Memory and Migration

Claudia was smart and driven, and had planned to work as an accountant after graduating high school. But every job she applied to required a college degree—something she didn’t have and couldn’t afford.

Like so many other Indigenous women in her country, Claudia found her opportunities hemmed in by her circumstances. Losing hope of finding a job, she passed her days weaving huipiles to sell in Xela.

With few options, Claudia came to see migration to the U.S. as her only path forward. “It’s a risk, but I’m wasting away here. I want to be somebody.” she told her parents, according to Marie Claire. “Don’t worry—I will make you very proud of me.” She headed north.

Two weeks later, on May 23rd, 2018, Claudia was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Rio Bravo, Texas while crossing the border. Her family and community were left devastated and without answers, with the Border Patrol issuing conflicting statements about her death and refusing to name the shooter.

Indigenous youth in Guatemala are faced with an impossible dilemma.

Those who stay and struggle for a dignified life at home face stacked odds in a country characterized by dystopian levels of inequality. A 2015 study by research firm WealthX estimated that Guatemala’s richest 260 people have a combined wealth of US$30 billion, while most people survive on less than $3 per day. Two thirds of arable land is owned by just 2% of landowners, most dedicated to large-scale exports like palm oil, sugar cane, and bananas.

On the other hand, migration means a traumatic separation from family and culture, and is increasingly risky. The U.S.’s militarized immigration enforcement strategy is designed to kill migrants, and it is working. Every year hundreds die crossing the desert and thousands more disappear in Mexico. Those who reach the U.S. suffer abuses in the workplace and live in constant fear of deportation.

Undeterred by the risks, some 20% of the population in many Indigenous villages has emigrated north, a testament to the severity and intransigence of structural racism in Guatemala. Despite sustained protest by Indigenous and working class movements, power and wealth remain concentrated in the hands of the corrupt economic elite, who control the government and allow transnational corporations to operate with impunity.

Ironically, U.S. foreign policy has played a key role in maintaining these uneven power relations and producing the very “root causes” of migration it claims to work towards solving today. Far from a beacon of hope, the U.S. has long been an architect of suffering for Indigenous Guatemalans, who continue to survive and resist after more than 500 years of cyclical invasion and exploitation.

The colonial logic of extraction and cruelty that persists today in Guatemala began in the days of the Spanish invasion, when roughly two-thirds of the Maya population died in the conquest and subsequent epidemics. The Spanish claimed vast tracts of land and instituted a brutal system of forced labor, justifying their violence with a racist ideology of criollo superiority.

Maya peoples resisted fiercely, preserving autonomy and communal land holdings in some highland regions. Still, by the end of the colonial period, persistent patterns of exploitation were established in Guatemala: mono-export, weak government and a lack of infrastructure, and the channeling of wealth to a tiny oligarchy and foreigners.

For Indigenous peoples, independence from Spain in 1821 brought no change for the better. In the words of thousands protesting during observation of the bicentennial in 2021, there was “nada que celebrar”, or “nothing to celebrate”. Dispossession and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the tiny elite only accelerated in the ensuing decades with the growth of the plantation economy.

As the craze for coffee and sugar accelerated in the late 1800’s, so did the expropriation of lands from Indigenous communities. In the Mam highlands, communal land holdings were decimated and forced labor on plantations was widespread. This 1888 map by Carlos Schulitz shows the massive scale of the coffee economy in the altiplano, where almost all land suitable for coffee was carved up into plantations.

During the first half of the 20th century, the Guatemalan government granted massive concessions to foreign capital, especially to U.S. companies. Dictators Manuel Estrada Cabrera(1898-1920) and Jorge Ubico(1931-1944) ceded so many monopolies and priveleges that by 1944, “United States companies virtually dictated Guatemala’s economic life”.

First and foremost among the U.S. corporations was United Fruit Company (UFCo), which monopolized banana production, controlled the railroads and ports, and owned much of the country’s best land. By the middle of the 20th century, UFCo owned 42% of Guatemala’s land and posted annual profits of more than $65 million, more than twice the revenue of the Guatemalan government.

The repression of the plantation era peaked with the 14-year reign of Ubico, who maintained control with thousands of secret police who routinely murdered and tortured dissidents. Ubico instituted a brutal system of forced labor that ensured UFCo and the coffee plantations a steady supply of cheap labor despite severe, underpaid working conditions.

Finally, in 1944, a student strike snowballed into a popular revolution that toppled Ubico and began what some historians have called the ‘Democratic Spring’. For the next ten years, a fragile representative democracy held sway and the feudal domination of the planters and foreign companies was truly challenged for the first time.

President Juan José Arévalo (1945-1951) abolished forced labor, enabled basic freedoms of speech and press, and passed a labor code that enabled union organizing. Yet Arévalo’s government limited rural labor unions and failed to truly challenge the foreign monopolies. President Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954) confronted the landed oligarchy and corporations more aggressively, most notably through the agrarian reform of 1952.

The 1952 Agrarian Reform Law was designed to address the most important and enduring barrier to equality in Guatemala: access to land. The law enabled the expropriation of fallow land from the largest landowners and its distribution to landless citizens. The law was supported by the majority of Indigenous and working class people, and bitterly resisted by the tiny elite, who saw it as an existential threat.

No landowner stood to lose more than UFCo, which had only 15% of its sprawling 550,000 acres in active production. From the earliest days of the 1944 revolution, UFCo and the landed elite had resented its democratic reforms and plotted its overthrow. UFCo, connected at the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration, finally convinced the U.S. government to topple the Arbenz government in 1954.

While the Eisenhower administration publically claimed a Communist threat as pretext for the CIA coup, the real aim was to oust Arbenz in favor of a repressive government that would protect the profits of the U.S. monopolies. According to historians, “every U.S. policymaking official involved in the decision to overthrow the Guatemalan government, except for President Eisenhower himself, had a family or business connection to United Fruit Company”.

The CIA used a mercenary army, aerial bombing, and a barrage of psychological warfare to overthrow Arbenz and install Carlos Castillo Armas in his place. In the months following the coup, the U.S. government warmly embraced Armas as he presided over a bloody counter-revolution that saw thousands of unionists, campesinos, and civil society leaders brutally murdered and imprisoned.

The CEH’s landmark report was only made possible by the dedication and bravery of the witnesses and organizers, who fought for justice despite great personal peril. Many of the recruiters and interviewers belonged to popular movement organizations such as the AEU (San Carlos Student Association), GAM (Mutual Aid Group), CUC (Committee for Peasant Unity), and CONAVIGUA (National Association of Guatemalan Widows), human rights groups whose members were criminalized and murdered during the conflict.

Despite heroic efforts to expose state-sponsored violence, the publication of the truth commision’s report did not signal a new age of accountability and justice in Guatemala. Impunity was built into the CEH from the start, as it was bound by its creation to avoid naming individual perpetrators. The recommendations of the CEH, like the broader commitments of the Peace Accords, were never really implemented, and prosecution of war criminals has been delayed and obstructed at every turn.

From the devastation of the colonial invasion, to the exploitation of the plantation era, to the genocidal violence of the armed conflict, a history of invasion has left deep scars in Indigenous communities. The structural inequality that drives the migration of Maya children like Claudia, Jakelin, Felipe, Juan, Wilmer, and Carlos is inextricably linked to this history—especially since the cycle of invasion has continued in the post-war era.

Democracy and dignity have remained under attack in Guatemala’s post-war period. The 1996 Peace Accords promised to address socioeconomic disparities, protect human rights, and create a multicultural state with equal rights for Indigenous peoples. Instead, the peace process paved the way for a new stage of invasion marked by the intensification of extractive capitalism, the empty promises of neoliberal multiculturalism, and the violent repression of land, water, and human rights defenders.

The rhetoric of multiculturalism promoted by the state has proven hollow. According to Kaqchiquel anthropologist Rigoberto Ajcalón Choy, “the Guatemalan state began to tolerate certain indigenous claims, especially to cultural rights, but it was unwilling to accept their economic rights, particularly those related to the struggle for territory and resources-oil, water, forests, minerals, plants, and animals, among others- because these affect dominant-sector interests and interfere with the government’s plan to promote capitalist investments”.

While the Guatemalan government paid lip service to Indigenous rights, a wave of neoliberal economic reforms in the 1990’s and early 2000’s ensured the continued domination of the elite and transnational corporations. These reforms included the privatization of public services, the passage of mining laws biased towards the interests of foreign capital, and the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005.

Abandoned by the government, struggling to make ends meet, and facing retaliation for resistance, many choose to migrate in search of dignity and security abroad. But many also choose to stay, continuing a tradition of resistance and survival, refusing to be separated from their lands, raising their voices and organizing to demand change.

Near Felipe Gómez Alonzo’s village of Yalambojoch, the Peaceful Resistance of the Microregion of Ixquisis continue to defend their territory from the unlawful development of a hydroelectric dam. They are one of many Indigenous communities across Guatemala demanding that the government honor their right to “prior, free, and informed consent” as guaranteed by law, and halt extractive mega-projects that destroy the land and leave communities impoverished.

Organizing in the streets and advocating change through art, Guatemalans continue to demand an end to discrimination against Indigenous peoples, women, and the poor. Leaders like Kaqchikel singer Sara Curruchich exemplify the resolve of Indigenous women, who she says should be considered “actors of change, fundamental actors for the prevalence of our Indigenous knowledge, and a pillar of sustainability for our communities and for the entire country, for the world”.

Transnational advocacy networks continue to struggle against border militarization and the criminalization of migrants, which compound insecurity and result in the death and disappearance of thousands each year. Groups including the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants are drawing attention to the cruelty of immigration enforcement regimes, while others such as the ACLU are demanding justice for the deaths of Claudia and other migrant youth.

Despite criminalization, communities continue to defend their lands and denounce the corruption of the state and economic elite, whose power is visible in institutions such as the CACIF, a coalition of business elites that “essentially exerts a veto power on undesirable economic policies”. Led by defenders like Q’eqchi’ schoolteacher Bernardo Caal Xol, recently released after four years of imprisonment for environmental defense, the people continue to struggle against extractivism, impunity, and structural racism.

The mass exodus that claimed the lives of Claudia, Jakelin, Felipe, Juan, Wilmer, and Carlos will end only when their voices are heard. Until then, the people will continue to fight, in memory of those who came before, and on behalf of those to come, for the right to dignified life in Guatemala. ♦