Social movements and the State in Guatemala: balance sheets and perspectives

Abstract

Despite the destruction and disintegration of autonomy, organization, solidarity and work together, ancestral precursors of a society without exploitation and destruction, were one of the objectives of the armed conflict that Guatemala lived for 35 years, after more than five centuries domination, the Guatemalan people is still standing bravely struggling against pillage of its territory, the exploitation of their labor and the destruction of their cultural and natural environment. After the Peace Accords, however, struggles and movements have been encased in a reformist framework and screen while the State continues to use both violence and ideological manipulation to control them, and most of the leaders have still a great illusion on that democracy, which empties the movements and the struggles of its transformative potential. Almost invisibly, however, a revolution is taking place every day in the country, through multiple underground initiatives, leaving the logic of the capitalist system. The challenge now is to remove them from the reformist framework in which they are, so to make a qualitative leap, start defining political-economic strategies of action and create a favorable correlation of forces to a global and comprehensive social change. This is necessary if we want to leave the caos, violence and repression with a popular strength, build supportive strategies with clear objectives, without which they will be prey of the State and reformist policies again. A conscientious, organized and underground social movement made up of people and organizations involved, to break with the divisions that weaken and constitute a powerful enough system to change the political force, is the challenge: Working hard to tell, study and build a new society together (from capitalist context in which we are), uniting with those who walk in the same direction. Realize the fiction in which we live and expel from our minds alienation in which they have kept us from birth to work together at national and international levels and break down the speech, the fictions, the gear and the inertia imposed on us while we contribute to the construction of the new world.