The Anti/Corruption Continuum: Generation, Politics and Grassroots Anti‐Corruption Mobilization in Guatemala 

Abstract

This article takes anticorruption activism as a starting point for analyzing how young activists unequally experience the inequalities produced by corruption, as well as the bureaucratic and financial weight of anticorruption and audit culture. Against the backdrop of Guatemala's now‐defunct pioneering anticorruption commission, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), we utilize the concept of the anti/corruption continuum to analyze the contradictory positions of young people fighting against and depending on corruption for their economic survival. Gender, age, and class dynamics and young people's economic precarity make clientelism difficult to avoid and often curtail participation in movements for change. While most discussions of the CICIG's work focus on the national level, this is a unique view on how national‐level politics reverberated locally in a Mayan community.

Regenerating Maya‐Mam ways of governing, Indigenous emancipatory politics in the age of the extractive imperative

“…In this way, FREDEMI refused to see Guatemala's culture of corruption as signaling “historical exhaustion” (Muir, 2016, p. 131). They rejected any reading of Guatemala's local state politics as inevitably corrupt, thus echoing some of the older Indigenous activists that Jennifer Burrell, Mounia El Kotni, and Ramiro Fernando Calmo (2020) worked with in Guatemala's Highlands. FREDEMI believed that complete moral integrity amongst their local political leaders was possible, and worked tirelessly towards cultivating this belief.…”

“…The demilitarization that followed the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 did nothing to improve the situation for Bámaca's people; the Army continued to be called upon to enforce the oligarchy's agenda by repressing the people's opposition, including their demonstrations against Marlin. The corruption scandals that forced Guatemala's president, vice president, and other top officials out of office when Dugal was conducting fieldwork in 2015 (Burrell, El Kotni, and Calmo, 2020) were not particularly surprising for FREDEMI members. According to López, “governments … are not looking out for us.…”

The Resilience of Democratic Values Under Difficult Conditions. The Case of Guatemala 2012-2021

“…A noticeably characteristic of Guatemalan protests is that the anti-corruption rethoric (at least in this cycle of protests) included both progressive and conservative civil society groups, ranging from human rights movements to religious, anti-abortion and anti-LGTB agendas (Pereyra et al, 2023) which manifest its powerful impact on the national political process. Even the effect of anti-corruption claims at the national level have had an impact on how organized younger generations -specially in Mayan communities-have challenged the political culture of impunity at the level of municipal governments (Burrell et al, 2020).…”