The state, institutions and population fronts in guatemala’s northeast: the case of Usumacinta inhabitants

Abstract

This article has the objective of reflecting, first, on some factors
that allowed rural populations in Guatemala’s northeast to turn
to displacement as a subsistence strategy. Among them, we want
to highlight a type of conglomerate of individuals, that we will
call population front, from peasant groups. In the second place,
we will highlight that these groups move in spite of the State
agencies’ interventions and projects for development. Their
contradictory interventions did not prevent the breakdown
and impoverishment of social forms in peasant domestic units.
Thirdly, beyond the identity classification as indigenous/
white with which otherness in Guatemalan population is
understood, we attempt to open a discussion regarding the
construction of a collective meaning in these inhabitants. As
a result of displacement as a subsistence strategy and the
unstable relationship with the State during the second half of
the 20th Century, emotions – the notion of suffering – prevail
in the construction of social memories. There is an attempt
to abandon the idea that refers to ethnic collective identities,
present in the south of the country since the Spanish Colony,
a conceptualization based on which development strategies are
designed, in the case of Petén. In conclusion, we describe the
processes that configure contents in the construction of meaning
in these rootless groups, synthesized in the suffering with which
these populations interiorized displacement.