“Nosotros no comemos caña”: Defence of Territory and Agrarian Change in the Polochic Valley, Guatemala

Abstract

Since the turn of the 21st century, the establishment and subsequent expansion of three (agro)extractive industries – sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining – in the Polochic valley lowlands of northern Guatemala has reduced local indigenous Q’eqchi’ campesino (peasant) communities’ access to farmland. Over the years, campesino groups and their allies have engaged in various forms of political contestation in “defence of territory”. In 2015, Chabil Utzaj, the sugarcane company, ceased operations following a second mass occupation of its plantations. As a result, over 800 campesino households now each have access to around 3.5 ha of farmland. In this dissertation, I employ an extended livelihoods approach consisting of archival research, oral histories, key informant interviews, and household surveys grounded in agrarian political economy to explore how the struggle for defence of territory has contested this latest wave of territorialisation driven by (agro)extractive industries and affected the trajectory of agrarian change in the Polochic valley lowlands. First, I find that while the struggle has produced remarkable achievements of immense intrinsic value to campesinos, household incomes remain, on average, well below national and international poverty lines. Campesino households with access to land by and large provide cheap labour, cheap wage goods, and cheap commodities (including environmental services) that sustain the national plantation-based agro-export industry and related global circuits of accumulation. The campesino struggle thus ultimately co-produced a pattern of uneven development characterised by functional dualism. Second, I argue that campesinos and their allies made effective use of available political opportunities, both toeing the line of “acceptable” politics and strategically transgressing its boundaries when necessary, to contest the reterritorialisation process under way. However, the nature of Guatemala’s elite-dominated political spaces limits the scope of the transformation that can be achieved. While campesinos were able to contest property relations and liberate much-needed spaces of social reproduction, the broader structures that shape labour regimes, income distribution, and social reproduction have remained largely intact. The long-term goal of sustainable agrarian change will remain conditional on a radical transformation of power relations and political spaces within Guatemala – a transformation that would require rethinking the scope of territorial struggles.