The Capacity for Democracy

This chapter examines how discourses of capacidad both enabled and constrained Sampedrano desires for democracy. I describe how state agrarian programs trained Sampedranos’ to solicit development projects, navigate the state, and run electoral campaigns, and how, after the transition to democracy, Mayas used discourses of capacidad to legitimate an indigenous right to govern, and eventually took municipal power in the mid 1990s. I describe the developmentalist political vision shared among this coalition, and how in 2003, this coalition splintered, and then lost an election to a less qualified candidate from an authoritarian party, revealing major exclusions in capacidad as a standard for earning rights.