Development and Indigenous Ecopolitics in Post-Peace Guatemala

Abstract

How do Indigenous and peasant political paradigms interact? This essay examines the relationship between Indigenous-ontopolitical critiques of development and peasant-oriented demands for alternative development in the Guatemalan defense of territory (DT), an Indigenous-led alliance against extractive development. Drawing on politically-engaged ethnographic and historical fieldwork, I argue that theories that counterpose indigenous ecological values of reciprocity and human-nature relationality to “development” oversimplify Indigenous responses to the multi-dimensional nature of colonization. I describe how Indigenous cosmological critiques coexist with demands for food sovereignty, agrarian struggles, integral development, and even progressive (redistributive) extraction in territorial defense movements. I suggest that the ascendance of post-development critiques in the DT crowds out heterogeneous demands for anticolonial development, limiting the movement’s potential to present a compelling alternative for marginalized communities. I point to a convergence between some kinds of Indigenous ontopolitics and counterinsurgency efforts to repress radical developmentalism and propose holding critiques of and demands for development in creative tension to strengthen counterhegemonic struggles.