No description available.

Spanning 1982-1985, the Counterinsurgency War was the violent period of the county's thirty-six year civil war. The army under General Efrian Rios Montt targeted the Maya villages and communities throughout the Guatemalan Highlands with more than 400 recorded massacres in just a three year span. At the center of this study is the population of Guatemalans that left their country as refugees and later came back as retornados. The term retornado, reflected an emerging identity that stemmed from the new and transformative experiences of exile in Mexico. Their direct negotiations with the government reflected the new skills, organizational ability, and political capital that challenged the distribution of power in the family, community, and nation upon their return. The emergence of women's organizations demonstrated not only a shift in the politics of citizenship rights and inclusion, but also Latin American women's unique contributions to the development of feminist discourse.

This study offers an account of the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), concentrating on the political, social and economic aspects of his regime. Following the 'Liberal' inheritance of the Justo Rufino Barrios years (1871-1885), Cabrera is a significant figure in the trajectory of autocratic regimes in Guatemala, which, with few interruptions, stretches from Rafael Carrera (1844-1861) to the present day. Cabrera inherited some of the techniques of Guatemalan dictatorship, but he was also an unorthodox and controversial ruler, remarkable for his sustained retention of power and for the methods he used. The historiography of nineteenth and twentieth-century Guatemala is not generally rich and the Cabrera period is one which has been neglected. Although the United States' and several other diplomatic archives were examined in order to complete this study, it must be stressed that it does not try to explain Guatemalan history through U.S. foreign policy; rather it seeks to focus on the man, and the people who kept him in power for twenty-two years. Diplomats and travellers wrote informative reports which often give frank assessments of character and motive, as well as commenting on internal and external matters in reports which supplement local sources. Secondary sources have also been examined, as well as what remains of Cabrera's private archives, contemporary letters and documents. Furthermore, oral sources added much information. This dictatorship is intrinsically interesting, given the peculiarities and unusual transformations which Cabrera instituted in his government and in national life so as to retain power. This study of Cabrera hopes to enable the reader to appreciate better how such autocracies have propagated themselves in Guatemala and what strains and pressures they were under, and may even afford some pointers for more recent times.

Modern agricultural production is being intensified worldwide and is often based on monoculture cultivation and the use of chemical pesticides. In Guatemala, the access to land suitable for farming is limited and many people struggle with land acquisition, malnutrition and discrimination. This is the situation for indigenous Mayans in the region of Lake Atitlán, where this qualitative study took place. An alternative approach is permaculture, where the focus is on regenerative living, self-sufficiency and reducing resource consumption. The concept is based on traditional knowledge that has been developed and practiced over time by indigenous people. The aim of the study is to examine how permaculture is practiced by different actors in the area, which includes both foreigners and indigenous Mayans. The research questions focus on how practicing permaculture can lead to ecological and social development in the area as well as what different challenges are encountered. The methods used in this field study was participant observation in the area and semi-structured interviews with ten respondents, both foreigners and indigenous people, who practice permaculture or similar methods. The result has shown that the respondents have experienced an increased access to food that provides a varied and healthy diet, as well as abundant and thriving ecosystems in their surrounding environment. Many of the indigenous respondents have chosen the practice in order to have enough food for a living and reduce their dependence on income and economic structures. In general, foreigners chose this way of life due to its simplicity and their longing to get away from a modern, hectic lifestyle. The respondents have experienced different challenges from current structures, but they are all positive about spreading the knowledge and practice.

No description available.

Thesis (M.D.)--Guatemala, 1902. / Includes index.

This study examines how violence affects youth in marginalized urban communities, focusing on the experiences of three groups of young people: gang members, activists, and the “jóvenes encerrados”, youth who live confined to their homes due to fear. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in El Mezquital, an extensive marginalized urban area in Guatemala City, I explore the socio-economic conditions that trigger violence in these communities, the responses of young people and the community to violence, and the State’s role in exacerbating violence in impoverished neighborhoods. In this dissertation I argue that gang members and activists are expressing a deep-seated social discontent against the exclusion, humiliation, and social stigmatization faced by young people in marginalized urban neighborhoods. However, the two groups express their discontent in significantly different ways. Initially, gangs used violence to express their discontent, but they gradually resorted to a perverse game of crime, in complicity with the police, and they distanced themselves from their own communities; in this work I analyze gangs’ process of transformation and the circumstances that led to this change. Activists express their discontent through community art and public protest, but their demonstrations have limited social impact, since public attention continues to focus on gangs; here I examine activists’ motivations, struggles, and obstacles. However, the vast majority of young people live in a state of fear, preferring to keep quiet and withdraw into their homes; here I show how violence, fear, and distrust affect the generation born into postwar Guatemala. This study illustrates the perverse role of the State in impoverished urban neighborhoods and its responsibility for the escalation of urban violence in Guatemala. On the one hand, the State shuns residents from these neighborhoods and systematically denies them basic services; it criminalizes and abuses young people, even forming social cleansing groups to eliminate gang members. On the other hand, the State fosters crime in these communities and acts as gangs’ accomplice in extortions, drug trade, and robberies. As in many other Latin American countries, the Guatemalan State penalizes crime, but simultaneously encourages and benefits from it; the State is complicit in crime. / text

This thesis is an investigation of the evolution of economic inequality in Guatemala. High inequality and poverty levels in the country are two widespread social problems, almost defining characteristics of Guatemalan society. Although some research has been done in an attempt to understand poverty, far less has been done with respect to inequality. Aggregated measures of both phenomena do not reveal much change, although it may well be the case that different and countervailing forces are acting behind summary indices, providing a misleading interpretation of stagnation over time. Using data from two living standards measurement surveys (LSMS) in 2000 and 2006, this investigation applies a household income generation model and a series of microeconomic decomposition techniques in order to explain some of the factors driving economic inequality. Those factors are grouped into three types of effects: price, occupational choice and endowment. The results show that three structural conditions segment the population: geographical location, gender and ethnic origin. However, they also indicate that over the course of six years, those characteristics have reduced their negative influence on the standard of living of the population. In other words, over time they show a mild equalizing effect, probably the result of changes in market conditions, state actions or a combination of both. Regarding the three types of effects identified above, the results show how market returns to individual attributes (price effects), such as years of education, can act as an equalizing force, particularly for women in the 4th and 5th quintiles of the distribution. Occupational choice effects reflect changes in the structure of the labour force, moving from the inactive to the self-employed, thus generating higher household income. Endowment effects, simulated as changes in household size and stock of education of income earners, are consistent with mild changes in fertility rates and higher public investment in education. Finally, the results leave ample room for social policy. However, for that to occur it will be necessary to increase the capacity of the State to intervene in specific areas, thus requiring higher government revenues while also addressing other institutional challenges such as better targeting of social programs, improving the quality of primary health and education, and investing in secondary schools and hospitals. A third round of LSMS survey would help corroborate whether observed reductions in expenditure and income inequality are truly a trend or just a temporary phenomena or simply a statistical artefact.

The alteration at the low-sulphidation epithermal Banderas Au-Ag prospect, Guatemala, was characterized using a portable infrared mineral analyzer (PIMA) spectrometer and shown to comprise illite, buddingtonite and, on surface, kaolinite associated with gold mineralization. The Spextract python program, developed by the author, was used to measure variations in the short-wave infrared spectra (SWIR) which were then mapped as equal-area-of-influence or voronoi diagrams. Voronoi maps of the 2200 and 2350 nm absorption features, position and depth, respectively, for illite and 1560 and 2120 nm feature depths for buddingtonite indicate that illite crystallinity and ammonium alteration intensity increase towards gold mineralization. The latter observation suggests that gold transport and deposition may have been controlled by ammonia complexation. At conditions likely to have prevailed during mineralization, i.e., temperatures between 150° and 250°C, a pH between 5 and 8.5, an oxygen fugacity ( fO2 ) near the hematite-magnetite buffer, a chlorinity of 0.5 m, a total sulfur activity of 0.001 m, and a total nitrogen activity of 0.004 m, AuNH3 +2 is the dominant ammonia complex and gold solubility at optimal pH- fO2 conditions reaches ∼65 ppm at 250°C. In contrast, the maximum solubility of gold as AuHS -2 , the species normally assumed to control gold transport in epithermal systems, is approximately four orders lower at 250°C; at 150°C the solubility of AuNH3 +2 and AuHS -2 are essentially the same, i.e., ∼9 ppb. A model for Au-Ag mineralization is proposed in which hydrothermal fluids were focused along NW-SE extensional faults and at the contacts of rhyolite domes and tuffs, and gold transport and deposition were controlled mainly by ammonia-dominated complexation and boiling-induced temperature decrease, respectively.

Throughout the 1960s, Guatemala’s radical left became consumed in an internal debate concerning the revolutionary strategy they believed should be followed to generate radical socio-political and economic changes in Guatemala. Confronting the societal anxieties that accompanied advances in modernity, such as growing wealth inequality, new forms of social poverty, and the marginalization of the fragments in Guatemalan society (primarily, peasants and workers), Guatemala’s radical left encountered a fundamental quandary in the development of its revolutionary methodology. Should they work within the confines of electoral democracy to realize radical reforms or, as a militant faction of the radical left increasingly proposed, would radical changes require an armed struggle aimed at toppling the nation’s entire system of governance?