The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Extractivism, and Maya Resistance in Guatemala, Giovanni Batz, 2024, University of California Press
The Mayan creation myth, Pop Wuj, tells of how brave twins defeat the lords of the underworld in “the place of fright”, Xib’alb’a, where fear, pain, sickness, starvation, destitution and death originate.
The Maya know a thing or two about resistance—their entire history since the arrival of the Spanish has been spent struggling against invaders and trying to survive against more modern incarnations of these evils.
And as author Giovanni Batz points out, today Guatemala is Xib’alb’a, and the heroic twins are the Indigenous and oppressed peoples still resisting invasion and seeking liberation from a violent and corrupt government.
His book The Fourth Invasion examines resistance from 2008 to 2012 by communities in Cotzal, an Ixil-speaking Mayan region, to the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant constructed by Enel Green Power.
Batz adopts a simple and effective premise—that megaprojects such as this are just one more incarnation of the struggle against invaders that has been underway since the Spanish Conquest.
In Cotzal it was certainly seen that way. The construction of megaprojects by foreign companies was referred to as the “new invasion” or “fourth invasion”, all but indistinguishable from three previous invasions: the Spanish invasion and colonisation; the creation of the plantation economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the state-sponsored genocide that occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96).
The Ixil region, the author points out, has a long history of foreign intervention and extraction, by which external forces impose forms of development through state-sponsored violence.
Megaprojects are merely a continuation of a colonial logic of extraction based on the displacement of Indigenous peoples such as the Ixil and the rapine destruction of their territories, today threatening their lives and self-determination.
The Guatemalan state’s support for these projects, based on the threat or use of violence to ensure they proceed, amounts to an “an undeclared extractivist war” against its long-suffering Indigenous people.
The book situates this in a continuous, if cyclical, history of invasion and resistance, beginning with the Spanish Conquest which, through violence and disease, claimed up to half of the Indigenous population.
The Spaniards created an extractive economy in which the colonisers and their church claimed the land “by right of conquest” and employed the tribute system in a violent way to extract labour, services, food, and other goods.
Nonetheless, there was resistance—from open revolt to everyday forms of struggle against Spanish conquistadores, priests, and colonial agents using what others have called the weapons of the weak.
The second invasion of the Ixil region was a massive land-grab undertaken by military officers, Europeans, and ladinos who displaced the Ixil from their ancestral territory to establish fincas for coffee production, creating a vicious cycle of debt servitude and forced labour.
Powerful and enduring landholding dynasties were created on land from which the Ixil were displaced, including that of the Brol family—very much villains of the piece in the story of Palo Viejo, which was destined for the finca San Francisco owned by Pedro Celestino Brol.
There were similar acts of resistance and revolt during this second invasion but it is self-evident from the persistence of the Brols and other local rulers in the region that these were ultimately ineffective.
In a fascinating set of observations, the author notes how, since the rise of US imperialism, Euro-American academic visitors to the region have provided a detailed set of records providing, in effect, an “insider’s” view of the ways of life of these dynastic beneficiaries of dispossession.
Batz adds: “At the same time, they reveal the extremely racist, sexist, and violent relationships that existed between foreigners, academics, landowners, priests, and Indigenous peoples, as well as growing US imperialist power, which was often the basis for their arrival and their capabilities to conduct work in Guatemala.”
The third invasion of the Ixil region was probably the most brutal and traumatic of all for Maya society, perpetrated by the Guatemalan state and backed by US imperialism, who together committed genocide against the Ixil.
The Guatemalan Civil War saw the worst violence against the Maya since Spanish colonisation, with state forces carrying out a counterinsurgency campaign in the Cold War climate of anti-communism meant to displace, massacre, and eliminate Maya communities that the military considered safe havens for the guerrillas.
It is hard to capture the scale of violence directed against Indigenous people in this period, with the United Nation’s Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) reporting 669 massacres that left 200,000 dead nationally, of whom 83 per cent were Indigenous.
The same report found that the armed forces were responsible for 93 per cent of the deaths and that state agents had committed “acts of genocide” against Maya peoples, with the Ixil region particularly badly hit.
In this case, the resistance, by dint of necessity, was far more pronounced, and many Ixil joined the guerrilla forces, thereby creating what some historians have come to recognise as “the first unequivocally Indigenous and revolutionary guerrilla resistance”.
As Batz points out, there is significant continuity here: the relationship of many Ixil with the guerrilla movement can be seen as part of an historic struggle to recover the lands from which they had been dispossessed during the second invasion.
As a work of research Batz clearly had to overcome significant hurdles to complete this study—not least the resistance of Enel Green Power and the obstructive, intimidating response of the finca San Francisco on which the dam was built. Eventually, he did not pursue an interview with the finca’s owners out of concerns for his safety.
Indeed, the backdrop to this work is one of considerable—and continuing—violence against Indigenous people and those who seek to champion them, underlining the colonial instability that persists in the Mayan heartlands to this day.
In a disturbing section about violence during his fieldwork, Batz provides a tragically long list of people who became victims or were threatened in the period he was conducting his fieldwork, and notes the high levels of impunity that persist for their persecutors.
He writes: “Guatemala remains a dangerous place for Indigenous leaders, environmentalists, human rights activists, and journalists, and in recent years an increasing number have had to flee into exile.”
As an ethnographic study, The Fourth Invasion is supremely well informed and sheds new light on Cotzal, a somewhat neglected focus in past scholarship, off the beaten track, but important here for having established its own ancestral authority, the Alcaldía Indígena, which at that time was not recognised by state officials.
But Batz is also mindful of the responsibility of the scholar schooled in the metropolitan tradition towards those he or she is studying, pointing out that, after all, academia itself “is an extractivist industry”.
The history of western scholarship about Indigenous people, and anthropology in particular, is generally ignoble to the extent that it has been intimately tied, through its dedication to the study of non-European “Others”, to imperialism and colonialism.
This places the onus on the researcher to collaborate closely with the communities in which he or she is immersed and to ensure knowledge-production is accessible, reciprocal, and does not appropriate Indigenous cultures in ways that contribute to their oppression.
This was a responsibility that, as the son of working-class Guatemalan immigrants to the US who identifies as a K’iche’ Maya, the author went to considerable lengths to fulfil, to the point that he even invited two ancestral authorities of Cotzal to be present for and to participate in his dissertation defence at the University of Texas at Austin.
Batz has produced a work that not only tells a disturbing truth, but does so in solidarity with a damaged people he is working hard to help. It is the very best example any scholar can set.
*A free ebook of The Fourth Invasion is available in various formats through Luminos, the excellent open access imprint of University of California Press, which readers can access here.
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Categories: Central America, Guatemala