Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders

Conclusion: Common Futures

198 Conclusion Common Futures It could happen once; the like could happen again. Pathih hun ten e; bey he u patal u lac e —Mayan proverb, from the Book of Chilam Balam S hortly after the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, Catholic friars began teaching the Maya elite to read and write their own languages using a Latin alphabet. Nine of these manuscripts recorded by Yucatec Maya priests survived and are collectively known as the Book of Chilam Balam. Some of the texts were mixtures of colonial history and Maya prophecy , while others discussed Maya agronomy, astronomy, and medicine (Bricker and Miram 2002). The following passage is from Munroe Edmonson’s translation of the sixteenth-century book of Tizimín, describing the arrival of foreigners in Maya lands: And there was the beginning And the construction of the god House That is in the middle of the city Of Merida Piling on work Was the burden of the katun [a Maya time period of twenty years] And there was the beginning Of the noose. And started was the fever of the nose Conclusion 199 And limbs Of the white lima bean Grove lands, Bringing with it their poison And their ropes over the world— Affecting children And younger brothers With the harsh lash, With the harsh tribute. And there was great theft of tribute: There was the great theft of Christendom (1982: 59–60) Increased workloads. Religious conversion. Tribute demands. Corporate punishment . Poisoned soils. These have been the recurrent burdens of the Maya and other indigenous peoples subjected to colonial, Liberal, and then neoliberal plunder during the thirteenth baktun1 (roughly 394 years in the Gregorian calendar). Marking the closure of a much longer calendrical cycle of more than five thousand years ending on the winter solstice, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0 in the Maya Long Count calendar), this period, according to ancient Maya prophecy, was to be an epoch of great strife and transformation.2 In contrast to a Western Enlightenment paradigm characterizing history as linear and progressive , the Maya view time as cyclical. Hence, any prophecy depends on the unfolding of the past. In that spirit, let us first review Q’eqchi’ agrarian conditions over the last baktun. The three major periods of displacement and expropriation of the Q’eqchi’ were (1) after the Spanish colonial invasion, (2) during the Liberal reforms of the 1870s that fueled Guatemala’s coffee boom, and (3) through the counterrevolutionary colonization and development programs. During each of these historical moments, the Q’eqchi’ people sought to escape the misery of plantation labor by migrating from their highland homeland of Alta Verapaz into the lowland hinterlands of both Guatemala and Belize and managed to stake substantial pioneer land claims. However, an agrarian squeeze caused by both demographic and distributional factors, compounded by a frontier property trap, prevents Q’eqchi’ farmers from sustainable agricultural intensification . World Bank land legalization programs meant to stabilize the agricultural frontier are now exacerbating regional land speculation. Following an inherent expansionary logic, cattle ranchers were the first to appropriate Q’eqchi’ land, 200 Conclusion but others have followed. In turn, this land concentration serves as a conduit for new transnational business investment under the PPP and the DR-CAFTA. Rather than closing the gap between economic classes, these trade and infrastructure programs seem to be giving a helping hand to “those who already have a centuries-old head start” (Roy 2001: 178). Over time, these many consecutive colonizations (Bartra 2004) served to re-create the asymmetries of landownership in Guatemala. Layered upon colonial structures, new economic systems have maintained inequities dating back to the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. These historical repetitions help explain the central paradox of frontier colonization—that is, how, in a remarkably short period, Q’eqchi’ settlers lose the land they worked so hard to claim, thereby replicating the agrarian inequities that compelled them to migrate to the lowland hinterland in the first place. It is as if, to borrow a phrase from historian David Noble, the Q’eqchi’ people “confront a world in which everything changes, yet nothing moves” (1977: xvii). As the ancient Maya proverb in the epigraph prophesies, “It could happen once; the like could happen again” (Edmonson 1982: vi). To be sure, the continuities of Q’eqchi’ dispossession were not accidental; they required reinforcements. Unveiling these repeated processes of enclosure reveals Guatemala’s persistent, pervasive, and seemingly intractable issue...