Village troubles: The civil patrols in Aguacatan, Guatemala.

Abstract

In 1982 the Guatemalan army compelled highland peasants to take up arms in the civilian self-defense patrols, a militia system that made villagers themselves responsible for keeping armed guerrillas out of their communities. A decade later the rebels had been driven from the highlands and formal military rule had ended. Yet the civil patrols remained. By keeping the guerrillas away, patrollers satisfied a brutal army and helped restore a sense of security to their villages. Yet the patrols led to new forms of violence. Patrol enthusiasts and resisters clashed in many communities, and the patrols' continued existence became a central issue for Guatemalans concerned with human rights and demilitarization. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation presents a social history of the village patrol system in one highland municipio--Aguacatan, Huehuetenango. It traces the history of state-village relations in Aguacatan, then the patrols' origins in counterinsurgency, to the clash over constitutional rights and community obligations, and concludes with the patrols' decline as part of a U.N.-brokered peace process. The study centrally concerns how rural Indians have understood and negotiated this time-consuming imposition. Yet it also considers how the civil patrols enhanced state control. The village patrols illustrate the partial nature of state power in Guatemala, and highlight the continued political salience of peasant community. Sources include guerrilla accounts, human rights reports, and municipal archives. Yet much of the history is based on the constructed narratives of villagers looking back from a militarized present. These recollections are not taken as statement of fact, but as things said and left unsaid, forming a collective discursive structure that actively shaped villagers' response to war. Participants present patrolling as a way to keep both guerrillas and army away, a way of reestablishing the village's sovereignty, less a capitulation to army rule than a popular community labor obligation. Less frequently villagers acknowledge how the patrols helped polarize and militarize local community. The patrols continued because they repress more local conflicts, including land fights and war-related divisions. In Aguacatan, the most insistent and abusive village patrols existed where locals had played a role in army or guerrilla violence against fellow villagers.