Fire and Water

• In Event: The precarious foundations and futures of Guatemala’s ‘judicial spring’

Abstract

In the 1999 UN truth commission report the Maya-Ixil territory of northern Guatemala was identified as a place where acts of genocide occurred. In 2013 the genocide ruling was confirmed in the historic court case against General Efraím Rios Montt. The very large number of people killed was compounded with the scorched earth tactics that annihilated people’s homes, clothing, food stores, crops, and domestic animals as proof that the intention was to destroy in whole or in part the Ixil people. “The ashes weren’t even cool when they brought in the megaprojects,” an Ixil human rights activist told me in early 2018. This paper traces the double entwining of fire and water as the genocidal burning gave way to massive interventions into the landscape to capture and extract hydropower and as water turns turbines to spark the fire of electricity that crackles overhead through high tension wires that leave the area in frequent darkness while lighting other homes in “our America” through export economies. This is what Giovanni Batz and Ixil activists call “the fourth invasion” (2018). Yet, as in other homelands of originary peoples, such “landscapes of power” (Powell 2018) are sites and stakes of struggle. The science fiction invasion of those high tech extractive formations may even shake up time itself, leading to the revivification of socio-political formations like ancestral authorities that many had thought were long relegated to the past. It also raises complex questions about how to confront the Anthropo-Capitalocene.

Author

• Diane M Nelson, Duke University