activists, union organizers, and otherwise. An additional 50,000 people remain disappeared.

Though the conflict in Guatemala was often dressed up as being a war against communists or insurgents, in many regions it is clear that what was really motivating the assassinations of Indigenous people was access to their lands. One example of this is the municipality of Rabinal, where approximately one-fifth of the population was assassinated between 1981 and 1983. Efraín Osorio Chen is from Rio Negro, a community in Rabinal, where Maya Achi people make up the majority of the population. Osorio was ten years old when he survived the massacres that killed his family. I met him as I traveled with Jesús Tecú Osorio through the village of Pacux, where many of the survivors who were displaced from Rio Negro were resettled in the 1980s. I mentioned to

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