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“Blind passes” and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border
Geoforum xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
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‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border Megan Ybarra Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 1 November 2014 Received in revised form 27 May 2015 Accepted 4 June 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Guatemala Borderlands Conservation Drug War Political ecology Security Maya Forest
a b s t r a c t Guatemalan protected areas have been sites for genocidal massacres, drug trafficking landing strips, and remilitarized ‘‘states of emergency,’’ but these activities are rarely considered in relation to conservation practices. This paper employs a political ecology approach to analyze interpellations of transboundary spaces as security threats, arguing that threat narratives produce insecurity in conservation spaces. Instead of assuming the primacy of neoliberalism in producing protected areas as sites of violence in the service of capitalism, the analysis traces the changing meanings of security in relation to Guatemala’s borderlands, from Cold War National Security Doctrine to discourses of citizen security in the twenty-first century Drug War. It is in the unmanned ‘‘blind passes’’ (pasos ciegos) of the Guatemalan–Mexican border, rendered as insecure spaces through the state’s putative absence, that policing paradoxically seeks to ensure ‘‘citizen security’’ through violence. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction A recent intervention in Science called the attention of policymakers and scientists alike to a crisis of ‘‘narco-deforestation,’’ in which the authors argued that drug trafficking causes deforestation in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (McSweeney et al., 2014). In the case of Guatemala, one co-author stated that part of the narco-deforestation crisis is ‘‘too few forest guards’’ in ‘‘those remote and poor regions’’ (Saliba, 2014). McSweeney et al. issue a normative call to decriminalize some drug activities to address ‘‘narco-deforestation’’ as a rapidly increasing problem over the past ten years. While I agree with their fundamental insight that drug policies affect conservation practice, my work seeks to frame recent narco-deforestation crisis narratives as part of a longer geopolitical history, one where states rationalize increased rural policing through repeated threat narratives of incursions by poachers, drug traffickers and terrorists (Kelly and Ybarra, this issue). In previous work (Ybarra, 2012), I developed a critique of how the Guatemalan military mobilizes an imaginary of the Maya Forest as a ‘‘jungle to be tamed’’ as a way to rebuild policing amidst massive defunding of military, police and security forces that committed a long-term campaign of genocide against indigenous citizens during the civil war (1960–1996). While US Congress instituted a partial ban on funding for the Guatemalan military in 1978 that has not been rescinded, it nonetheless increased funding E-mail address: [email protected]
and joint operations since then. The role of conservation in saving the Maya Forest is key to understanding how international and national agencies revived scorched earth counterinsurgency campaigns. Building on this work, this paper looks at remilitarization in the Guatemala–Mexico borderlands to interrogate how the US and Mexico promote ‘‘citizen security’’ in countries they interpellate as threats for drug trafficking and associated violence. The current conjuncture moves beyond historical framing of rural inhabitants as ‘‘cultural and environmental predators’’ (Grandia, 2012; Devine, 2014, 993). While framing resource users as environmental criminals is a centuries-old practice (Thompson, 1975; Jacoby, 2001), more recent threat narratives have interpellated them as members of organized cartels. This, in turn, moves from the criminalization of natural resource use towards a broader threat narrative that associates rural citizens with sophisticated weapons, paramilitary skills and/or terrorist affiliations. The structural politics of green security produce narco imaginaries, facilitating claims that the Maya Forest can only be secured through increasing violence. In the wake of so-called Latin American ‘‘dirty wars’’ in the 1970s and 1980s, scholarly and advocacy attention shifted from critiques of military dictatorships towards analysis of neoliberalism as structural violence in post-war democracies (Burrell and Moodie, 2013). This otherwise salutary shift perhaps led scholars to underestimate the continued and resurging importance of militarization in development and conservation. Building on insights of political ecology, critical geopolitics and security studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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to demonstrate the articulation of regional trafficking threats with global and national conservation imperatives, my analysis focuses on the role of border security in shaping protected areas security. To do so, I look at how threats of deforestation, drug trafficking and human trafficking articulate in the ‘‘blind passes’’ between Mexico and Guatemala. While blind passes are the specific places where people cross without a border patrol check, they also represent broader threat narratives that rationalize state violence far beyond the border-line itself. I first explain the analytic of green security to signal the role of threat narratives in the resurgence of violent policing in protected areas. I then briefly outline national contexts of Guatemala and Mexico, as well as describe regional political projects that seek to bind together their security, economies, and environments. In so doing, I argue for increased scholarly analysis of securitization as a key mechanism in producing differential life chances in the Maya Forest. Next, I explain how these regional projects are implemented in Guatemala, and why remilitarization and martial law have become processes through which ‘‘citizen security’’ supposedly will be achieved. Finally, I reflect on the importance of securitization for borderlands conservation and everyday lives in Guatemala’s Maya Forest. 2. Green security Political ecologists have considered how people negotiate relationships over nature through ‘‘conflict,’’ ‘‘struggle,’’ ‘‘war’’ or ‘‘(in)security’’ (Deudney and Matthew, 1999; Le Billon, 2001; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Fairhead et al., 2012). In recent decades, scholars of environmental conflict have increasingly framed problems in terms of the privatization and commodification of nature (Mansfield, 2009; Büscher et al., 2014) and how neoliberal capitalism reshapes environmental governance (McAfee, 1999; Heynen et al., 2007). Taken as a whole, this scholarship demonstrates that the seemingly universal good of global conservation is often mobilized through capitalist projects with uneven effects, creating ‘‘winners and losers’’ (Brockington et al., 2008). True to political ecology’s historical roots, one area of recent scholarly inquiry has focused on ‘‘green grabbing,’’ or the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends (Fairhead et al., 2012). While many of these also are interested in the ideological and technical work of neoliberal capitalism in facilitating dispossession (e.g., Massé and Lunstrum, this issue), my work is focused on power relations and the production of difference in ‘‘green grabbing’’ (e.g., Bocarejo and Ojeda, this issue; Loperena, this issue). Thus, an emphasis on green security over neoliberalism allows for an analysis of violence inherent in incomplete and repeated enclosures, without privileging profit motives over fear based on cultural markers of difference. Fewer political ecologists examine the key role that paramilitary and military actors play in shaping conservation practice (Peluso, 1993; Duffy, 2010; Ojeda, 2012; Lunstrum, 2014). This approach focuses on the mostly collaborative, but occasionally antagonistic, relationship between conservation BINGOs,1 state protected areas agencies, and national militaries. These relationships are important in analyses that ask how conservation’s territorialities ‘‘[rework] not only human-environment relations, but also power relations among social groups’’ (Corson, 2011, 707). While the role of the military in post-genocidal Guatemala is particularly important (given its leadership role in committing mass genocide), the broader engagement with state violence through protected areas agencies, international collaborations with the US Drug Enforcement 1 Big International Non-Governmental Organizations that work on global conservation, notably Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature.
Administration (DEA), and national police forces comprise a broader trend to perform violence in the name of security. Geopolitics and security studies use the analytic of securitization, which I use here to explain the linkage between militarization and conservation practices. Securitization is the process where issues, spaces and subjectivities become targets of regulation and surveillance in the name of ‘security’, which serves to legitimize the use of force in ways that reproduce unequal economic and racial privileges (Buzan et al., 1998; Williams and Massaro, 2013). Likewise, security studies following the Copenhagen school emphasize the political construction of security based around ‘‘a particular kind of danger, an existential threat to state, society, ‘our way of life.’ ‘Security’ from this perspective is fundamentally social and in a sense performative’’ (Goldstein, 2010, 492). In other words, a successful security strategy uses imaginaries of existential threats to justify violence. In both national and international framings (e.g., UNDP, 2013), Latin American discourses have shifted from state-centric national security to society-centric citizen security. This was particularly notable in former military dictatorships seeking legitimacy in the rising tide of NGOs and new social movements. In the case of Guatemala, worldwide condemnation of genocide meant that the military could not longer claim it ensured ‘‘national security’’ at the expense of more than 200,000 lives (REMHI, 1998; CEH, 1999). This is not to say that national security discourses faded away – rather, state agencies subsumed their claims within broader international human rights discourses of citizen security, understood as ‘‘freedom from crime and victimization’’ (Burrell, 2010, 92). Citizen security seems to protect individuals from violence by both state and non-state actors, and thus enacts a key element of universal human rights. While citizen security sounds like a universal goal, national racial genealogies shape the meaning of security. The question may become, which citizens’ security does state policing ensure? As Hall (1992, 17) cogently explains, the driving force that makes racism into the ‘‘fatal coupling of difference and power’’ is ‘‘the fear—the terrifying, internal fear—of living with difference.’’ While the definitions and implicit meanings of difference change over time and place, deep-seated fears lead people, institutions, and armies to act in violence as a matter of their own security against the unknown Other that is too close for comfort. For those of us seeking to understand where criminalization and brute violence come from, we must look to the ‘‘security gaze,’’ to the ‘‘moral panics’’ that serve to rationalize states of exception and presumptively criminalize whole peoples (Hall et al., 1978; Gilmore, 2002; Ferradás, 2004). To the extent that security is also read as ‘‘the ability to protect oneself’’ (Burrell, 2010, 96), it begs the questions: Whose security is at stake when we speak about security (Mutimer, 1999, 418)? Who is the presumptive culprit in the security gaze (Ferradás, 2004)? What violence is authorized in the name of ‘‘citizen security’’? This is a particularly urgent question in the Maya Forest, where living Q’eqchi’ Maya peoples are often framed as land-hungry farmers or ‘‘narco’’ collaborators, rather than rights-bearing indigenous peoples. While my broader research project takes up the question of racialized criminalization at length, this paper focuses on the implications of green security for territorialized protected areas management. 2.1. Conservation’s territoriality Territorialization, or the writing of new spatial relations, is both the production of social hierarchies and the production of cultural imaginaries that give meaning to different rights for different categories within the same space (Mbembe, 2003, 25–26). What do the military and state protected area agencies have in common? They each work to territorialize Westphalian container-states,
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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even as the need for their work arises from the impossibility of ever ‘‘sealing’’ the border. Both utilize crisis narratives to represent frontiers as a threat and create the impetus for (re)militarization and both follow logics that claim to implement regional, or even global, political projects, but they do so through the performance of nation-state boundaries. Much of Guatemala’s protected areas system, particularly the Maya Biosphere Reserve along the border with Mexico, contain ‘‘blind passes’’ that do not have state checkpoints. In securitization threat narratives, these are places where traffickers might bring through illicit people (sometimes against their will), drugs, animals or natural resources against the law. Rather than lead to a border build-up, securitization strategies across the Américas have recently focused on expanding the borderland imaginary. For example, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) uses a working definition of the border zone that extends 100 miles beyond ‘‘external boundaries,’’ which the state argues exempts CBP from constitutional protections against arbitrary stops and searches (ACLU, 2015). Likewise, Mexican and Guatemalan securitization does not seek a retrenchment of a fixed borderline. Instead, state authorities use threat narratives and the existence of blind passes to effectively expand the borderlands as a site for violence, stretching far into the interior. The articulation of blind passes with parks produces them as sites to perform sovereignty, even as conservation imperatives work as a kind of ‘‘green alibi’’ to displace human rights concerns about violent policing (Lunstrum, 2013; Massé and Lunstrum, this issue). Even in transboundary projects, conservation operates according to a container state logic. The case of the Maya Forest offers multiple overlapping imaginaries: a global project to combat anthropogenic climate change through halting (narco)deforestation, a regional project to create corridors to protect jaguars and other endangered species across nation-state boundaries, and a national project to promote conservation and border security through a protected areas system. The ‘‘crown jewel’’ of the Guatemalan project is the Maya Biosphere Reserve, which incorporates a graduated rights regime. According to the biosphere model, the ‘‘core’’ is untouchable to human contact, surrounded by a series of buffer zones that are incorporated using a nested doll model of scaled land uses that supposedly do not overlap. While in recent decades global conservation has focused on local practices through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and integrated conservation and development projects (ICDP), the relationship between conservation and remilitarization reveals that green security relies heavily on a nation-state imaginary. In other words, green security brings together capitalist firms, conservation BINGOs, and multiple state agencies whose work is predicated on protected areas that are created and maintained as part of nation-states. These logics and their implications are most clear in transnational and transboundary projects. Despite international goals, funding is apportioned to nation-states that perform sovereignty through enacting conservation and citizen security. 3. Study context: Northern Triangle, Maya Forest Security specialists, usually with training in political science or geography, divide Mexico between north and south, as expressed through the Mérida Initiative to strengthen Mexico’s southern border.2 Instead of an analysis of all Central America (which would 2 With the participation of US DEA and ICE agents, Mexican border agents often seek to detain and deport Central American immigrants who have made it north from Guatemala into Mexico before they reach the US–Mexico border. These practices extend beyond the physical Mexico–Guatemala border into the nine southern Mexican states.
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include Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua), security specialists focus on the isthmus called the ‘‘Northern Triangle,’’ three contiguous countries that the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), a combatant command assigned to security cooperation throughout the Americas, deems a ‘‘dire threat’’ to US national security (Kelly, 2014): El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Meanwhile, biologists and conservation practitioners promoting tourism and conservation speak of the Maya Forest, a biological hotspot replete with endangered megafauna, ancient Maya ruins, and tropical forests (see Fig. 3.1). Much as a Google search yields different results when one looks for ‘‘Maya Forest’’ and ‘‘Northern Triangle,’’ scholars of the ‘‘Maya Forest’’ rarely follow ‘‘Northern Triangle’’ debates. I first noticed this gap at the Guatemala Scholars Network meeting in 2012, where I realized that cultural geographers and anthropologists, even those whose work grappled with violence and critiqued narratives of Guatemala as a ‘‘failed state,’’ were not familiar with my references to the Northern Triangle or regional security projects (Mérida Initiative and CARSI, explained below).
3.1. Guatemala’s northern border Mexicans have an oft-repeated saying in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘‘Poor Mexico – so far from God, so close to the United States.’’ This is also how many Guatemalans feel about Mexico. As military dictator Lucas García said in the late 1970s, right around the time he pushed Guatemala up to a new level of genocidal violence in scorched earth campaigns, ‘‘we must think of the defense of our territory. In the last century we lost Chiapas and Soconusco [in contemporary southern Mexico], not for a lack of valor, but due to idleness.’’3 In the same way that Mexicans remember that they lost much of their territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,4 Guatemalans remember the post-independence dream of a united Central America that included Belize, Guatemala, and southern Mexico. In the late nineteenth century, after losing territory to the north, Mexican soldiers attempted to annex part of northern Guatemala. The Mexican army invaded Huehuetenango and El Quiché and attempted claim broad swaths of northern Guatemala in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Mexicans also conducted ‘‘Hispanization’’ campaigns, targeting indigenous peoples with shared identities across the border as ‘‘foreigners’’ undeserving of land and labor rights (Hernández Castillo, 2001; Nolan-Ferrell, 2012). In the 1960s, the northern part of Guatemalan departments Quiché and Alta Verapaz also were of increasing importance, primarily due to perceived possibilities for petroleum extraction (Solano Ponciano, 2005). During the 1960s, Guatemalan military planners feared that Mexico was close to receiving international funding to dam the Usumacinta River in a hydroelectric project, so they recruited rural communities to form agricultural cooperatives along the borderlands river in Petén, using poor people in a border build-up that would later become an obstacle for protected areas management (FEDECOAG, 1993). Petén, meanwhile, bordered Belize and was also subject to potential ‘‘Britishization.’’ As Guatemala debated whether or not to recognize Belize as an independent nation in the 1970s, there was a national propaganda campaign that claimed ‘‘Belize is also Guatemala.’’ Strikingly, the governor of Petén department supposedly joked, ‘‘Petén is also Guatemala.’’5 In other words, despite the 3 Latin American History and Culture: Series 5: Civil War, society and Political transition in Guatemala: The Guatemala News and Information Bureau Archive, 1963–2000. PG.4.6 Lucas García Regime, 1978–1982, Reel 12. CIRMA Archives. 4 Mexico ceded Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah to the United States in 1848. 5 ‘‘Los Polos de Desarrollo, una vision crítica.’’ Colección Infostelle del 08.01.01 al 08.01.03. Signatura 90. CIRMA Archives.
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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Fig. 3.1. Author’s research site consists of the part of Guatemala (peach) that is considered the Maya Forest (green cross-hatch), which is also the majority of the Mexico– Guatemala borderlands.
department’s official status as part of the nation, its border location led the governor to acknowledge that the region was not part of the national imaginary. Belize became an independent nation in 1982, but Guatemala did not recognize it for another decade, and some educational maps still show Belize as a department of Guatemala.6 This territorial loss remains surprisingly powerful today, serving as a cautionary tale of the vulnerability of the nation’s sovereignty. Finally, Guatemala’s northern borderlands came to represent a threat in the form of the guerrilla insurgencies’ strongest push against military dictatorship in the 1970s. Following a failed campaign in the east, many guerrillas reorganized their insurgency campaign in southern Mexico, popping south for quick impact incursions. For a few years during the 1970s, the guerrillas also sought to organize a rural indigenous base with some success (Payeras, 1980). The military responded with its infamous scorched earth campaigns, systematically killing off more than 400 rural villages. Rural survivors along the northern border were sometimes able to seek refuge in Mexico, where the United Nations recognized more than 40,000 people as refugees living in organized camps. At one point in 1993, the Guatemalan army even crossed the border illegally into Mexico to terrorize the refugees, later claiming that this was a ‘topographical’ error (Anonymous, 1993). Despite the fact that the Guatemalan military unambiguously broke international laws, the state’s ambiguous apology to what it saw as a threat to national sovereignty was a contributing factor to relocating the refugees further north in Mexico. This broad set of historical incursions creates the context in which the northern border represented a security threat from the perspective of the Guatemalan state, long before environmental concerns about deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change. Whether as a safe hiding place for gringos training Cubans to try 6 As of 2015, the International Court of Justice is considering the Belize-Guatemala border dispute.
and overthrow Fidel Castro in the failed Bay of Pigs takeover, or as dense forest cover that allows Marxist guerrillas to invade from the northern borderlands during the civil war, the politically fungible history of the borderlands came to make it seem like a natural threat to national sovereignty. This is the context in which President Cerezo, in a country still in civil war, supported the creation of Guatemala’s national protected areas system, enclosing one-third of the nation’s territory, and more than half of the territory in the Maya Forest. According to archeologists and conservationists, President Cerezo’s nationalist anxieties around Mexicans illegally logging in Petén was a key factor in declaring the Maya Biosphere in 1990 (Nations, 2006; NASA, 2012). While presumably there were other important considerations in creating the protected areas system, these published accounts suggest that international conservationists used green security as a rationale for supporting protected areas for decades. Despite the fact that locals claim that some of the main actors involved in illegal lumber trafficking were themselves in the Guatemalan military (FEDECOAG, 1993), the military as an institution immediately supported the creation of borderlands parks and posited themselves as their protectors. Borderlands protected areas management served three interlocking purposes: first, it justified the military’s territorial mandate at precisely the moment with human rights reports and brewing truth commissions called its legitimacy to act in the name of the Guatemalan people in question (Ybarra, 2012); second, it framed the military as protector of key natural/national resources, not least of which is petroleum; and third, it served to reproduce the narrative that Mexicans-as-outsiders are the source of what ails the national body politic. The Mexico–Guatemalan borderlands have served as a site of competing insecurities between Mexico and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military in particular views its northern neighbor as the site of unsavory insurgents, illegal loggers and violent drug
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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traffickers. Mexican security forces view Guatemala as a country to the south that cannot control its borders, thus allowing for unauthorized immigration of poor, indigenous, and gang-affiliated youth from the Northern Triangle.7 For its part, the US views both countries as ‘‘weak states’’ and immigration threats. All three countries seek to strengthen their uneasy alliances through regional trade, conservation and security projects, which I describe below. 4. Transnational political projects: Trade, conservation and security Whereas Mesoamerican scholarship has tended to treat interconnected threads of trade and economic development, conservation and security separately – through political economy critiques of neoliberalism, competing frameworks from conservation biology and anthropology, and international relations respectively – regional projects that span the US, Mexico and Central America are typically interlocking. In terms of funding, the US State Department, US AID, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank are key players. In terms of implementation, key players are increasingly the same as well – US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), DEA, Interior Ministries, and military forces. I explain major projects in each of these three threads below, arguing that increased funding for security is reshaping the work of economic development and conservation. 4.1. Trade, not conservation, in the Mesoamerica Project The US, Mexico and Central America are linked in two key ways. First, the US feared that countries like Guatemala would fall like dominoes to communism, leading the CIA to play a central role in the 1954 coup d’état that plunged Guatemala into a 36 year civil war. Cold War restrictions on trade together with military mobilities enlivened illicit networks to meet market demand for everything from cheese to fancy cars to machine guns. Ironically, then, Cold War production of unequal power relations meant that 20th century soldiers and political leaders laid the foundation for 21st century drug and human trafficking networks (Arnson et al., 2011; Dudley, 2012). Second, licit regional markets were strengthened through multilateral diplomatic relationships and trade agreements.8 A precursor to these was the 1980s Caribbean Basin Initiative, in which the US unilaterally offered trade and tariff benefits to some Central American and Caribbean countries, excluding those it judged to be leftist or working against US capitalist interests. Most notable amongst these is the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for which Mexico modified its constitution to allow foreign land ownership and privatization of ejido communal lands, and whose provisions for environmental and labor protections have proven weak. Building on this model, the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) establishes economic trade at the relative expense of labor and environmental conditions. A specter of more intense economic relationships looms large: the Mesoamerica Project, also known as the Mesoamerican Integration and Development Project, including Mexico’s southern states and all of Central America. In 2001, Mexican president Vicente Fox announced this initiative as the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP) with significant multilateral funding to stimulate trade in 7 While it seems possible that transnational gangs emerged in their current form out of Los Angeles in the USA, mass and rising deportations together with harsher immigration laws after 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act mean that Mexico still locates border threats to the south. 8 There were also unilateral initiatives, such as the United States’ Caribbean Basin Initiative.
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the region through investment in energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and assorted ‘‘human development’’ initiatives that received proportionately little funding.9 Civil society groups, including Zapatista communities, fiercely contested the lack of community consultation and the ways that it would strengthen foreign capitalist interests to the detriment of small farmers. Over the ensuing decade, the PPP was like a zombie, regularly declared dead and resurrected. Today, at least a few billion dollars have been allocated under the name ‘‘Mesoamerica Project’’ for transportation and electricity infrastructure, but the environmental component has been officially split off (key funders and actors remain the same). For critics of mega-development as mega-dispossession, security is usually understood primarily as a stepping stone to capitalist investment, but not a purpose in and of itself. While disaster capitalism seems to play a key role in the region’s development projects (Klein, 2008; Klein and Smith, 2008), the power relations invoked in securitization are not fully explained by economic rationales. Even in the initial neoliberal experiment in Latin America of Chile in 1973, it is worth remembering that Pinochet engineered a coup d’etat without a vision of neoliberalism. While this vision quickly emerged and became a defining ideology of the regime (Valdés, 1995), militarization and neoliberal capitalism are not always already intertwined projects.
4.2. Conservation While the current version of the Mesoamerica Project has significantly scaled back proposals for major infrastructure like dam construction, scholars and activists alike remember that the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) was originally part of an economic development plan. The political genesis for a regional conservation approach, however, came from pioneering conservation biologists. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is usually credited with drawing up the regional proposal for a ‘‘Panther Path,’’ around the same time as Conservation International pioneered its ‘‘biodiversity hotspot’’ ranking system, ranking Mesoamerica as third largest in the world (Grandia, 2007). While the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank have regularly included proposals for regional conservation in development plans, most monies have been channeled through bilateral plans for ecotourism in Mexico’s Maya Riviera, marine conservation in Belize, and the creation of Guatemala’s protected areas system. Even as some conservation practitioners declared success (Nations, 2006), others expressed deep concern about potentially conflicting goals. In particular, Grandia’s (2007, 489) analysis argues that the constant construction of a biodiversity ‘‘crisis’’ justifies the ‘‘intervention’’ of foreign experts who advise selling nature to save it. Her analysis hinges on a top-down vision of ‘‘neoliberal economic corridors’’ that promote ‘‘privatization, profiteering and poverty.’’ This is one in a chorus of voices that have demonstrated with devastating accuracy the ways that neoliberal visions of nature have affected conservation practice (Heynen et al., 2007; Brockington et al., 2008; Finley-Brook, 2014). At the same time as critics have decried the environmental and economic effects of NAFTA (McCarthy, 2004), however, they have done little to link their critiques to the simultaneous securitization in the figure of border walls and militarization of the US–Mexico border (Nevins, 2010). In a similar vein, political ecologists have decried the environmental and economic effects of CAFTA-DR on countries like Guatemala, but rarely link their analyses to the simultaneous securitization of the Mexico–Guatemala borderlands. 9 Initial proposals were far-ranging, including Colombia and the Dominican Republic.
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4.3. Security Security, or lack thereof, has long been a focal point for the relationship between the US, Mexico and Central America. Following the Cuban Revolution (1953), US interest in the region focused on halting what it saw as nation-states falling like dominoes to communism. When the CIA fomented the 1954 coup in Guatemala sparking massive militarization and genocide, it was in the name of (US) national security, to keep the threat of communism from creeping north. While political scientists sometimes frame US interests in Latin America in terms of a clean shift from Cold War to Drug War (Andreas and Price, 2001), it was in 1986 that National Security Decision Directive No. 22 declared drug trafficking a threat to the security of the American continent (McCoy, 2004). The US never declared war on any country or organized group in this non-state ‘‘war,’’ but Congress authorized a few interventions. Key among them are Plan Colombia (1998/2000), a $1.3 billion program for US military training of a Colombian anti-drug battalion, helicopter purchases and killing off coca cultivation. To the extent that Plan Colombia was a success, it served not to stop illicit drug trafficking, but rather to redirect it through the Northern Triangle and create an opportunity for Mexican-based cartels to wrest control from traditional Colombian monopolies (Gootenberg, 2011). As these factors served to push drug cultivation and organization north in the last decade, the US State Department increasingly perceives trafficking and associated violence as a threat to (US) national security. Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and George W. Bush, who reportedly decided that Latin America would be his legacy (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007), agreed on a regional security initiative that would include Central America.10 Without Congressional approval, the US allocated more than $250 million in counter-narcotics assistance directly to Mexico and more than $139 million to Central America during fiscal years 2000–2006, building relationships amongst state departments, military, navy and drug enforcement agencies (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007). In 2008, Congress approved the first round of the Mérida Initiative, funding counter-narcotics and border policing south into Central America and the Caribbean to ‘‘enhance citizen security.’’ In subsequent years, the project was split into the Mérida Initiative for southern Mexico and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). According to the US State Department, CARSI’s goals include: ‘‘create safe streets for the citizens of the region; disrupt the movement of criminals and contraband to, within, and between the nations of Central America’’ and ‘‘re-establish effective state presence, services, and security in communities at risk.’’ This framing does not imagine anyone traveling across national boundaries that is not a criminal. US Congress has allocated more than $640 million thus far towards a regional security strategy, including a new Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism. because ‘‘the isthmus is the primary transit point for people, drugs and arms destined for the United States’’ (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007, 53). While CARSI and the Mérida Initiative do not address conservation in strategy or budget justifications to US Congress, these initiatives take place in the Maya Forest, mostly on the borderlands between southern Mexico, northern Guatemala, and Belize. The US military (army and navy) train Mexican and Central American soldiers, as well as participate in field operations. Since 1989, the US military has been the single lead agency for the detection and monitoring of drugs entering the US (Isacson et al.,
10 The Senate Committee report does not claim that Central Americans participated in this process.
2007), with its attentions focused firmly south. In addition, the US DEA, military, navy, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and ICE all regularly participate in security actions in Mexico and Central America. 5. Blind passes and the production of borderlands as a security threat The ‘‘blind passes’’ of the Mexican–Guatemalan borderlands are sites of violence precisely because deforestation and drug trafficking are phenomena that transgress nation-state boundaries. Drug traffickers run long networks that stretch from South America into the US with only a few key nodes, and even those cannot be fixed territorially, lest they form a fixed target for law enforcement task forces. In other words, the same networks that traffic lumber also traffic illicit drugs and people. In response to the production of porous borders as a security threat, the Guatemalan state – with significant US funding and training – has created roving Special Forces units. I use the creation of these units as a lens to think through the changing valences of conservation practice and their implication for rural citizen security. 5.1. How frontiers become security threats Mexican journalist Víctor Hugo Michel (2013) visited the Maya Biosphere Reserve in 2013 with the Guatemalan military’s Special Jungle Operations Brigade. He used evocative language to explain the remote dangers of the Maya Forest are why it became a ‘‘cemetery’’ for crashed planes carrying drugs. The metaphor of the cemetery evokes danger and death, making the borderlands forest into a wasteland. Perhaps to an outside visitor, this rendering makes sense, unless and until this is reconciled with conservation claims that the forest is overpopulated dating back decades (Grandia, 2000). Rather than judge whether the borderlands are overrun or empty, I suggest that scholars look to what kind of actions these imaginaries seek to authorize, often complementary calls for state security forces to clear out the overrun/empty borderlands, which are rendered as dangerous in either case. As the securitization literature suggests, a key question to ask is ‘‘dangerous to whom,’’ making explicit the tradeoffs between one citizen’s security for another’s. This newspaper article frames the Maya Forest as a ‘‘green hell’’ (Slater, 2002), irredeemable and unloved, which prospectively rationalizes it as a site for violence. These histories are sedimented layers onto which this imaginary of the Maya Forest as a ‘‘green hell’’ is produced through its remoteness in relation to urban capitals, including Guatemala City, Mexico City, and Washington, DC. To paraphrase Gregory (2004, 8), cultural discourses of frontiers underwrite militarizing power, even as securitization elaborates a pathologizing culture. As Hall (2013, 52) concisely defines it, ‘‘frontiers are areas where states fall well short of exercising administrative control.’’ Frontiers are not natural or fixed, but instead are produced through state imaginaries of the territorial boundaries of their reach; rather than admit to weakness, central state powers claim that the problem is the frontier itself. The language that scholars employ may also reproduce the notion that these regions are ‘‘ungovernable’’ due to their location, weather and lack of legibility (from the perspective of urban centers). In terms of location, Guatemala’s northern lowlands are often framed as a ‘‘frontier’’ for disappearing forests giving way to small farms and plantations (Schwartz, 1990; Carr, 2006; Gould et al., 2006; Grandia, 2012), which implies that agriculture is newly expanding into virgin rainforest in a one-way historical shift. In a longer historical viewpoint, ‘‘virgin’’ forest has not existed in the Américas for centuries (Denevan, 1992), but reforestation may also be an
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important dynamic (Hecht, 2014). At the same time, scholars and journalists alike describe this climate as inhospitable, claiming that the forest is ‘‘infested with malaria carrying mosquitoes’’ (Taylor, 2007, 185) and that ‘‘crocodiles are a plague’’ (Michel, 2013). In this way, the region is represented as unknowable and possibly dangerous. The borderlands are places for ‘‘hidden wars’’ (Manz, 1988), places that are historically ‘‘unpopulated,’’ ‘‘remote,’’ ‘‘periphery’’ (Taylor, 2007), and even ‘‘unknown to Guatemalans’’ (IDS, 1961). While some scholars employ these terms in solidarity with homesteaders who suffered massacres during the civil war, they nonetheless contribute to the production of an imaginary of a remote, dangerous, ungovernable frontier that is marked by ‘‘blind passes’’ where people and drugs transgress borders. Although US-based security analyses in support of CARSI and the Mérida Initiative pose these as new and growing challenges, a brief look at Guatemalan history reveals that states and military forces are drawing on older histories of the frontier’s discomforting fungibility as threatening. 5.2. Illicit networks transgress the myth of the container state While borderlands are framed as no-man’s lands or spaces of exception (Jones, 2009), some scholars argue that we should instead think about networked borders. Life in the borderlands transcends fixed lines, particularly since many nation-states claim sovereignty that can extend up to 100 miles on land or sea. In the case of Guatemala, migrants and traffickers may successfully cross through ‘‘blind passes’’ without state border checkpoints, only to find themselves detained at a checkpoint 30 km past the border (Galemba, 2012). Just as these ‘‘blind passes’’ threaten the sovereignty of both Mexico and Guatemala, they threaten the core zones of protected areas. It is in the production of ‘‘blind passes’’ as threats that green security intersects with national military logics. Under the Mérida Initiative, Mexico attempted to create a southern border that makes traveling from southern to northern Mexico more difficult and dangerous than traveling from northern Mexico into the southern US. Illicit networks threaten the myth of the container state, in which people, kinship networks and ethnicities, and economies are based in one national identity that is reflected by Westphalian territorial boundaries (Agnew, 2003; Elden, 2010). It is only in this context that we can properly understand the central role of US state agents, Mexican border agents and regional organizations (SOUTHCOM) in the production of the borderlands as a threat. Paradoxically, these organizations must themselves transcend borders as fixed lines in order to perform them. While supposedly the US DEA would only work in the United States, agents perform key job duties internationally, in which they are effectively exempted from following either US or host country laws when they conduct operations (Loperena, this issue). The premise of ‘‘domestic’’ US agencies working in Mexico and Central America seems to be that the agencies are working abroad as a temporary suspension of normal activities until these putatively ‘‘weak states’’ can effectively control their own national borders. Thus, while anti-narcotics operations are meant to reassert nation-state boundaries in a performance that simulates ‘‘weak states’’ as coherent and fixed in bounded spaces, the insecurities that spark these operations demonstrate the fallibility of state-centric boundaries. For example, Fig. 5.1 demonstrates the US DEA’s estimation of Mexican cartels’ ‘‘areas of dominant influence’’ represents them as mutually exclusive and contiguous shapes on a map that conforms to the borders of the Mexican nation-state, despite the fact that the DEA pursues these cartels north and south of the map. It is as if the DEA hopes to reproduce the idea that these cartels are a Mexican problem, rather than a transnational problem, by
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mapping them exclusively onto Mexico. While a caption notes that the map is ‘‘subject to change given the fluid nature of Mexican [Drug Trafficking Organizations],’’ it does not show areas of overlap, competition or collaboration between cartels. Two examples of how cartel territoriality transgresses DEA imaginaries could be the ways that the Zetas (dark green) is slowly swallowing up the Gulf Cartel (light green) and the struggles between the newly independent Zetas cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel (orange) over the Mexican–Guatemalan borderlands. In sharp contrast, the putatively ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘failed’’ state of Guatemala is often represented with little territorial continuity. For example, Fig. 5.2 delineates key border departments, but territory is represented in brown – in other words, cartels are not represented as having fixed territorialities. Despite Guatemalan perceptions (and occasional Zetas declarations in paid radio advertisements, as in Cobán, 2008) that cartels do control contiguous territories, US security analysts rarely represent Mexican cartels as territorializing Guatemala, just as arrows that easily pass through it. This reproduces the idea that massive international cartels that traffic everything from people to parrots are primarily Mexican, and penetrate the porous borders of the Guatemalan nation-state. As such, the retrenchment of Westphalian territoriality through borderlands security is framed as simultaneously saving weak nation-states. From what I understand, cartels operate somewhere between the representations of networked arrows and contiguous shape-maps (see also Dudley, 2012; Osorno, 2012). Historically, sophisticated drug trafficking organizations were organized through cartels around the reliable delivery of illegal drugs to US-based sellers – cartels were middlemen with high markups. With security crackdowns under the Mérida Initiative and CARSI, reliable trafficking became more difficult and thus more expensive. Seizing this opportunity, the Zetas splintered from the Gulf cartel and took over large swaths of Mexican territory through the use of violence as spectacle. Rather than conducting the trafficking, cartels with name recognition now claim control over key transportation arteries and routes north, then franchise these to entrepreneurs seeking to traffic drugs, gun, natural resources, and/or people (either for migration north or kidnapping for ransom, usually a mixed model). In summary, transnational cartels seem to effectively work at the limits of container states to their advantage. As Nordstrom (2004, 91) explains, the most powerful of these networks control finances and resources larger than many of the world’s economies, and the value of illicit trade networks often dwarfs that of licit trade networks. Perhaps more threatening to centralized nation-states, illicit networks are not competing to become states – cartels engage in state-like behaviors primarily to usurp the state’s role as protector, but not replace it (Tilly, 1985; Leeds, 1996). While transboundary conservation projects such as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) might seem to suggest the waning importance of nation-states, in practice the MBC likewise employs green security logics that are predicated on contiguous and territorially bounded protected areas. As with state-centric politics, conservation policies rely on – and reproduce – a distinction between internal and external territorialization (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001). National protected areas systems are nested within the presumption of a territorial container state (Massey, 2004), whereas the ability of illicit networks to traffic beyond the bounds of the container state is the very source of their power. If cartel violence were the primary reason that state agencies read borders as frontier threats, then it is hard to see why unaccompanied minors would comprise a crisis that needs to be met with securitization. In summer 2014, a waft of urgent news stories emerged in English-language media about a US–Mexico border
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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Fig. 5.1. DEA representation of Mexican cartels (Beittel, 2013).
Fig. 5.2. Drug trafficking networks, represented as arrows (Wells and Stone, 2013).
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‘‘humanitarian’’ crisis. Border Patrol apprehended more than 68,000 unaccompanied children in one year, a 77% rise that signals mass desperation and migration, even as it obscures the 361% increase in ‘‘family unit’’ apprehensions (US CBP, 2014). Most children were what CBP calls ‘‘Other than Mexicans’’ from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The US has responded through media campaigns to explain to Central American youth that they will be deported, even though most youth apprehended already know this, as they reported this was not their first attempt to immigrate to the US (Gonzalez-Barrera et al., 2014). In response, Northern Triangle leaders proposed a ‘‘Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle,’’ which appears to be a new initiative but draws on language similar to CARSI in calls for ‘‘public safety’’ and ‘‘strengthening institutions’’ (US State Department, 2014). In his public endorsement of the $1 billion aid package, Vice President Biden (2015) stated that ‘‘first, security makes everything else possible. We can help stabilize neighborhoods through community-based policing, and eradicate transnational criminal networks that have turned Central America into a hotbed for drug smuggling, human trafficking and financial crime,’’ which he described as a ‘‘climate of endemic violence and poverty.’’ In other words, the US, Mexico and Northern Triangle governments plan to intensify their current security programs, rather than rethinking them. The effectiveness of remilitarization strategies in stemming the tide of drug and human trafficking north through the production of citizen safety is unproven at best. If present trends continue, the US will allocate funds to alleviate a ‘‘humanitarian crisis’’ that Guatemala will devote to state violence in the name of citizen security.
6. Guns, drugs and friends: Securing the Maya Forest While state cooperation in transnational trade and conservation projects might seem to transcend borders, the intertwined relationship between these and transnational policing of trafficking and conservation with violence reveals the liminal politico-legal status of people and places in the borderlands (Hyndman and Mountz, 2007; Popescu, 2011). Security is often framed as a prerequisite to developing international business cooperation, infrastructure or protected areas protections. The US, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank have devoted monies to projects for regional economic development including infrastructure and trade, as well as conservation initiatives including climate change mitigation, but international efforts have increasingly centered around the idea of Mexico and Central America as security problems to be fixed. Perhaps one of the most clear indications of this was a report to US Congress entitled ‘‘Guns, Drugs and Friends’’ (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007), which argued that the US must develop friendly relationships with Mexico and Central America to deal with gun and drug trafficking in order to foment positive trade opportunities. While the title is not explained in the report text, it seems clear that Mesoamerican friendships are read through the lens of US security.
6.1. Guatemalan rural remilitarization in the name of ‘‘citizen security’’ Despite the shift in American policy from ‘‘national’’ to ‘‘citizen’’ security, the meaning of citizenship is unclear in regional plans. In other words, what is the imaginary of the citizen whose security must be ensured? Building on critical geopolitics and security studies, we can interrogate the ways plans that purport to have the objective of promoting citizen security use rural remilitarization as a means to achieve this goal.
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Sites for security, sites for violence What the Mérida Initiative, Plan Mesoamérica, and CARSI have in common is the ways that regionalized plans are carried out through a series of bilateral agreements, revealing changing and inconsistent meanings of citizenship and security. In 2012, the Guatemalan Congress officially approved a loan for a project to create a System of Vigilance and Protection of the Guatemalan Biosphere, which strengthens the institutionalization of the Jungle Special Operations Brigade. As this is the first legislative approval of remilitarization (since the 1996 Peace Accords dictated its dismantling), it is worth examining Decree 28-2012 at length: ‘‘The Guatemalan Republic has registered in recent years an increase in illicit activities in its territory, especially where the State has no presence, Alta and Baja Verapaz and Petén in the north of the country. This circumstance has allowed for a high level of natural resource depredation, due to problems related with the increasingly high levels of international drug trafficking; due to organized crime, the scourge of poverty amongst the majority of the population and the institutional weakness of state agencies responsible for safeguarding sovereignty and security, which has a strong impact on economic, social and environmental issues.’’ This institutionalization follows on the heels of actions where successive presidents declared temporary martial law (estados de sitio) in the Maya Forest, stripping residents of freedom of assembly, giving police and soldiers the right to search and arrest without a warrant, and to censor press coverage of these activities. Leftist president Alvaro Colom declared estados de sitio for military campaigns against drug trafficking in two departments of the Maya Forest, Alta Verapaz (2010–2011) and Petén (2011). Former military officer Pérez Molina was elected president in 2012 after campaigning to bring back iron-fisted justice (mano dura), then successfully working with Congress to respond to the supposed need to remilitarize border regions ‘‘where the State has no presence,’’ bringing together claims of conservation with ‘‘sovereignty and security,’’ as above.11 Whereas Colom began assembling ‘‘green forces,’’ Perez Molina expanded the reach of these forces, renaming them roving Brigades and equipping them with planes, ships and guns (Decree 28-2012). To the best of my knowledge, there are currently three major roving brigades: the Jungle Special Operations Brigade ‘‘Víctor Augusto Quilo Ayuso’’ based out of La Libertad, Petén, the High Mountain Brigade on the northwestern border with Mexico in San Marcos, and a Military Police Brigade ‘‘General Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales,’’12 in San Juan Sacatepéquez. As of August 2014, the fourth brigade will be an extension of the Jungle Special Operations Brigade into Alta and Baja Verapaz, a place where a state functionary explained that people are ‘‘accustomed not to having authority,’’ and that ‘‘would be converted into a drug trafficking corridor, that starts in Izabal, arrives in Quiché and Huehuetenango to penetrate Mexico’’ if left unchecked (Anonymous, 2014). Whereas the first two roving special operations brigades are arguably related to the nexus of deforestation and drug trafficking, the third brigade reveals the disjuncture between US funding for ‘‘citizen security’’ and Guatemalan implementation for ‘‘safeguarding sovereignty and security.’’ San Juan Sacatepéquez was not listed as a problem site for intervention in the 2012 law because it is not along Guatemala’s northern border, it does not have a significant drug trafficking problem, and as a central municipality the Guatemalan legislature does not list this as a place where ‘‘the 11 Apparently State presence is not important in terms of education or health services where state sovereignty is threatened. 12 Former Defense Minister, a US civil court found him guilty of a massacre of Q’anjob’al Maya, as well as kidnapping and torturing a nun, Dianna Ortiz, in 1995.
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State has no presence.’’ Rather, it was the site of massive peaceful protests against natural resource extraction by Cementos Progreso plant, which was met with police and military violence. In September 2014, the Defense Ministry declared martial law (estado de prevención),13 and the role of the new brigade is to bring ‘‘security.’’ In this case, the supposed root cause of insecurity that threatens state security is rural citizens who are protesting the cement plant’s massive negative environmental effects, particularly in terms of water. In this logic, military brigades use violence against citizens to produce security with international assistance for ‘‘citizen security.’’ Otto Pérez Molina is precisely the person whose ideologies weave these seemingly disparate threads together – for most Guatemalans, there is no contradiction that he was both a military commander who ran a major scorched earth military campaign that the UN condemned as genocide, and as president advocates for decriminalization of some illicit drug activities. Unfortunately, these contradictions of killing people in the name of safety are in keeping with regional historical patterns. 6.2. Kaibiles rule the jungle, but who rules the kaibiles? In their call for conservationists to rethink ‘‘narco-deforesta tion’’ and advocate for decriminalizing some drug activities, McSweeney et al. (2014) imply that iron-fisted enforcement and decriminalization are mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, Pérez Molina and the Guatemalan government are simultaneously promoting iron-fisted military law and calling on Latin American nations to consider decriminalizing drug use and cultivation (not trafficking). One social commentator highlighted a similar dynamic in El Salvador: ‘‘What we have in the post-civil war era is una ensalada [a salad or mixture] of progressive and regressive laws, an incoherent, disordered, and contradictory set of laws’’ (in Zilberg 2011, 172). In post-war El Salvador, Zilberg explains, the Súper Mano Dura (Super Iron Fist) Plan was paired with the Mano Amiga (Friendly Hand) and Mano Extendida (Hand Outreached) for violence prevention and gang rehabilitation. While some scholars argue that ‘‘official development initiatives increasingly conflate development with militarization’’ (Galemba, 2012, 826), the iron fist and the hand outstretched have always been part and parcel of the same territorial project. Historically, military dictators treated rural massacres as an ethno-political cleansing necessary for the success of their simultaneous rural development projects in the region. Likewise, Pérez Molina’s calls to decriminalize drugs does not mean that the Defense Ministry will scale back its anti-trafficking campaigns. While decriminalizing drugs could be an important step in rethinking the ‘‘war’’ on drugs as a public health problem, this would have little impact on the escalating state attempts to bring security through violence in protected areas and borderlands. One clear implication of this two-pronged strategy including remilitarization is in privileging Kaibiles special forces to lead Jungle Brigades. Kaibiles are inextricably linked with some of the most horrific practices during massacres at the height of the Guatemalan civil war. Some people in US became familiar with the massacre at Dos Erres, Petén, and the kidnapping of a child survivor through a This American Life story (Rotella and Arana, 2012). The narrative largely elides the role of the US in funding and carrying out the training of Kaibiles who committed the massacres, much less current funding for similar activities in the name of ‘‘citizen security.’’ Kaibiles are renowned for their grueling training program, which supposedly culminated with a survival test in the jungles of Petén with only a dog as a companion that soldiers 13 In the Guatemalan gradation of ‘‘States of Exception,’’ the estado de prevención is less harsh than an estadio de sitio, but both authorize martial law measures for security reasons.
had to kill and eat to graduate. While I saw no mention of the Kaibiles unit in official US State Department or Congressional documents, Spanish language media implies the state’s clear and public embrace of Kaibiles as central to citizen security, including taking reporters on tours in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve (as in Michel, 2013). It is also of note that President Pérez Molina was a Kaibil in his time with the army. On a practical level, the central role of the Kaibiles does not bode well for the safety of rural borderlands citizens. As Charles Bowden (2010, 109) declares, ‘‘in over a half century of fighting drugs, Mexico has never created a police unit that did not join the traffickers. Or die.’’ The same, unfortunately, seems true for Guatemalan police and military units. The Zetas first came to Guatemala in the mid-1990s as the enforcement branch of the Gulf Cartel, making the borderlands department Alta Verapaz their operations base (López, 2013). Since then, Kaibiles have been a key source of Zetas recruiting, and security scholars characterize the Zetas as ‘‘paramilitary’’ because of their strategic incorporation of counterinsurgency strategies (including violent spectacles like beheading and torture), complex assaults, and intelligence (Brands, 2010). Today, US funding for ‘‘citizen security’’ goes to train and equip Kaibiles who are supposed to keep the jungle safe from ex-Kaibil Zetas. During repeated states of martial law, any person Kaibiles encounter in raids is presumptively breaking the law. Nonetheless, the chief of the US Southern Command recently praised US-Central American military collaboration for human rights promotion, saying ‘‘I challenge anyone to argue differently, unless of course one does not trust US intentions in the region and also does not have the faith in the decency of our military men and women’’ (Kelly, 2014). I feel compelled to respond personally to this challenge. My father served the US army in Vietnam – while he is a decent man, this does not mean that US actions were above reproach. Likewise, I have concerns about US interventions in Mexico and Central America, but I write this piece as a hopeful provocation to the Southern Command, Guatemalan military, and international conservationists to be accountable to citizens of the Maya Forest. 6.3. What does remilitarization mean for the future of the Maya Forest? Securitization reframes historically contentious political claims around the Maya Forest into risk assessments of ‘‘narco-deforesta tion.’’ While work to decriminalize the consumption and cultivation of illicit drugs would represent an important progressive move, this might do little to ameliorate the criminalization of so-called ‘‘narco-peasants’’. After all, President Pérez Molina promotes both decriminalization of illicit drug use and remilitarization of the countryside. Likewise, securitization through militarization is unlikely to have a salutary effect on conservation. ‘‘This is just a slight disruption for them,’’ said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He estimated that 70 percent of Mexico’s 550-mile border with Guatemala is controlled by the Zetas (Booth and Miroff, 2011). While power dynamics in the border region are constantly in flux, years of securitization accomplished little in trafficking routes from Montes Azules Biosphere in Mexico through the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala. I have argued that remilitarization continues to produce the Maya Forest as a threatening frontier, which centers state presence in the form of militarization (rather than social services). It seems likely that trends towards remilitarization will demonstrate to rural citizens that repression is inherent to protected areas management. Whereas funding for conservation and climate change mitigation has rallied around the imaginary of the ‘‘Maya Forest,’’ the bulk of funding channeled into the region is through security
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programs that envision it as a porous border that leaks drugs and undocumented immigrants north on their path to the US. Of course, security funding increasingly extends beyond the bounds of the Maya Forest. For example, a Guatemalan state official claimed that 58 of 334 municipalities are ‘‘ungovernable’’ due to drug trafficking (Agencia ACAN-EFE, 2012). While securitization is not specific to the Maya Forest, it encompasses it. Today, protected areas officials only patrol with the military, leading rural residents to associate them with remilitarization and repression. As Duffy (this issue) demonstrates, some conservation BINGOs attempt to harness these fears in their fundraising. One notable example is the claim by Rob Walton (of Wal-Mart) and Harrison Ford (actor) for Conservation International that ‘‘there is a direct connection between international conservation and U.S. economic and national security interests.’’14 The Maya Biosphere Reserve’s remilitarization is part of a longer history of exclusionist conservation. The original, supposedly inclusive, language describes a project of ‘‘weaving small farmers into the Mesoamerican Corridor,’’ (Miller at al., 2001, 10), which ascribes agency only to conservation agencies and implies that rural residents did not practice conservation in the region in the first place – in other words, Mesoamerica is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet in spite of, not because of, the people who have lived there. Likewise, conservation projects’ move to inclusive planning asked leading questions like, ‘‘What degraded ecosystems in the area should be restored and why?’’ (Miller at al., 2001, 17), which foreclosed the opportunity for rural communities to articulate positive conservation practices in the Maya Forest. These practices have usefully been critiqued in the making of the Maya Biosphere Reserve (Sundberg, 2003, 2006; Grandia, 2012). Unfortunately, the current conjuncture reveals a trend that escalated from treating rural residents as illegitimate and inefficient resource users towards a reauthorization of state violence. The reframing of environmental criminals as part of drug trafficking organizations serves to associate rural citizens with sophisticated weapons, paramilitary skills, and/or terrorist affiliations. While there are certainly gangs and cartels that have paramilitary training and sophisticated weapons, these people are less likely to live in long-term housing in protected areas without access to potable water or electricity. Rather, sophisticated criminals are able to collaborate with or simply evade state security forces while the poorest of the poor are structurally vulnerable. While their capture may allow state security forces to claim success in term of people arrested, it seems possible that the citizens who are most vulnerable to drug trafficking organizations are also those who are most vulnerable to state policing. This article has argued for the continued and resurging importance of militarization in both development and conservation practices. While regional trade agreements have indeed reshaped national economies to create conditions of possibility for resource privatization and even land grabbing, analyses of capitalism must look to the relationship between licit and illicit economies. Green security narratives produce narco imaginaries, where narco activities articulate with deforestation and human migration to produce all three as a single, urgent threat. While the performance of green security in the Guatemalan borderlands has important material effects, these do not include lower homicide rates or lessened drug trafficking through the Maya Forest. Instead, the primary effect of green security seems to be justification of increased state violence that is not contingent on any benefits to citizens.
14 Conservation International (2014). ‘‘Promoting economic, national and global security.’’ http://www.conservation.org/projects/Pages/Promoting-Economic-National-and-Global-Security-Direct-connection.aspx (accessed 27.04.15).
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Williams, J., Massaro, V., 2013. Feminist geopolitics: unpacking (in)security, animating social change. Geopolitics 18 (4), 751–758. Ybarra, M., 2012. Taming the jungle, saving the maya forest: sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation. J. Peasant Stud. 39 (2), 479–502. Zilberg, E., 2011. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Duke University Press.
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‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border Megan Ybarra Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 1 November 2014 Received in revised form 27 May 2015 Accepted 4 June 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Guatemala Borderlands Conservation Drug War Political ecology Security Maya Forest
a b s t r a c t Guatemalan protected areas have been sites for genocidal massacres, drug trafficking landing strips, and remilitarized ‘‘states of emergency,’’ but these activities are rarely considered in relation to conservation practices. This paper employs a political ecology approach to analyze interpellations of transboundary spaces as security threats, arguing that threat narratives produce insecurity in conservation spaces. Instead of assuming the primacy of neoliberalism in producing protected areas as sites of violence in the service of capitalism, the analysis traces the changing meanings of security in relation to Guatemala’s borderlands, from Cold War National Security Doctrine to discourses of citizen security in the twenty-first century Drug War. It is in the unmanned ‘‘blind passes’’ (pasos ciegos) of the Guatemalan–Mexican border, rendered as insecure spaces through the state’s putative absence, that policing paradoxically seeks to ensure ‘‘citizen security’’ through violence. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction A recent intervention in Science called the attention of policymakers and scientists alike to a crisis of ‘‘narco-deforestation,’’ in which the authors argued that drug trafficking causes deforestation in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (McSweeney et al., 2014). In the case of Guatemala, one co-author stated that part of the narco-deforestation crisis is ‘‘too few forest guards’’ in ‘‘those remote and poor regions’’ (Saliba, 2014). McSweeney et al. issue a normative call to decriminalize some drug activities to address ‘‘narco-deforestation’’ as a rapidly increasing problem over the past ten years. While I agree with their fundamental insight that drug policies affect conservation practice, my work seeks to frame recent narco-deforestation crisis narratives as part of a longer geopolitical history, one where states rationalize increased rural policing through repeated threat narratives of incursions by poachers, drug traffickers and terrorists (Kelly and Ybarra, this issue). In previous work (Ybarra, 2012), I developed a critique of how the Guatemalan military mobilizes an imaginary of the Maya Forest as a ‘‘jungle to be tamed’’ as a way to rebuild policing amidst massive defunding of military, police and security forces that committed a long-term campaign of genocide against indigenous citizens during the civil war (1960–1996). While US Congress instituted a partial ban on funding for the Guatemalan military in 1978 that has not been rescinded, it nonetheless increased funding E-mail address: [email protected]
and joint operations since then. The role of conservation in saving the Maya Forest is key to understanding how international and national agencies revived scorched earth counterinsurgency campaigns. Building on this work, this paper looks at remilitarization in the Guatemala–Mexico borderlands to interrogate how the US and Mexico promote ‘‘citizen security’’ in countries they interpellate as threats for drug trafficking and associated violence. The current conjuncture moves beyond historical framing of rural inhabitants as ‘‘cultural and environmental predators’’ (Grandia, 2012; Devine, 2014, 993). While framing resource users as environmental criminals is a centuries-old practice (Thompson, 1975; Jacoby, 2001), more recent threat narratives have interpellated them as members of organized cartels. This, in turn, moves from the criminalization of natural resource use towards a broader threat narrative that associates rural citizens with sophisticated weapons, paramilitary skills and/or terrorist affiliations. The structural politics of green security produce narco imaginaries, facilitating claims that the Maya Forest can only be secured through increasing violence. In the wake of so-called Latin American ‘‘dirty wars’’ in the 1970s and 1980s, scholarly and advocacy attention shifted from critiques of military dictatorships towards analysis of neoliberalism as structural violence in post-war democracies (Burrell and Moodie, 2013). This otherwise salutary shift perhaps led scholars to underestimate the continued and resurging importance of militarization in development and conservation. Building on insights of political ecology, critical geopolitics and security studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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to demonstrate the articulation of regional trafficking threats with global and national conservation imperatives, my analysis focuses on the role of border security in shaping protected areas security. To do so, I look at how threats of deforestation, drug trafficking and human trafficking articulate in the ‘‘blind passes’’ between Mexico and Guatemala. While blind passes are the specific places where people cross without a border patrol check, they also represent broader threat narratives that rationalize state violence far beyond the border-line itself. I first explain the analytic of green security to signal the role of threat narratives in the resurgence of violent policing in protected areas. I then briefly outline national contexts of Guatemala and Mexico, as well as describe regional political projects that seek to bind together their security, economies, and environments. In so doing, I argue for increased scholarly analysis of securitization as a key mechanism in producing differential life chances in the Maya Forest. Next, I explain how these regional projects are implemented in Guatemala, and why remilitarization and martial law have become processes through which ‘‘citizen security’’ supposedly will be achieved. Finally, I reflect on the importance of securitization for borderlands conservation and everyday lives in Guatemala’s Maya Forest. 2. Green security Political ecologists have considered how people negotiate relationships over nature through ‘‘conflict,’’ ‘‘struggle,’’ ‘‘war’’ or ‘‘(in)security’’ (Deudney and Matthew, 1999; Le Billon, 2001; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Fairhead et al., 2012). In recent decades, scholars of environmental conflict have increasingly framed problems in terms of the privatization and commodification of nature (Mansfield, 2009; Büscher et al., 2014) and how neoliberal capitalism reshapes environmental governance (McAfee, 1999; Heynen et al., 2007). Taken as a whole, this scholarship demonstrates that the seemingly universal good of global conservation is often mobilized through capitalist projects with uneven effects, creating ‘‘winners and losers’’ (Brockington et al., 2008). True to political ecology’s historical roots, one area of recent scholarly inquiry has focused on ‘‘green grabbing,’’ or the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends (Fairhead et al., 2012). While many of these also are interested in the ideological and technical work of neoliberal capitalism in facilitating dispossession (e.g., Massé and Lunstrum, this issue), my work is focused on power relations and the production of difference in ‘‘green grabbing’’ (e.g., Bocarejo and Ojeda, this issue; Loperena, this issue). Thus, an emphasis on green security over neoliberalism allows for an analysis of violence inherent in incomplete and repeated enclosures, without privileging profit motives over fear based on cultural markers of difference. Fewer political ecologists examine the key role that paramilitary and military actors play in shaping conservation practice (Peluso, 1993; Duffy, 2010; Ojeda, 2012; Lunstrum, 2014). This approach focuses on the mostly collaborative, but occasionally antagonistic, relationship between conservation BINGOs,1 state protected areas agencies, and national militaries. These relationships are important in analyses that ask how conservation’s territorialities ‘‘[rework] not only human-environment relations, but also power relations among social groups’’ (Corson, 2011, 707). While the role of the military in post-genocidal Guatemala is particularly important (given its leadership role in committing mass genocide), the broader engagement with state violence through protected areas agencies, international collaborations with the US Drug Enforcement 1 Big International Non-Governmental Organizations that work on global conservation, notably Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature.
Administration (DEA), and national police forces comprise a broader trend to perform violence in the name of security. Geopolitics and security studies use the analytic of securitization, which I use here to explain the linkage between militarization and conservation practices. Securitization is the process where issues, spaces and subjectivities become targets of regulation and surveillance in the name of ‘security’, which serves to legitimize the use of force in ways that reproduce unequal economic and racial privileges (Buzan et al., 1998; Williams and Massaro, 2013). Likewise, security studies following the Copenhagen school emphasize the political construction of security based around ‘‘a particular kind of danger, an existential threat to state, society, ‘our way of life.’ ‘Security’ from this perspective is fundamentally social and in a sense performative’’ (Goldstein, 2010, 492). In other words, a successful security strategy uses imaginaries of existential threats to justify violence. In both national and international framings (e.g., UNDP, 2013), Latin American discourses have shifted from state-centric national security to society-centric citizen security. This was particularly notable in former military dictatorships seeking legitimacy in the rising tide of NGOs and new social movements. In the case of Guatemala, worldwide condemnation of genocide meant that the military could not longer claim it ensured ‘‘national security’’ at the expense of more than 200,000 lives (REMHI, 1998; CEH, 1999). This is not to say that national security discourses faded away – rather, state agencies subsumed their claims within broader international human rights discourses of citizen security, understood as ‘‘freedom from crime and victimization’’ (Burrell, 2010, 92). Citizen security seems to protect individuals from violence by both state and non-state actors, and thus enacts a key element of universal human rights. While citizen security sounds like a universal goal, national racial genealogies shape the meaning of security. The question may become, which citizens’ security does state policing ensure? As Hall (1992, 17) cogently explains, the driving force that makes racism into the ‘‘fatal coupling of difference and power’’ is ‘‘the fear—the terrifying, internal fear—of living with difference.’’ While the definitions and implicit meanings of difference change over time and place, deep-seated fears lead people, institutions, and armies to act in violence as a matter of their own security against the unknown Other that is too close for comfort. For those of us seeking to understand where criminalization and brute violence come from, we must look to the ‘‘security gaze,’’ to the ‘‘moral panics’’ that serve to rationalize states of exception and presumptively criminalize whole peoples (Hall et al., 1978; Gilmore, 2002; Ferradás, 2004). To the extent that security is also read as ‘‘the ability to protect oneself’’ (Burrell, 2010, 96), it begs the questions: Whose security is at stake when we speak about security (Mutimer, 1999, 418)? Who is the presumptive culprit in the security gaze (Ferradás, 2004)? What violence is authorized in the name of ‘‘citizen security’’? This is a particularly urgent question in the Maya Forest, where living Q’eqchi’ Maya peoples are often framed as land-hungry farmers or ‘‘narco’’ collaborators, rather than rights-bearing indigenous peoples. While my broader research project takes up the question of racialized criminalization at length, this paper focuses on the implications of green security for territorialized protected areas management. 2.1. Conservation’s territoriality Territorialization, or the writing of new spatial relations, is both the production of social hierarchies and the production of cultural imaginaries that give meaning to different rights for different categories within the same space (Mbembe, 2003, 25–26). What do the military and state protected area agencies have in common? They each work to territorialize Westphalian container-states,
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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even as the need for their work arises from the impossibility of ever ‘‘sealing’’ the border. Both utilize crisis narratives to represent frontiers as a threat and create the impetus for (re)militarization and both follow logics that claim to implement regional, or even global, political projects, but they do so through the performance of nation-state boundaries. Much of Guatemala’s protected areas system, particularly the Maya Biosphere Reserve along the border with Mexico, contain ‘‘blind passes’’ that do not have state checkpoints. In securitization threat narratives, these are places where traffickers might bring through illicit people (sometimes against their will), drugs, animals or natural resources against the law. Rather than lead to a border build-up, securitization strategies across the Américas have recently focused on expanding the borderland imaginary. For example, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) uses a working definition of the border zone that extends 100 miles beyond ‘‘external boundaries,’’ which the state argues exempts CBP from constitutional protections against arbitrary stops and searches (ACLU, 2015). Likewise, Mexican and Guatemalan securitization does not seek a retrenchment of a fixed borderline. Instead, state authorities use threat narratives and the existence of blind passes to effectively expand the borderlands as a site for violence, stretching far into the interior. The articulation of blind passes with parks produces them as sites to perform sovereignty, even as conservation imperatives work as a kind of ‘‘green alibi’’ to displace human rights concerns about violent policing (Lunstrum, 2013; Massé and Lunstrum, this issue). Even in transboundary projects, conservation operates according to a container state logic. The case of the Maya Forest offers multiple overlapping imaginaries: a global project to combat anthropogenic climate change through halting (narco)deforestation, a regional project to create corridors to protect jaguars and other endangered species across nation-state boundaries, and a national project to promote conservation and border security through a protected areas system. The ‘‘crown jewel’’ of the Guatemalan project is the Maya Biosphere Reserve, which incorporates a graduated rights regime. According to the biosphere model, the ‘‘core’’ is untouchable to human contact, surrounded by a series of buffer zones that are incorporated using a nested doll model of scaled land uses that supposedly do not overlap. While in recent decades global conservation has focused on local practices through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and integrated conservation and development projects (ICDP), the relationship between conservation and remilitarization reveals that green security relies heavily on a nation-state imaginary. In other words, green security brings together capitalist firms, conservation BINGOs, and multiple state agencies whose work is predicated on protected areas that are created and maintained as part of nation-states. These logics and their implications are most clear in transnational and transboundary projects. Despite international goals, funding is apportioned to nation-states that perform sovereignty through enacting conservation and citizen security. 3. Study context: Northern Triangle, Maya Forest Security specialists, usually with training in political science or geography, divide Mexico between north and south, as expressed through the Mérida Initiative to strengthen Mexico’s southern border.2 Instead of an analysis of all Central America (which would 2 With the participation of US DEA and ICE agents, Mexican border agents often seek to detain and deport Central American immigrants who have made it north from Guatemala into Mexico before they reach the US–Mexico border. These practices extend beyond the physical Mexico–Guatemala border into the nine southern Mexican states.
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include Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua), security specialists focus on the isthmus called the ‘‘Northern Triangle,’’ three contiguous countries that the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), a combatant command assigned to security cooperation throughout the Americas, deems a ‘‘dire threat’’ to US national security (Kelly, 2014): El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Meanwhile, biologists and conservation practitioners promoting tourism and conservation speak of the Maya Forest, a biological hotspot replete with endangered megafauna, ancient Maya ruins, and tropical forests (see Fig. 3.1). Much as a Google search yields different results when one looks for ‘‘Maya Forest’’ and ‘‘Northern Triangle,’’ scholars of the ‘‘Maya Forest’’ rarely follow ‘‘Northern Triangle’’ debates. I first noticed this gap at the Guatemala Scholars Network meeting in 2012, where I realized that cultural geographers and anthropologists, even those whose work grappled with violence and critiqued narratives of Guatemala as a ‘‘failed state,’’ were not familiar with my references to the Northern Triangle or regional security projects (Mérida Initiative and CARSI, explained below).
3.1. Guatemala’s northern border Mexicans have an oft-repeated saying in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘‘Poor Mexico – so far from God, so close to the United States.’’ This is also how many Guatemalans feel about Mexico. As military dictator Lucas García said in the late 1970s, right around the time he pushed Guatemala up to a new level of genocidal violence in scorched earth campaigns, ‘‘we must think of the defense of our territory. In the last century we lost Chiapas and Soconusco [in contemporary southern Mexico], not for a lack of valor, but due to idleness.’’3 In the same way that Mexicans remember that they lost much of their territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,4 Guatemalans remember the post-independence dream of a united Central America that included Belize, Guatemala, and southern Mexico. In the late nineteenth century, after losing territory to the north, Mexican soldiers attempted to annex part of northern Guatemala. The Mexican army invaded Huehuetenango and El Quiché and attempted claim broad swaths of northern Guatemala in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Mexicans also conducted ‘‘Hispanization’’ campaigns, targeting indigenous peoples with shared identities across the border as ‘‘foreigners’’ undeserving of land and labor rights (Hernández Castillo, 2001; Nolan-Ferrell, 2012). In the 1960s, the northern part of Guatemalan departments Quiché and Alta Verapaz also were of increasing importance, primarily due to perceived possibilities for petroleum extraction (Solano Ponciano, 2005). During the 1960s, Guatemalan military planners feared that Mexico was close to receiving international funding to dam the Usumacinta River in a hydroelectric project, so they recruited rural communities to form agricultural cooperatives along the borderlands river in Petén, using poor people in a border build-up that would later become an obstacle for protected areas management (FEDECOAG, 1993). Petén, meanwhile, bordered Belize and was also subject to potential ‘‘Britishization.’’ As Guatemala debated whether or not to recognize Belize as an independent nation in the 1970s, there was a national propaganda campaign that claimed ‘‘Belize is also Guatemala.’’ Strikingly, the governor of Petén department supposedly joked, ‘‘Petén is also Guatemala.’’5 In other words, despite the 3 Latin American History and Culture: Series 5: Civil War, society and Political transition in Guatemala: The Guatemala News and Information Bureau Archive, 1963–2000. PG.4.6 Lucas García Regime, 1978–1982, Reel 12. CIRMA Archives. 4 Mexico ceded Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah to the United States in 1848. 5 ‘‘Los Polos de Desarrollo, una vision crítica.’’ Colección Infostelle del 08.01.01 al 08.01.03. Signatura 90. CIRMA Archives.
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Fig. 3.1. Author’s research site consists of the part of Guatemala (peach) that is considered the Maya Forest (green cross-hatch), which is also the majority of the Mexico– Guatemala borderlands.
department’s official status as part of the nation, its border location led the governor to acknowledge that the region was not part of the national imaginary. Belize became an independent nation in 1982, but Guatemala did not recognize it for another decade, and some educational maps still show Belize as a department of Guatemala.6 This territorial loss remains surprisingly powerful today, serving as a cautionary tale of the vulnerability of the nation’s sovereignty. Finally, Guatemala’s northern borderlands came to represent a threat in the form of the guerrilla insurgencies’ strongest push against military dictatorship in the 1970s. Following a failed campaign in the east, many guerrillas reorganized their insurgency campaign in southern Mexico, popping south for quick impact incursions. For a few years during the 1970s, the guerrillas also sought to organize a rural indigenous base with some success (Payeras, 1980). The military responded with its infamous scorched earth campaigns, systematically killing off more than 400 rural villages. Rural survivors along the northern border were sometimes able to seek refuge in Mexico, where the United Nations recognized more than 40,000 people as refugees living in organized camps. At one point in 1993, the Guatemalan army even crossed the border illegally into Mexico to terrorize the refugees, later claiming that this was a ‘topographical’ error (Anonymous, 1993). Despite the fact that the Guatemalan military unambiguously broke international laws, the state’s ambiguous apology to what it saw as a threat to national sovereignty was a contributing factor to relocating the refugees further north in Mexico. This broad set of historical incursions creates the context in which the northern border represented a security threat from the perspective of the Guatemalan state, long before environmental concerns about deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change. Whether as a safe hiding place for gringos training Cubans to try 6 As of 2015, the International Court of Justice is considering the Belize-Guatemala border dispute.
and overthrow Fidel Castro in the failed Bay of Pigs takeover, or as dense forest cover that allows Marxist guerrillas to invade from the northern borderlands during the civil war, the politically fungible history of the borderlands came to make it seem like a natural threat to national sovereignty. This is the context in which President Cerezo, in a country still in civil war, supported the creation of Guatemala’s national protected areas system, enclosing one-third of the nation’s territory, and more than half of the territory in the Maya Forest. According to archeologists and conservationists, President Cerezo’s nationalist anxieties around Mexicans illegally logging in Petén was a key factor in declaring the Maya Biosphere in 1990 (Nations, 2006; NASA, 2012). While presumably there were other important considerations in creating the protected areas system, these published accounts suggest that international conservationists used green security as a rationale for supporting protected areas for decades. Despite the fact that locals claim that some of the main actors involved in illegal lumber trafficking were themselves in the Guatemalan military (FEDECOAG, 1993), the military as an institution immediately supported the creation of borderlands parks and posited themselves as their protectors. Borderlands protected areas management served three interlocking purposes: first, it justified the military’s territorial mandate at precisely the moment with human rights reports and brewing truth commissions called its legitimacy to act in the name of the Guatemalan people in question (Ybarra, 2012); second, it framed the military as protector of key natural/national resources, not least of which is petroleum; and third, it served to reproduce the narrative that Mexicans-as-outsiders are the source of what ails the national body politic. The Mexico–Guatemalan borderlands have served as a site of competing insecurities between Mexico and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military in particular views its northern neighbor as the site of unsavory insurgents, illegal loggers and violent drug
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traffickers. Mexican security forces view Guatemala as a country to the south that cannot control its borders, thus allowing for unauthorized immigration of poor, indigenous, and gang-affiliated youth from the Northern Triangle.7 For its part, the US views both countries as ‘‘weak states’’ and immigration threats. All three countries seek to strengthen their uneasy alliances through regional trade, conservation and security projects, which I describe below. 4. Transnational political projects: Trade, conservation and security Whereas Mesoamerican scholarship has tended to treat interconnected threads of trade and economic development, conservation and security separately – through political economy critiques of neoliberalism, competing frameworks from conservation biology and anthropology, and international relations respectively – regional projects that span the US, Mexico and Central America are typically interlocking. In terms of funding, the US State Department, US AID, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank are key players. In terms of implementation, key players are increasingly the same as well – US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), DEA, Interior Ministries, and military forces. I explain major projects in each of these three threads below, arguing that increased funding for security is reshaping the work of economic development and conservation. 4.1. Trade, not conservation, in the Mesoamerica Project The US, Mexico and Central America are linked in two key ways. First, the US feared that countries like Guatemala would fall like dominoes to communism, leading the CIA to play a central role in the 1954 coup d’état that plunged Guatemala into a 36 year civil war. Cold War restrictions on trade together with military mobilities enlivened illicit networks to meet market demand for everything from cheese to fancy cars to machine guns. Ironically, then, Cold War production of unequal power relations meant that 20th century soldiers and political leaders laid the foundation for 21st century drug and human trafficking networks (Arnson et al., 2011; Dudley, 2012). Second, licit regional markets were strengthened through multilateral diplomatic relationships and trade agreements.8 A precursor to these was the 1980s Caribbean Basin Initiative, in which the US unilaterally offered trade and tariff benefits to some Central American and Caribbean countries, excluding those it judged to be leftist or working against US capitalist interests. Most notable amongst these is the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for which Mexico modified its constitution to allow foreign land ownership and privatization of ejido communal lands, and whose provisions for environmental and labor protections have proven weak. Building on this model, the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) establishes economic trade at the relative expense of labor and environmental conditions. A specter of more intense economic relationships looms large: the Mesoamerica Project, also known as the Mesoamerican Integration and Development Project, including Mexico’s southern states and all of Central America. In 2001, Mexican president Vicente Fox announced this initiative as the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP) with significant multilateral funding to stimulate trade in 7 While it seems possible that transnational gangs emerged in their current form out of Los Angeles in the USA, mass and rising deportations together with harsher immigration laws after 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act mean that Mexico still locates border threats to the south. 8 There were also unilateral initiatives, such as the United States’ Caribbean Basin Initiative.
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the region through investment in energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and assorted ‘‘human development’’ initiatives that received proportionately little funding.9 Civil society groups, including Zapatista communities, fiercely contested the lack of community consultation and the ways that it would strengthen foreign capitalist interests to the detriment of small farmers. Over the ensuing decade, the PPP was like a zombie, regularly declared dead and resurrected. Today, at least a few billion dollars have been allocated under the name ‘‘Mesoamerica Project’’ for transportation and electricity infrastructure, but the environmental component has been officially split off (key funders and actors remain the same). For critics of mega-development as mega-dispossession, security is usually understood primarily as a stepping stone to capitalist investment, but not a purpose in and of itself. While disaster capitalism seems to play a key role in the region’s development projects (Klein, 2008; Klein and Smith, 2008), the power relations invoked in securitization are not fully explained by economic rationales. Even in the initial neoliberal experiment in Latin America of Chile in 1973, it is worth remembering that Pinochet engineered a coup d’etat without a vision of neoliberalism. While this vision quickly emerged and became a defining ideology of the regime (Valdés, 1995), militarization and neoliberal capitalism are not always already intertwined projects.
4.2. Conservation While the current version of the Mesoamerica Project has significantly scaled back proposals for major infrastructure like dam construction, scholars and activists alike remember that the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) was originally part of an economic development plan. The political genesis for a regional conservation approach, however, came from pioneering conservation biologists. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is usually credited with drawing up the regional proposal for a ‘‘Panther Path,’’ around the same time as Conservation International pioneered its ‘‘biodiversity hotspot’’ ranking system, ranking Mesoamerica as third largest in the world (Grandia, 2007). While the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank have regularly included proposals for regional conservation in development plans, most monies have been channeled through bilateral plans for ecotourism in Mexico’s Maya Riviera, marine conservation in Belize, and the creation of Guatemala’s protected areas system. Even as some conservation practitioners declared success (Nations, 2006), others expressed deep concern about potentially conflicting goals. In particular, Grandia’s (2007, 489) analysis argues that the constant construction of a biodiversity ‘‘crisis’’ justifies the ‘‘intervention’’ of foreign experts who advise selling nature to save it. Her analysis hinges on a top-down vision of ‘‘neoliberal economic corridors’’ that promote ‘‘privatization, profiteering and poverty.’’ This is one in a chorus of voices that have demonstrated with devastating accuracy the ways that neoliberal visions of nature have affected conservation practice (Heynen et al., 2007; Brockington et al., 2008; Finley-Brook, 2014). At the same time as critics have decried the environmental and economic effects of NAFTA (McCarthy, 2004), however, they have done little to link their critiques to the simultaneous securitization in the figure of border walls and militarization of the US–Mexico border (Nevins, 2010). In a similar vein, political ecologists have decried the environmental and economic effects of CAFTA-DR on countries like Guatemala, but rarely link their analyses to the simultaneous securitization of the Mexico–Guatemala borderlands. 9 Initial proposals were far-ranging, including Colombia and the Dominican Republic.
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4.3. Security Security, or lack thereof, has long been a focal point for the relationship between the US, Mexico and Central America. Following the Cuban Revolution (1953), US interest in the region focused on halting what it saw as nation-states falling like dominoes to communism. When the CIA fomented the 1954 coup in Guatemala sparking massive militarization and genocide, it was in the name of (US) national security, to keep the threat of communism from creeping north. While political scientists sometimes frame US interests in Latin America in terms of a clean shift from Cold War to Drug War (Andreas and Price, 2001), it was in 1986 that National Security Decision Directive No. 22 declared drug trafficking a threat to the security of the American continent (McCoy, 2004). The US never declared war on any country or organized group in this non-state ‘‘war,’’ but Congress authorized a few interventions. Key among them are Plan Colombia (1998/2000), a $1.3 billion program for US military training of a Colombian anti-drug battalion, helicopter purchases and killing off coca cultivation. To the extent that Plan Colombia was a success, it served not to stop illicit drug trafficking, but rather to redirect it through the Northern Triangle and create an opportunity for Mexican-based cartels to wrest control from traditional Colombian monopolies (Gootenberg, 2011). As these factors served to push drug cultivation and organization north in the last decade, the US State Department increasingly perceives trafficking and associated violence as a threat to (US) national security. Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and George W. Bush, who reportedly decided that Latin America would be his legacy (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007), agreed on a regional security initiative that would include Central America.10 Without Congressional approval, the US allocated more than $250 million in counter-narcotics assistance directly to Mexico and more than $139 million to Central America during fiscal years 2000–2006, building relationships amongst state departments, military, navy and drug enforcement agencies (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007). In 2008, Congress approved the first round of the Mérida Initiative, funding counter-narcotics and border policing south into Central America and the Caribbean to ‘‘enhance citizen security.’’ In subsequent years, the project was split into the Mérida Initiative for southern Mexico and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). According to the US State Department, CARSI’s goals include: ‘‘create safe streets for the citizens of the region; disrupt the movement of criminals and contraband to, within, and between the nations of Central America’’ and ‘‘re-establish effective state presence, services, and security in communities at risk.’’ This framing does not imagine anyone traveling across national boundaries that is not a criminal. US Congress has allocated more than $640 million thus far towards a regional security strategy, including a new Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism. because ‘‘the isthmus is the primary transit point for people, drugs and arms destined for the United States’’ (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007, 53). While CARSI and the Mérida Initiative do not address conservation in strategy or budget justifications to US Congress, these initiatives take place in the Maya Forest, mostly on the borderlands between southern Mexico, northern Guatemala, and Belize. The US military (army and navy) train Mexican and Central American soldiers, as well as participate in field operations. Since 1989, the US military has been the single lead agency for the detection and monitoring of drugs entering the US (Isacson et al.,
10 The Senate Committee report does not claim that Central Americans participated in this process.
2007), with its attentions focused firmly south. In addition, the US DEA, military, navy, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and ICE all regularly participate in security actions in Mexico and Central America. 5. Blind passes and the production of borderlands as a security threat The ‘‘blind passes’’ of the Mexican–Guatemalan borderlands are sites of violence precisely because deforestation and drug trafficking are phenomena that transgress nation-state boundaries. Drug traffickers run long networks that stretch from South America into the US with only a few key nodes, and even those cannot be fixed territorially, lest they form a fixed target for law enforcement task forces. In other words, the same networks that traffic lumber also traffic illicit drugs and people. In response to the production of porous borders as a security threat, the Guatemalan state – with significant US funding and training – has created roving Special Forces units. I use the creation of these units as a lens to think through the changing valences of conservation practice and their implication for rural citizen security. 5.1. How frontiers become security threats Mexican journalist Víctor Hugo Michel (2013) visited the Maya Biosphere Reserve in 2013 with the Guatemalan military’s Special Jungle Operations Brigade. He used evocative language to explain the remote dangers of the Maya Forest are why it became a ‘‘cemetery’’ for crashed planes carrying drugs. The metaphor of the cemetery evokes danger and death, making the borderlands forest into a wasteland. Perhaps to an outside visitor, this rendering makes sense, unless and until this is reconciled with conservation claims that the forest is overpopulated dating back decades (Grandia, 2000). Rather than judge whether the borderlands are overrun or empty, I suggest that scholars look to what kind of actions these imaginaries seek to authorize, often complementary calls for state security forces to clear out the overrun/empty borderlands, which are rendered as dangerous in either case. As the securitization literature suggests, a key question to ask is ‘‘dangerous to whom,’’ making explicit the tradeoffs between one citizen’s security for another’s. This newspaper article frames the Maya Forest as a ‘‘green hell’’ (Slater, 2002), irredeemable and unloved, which prospectively rationalizes it as a site for violence. These histories are sedimented layers onto which this imaginary of the Maya Forest as a ‘‘green hell’’ is produced through its remoteness in relation to urban capitals, including Guatemala City, Mexico City, and Washington, DC. To paraphrase Gregory (2004, 8), cultural discourses of frontiers underwrite militarizing power, even as securitization elaborates a pathologizing culture. As Hall (2013, 52) concisely defines it, ‘‘frontiers are areas where states fall well short of exercising administrative control.’’ Frontiers are not natural or fixed, but instead are produced through state imaginaries of the territorial boundaries of their reach; rather than admit to weakness, central state powers claim that the problem is the frontier itself. The language that scholars employ may also reproduce the notion that these regions are ‘‘ungovernable’’ due to their location, weather and lack of legibility (from the perspective of urban centers). In terms of location, Guatemala’s northern lowlands are often framed as a ‘‘frontier’’ for disappearing forests giving way to small farms and plantations (Schwartz, 1990; Carr, 2006; Gould et al., 2006; Grandia, 2012), which implies that agriculture is newly expanding into virgin rainforest in a one-way historical shift. In a longer historical viewpoint, ‘‘virgin’’ forest has not existed in the Américas for centuries (Denevan, 1992), but reforestation may also be an
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important dynamic (Hecht, 2014). At the same time, scholars and journalists alike describe this climate as inhospitable, claiming that the forest is ‘‘infested with malaria carrying mosquitoes’’ (Taylor, 2007, 185) and that ‘‘crocodiles are a plague’’ (Michel, 2013). In this way, the region is represented as unknowable and possibly dangerous. The borderlands are places for ‘‘hidden wars’’ (Manz, 1988), places that are historically ‘‘unpopulated,’’ ‘‘remote,’’ ‘‘periphery’’ (Taylor, 2007), and even ‘‘unknown to Guatemalans’’ (IDS, 1961). While some scholars employ these terms in solidarity with homesteaders who suffered massacres during the civil war, they nonetheless contribute to the production of an imaginary of a remote, dangerous, ungovernable frontier that is marked by ‘‘blind passes’’ where people and drugs transgress borders. Although US-based security analyses in support of CARSI and the Mérida Initiative pose these as new and growing challenges, a brief look at Guatemalan history reveals that states and military forces are drawing on older histories of the frontier’s discomforting fungibility as threatening. 5.2. Illicit networks transgress the myth of the container state While borderlands are framed as no-man’s lands or spaces of exception (Jones, 2009), some scholars argue that we should instead think about networked borders. Life in the borderlands transcends fixed lines, particularly since many nation-states claim sovereignty that can extend up to 100 miles on land or sea. In the case of Guatemala, migrants and traffickers may successfully cross through ‘‘blind passes’’ without state border checkpoints, only to find themselves detained at a checkpoint 30 km past the border (Galemba, 2012). Just as these ‘‘blind passes’’ threaten the sovereignty of both Mexico and Guatemala, they threaten the core zones of protected areas. It is in the production of ‘‘blind passes’’ as threats that green security intersects with national military logics. Under the Mérida Initiative, Mexico attempted to create a southern border that makes traveling from southern to northern Mexico more difficult and dangerous than traveling from northern Mexico into the southern US. Illicit networks threaten the myth of the container state, in which people, kinship networks and ethnicities, and economies are based in one national identity that is reflected by Westphalian territorial boundaries (Agnew, 2003; Elden, 2010). It is only in this context that we can properly understand the central role of US state agents, Mexican border agents and regional organizations (SOUTHCOM) in the production of the borderlands as a threat. Paradoxically, these organizations must themselves transcend borders as fixed lines in order to perform them. While supposedly the US DEA would only work in the United States, agents perform key job duties internationally, in which they are effectively exempted from following either US or host country laws when they conduct operations (Loperena, this issue). The premise of ‘‘domestic’’ US agencies working in Mexico and Central America seems to be that the agencies are working abroad as a temporary suspension of normal activities until these putatively ‘‘weak states’’ can effectively control their own national borders. Thus, while anti-narcotics operations are meant to reassert nation-state boundaries in a performance that simulates ‘‘weak states’’ as coherent and fixed in bounded spaces, the insecurities that spark these operations demonstrate the fallibility of state-centric boundaries. For example, Fig. 5.1 demonstrates the US DEA’s estimation of Mexican cartels’ ‘‘areas of dominant influence’’ represents them as mutually exclusive and contiguous shapes on a map that conforms to the borders of the Mexican nation-state, despite the fact that the DEA pursues these cartels north and south of the map. It is as if the DEA hopes to reproduce the idea that these cartels are a Mexican problem, rather than a transnational problem, by
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mapping them exclusively onto Mexico. While a caption notes that the map is ‘‘subject to change given the fluid nature of Mexican [Drug Trafficking Organizations],’’ it does not show areas of overlap, competition or collaboration between cartels. Two examples of how cartel territoriality transgresses DEA imaginaries could be the ways that the Zetas (dark green) is slowly swallowing up the Gulf Cartel (light green) and the struggles between the newly independent Zetas cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel (orange) over the Mexican–Guatemalan borderlands. In sharp contrast, the putatively ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘failed’’ state of Guatemala is often represented with little territorial continuity. For example, Fig. 5.2 delineates key border departments, but territory is represented in brown – in other words, cartels are not represented as having fixed territorialities. Despite Guatemalan perceptions (and occasional Zetas declarations in paid radio advertisements, as in Cobán, 2008) that cartels do control contiguous territories, US security analysts rarely represent Mexican cartels as territorializing Guatemala, just as arrows that easily pass through it. This reproduces the idea that massive international cartels that traffic everything from people to parrots are primarily Mexican, and penetrate the porous borders of the Guatemalan nation-state. As such, the retrenchment of Westphalian territoriality through borderlands security is framed as simultaneously saving weak nation-states. From what I understand, cartels operate somewhere between the representations of networked arrows and contiguous shape-maps (see also Dudley, 2012; Osorno, 2012). Historically, sophisticated drug trafficking organizations were organized through cartels around the reliable delivery of illegal drugs to US-based sellers – cartels were middlemen with high markups. With security crackdowns under the Mérida Initiative and CARSI, reliable trafficking became more difficult and thus more expensive. Seizing this opportunity, the Zetas splintered from the Gulf cartel and took over large swaths of Mexican territory through the use of violence as spectacle. Rather than conducting the trafficking, cartels with name recognition now claim control over key transportation arteries and routes north, then franchise these to entrepreneurs seeking to traffic drugs, gun, natural resources, and/or people (either for migration north or kidnapping for ransom, usually a mixed model). In summary, transnational cartels seem to effectively work at the limits of container states to their advantage. As Nordstrom (2004, 91) explains, the most powerful of these networks control finances and resources larger than many of the world’s economies, and the value of illicit trade networks often dwarfs that of licit trade networks. Perhaps more threatening to centralized nation-states, illicit networks are not competing to become states – cartels engage in state-like behaviors primarily to usurp the state’s role as protector, but not replace it (Tilly, 1985; Leeds, 1996). While transboundary conservation projects such as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) might seem to suggest the waning importance of nation-states, in practice the MBC likewise employs green security logics that are predicated on contiguous and territorially bounded protected areas. As with state-centric politics, conservation policies rely on – and reproduce – a distinction between internal and external territorialization (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001). National protected areas systems are nested within the presumption of a territorial container state (Massey, 2004), whereas the ability of illicit networks to traffic beyond the bounds of the container state is the very source of their power. If cartel violence were the primary reason that state agencies read borders as frontier threats, then it is hard to see why unaccompanied minors would comprise a crisis that needs to be met with securitization. In summer 2014, a waft of urgent news stories emerged in English-language media about a US–Mexico border
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Fig. 5.1. DEA representation of Mexican cartels (Beittel, 2013).
Fig. 5.2. Drug trafficking networks, represented as arrows (Wells and Stone, 2013).
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‘‘humanitarian’’ crisis. Border Patrol apprehended more than 68,000 unaccompanied children in one year, a 77% rise that signals mass desperation and migration, even as it obscures the 361% increase in ‘‘family unit’’ apprehensions (US CBP, 2014). Most children were what CBP calls ‘‘Other than Mexicans’’ from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The US has responded through media campaigns to explain to Central American youth that they will be deported, even though most youth apprehended already know this, as they reported this was not their first attempt to immigrate to the US (Gonzalez-Barrera et al., 2014). In response, Northern Triangle leaders proposed a ‘‘Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle,’’ which appears to be a new initiative but draws on language similar to CARSI in calls for ‘‘public safety’’ and ‘‘strengthening institutions’’ (US State Department, 2014). In his public endorsement of the $1 billion aid package, Vice President Biden (2015) stated that ‘‘first, security makes everything else possible. We can help stabilize neighborhoods through community-based policing, and eradicate transnational criminal networks that have turned Central America into a hotbed for drug smuggling, human trafficking and financial crime,’’ which he described as a ‘‘climate of endemic violence and poverty.’’ In other words, the US, Mexico and Northern Triangle governments plan to intensify their current security programs, rather than rethinking them. The effectiveness of remilitarization strategies in stemming the tide of drug and human trafficking north through the production of citizen safety is unproven at best. If present trends continue, the US will allocate funds to alleviate a ‘‘humanitarian crisis’’ that Guatemala will devote to state violence in the name of citizen security.
6. Guns, drugs and friends: Securing the Maya Forest While state cooperation in transnational trade and conservation projects might seem to transcend borders, the intertwined relationship between these and transnational policing of trafficking and conservation with violence reveals the liminal politico-legal status of people and places in the borderlands (Hyndman and Mountz, 2007; Popescu, 2011). Security is often framed as a prerequisite to developing international business cooperation, infrastructure or protected areas protections. The US, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank have devoted monies to projects for regional economic development including infrastructure and trade, as well as conservation initiatives including climate change mitigation, but international efforts have increasingly centered around the idea of Mexico and Central America as security problems to be fixed. Perhaps one of the most clear indications of this was a report to US Congress entitled ‘‘Guns, Drugs and Friends’’ (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2007), which argued that the US must develop friendly relationships with Mexico and Central America to deal with gun and drug trafficking in order to foment positive trade opportunities. While the title is not explained in the report text, it seems clear that Mesoamerican friendships are read through the lens of US security.
6.1. Guatemalan rural remilitarization in the name of ‘‘citizen security’’ Despite the shift in American policy from ‘‘national’’ to ‘‘citizen’’ security, the meaning of citizenship is unclear in regional plans. In other words, what is the imaginary of the citizen whose security must be ensured? Building on critical geopolitics and security studies, we can interrogate the ways plans that purport to have the objective of promoting citizen security use rural remilitarization as a means to achieve this goal.
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Sites for security, sites for violence What the Mérida Initiative, Plan Mesoamérica, and CARSI have in common is the ways that regionalized plans are carried out through a series of bilateral agreements, revealing changing and inconsistent meanings of citizenship and security. In 2012, the Guatemalan Congress officially approved a loan for a project to create a System of Vigilance and Protection of the Guatemalan Biosphere, which strengthens the institutionalization of the Jungle Special Operations Brigade. As this is the first legislative approval of remilitarization (since the 1996 Peace Accords dictated its dismantling), it is worth examining Decree 28-2012 at length: ‘‘The Guatemalan Republic has registered in recent years an increase in illicit activities in its territory, especially where the State has no presence, Alta and Baja Verapaz and Petén in the north of the country. This circumstance has allowed for a high level of natural resource depredation, due to problems related with the increasingly high levels of international drug trafficking; due to organized crime, the scourge of poverty amongst the majority of the population and the institutional weakness of state agencies responsible for safeguarding sovereignty and security, which has a strong impact on economic, social and environmental issues.’’ This institutionalization follows on the heels of actions where successive presidents declared temporary martial law (estados de sitio) in the Maya Forest, stripping residents of freedom of assembly, giving police and soldiers the right to search and arrest without a warrant, and to censor press coverage of these activities. Leftist president Alvaro Colom declared estados de sitio for military campaigns against drug trafficking in two departments of the Maya Forest, Alta Verapaz (2010–2011) and Petén (2011). Former military officer Pérez Molina was elected president in 2012 after campaigning to bring back iron-fisted justice (mano dura), then successfully working with Congress to respond to the supposed need to remilitarize border regions ‘‘where the State has no presence,’’ bringing together claims of conservation with ‘‘sovereignty and security,’’ as above.11 Whereas Colom began assembling ‘‘green forces,’’ Perez Molina expanded the reach of these forces, renaming them roving Brigades and equipping them with planes, ships and guns (Decree 28-2012). To the best of my knowledge, there are currently three major roving brigades: the Jungle Special Operations Brigade ‘‘Víctor Augusto Quilo Ayuso’’ based out of La Libertad, Petén, the High Mountain Brigade on the northwestern border with Mexico in San Marcos, and a Military Police Brigade ‘‘General Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales,’’12 in San Juan Sacatepéquez. As of August 2014, the fourth brigade will be an extension of the Jungle Special Operations Brigade into Alta and Baja Verapaz, a place where a state functionary explained that people are ‘‘accustomed not to having authority,’’ and that ‘‘would be converted into a drug trafficking corridor, that starts in Izabal, arrives in Quiché and Huehuetenango to penetrate Mexico’’ if left unchecked (Anonymous, 2014). Whereas the first two roving special operations brigades are arguably related to the nexus of deforestation and drug trafficking, the third brigade reveals the disjuncture between US funding for ‘‘citizen security’’ and Guatemalan implementation for ‘‘safeguarding sovereignty and security.’’ San Juan Sacatepéquez was not listed as a problem site for intervention in the 2012 law because it is not along Guatemala’s northern border, it does not have a significant drug trafficking problem, and as a central municipality the Guatemalan legislature does not list this as a place where ‘‘the 11 Apparently State presence is not important in terms of education or health services where state sovereignty is threatened. 12 Former Defense Minister, a US civil court found him guilty of a massacre of Q’anjob’al Maya, as well as kidnapping and torturing a nun, Dianna Ortiz, in 1995.
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
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State has no presence.’’ Rather, it was the site of massive peaceful protests against natural resource extraction by Cementos Progreso plant, which was met with police and military violence. In September 2014, the Defense Ministry declared martial law (estado de prevención),13 and the role of the new brigade is to bring ‘‘security.’’ In this case, the supposed root cause of insecurity that threatens state security is rural citizens who are protesting the cement plant’s massive negative environmental effects, particularly in terms of water. In this logic, military brigades use violence against citizens to produce security with international assistance for ‘‘citizen security.’’ Otto Pérez Molina is precisely the person whose ideologies weave these seemingly disparate threads together – for most Guatemalans, there is no contradiction that he was both a military commander who ran a major scorched earth military campaign that the UN condemned as genocide, and as president advocates for decriminalization of some illicit drug activities. Unfortunately, these contradictions of killing people in the name of safety are in keeping with regional historical patterns. 6.2. Kaibiles rule the jungle, but who rules the kaibiles? In their call for conservationists to rethink ‘‘narco-deforesta tion’’ and advocate for decriminalizing some drug activities, McSweeney et al. (2014) imply that iron-fisted enforcement and decriminalization are mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, Pérez Molina and the Guatemalan government are simultaneously promoting iron-fisted military law and calling on Latin American nations to consider decriminalizing drug use and cultivation (not trafficking). One social commentator highlighted a similar dynamic in El Salvador: ‘‘What we have in the post-civil war era is una ensalada [a salad or mixture] of progressive and regressive laws, an incoherent, disordered, and contradictory set of laws’’ (in Zilberg 2011, 172). In post-war El Salvador, Zilberg explains, the Súper Mano Dura (Super Iron Fist) Plan was paired with the Mano Amiga (Friendly Hand) and Mano Extendida (Hand Outreached) for violence prevention and gang rehabilitation. While some scholars argue that ‘‘official development initiatives increasingly conflate development with militarization’’ (Galemba, 2012, 826), the iron fist and the hand outstretched have always been part and parcel of the same territorial project. Historically, military dictators treated rural massacres as an ethno-political cleansing necessary for the success of their simultaneous rural development projects in the region. Likewise, Pérez Molina’s calls to decriminalize drugs does not mean that the Defense Ministry will scale back its anti-trafficking campaigns. While decriminalizing drugs could be an important step in rethinking the ‘‘war’’ on drugs as a public health problem, this would have little impact on the escalating state attempts to bring security through violence in protected areas and borderlands. One clear implication of this two-pronged strategy including remilitarization is in privileging Kaibiles special forces to lead Jungle Brigades. Kaibiles are inextricably linked with some of the most horrific practices during massacres at the height of the Guatemalan civil war. Some people in US became familiar with the massacre at Dos Erres, Petén, and the kidnapping of a child survivor through a This American Life story (Rotella and Arana, 2012). The narrative largely elides the role of the US in funding and carrying out the training of Kaibiles who committed the massacres, much less current funding for similar activities in the name of ‘‘citizen security.’’ Kaibiles are renowned for their grueling training program, which supposedly culminated with a survival test in the jungles of Petén with only a dog as a companion that soldiers 13 In the Guatemalan gradation of ‘‘States of Exception,’’ the estado de prevención is less harsh than an estadio de sitio, but both authorize martial law measures for security reasons.
had to kill and eat to graduate. While I saw no mention of the Kaibiles unit in official US State Department or Congressional documents, Spanish language media implies the state’s clear and public embrace of Kaibiles as central to citizen security, including taking reporters on tours in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve (as in Michel, 2013). It is also of note that President Pérez Molina was a Kaibil in his time with the army. On a practical level, the central role of the Kaibiles does not bode well for the safety of rural borderlands citizens. As Charles Bowden (2010, 109) declares, ‘‘in over a half century of fighting drugs, Mexico has never created a police unit that did not join the traffickers. Or die.’’ The same, unfortunately, seems true for Guatemalan police and military units. The Zetas first came to Guatemala in the mid-1990s as the enforcement branch of the Gulf Cartel, making the borderlands department Alta Verapaz their operations base (López, 2013). Since then, Kaibiles have been a key source of Zetas recruiting, and security scholars characterize the Zetas as ‘‘paramilitary’’ because of their strategic incorporation of counterinsurgency strategies (including violent spectacles like beheading and torture), complex assaults, and intelligence (Brands, 2010). Today, US funding for ‘‘citizen security’’ goes to train and equip Kaibiles who are supposed to keep the jungle safe from ex-Kaibil Zetas. During repeated states of martial law, any person Kaibiles encounter in raids is presumptively breaking the law. Nonetheless, the chief of the US Southern Command recently praised US-Central American military collaboration for human rights promotion, saying ‘‘I challenge anyone to argue differently, unless of course one does not trust US intentions in the region and also does not have the faith in the decency of our military men and women’’ (Kelly, 2014). I feel compelled to respond personally to this challenge. My father served the US army in Vietnam – while he is a decent man, this does not mean that US actions were above reproach. Likewise, I have concerns about US interventions in Mexico and Central America, but I write this piece as a hopeful provocation to the Southern Command, Guatemalan military, and international conservationists to be accountable to citizens of the Maya Forest. 6.3. What does remilitarization mean for the future of the Maya Forest? Securitization reframes historically contentious political claims around the Maya Forest into risk assessments of ‘‘narco-deforesta tion.’’ While work to decriminalize the consumption and cultivation of illicit drugs would represent an important progressive move, this might do little to ameliorate the criminalization of so-called ‘‘narco-peasants’’. After all, President Pérez Molina promotes both decriminalization of illicit drug use and remilitarization of the countryside. Likewise, securitization through militarization is unlikely to have a salutary effect on conservation. ‘‘This is just a slight disruption for them,’’ said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He estimated that 70 percent of Mexico’s 550-mile border with Guatemala is controlled by the Zetas (Booth and Miroff, 2011). While power dynamics in the border region are constantly in flux, years of securitization accomplished little in trafficking routes from Montes Azules Biosphere in Mexico through the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala. I have argued that remilitarization continues to produce the Maya Forest as a threatening frontier, which centers state presence in the form of militarization (rather than social services). It seems likely that trends towards remilitarization will demonstrate to rural citizens that repression is inherent to protected areas management. Whereas funding for conservation and climate change mitigation has rallied around the imaginary of the ‘‘Maya Forest,’’ the bulk of funding channeled into the region is through security
Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004
M. Ybarra / Geoforum xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
programs that envision it as a porous border that leaks drugs and undocumented immigrants north on their path to the US. Of course, security funding increasingly extends beyond the bounds of the Maya Forest. For example, a Guatemalan state official claimed that 58 of 334 municipalities are ‘‘ungovernable’’ due to drug trafficking (Agencia ACAN-EFE, 2012). While securitization is not specific to the Maya Forest, it encompasses it. Today, protected areas officials only patrol with the military, leading rural residents to associate them with remilitarization and repression. As Duffy (this issue) demonstrates, some conservation BINGOs attempt to harness these fears in their fundraising. One notable example is the claim by Rob Walton (of Wal-Mart) and Harrison Ford (actor) for Conservation International that ‘‘there is a direct connection between international conservation and U.S. economic and national security interests.’’14 The Maya Biosphere Reserve’s remilitarization is part of a longer history of exclusionist conservation. The original, supposedly inclusive, language describes a project of ‘‘weaving small farmers into the Mesoamerican Corridor,’’ (Miller at al., 2001, 10), which ascribes agency only to conservation agencies and implies that rural residents did not practice conservation in the region in the first place – in other words, Mesoamerica is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet in spite of, not because of, the people who have lived there. Likewise, conservation projects’ move to inclusive planning asked leading questions like, ‘‘What degraded ecosystems in the area should be restored and why?’’ (Miller at al., 2001, 17), which foreclosed the opportunity for rural communities to articulate positive conservation practices in the Maya Forest. These practices have usefully been critiqued in the making of the Maya Biosphere Reserve (Sundberg, 2003, 2006; Grandia, 2012). Unfortunately, the current conjuncture reveals a trend that escalated from treating rural residents as illegitimate and inefficient resource users towards a reauthorization of state violence. The reframing of environmental criminals as part of drug trafficking organizations serves to associate rural citizens with sophisticated weapons, paramilitary skills, and/or terrorist affiliations. While there are certainly gangs and cartels that have paramilitary training and sophisticated weapons, these people are less likely to live in long-term housing in protected areas without access to potable water or electricity. Rather, sophisticated criminals are able to collaborate with or simply evade state security forces while the poorest of the poor are structurally vulnerable. While their capture may allow state security forces to claim success in term of people arrested, it seems possible that the citizens who are most vulnerable to drug trafficking organizations are also those who are most vulnerable to state policing. This article has argued for the continued and resurging importance of militarization in both development and conservation practices. While regional trade agreements have indeed reshaped national economies to create conditions of possibility for resource privatization and even land grabbing, analyses of capitalism must look to the relationship between licit and illicit economies. Green security narratives produce narco imaginaries, where narco activities articulate with deforestation and human migration to produce all three as a single, urgent threat. While the performance of green security in the Guatemalan borderlands has important material effects, these do not include lower homicide rates or lessened drug trafficking through the Maya Forest. Instead, the primary effect of green security seems to be justification of increased state violence that is not contingent on any benefits to citizens.
14 Conservation International (2014). ‘‘Promoting economic, national and global security.’’ http://www.conservation.org/projects/Pages/Promoting-Economic-National-and-Global-Security-Direct-connection.aspx (accessed 27.04.15).
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Acknowledgments Many thanks to collaborators in Petén and beyond for challenging me to think through the relationship between USA security and everyday lives in the Maya Forest. I am also grateful to Kidan Araya, Alice B. Kelly, Kevin Gould, Christopher Loperena, Norman B. Schwartz and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in developing ideas in the paper. All translations from the Spanish are mine, and I am responsible for all arguments and errors in the paper. References ACLU, 2015. The constitution in the 100-mile border zone. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
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Please cite this article in press as: Ybarra, M. ‘‘Blind passes’’ and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.004