Cement in sacred territory: contesting extractive constitutionalism in Guatemala

While multiculturalism in Latin America recognised specific Indigenous peoples’ collective rights, the prevailing legal, institutional and political arrangements privileged the neo-extractive economic model, which I understand as extractive constitutionalism. In Guatemala, this extractive constitutionalism supports a regime normatively and institutionally designed to serve the interests of small non-Indigenous elites whose power and wealth depend on the control of land and public institutions. In the specific case of Quetzaltenango (the country’s second-largest city), the dominant extractive industry is the quarrying of construction materials located in the hills of the Pa Lajuj No’j valley mainly inhabited by the Maya K’iche’. This cement and concrete industry creates Indigenous sacrifice zones by not only destroying the environment but also damaging people’s livelihoods and community weaving. However, my findings show that in these K’iche’ territories, organised Indigenous leadership has engaged against these industries by using legal instruments and invoking a justice of nature as a core Indigenous repertoire of socio-legal mobilisation. Drawing upon interviews with public officials at national and municipal levels, Indigenous and mining actors, secondary sources, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that extractive constitutionalism, although difficult to alter due to its entrenchment, is contested by reclaiming territorial ancestry through the sacred and care.