Indigenous Peoples – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

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_{South Paris, Maine}

Bernardo Arévalo’s victory in first round of presidential voting on June 25 surprised Guatemalans, as did the emergence of his Seed (Semilla) political party. Roadblocks engineered by established political forces threatened his candidacy in the second round of voting, on August 20, and now may keep him from taking office, on January 14, 2024.

Arévalo and the Seed Party seek to remove corruption from Guatemalan politics. They and others oppose “the Pact of the Corrupt,” individuals with criminal associations that for decades, they say, have occupied all levels of government, national and local. They are, “former military people …sophisticated businessmen, judicial functionaries, legislators, mayors, communications people, bankers, and liberal professionals, the facilitators of business deals worth millions.”

From shortly after Arévalo’s first-round victory until now, their operatives in the government of outgoing President Alejandro Giamattei have alleged voter fraud. The attorney general, a couple of prosecutors, and a few judges of the Supreme Court of Justice and Constitutional Court have forced the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to take measures that would prevent Arévalo from becoming president.

It decreed that ballot boxes be seized and the Seed Party no longer qualify as a political party. It voided the election of congressional deputies. President Giamattei has rejected widespread demands that Attorney General Consuelo Porras, the offending prosecutors, and a couple of judges be dismissed.

Another surprise was on the way. A national strike of indigenous peoples erupted on October 2. For one commentator, this represented “the discovery of a forgotten and marginalized country, that didn’t exist in the national imagination … [and].came from the provinces, where the Seed Party, with its basically urban and middle-class origins, did not exist.”

Sit-ins and blockades of highways spread nationwide, peaking at 130 or more. Up to 60% of Guatemala’s commerce halted. Schools, colleges, and some local government offices closed. The demands were: no more corruption, remove Attorney General Porras, and Arévalo will become president on January 14.

Indigenous leaders referred to as the “48 Cantons of Totonicapán” had called the strike. They and indigenous officials nationwide were in charge. Guatemala’s European-descended leadership class had bestowed administrative authority on the “48 Cantons” in the 19^th century. Now, somehow, they seem to set the course for indigenous authorities in municipalities nationwide.

News reports cite the “Ancestral Indigenous Authorities” as representing indigenous participation in Guatemalan politics. The Accord on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, formulated in 1995, had enabled such. It was part of the Peace Agreement that ended decades of armed conflict during which some 200,000 people died, most of them indigenous.

Partisans of the current strike staged a rally in Guatemala City on October 20 to mark the 79^th anniversary of Guatemala’s “October Revolution.” On that day in 1944, a three-person “revolutionary junta” replaced the long dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Voters in 1945 elected Juan José Arévalo, father of Bernardo, as president and Guatemala experienced its so-called “Democratic Spring,” which ended in 1954 thanks to a CIA-instigated coup.

Bernardo Arévalo spoke at the rally on October 20:

“The ancestral authorities have opened the way to students, community leaders, professionals, unions, … business leaders. … Look around. We are located in the center of citizens’ life in the country. The legacy of the October Revolution of 1944 is before our eyes. The Guatemalan Institute of Social Security is an instrument of solidarity… and source of tranquility for many families … [and the] Bank of Guatemala guarantees economic stability and supports … an economy whose benefits extend to everyone.”

In Guatemala, however, the poverty rate was 59% in 2020, 80% in rural areas; half of the population have limited access to food. That the average adult income in 2022 was $13,412 testifies to a well-resourced sector of the population. Indeed, 10% of Guatemalans owned 61.7% of the nation’s wealth in 2021.

Journalist Víctor Ferrigno points out the limited ambitions of the national strike: its indigenous leaders claim not to represent a political party but merely to be defending democracy and opposing corruption. Analyst Ollantay Itzamná adds that Guatemala’s government will emerge unscathed and will “certainly continue being racist and lethal for indigenous peoples.”

He argues elsewhere that the Seed Party, attentive mostly to the urban middle class, is responding to concerns that the government, a big source of employment, might disintegrate because of corruption, racist though it may be.

The U.S. government backs Arévalo, the Seed Party, and the campaign against political corruption. Itzamná points out that USAID finances projects of the 48 Cantons and of NGOs siding with the Seed Party. Indigenous leadership groups in Guatemala have gained U.S. trust, he indicates, by not “questioning the racist nature of the state or disputing the power of the rich.”

The U.S. government, he explains, is willing to “try out a progressive government in Guatemala as long as it is obedient to U.S. interests.” That government now gains U.S. favor by accepting an indigenous mobilization that serves to “hide the emergence of the pluri-national, anti-neoliberal, or anti-imperialist social subjects that do exist in Guatemala.” Radical indigenous movements, such as the ones active in Peru and especially Bolivia, are to be squelched.

One would be Committee of Campesino Development (CODECA), formed in 1992 as a “class-based organization” defending farm workers. CODECA announced its own national strike to begin on September 19. Demands were those of the current strike with the addition of a “people’s and pluri-national constituent assembly.”

Calling for a constituent assembly and basic change, Thelma Cabrera, presidential candidate of CODECA’s political party,The Movement for Liberation of the Peoples, won 456,114 votes, or fourth place, in the 2019 elections. She was ranking in fourth place in 2023, according to opinion polls, when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal rejected her candidacy.

In an interview on February 19, 2023, Mauro Vay Gonón, the CODECA founder, recalled that “state terrorism, mainly at the hands of Guatemala’s military, had cost the lives of 25 CODECA activists.” Tereso Cárcamo, killed on December 5, 2022, had taken part “in different peasant struggles such as the Popular and Pluri-national Constituent Assembly process.”

Vay Gonón, a guerrilla insurgent during the armed conflict, lamented that, “The entire Peace Agreement” [of 1996] is for nothing. They are walking all over it. This is a sad truth for the Guatemalans, because we sincerely don’t want to go back to a war.”

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}

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U.S. government programs for migrants who crossed the U.S. southern border are punitive and disjointed. Left-leaning political groupings may criticize, but they too have fallen short in conceptualizing lives of dignity for migrants in the United States. Nor do they adequately take into account adverse circumstances weighing on migrants’ lives in their home countries.

First among forces pushing masses of people northward is the environmental crisis. The role of climate change in reducing soil productivity and food availability and in predisposing already beleaguered people to migrate is of great concern.

One assumption here is that capitalist systems of production and consumption have been central to causing the climate to change for the worse. Another is the need for war on capitalism so as to stave off more climate change and cope with its fallout. That hasn’t happened in the industrialized northern countries.

Southern regions may be different. The excesses of capitalist globalization have hurt masses of people there. They were never afforded the relief northern peoples gained from welfare-state remedies. They may be ready to take up the climate-change fight.

Northern climate-change warriors who are anti-capitalist ought to be establishing linkages of support with their southern counterparts. One precedent for them is Spain. Anti-fascists in 1936 joined the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic. Now, in one way or another, northerners would be joining a faraway fight, this time against climate change. One locality is Guatemala.

Storytelling

Author Ilka Oliva Corado describes herself as an “indigenous, undocumented immigrant in the United States.” An English-language version of her story, which is situated in Guatemala and titled “The Plum,” appears here. Excepts follow:

Guillermina leaves the grocery bags on the table and hurriedly takes out a plum, washes it and takes a bite … She is grateful for the hands that cared for it from the time the seed of the tree was planted. Ever since she was a child, her peasant grandparents taught her to be thankful for the labor of those who work on the land.

She was from Parramos, Chimaltenango, in Guatemala. When she arrived in the United States, she was speaking only her mother tongue, Cakchiquel. … She spent 20 years working as a domestic worker in New York. … Guillermina left Guatemala with her brother Jacobo to help her parents raise her younger siblings … She was on the eve of her fifteenth birthday when she left her indigenous clothing behind and packed two pairs of pants and two T-shirts in her backpack …

(Oliva Corado writes that the traffickers sexually abused Guillermina and her brother as they traveled in Mexico, from Chiapas to Tijuana.) “She doesn’t know what happened to her memory. But she managed to block all recall of the journey after they arrived in Tapachula [in Chiapas].” (The author writes that Jacobo was similarly abused. He remembers, has nightmares, and sleeps fitfully at night.)

He works three jobs. Every Friday they collect their money so that Guillermina can send off the remittance. Neither of the two will allow their younger siblings to emigrate. At home … they work the land of their grandparents, but Miguel, the youngest, didn’t listen to them and emigrated with another group of friends. He wanted to leave to help his older siblings deal with the economic burden of the house. Now he’s been missing for three years.

Guillermina bites into the plum that takes her back to remembering the bean fields, shade from the avocado and orange trees, and furrows in the cornfields. It was there she saw her younger siblings beginning to walk while her parents were working.

Plum juice drips from the corner of her lips. … But tasting the fruit that Miguel loved so much sets off the pain that for three years has been knotted in her throat and she begins to cry inconsolably.

It was in the supermarket that she received the call from Jacobo. There is news of Miguel. A forensic team did tests and they have confirmed his identity. A humanitarian rescue team searching months ago for a missing migrant woman found his bones in a dry river in Sonora. Her parents will be able to bury their young son in the town cemetery, finally.

Context

The family’s land may not have been producing enough food to satisfy nutritional needs, nor enough to sell and provide cash. International agencies concerned about food shortages use a scale that registers severity. It consists of phase 1 – no significant problem; phase 2 – stress; phase 3 – crisis; phase 4 – emergency; and phase 5 – widespread acute malnutrition.

The 2022 Global Report on Food Crises, assembled by United Nations agencies, reported on trends in Guatemala, population 16.9 million. In November, 2018, 2.12 million Guatemalans were classified as experiencing food “crisis.” The corresponding figures in August, 2000 and in May, 2021 were 3.24 million and 3.29, respectively. As of those dates, there were 4.67 million, 7.21 million, and 7.78 million people, respectively, who endured food stress. A recent report indicates that, as of September 2021, 4.6 million Guatemalans were facing food crisis (phase 3) or food emergency (phase 4).

The World Meteorological Organization, reporting in July on the impact of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean, points out that, “Droughts, heat waves, periods of cold, more tropical storms and floods have led to loss of life, serious damage to agricultural production and infrastructure, and displaced populations.”

The authors of another detailed report on the region’s “Climate Change Emergency” state that, “the present bimodal pattern of precipitation in Central America may be distorted in the coming decades … Extreme phenomena like droughts, hurricanes, and the Niño Southern Oscillation will be recurring … and their intensity will increase with climate change .. These phenomena magnify social-economic vulnerability in the region.”

A survey of the impact of changing climate in Guatemala claims that drought “mostly afflicts the semi-arid region of the country known as the “dry corridor,” and that “in the coming years, that area is expected to extend to higher elevations.” Recently rain has been uncharacteristically scarce or absent during heat waves.

Rural families in Guatemala grow or produce food from their own land. Family members may also work seasonally on big farms to be able to purchase additional food, or they fish or hunt. High poverty rates underscore the vulnerability of their lives – 70% in Guillermina’s Chimaltenango department and nearly 80 percent among Guatemala’s indigenous population. Now the impact on food supplies of droughts, storms, and floods – which are more severe now because of climate-change – adds to their plight.

Many Guatemalans and others in the Global South have to move. They go to big cities or they cross national borders to begin new lives, and/or earn money to support families at home. Plenty of other reasons to migrate do exist such as land grabs, governmental chaos, and violence from criminals, gangs, paramilitaries, and soldiers.

But migration undertaken in response to climate-change effects is highly significant, so much so that victims are everywhere, and in the millions. On that account, the prospect emerges of mass political mobilization and of growing awareness along the way of capitalism as enemy.

Capitalist-inspired intrusions already fill the landscape with mines and oil-extraction facilities, dams and flooded rivers, pollution, mega land-holdings and mono-culture farming operations. U.S. political interference, debt owed foreign banks, privatizations, and cuts in social spending have provoked opposition movements. Growing appreciation of linkage between these manifestations of global capitalism and capitalism’s contribution to climate change may serve to stimulate anti-capitalist resistance movements that are ready to take on the environmental crisis.

This possible scenario in the Global South ought to resonate with anti-capitalist activists in the North. The great need is for international solidarity. Author, editor, and eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster offers perspective in his recently published article titled “Ecology and the Future of History.” Excerpts follow:

“The agent of revolution is increasingly a class that is not to be conceived in its usual sense as a purely economic force but as an environmental (and cultural) force: an environmental proletariat …[and] Most of the major class struggles and revolutionary movements over the centuries of capitalist expansion have been animated in part by what could be called ecological imperatives – such as struggles over land, food and environmental conditions.”

He adds: “In general, Third World liberation movements have been aimed at both the environment and economy and have been struggles in which peasants and Indigenous peoples have played central roles, together with nascent proletarian and petty bourgeois forces …[and] All material struggles are now environmental-class as well as economic-class struggles, with the separation between the two fading.”

Finally, “The objective consequence of the changing social and ecological environment, the product of uncontrolled capitalist globalization and accumulation, arising from forces at the center of the system, is inevitably to create a more globally interconnected revolutionary struggle: a new eco-revolutionary wave emanating primarily from the Global South.”

_{W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}