Apartheid

all agricultural land in Guatemala is owned by just two per cent of the population. 45
Aside from the short-lived exception of the fledgling Sandinista government in
neighboring Nicaragua during the 1980s, the Guatemalan apartheid elites were surrounded by
regimes friendly to theirs. Right-wing, pro-US, and mostly fascist and racist regimes have
since long formed a transnational system of oppression of the indigenous peoples and of
others in Central America, many or most aspects of which reach beyond that immediate
region into North and South America, and the world. In the neighboring Caribbean region, on
the other hand, the indigenous were first exploited and decimated, subsequently wiped out of
existence, and then a forcibly imported ethnic majority was oppressed and exploited.
The Guatemalan geo-political situation is thus principally different from the South
African, the Israeli and the Graeco-Roman apartheid societies, which are characterized by
geopolitical isolation within their regions, by hostile neighboring countries (if independent),
and by matching elite attitudes and collective behavior in the apartheid country that
sometimes or often amounts to political, military and social paranoia.
Furthermore, like Rhodesia, Guatemala was never a military, political or economic
power on the global or even regional scale ever since the time that the land was first stolen by
the Europeans. Despite these important differences, Guatemala seems to me to have more in
common with apartheid South Africa (and with Graeco-Roman Egypt and modern Israel) than
any of the other societies considered in this chapter do, except perhaps for the now following
society: Outremer. In the formal sense of my definition of apartheid (see below) Guatemala is
even more of an apartheid society than Rhodesia is, mainly because of its larger oppressive
ethnic minority, around 40 per cent of the entire population, and its much longer period of
formal political independence. 46
45 Maher (senior editor): The Europa World Year Book, 2001: 1804ff (Article ‘Guatemala’); Haviland: Cultural
Anthropology, 5 1987: 401-404; Ellwood: The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 2001: 15; Daniel: Fifty
Years On, Coup Memories Fade in Guatemala, 2004; Brosnan: Guatemala Court Annuls Rights Convictions,
2002; N.N.: US-Guatemala: Clinton Admits US Military Aid Was Wrong, March 11, 1999. Since Clinton never
offered an apology, Guatemala has no way of demanding compensation from its mighty northern neighbor. In a
country like Colombia, on the other hand, the Native Americans have now been reduced to 2.5 per cent of the
population. It is therefore much better described as ‘genocidal’ than as ‘apartheid’. See Abultaif: Colombian
Tribes Hold Rally against ‘Genocide’, 2001. Colombia, however, has been compared to apartheid Israel, mainly
in terms of the two countries’ governments fighting wars for the USA, displacing millions of indigenous people,
murdering hundreds of thousands more, legitimizing state terrorism in terms of a fight against terrorism, and
refusing to solve or even recognize the basic problems behind the violence. See Mondragon: The South
American Israel, 2003. Brazil, similar to Colombia, is probably about to see the extinction of its native
population soon, as it is already down to less than one per cent of the total population. See Fenton 1999: 41. In
Peru, the indigenous are also severely marginalized, although they still amount to 33 per cent of the population.
See Mellado: Peru Party Seeks to Reclaim Power for Native People, 2002. On Guatemala, see also North
American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) editors: An Interview with Rigoberta Menchu, 1996, where the
Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate refers to ‘apartheid in Guatemala’ in previous years. Not until December
2001 was there a first compensation to victims when an equivalent of $1.8 million was paid to families of 226
men, women and children massacred by soldiers and paramilitaries in the village of Las Dos Erres in 1982.
Brosnan: Guatemala Compensates Wartime Massacre Survivors, 2001. See also: Brosnan: Guatemalan Human
Rights Worker Shot Dead, 2002. On femicide in Guatemala, see footnote 296, below.
46 Furthermore, due to the high percentage of Europeans and the manner in which they established themselves,
Guatemala is closer to a genocidal society than Rhodesia – an essentially colonialist atrocity with an apartheid
veneer towards the end of its existence – ever was. Also similar to Guatemala is Bolivia, the poorest country in
South America and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. There, too, a minority of Whites has
dominated a sixty per cent indigenous majority. For 500 years, the indigenous have been denied jobs and
education. Until the 1950s, most of them were virtual slaves in mines or on plantations. Until recently, they were
poorly represented politically, and indigenous lawmakers, slowly growing in numbers, were still unable to
address Congress in their native languages. In 2002, Evo Morales became the first indigenous person to contest
run-off presidential elections. He lost the election, but gained 21 per cent of the vote, which was widely seen as
an encouraging sign by the oppressed majority indigenous groups. See Jones: Bolivia’s Indians Win Long-
Awaited Political Voice, 2002. In 2005, Morales won the presidential elections with an absolute majority after
three years of worsening neo-liberal concentration of wealth and power. He is the first indigenous person to win
45