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1 results

  • ‘Guatemala Will Never Change’: Radical Pessimism and the Politics of Personal Interest in the Western Highlands

  • NICK COPELAND
  • Journal:
    Journal of Latin American Studies / Volume 43 / Issue 3 / August 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 September 2011, pp. 485-515
    Print publication:
    August 2011

  • This article examines how neoliberal multicultural governance shapes the political imaginaries and practices of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the town of San Pedro Necta. Decades of counter-insurgency warfare have displaced radical politics into sanctioned forms of ethnic empowerment, memory and development, but most indigenous sampedranos have maintained radical investments. Persistent political violence, stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism undermined multicultural inclusion, development and optimism regarding the 1996 peace accords, and weakened community autonomy. The resulting mix of pessimism, unmet needs and divisionism has discouraged progressive politics and normalised political disengagement and, increasingly, self-interested affiliations with multiple conservative parties, including corrupt authoritarian populists implicated in genocide.