Barriers to Maya Mobilization in Post-Conflict Guatemala

Manuel Vogt has a new article on The Disarticulated Movement: Barriers to Maya Mobilization in Post-Conflict Guatemala in the new edition of Latin American Politics & Society.  It's an interesting article that looks at what happened to the Guatemalan Maya movement over the last fifteen years. The mobilization of Guatemala's indigenous occurred in earnest with the return to more open political rule in the 1980s and the freedom accorded through the peace process. However, that movement has stalled.

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices.

In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.

Vogt's interviews were carried out in spring 2011 and is only being published now. That's how academia works. Therefore, it would have been interesting to better understand how things have changed in terms of indigenous mobilization from the Colom to Perez Molina administration. I'm not sure that it has (there's a new cabinet position) but there has been so much activity in terms of mobilization against land projects and in support of general indigenous rights that I am looking forward to a follow up study.

There's also nothing in the piece about mobilization in terms of the Efrain Rios Montt genocide case. While there was some support among the country's indigenous for the trial, looking back, one doesn't get the impression that it was overly widespread. Is this another area where there was disagreement among different indigenous groups in Guatemala?

Vogt's study on indigenous mobilization is a good companion to Kevin Pallister's Why No Mayan Party? Indigenous Movements and National Politics in Guatemala that was also published in LAPS. Pallister notes a relatively strong Mayan movement which has been unable (unwilling) to transform itself into a viable political party (here' my summary). Institutional incentives to mobilize locally and outside of parties and a history of state repression were key variables for explaining the absence of a political party.