After Judicialization? Law, Authoritarian Regression, and the Defense of Indigenous Life-Worlds in Guatemala

The late twentieth-century recognition of indigenous peoples as collective subjects of human rights represents a case of “iconic indexicality,” as international human rights instruments held out promises of recognizing difference, repairing colonial harms, and reckoning with the slow violence of genocide. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples in Guatemala mobilized human rights through legal actions to defend their ancestral territories and ways of being, mirroring similar processes occurring across Latin America. Yet at the same time the intensification of extractive industries deepened processes of capture of state apparatus by corrupt elites and criminal networks, leading to backlash and the stalling or reversal of earlier legal victories. Today indigenous communities and their allies are subject to systematic criminalization and renewed processes of legalized violent dispossession. This chapter argues that the current “juristocratic reckoning” with the promise of indigenous rights must be viewed in the longue durée. Indigenous people have engaged with hegemonic forms of law since conquest, and although these engagements acquired new dimensions and intensity during the twentieth century’s “age of human rights” (Goodale 2022), they were accompanied by a keen awareness of the historical role of law in old and new forms of colonial violence and dispossession. This is because colonial legal orderings of land and territorial resources are always racially constituted. As Nichols (2020), Di Giminiani (2018) and others have shown, the laws of the colonizers remade indigenous worlds by constituting land as an alienable object (“property”), displacing alternative “land ontologies” to justify racialized inequalities grounded in systemic violence. The late twentieth-century turn to law by indigenous peoples never supplanted other horizons of justice premised on alternative lifeworlds; indeed, the juristocratic shift and its centering of “self-determination” served to amplify claims and histories conceived prior to and beyond human rights law. As this chapter shows, through processes of judicialization indigenous lawyers’ collectives in Guatemala have meticulously documented long-run theft of indigenous lands and appealed to less individually centered and proprietary understandings of land to stake decolonial claims to self-determination. Various mechanisms have been deployed; for example, special expert witness reports or different forms of indigenous self-representation in court to amplify alternative ontologies within the public sphere. This strategic, discursive, and affective engagement with the law is just one part of ongoing processes to strengthen autonomous self-governance.