A Violent Peace? Continuities of Violence in Democratic Guatemala
Date
2014
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
This thesis contends that while the Guatemalan state has had formal peace since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the state has remained a violent actor despite the absence of an interstate or intrastate war. The state's use of violence today occurs in modalities very similar to its use of violence in the past: extralegal physical violence is used to defend an exclusionary state structure which levies extreme levels of structural violence against the majority of its population. The exclusionary state structure and the violence implicated in this structure are designed to benefit the elites. Criminalization is a tactic of the state employed to justify its use of violence towards civilians. These patterns of violence are first examined during the armed conflict (1960-1996), when the Guatemalan military committed genocidal acts against thousands of indigenous civilians, in order to establish a baseline for violence in Guatemala. The patterns of violence from the armed conflict are then compared to two situations of state-sponsored violence following the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996. It is found that the same patterns of violence hold when examining the state's relationship towards poor urban populations and indigenous social protesters today. Poor urban populations are the subjects of high levels of structural violence, the physical violence of clandestine police groups which use social cleansing and extrajudicial executions of gang members, and are consistently criminalized as the bane of Guatemala's problems. Indigenous social protesters face the structural violence of megaprojects, the physical violence of state security guards and private security agents during protests, and are criminalized as preventing Guatemala's development. The elite benefit from these continued patterns of violence by maintaining a regressive tax structure, profiting economically from their ties to private security companies and megaprojects, and by maintaining political power in a few hands. These patterns of violence which have survived the Peace Accords have negative implications for the establishment of peace as well as the establishment of democracy in Guatemala. Democracy is thwarted because social and civil citizenship rights are violated by these patterns of violence, which precludes effective political participation. These patterns of violence will only be abated by the transformation of the exclusionary state structure from which these patterns of violence emanate.