Free Trade and Resistance in Guatemala

On January 11, 2005, Guatemalan President Oscar Berger spoke to a group of reporters in Guatemala City about ongoing protests against a World Bank mining project in the northern part of the country. He said that his government had to establish law and order.

"We have to protect investors," said Berger.

Hours later the Guatemalan military and police forces armed in riot gear opened fire on protesters, murdering one man and leaving dozens injured. Berger's comments about establishing law and order in Guatemala to protect investors and the ensuing violence and state repression that followed that day and in the following months are not isolated incidents indicative of that country's democratic shortcomings. Rather they illustrates the violent forces employed to secure the expansion of capitalist globalization being forced on people through neoliberal reforms and free trade agreements pushed by transnational corporations, Northern governments, and international lending agencies.

All That Glitters Isn't Gold

Glamis Gold, a mining company incorporated in Canada with headquarters in Reno, Nevada, was given a $45 million loan from the World Bank to construct and operate a gold and silver mine in San Marcos, Guatemala, 90 air miles from Guatemala City in the country's western highlands. Two of the towns directly affected by the project are San Miguel Ixtahuacan, and Sipacapa, whose populations are 98 percent and 77 percent indigenous.

The Guatemalan government ratified International Labor Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which ensures (at least on paper) indigenous people's land rights and rights to self-determination. Articles in the Convention state that indigenous communities must be consulted and allowed to participate in decision-making processes in any matters concerning their land and lives.

The World Bank has similar procedural "safeguards" to ensure only projects with "broad community support" are approved. Unfortunately, the ambiguous language coupled with lack of independent oversight and enforcement mechanisms allows transnational corporations like Glamis and global institutions like the World Bank to set their own standards.

According to Sandra Cuffe of Rights Action, a human rights and community development organization, local community members said people were asked to sign their names to receive lunch at Glamis presentations. They now suspect Glamis used the lunch lists to claim they 'consulted' people. Cuffe works in Honduras, has traveled to Guatemala and has monitored Glamis' mining operations in both countries. She is the author of a report on mining and neoliberal reforms in the two countries titled, "A backwards, upside-down kind of development: Global actors, mining and community-based resistance in Honduras and Guatemala."

Graham Saul, International Program Coordinator for Friends of the Earth Canada, has been monitoring the project and agrees the "consultation" process is largely a charade. "Consultation is more of a public relations exercise than a meaningful legal process. It gives companies like Glamis and the World Bank cover [where they can say]: 'Yes we consulted and yes there is popular support,'" said Saul.

Needless to say, both institutions claim the project has broad support. But an article in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre contradicts their claims. The article cites a survey conducted by the Vox Latina Institute in which 95 percent of people living in San Miguel Ixtahuacan and Sipacapa who were surveyed oppose the mining project. A majority of people believe that mining would harm the environment and not benefit their communities. These people are right. The local communities sustain themselves largely through farming and raising livestock. As a result of the project, which is in its construction phase, many of the people have been evicted and relocated from land they have lived on for generations.