Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2694373

1527-1900

Jennifer Way,

Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

War by Other Means places violence in contemporary Guatemala in historical context, exploring “the violence war both channels from earlier times and generates anew” and questioning “histories of the future,” or “the promise that an ‘after’ to this war will someday come” (p. 10). Part of a new wave of scholarship on neoliberal Guatemala, this volume's fine-grained studies bridge wartime and postwar violence in local communities. The work also interrogates how popular narratives of the future's possibilities have evolved, making it both an insightful anthropology of postwar Guatemala and a richly detailed history of the war and its aftermath at the local level.The first of four sections, “Surveying the Landscape: Histories of the Present,” explores the conjunctures between popular political organizing, often Mayan, and state violence. A 500-year overview by Greg Grandin focuses on the relations between the state and indigenous communities. Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus examine the rise and fall of the Coordination of Maya People's Organizations of Guatemala in the 1990s, situating this umbrella group's story in a 50-year history of relations between Mayan organizations, which promoted ethnic rights, and the Left, which fought for class interests. Carlota McAllister argues that this multifaceted period of conflict, and the genocidal violence that characterized it, have resulted in “modalities of silence” (p. 98) that erase the politics of the past and the vision of the future embedded in political actors' struggles during the civil war.The second section, “Market Freedoms and Market Forces: The New Biopolitical Economy,” ties present-day neoliberal realities to land struggles as the agricultural economy changed from the 1950s to the 1980s. Luis Solano traces networks of power and cycles of “development and/as dispossession” in the Franja Transversal del Norte (FTN), a mineral-rich region subject to military development plans throughout the second half of the twentieth century, now targeted for biofuel production and hydroelectric projects. Elizabeth Oglesby details the social relations of production and the dismemberment of the unions in the sugar-growing region of the Pacific coast (newly important for biofuel), examining changing technologies of rule sparked by a historic 1980 strike. Relations of community members in the Maya-Mam town of Nueva Cajolá with leftist groups and, increasingly, with state and international agencies are traced by Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj. Arguing that neoliberal solutions are unable to provide agrarian justice in a new millennium marked by coffee-price collapse and the influx of imports, she demonstrates that current social divisions date to decades of debt, frustration, and loss.Part 3, “Means into Ends: Neoliberal Transparency and Its Shadows,” follows up on division and frustration. Deborah Levenson overviews the transformation of urban gangs from social spaces marked by “Robin Hood” justice in the 1980s to current-day cults of death. Transmigration through Mexico and Los Angeles, some of it spurred by the army's blood-soaked “projects” with gang youth, teamed with the dissolution of the popular front to underpin this change. Over the time period, Matilde González-Izás demonstrates, peacetime nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) intent on strengthening local power in the K'iche’ town of San Bartolomé Jocotenango instead made that power more vertical. By seeking out established local authorities, the NGOs blindly empowered indigenous agents of state violence who had collaborated with the military and who later formed the municipal Merchants' Association to protect their ill-gained wealth. A related study of local wartime affiliations by Paul Kobrak underscores how both the guerrillas and, more brutally, the military manipulated rural communities and exacerbated social divisions in Colotenango that played out in postwar trials. Jennifer Burrell's essay explicates the unfolding and aftermath of the lynching of a Japanese tourist and a Guatemalan bus driver in 2000 in Todos Santos amid a moral panic over Satanists. Arguing that a weak state cannot sufficiently explain such events, Burrell analyzes the roles of personal vengeance, rumor, decentered law, and citizen-state relationships.The book's final section, “Whither the Future? Postwar Aspirations and Identifications,” explores postwar economics, class structures, and conflicts. Diane Nelson uses Omnilife, a Mexican health product sold pyramid-fashion, to illuminate the complexities of postwar economics and survival, unraveling global flows of people, products, and money in Joyabaj and underscoring the local agency in this hypermodern form of entrepreneurial commerce. The social category of shumo — an insulting word used to stigmatize lowbrow people — is taken up by Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, who complicates paradigms of class and race and argues that Guatemala is going through “a symbolic war between a cosmopolitanism from below … [and] from above,” pitting a new, diasporic, and mobile lower class against an oligarchic hierarchy born on the plantation (p. 309). Paula Worby unearths the local mechanisms of cosmopolitanism from below in an examination of the mass return of refugees to the Ixcán and the FTN, homing in on community and gender relations, everyday politics, and local economic struggles.War by Other Means brilliantly links past and present through studies of biopolitics, everyday life, and lived hypermodernity in a land wracked by violence. Rich, nuanced, detailed, and full of multiple voices — many of them Guatemalan — it is indispensable to students and experts alike. It engages themes at the forefront of Guatemalan and Latin American studies and cannot be recommended highly enough.