LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Linking Hydro-Extractivism to State Power in Guatemala

• In Event: Water Ontologies and Hydro-Extractivisms: Decolonizing Rivers in Central America and the Himalayan Region

Abstract

As freshwater becomes a strategic resource, because of climate change, water scarcity and man-made forms of deprivation around the world, there is a greater need to understand how societies, governments and corporations configure access and control of available sources. In Guatemala, neoliberal reforms laid the groundwork for a more intensive and deregulated approach to water extraction. The country was also the site for rapid development of different forms of hydro extractivism, starting in 2004. In this period, the Guatemalan government prioritized the development of a long term and ongoing energetic plan (matriz energética) that focuses on hydropower, as the main source of energy for the country, and the Mesoamerican region. As such, hydroextractivism in Guatemala is linked to deeply rooted tendencies that procure private profit over socio environmental well-being. These tendencies are connected to historical and actual frameworks that link (trans)national capital, government officials, and oligarchic families with one another, to modes of accumulation by dispossession. This paper focuses on describing and analyzing the historical and current framework of political and economic contention, that gives way to socio environmental conflicts based on hydro extractivism. We will argue that the dynamics of contention are reproduced because of an authoritarian and ontologically “liberal”, Euro-Western legacy, that gives a certain strategic orientation to state power, infrastructure and forms of governance, in the midst of a rapidly changing world-system

Author

• Diego A Padilla, Universidad Rafael Landívar