Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala

2. Violence, Sovereignty, Governmentality

2 Violence, Sovereignty, Governmentality They make slaughter and they call it peace. —Tacitus, in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, 3 Introduction This chapter explores the “contexts” of the present research further, and specifically the ways in which different cultural texts may illuminate contrasting and of­ten contradictory aspects and interpretations of social life in Guatemala. Through juxtaposition, partiality and what is or has been “out of context” are brought into the descriptive frame (Fardon 1990; Strathern 1987). In my analy­ sis I aim to delineate “plurality in context,” through reflections on the contextual and located character of selected accounts and the systems of representation that may be said to underpin them. Accounts and fragments of social reality relationally contextualize each other while also pointing to what has been out-­ contextualized and kept out of view. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous cultural texts—as much as their mutual out-­ contextualization—gives a form to the multi-­ sitedness of my fieldwork.1 In other words, the complex social reality of Petén is here contrived to reveal itself in the pieces and parts of the itinerant and multi-­ sited research practices, through which Petén contextualizes and contextualized itself in that elusive and open-­ ended interval that was and is the temporality of the field/fieldwork (Hastrup 1990; 1995). In this chapter, I take issue with the systemic models of analy­ sis and representation of the social and cultural realm, and the exclusions they engendered . I note that social and cultural analy­sis of Guatemala has deemed Petén to be “out of context” in the sense of being tangential to national, regional , and international dynamics. Conversely, I explore how Petén, rather than being peripheral vis-­ à-­ vis national, regional, and international contexts , has in fact been enmeshed in complex relations with the nation-­ state and regional and transnational geopo­ liti­ cal realities. To reflect on the relation between Petén and the nation-­ state, I discuss the administrations of Violence, Sovereignty, Governmentality / 51 Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz and note how these impacted con­ fig­ ura­tions of social life in the departamento, notably through policies of colonization . Further, I note how the forest of Petén was the training ground for the counterrevolutionary forces that staged the invasion of Cuba in 1961, thus challenging accounts that have represented Petén as peripheral vis-­ à-­ vis national and international events. In point of fact, the region of Petén was a site of early militarization and counterinsurgency. I proceed to document the establishment and operations of the government agency in charge of the development of the region between 1960 and 1989, namely the Empresa Nacional de Fomento y Desarrollo de Petén (National Enterprise of Fomentation and Development of Petén; FYDEP) and argue that since its inception, FYDEP amounted to an organism of oligarchic self-­ governance, which was under direct control of the Guatemalan Army. As such, a focus on FYDEP allows for the delineation of processes of relentless and progressive militarization of the departamento in the sec­ ond half of the twentieth century. Further, I consider the operations of FYDEP and specifically FYDEP’s role in overseeing the colonization of Petén as a project of governmentality, through the accounts of FYDEP personnel.2 I argue that through a consideration of different orders of connections that have produced Petén his­ tori­ cally as a site of governmentality, histories of insurgency begin to contextualize themselves. Defying linear periodizations of the conflict, I conclude by noting contemporary forms of violent governmentality in the guise of conservationist agendas and document the displacements they generated during the course of my fieldwork. El Petén The departamento of El Petén is the north­ ern region of Guatemala, which has consistently occupied a relatively peripheral location in both a capital-­ centered national imagination and the highlands-­ oriented gaze of social and cultural analy­ sis. Contemporary Petén amounts to roughly 36,000 square kilometers enclosed by the Guatemalan highlands of Alta Verapaz to the south, the departamento of Izabal to the southeast, and the periodically disputed borders with Mexico to the northwest and Belize to the northeast. Envisaged as a vast, remote, and sparsely populated rainforest punctuated by innumerable ancient Maya archaeological sites,3 Petén was said to be for most of the twentieth century a relatively distant outpost (Samayoa Rivera n.d.; Schwartz 1990; Soza 1970).4 “To the untrained eye, that is, to most of us, as late as...