Hydroelectric Chimeras and “Our” Mayan Rivers: De-inscribing Security in Guatemala

Abstract

This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as “internal enemy.” People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how “scripts” like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of “security”—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera.