See the link below for latest issue of Democracy and Society with my (short) article on security and governance in Guatemala entitled:
“State Fragility, Transnational Crime & External Intervention in Guatemala: Regional Security as a Governance Challenge”
http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/DS-Vol.-10-Iss.-2-Spring-2013.pdf
I recently reviewed a research proposal for an ethnographic study of the dynamics of violence and the responses by local actors in a low-income barrio in Guatemala City. The methodology was focused on seeing violence through the eyes of neighborhood residents by means of observation and interviews. The proposal made some mention of examining the macro-social contextual factors that affected the area as well, such as economic and political marginalization, which are generally understood to be drivers of violence in such communities.
In my comments, I suggested that the researchers focus much more on this last element. I mentioned that there existed a number of studies such as the one they were proposing, oriented towards understanding the character of violence in vulnerable neighborhoods in Latin America. Researchers have also studied the types of responses local actors have carried out in these situations. However, the linkage between underlying structures of economic, political and social exclusion, on the one hand, and local dynamics of violence, on the other, have not been as fully explored, at least not empirically. This, I argued, would be the most policy-relevant area of potential investigation: understanding the relationship between macro-structures and micro-dynamics.
As long as the linkages between structural exclusion and neighborhood violence remain murky, efforts to promote citizen security will continue to focus on the violence itself as the cause of security problems, rather than a symptom of an underlying cause. Efforts to address violence often treat violence as a characteristic of an individual, or possibly group, rather than an element of the structures in which those actors are imbedded. If we could better understand the relationship between structural exclusion and violence, we could better address the underlying issues that were making individuals and communities more prone to violence. That would be a step forward in the journey towards addressing spiraling levels of violence in many cities throughout Latin America.
In my own research on vulnerable urban communities in Guatemala, I have attempted to delve into this connection between macro and micro, particularly concerning political dynamics. In Guatemala, the nature of political clientelism, a much-studied phenomenon in Latin America, is more short-term and transactional, better described as vote buying. Political parties are too weak and fragmented to build and sustain the durable forms of clientelism associated with parties like Mexico’s PRI and Argentina’s Peronist Party, which have endured for generations. Rather, parties focus their resources on more simple and direct exchanges of material goods for votes.
On the ground, I found that parties interfaced with community leaders in an attempt to secure votes. They deployed promises, both of future benefits for the neighborhood and for special consideration for local leaders (often cash or a commitment to provide a government job), building materials such as bags of cement or corrugated metal sheets, or a tangible physical project in the community. This last option was actually quite rare, as the cost to the party often outweighed the benefit. Voting is secret and there were over a dozen parties to choose from, so political operatives were hesitant to commit significant resources in an uncertain exchange.
The impacts of the macro-political context were several. First and most importantly, the interchange between community leaders and political parties, given the total lack of credibility of the later, weakened the position of those leaders in the community. Association with a party opened local leaders up to charges of corruption and manipulation. Second, political parties did not build any lasting machinery or affiliates on the ground; they simply disappeared once the elections were finished. Thus, political parties remained weak and were not a mechanism to channel the interests of citizens to the government. Vote buying is a substitute for a more programmatic basis for party identity, and a means of marginalizing citizens, by exchanging political rights (a citizen’s vote) for a material good at the time of election, rather than responsive service throughout the elected official’s term in office. The absence of credible political parties and the presence of vote buying practices sustained the political marginalization of poor urban communities, leaving them systematically ignored by elected politicians.
Studying the link between broader structural factors and local dynamics can be challenging, as the relationships are often complex and indirect. Isolating relevant contextual elements can be difficult, as can the search for causal linkages. Yet such research can yield promising policy recommendations to long-standing and challenging problems. Specifically, it can allow decision-makers to differentiate symptoms and causes, and thus channel resources to the most effective leverage points to promote positive change.
Have a look at my new article published in Public Knowledge Journal entitled “AIDing Democratic Governance? Examining USAID Efforts to Strengthen Participatory Governance in Guatemala and Bolivia”.
You can find it here.
Check out the other articles in the current issue on Interventions here.
Feel free to comment on the issues raised.
And, as always, the views expressed in the article are my own and not those of USAID.
Vote buying is a phenomenon found all over the world. Vote buying differs slightly from clientelism in that the latter often entails more durable relationships based on repeated interactions, relationships and symbolism. The buying of votes, on the other hand, can be viewed as a more episodic and transactional event. As a political strategy, clientelism is infinitely preferable, as it is associated with much high predictability of outcomes. A Mexican PRIista or Argentinian Peronista has likely been supporting the same party for years and is well enmeshed in a system of favors, relationships, symbolic exchanges and functions to demonstrate expressions of party loyalty (see studies by Javier Auyero for the case of Peronist clientelism).
In Guatemala, however, political parties do not have nearly the resources, organization, or ideology to establish such structures and relationships. Guatemalan political parties are incredibly ephemeral, often functioning for only 2 or 3 elections before fading into irrelevance and being disbanded. Thus, parties often rely on more abstract promises and proposals to influence voter preference. But parties have also had a long history of offering more tangible inducements, such as food, fertilizer, building materials, etc. A recent (2012) study the National Democratic Institute (NDI), Accion Ciudadana and the University of Notre Dame examined the phenomenon of vote buying in Guatemala and provides some concrete evidence on the prevalence of this activity.
The investigation found that 37% of respondents reported being aware of vote buying in their locality. Only 4.4% of respondents reported that their vote was influenced by vote buying activities however. Due to the likelihood of under reporting the study utilized a methodology to establish a more accurate estimate of actual participation in vote buying, arriving at a figure of 17%. Given Guatemala’s poverty and lack of established political parties, one might view this figure as rather low. It would seem logical that the cost of a vote for Guatemala’s poor majority would be rather economical for political parties versus the rather high cost of advertising, especially buying television air time. Yet vote buying is unpredictable. Individuals may accept material inducements from many parties and vote for none of them on election day. Improvements in electoral practices, particularly disallowing individuals to enter with cell phones, and thus photograph their ballot to confirm their loyalty, have reduced the efficiency of one-off vote buying transactions.
Yet in certain localities, vote buying is prevalent. The following table presents the results of a survey in 7 neighborhoods of a low income urban area on the periphery of Guatemala City. Survey respondents were asked to identify any of the following 4 activities undertaken by political candidates and parties in their neighborhood during the most recent elections in 2011: General promises and commitments; Promised personal benefits; Campaign paraphernalia, food and trinkets; and materials or a community project.
| Neighborhood | General promises/ Commitments |
Promised personal benefits |
Shirts/Food/ Trinkets |
Materials/ Project |
| A | 49% | 82% | 49% | 55% |
| B | 43% | 52% | 29% | 10% |
| C | 95% | 75% | 55% | 80% |
| D | 95% | 66% | 66% | 14% |
| E | 73% | 41% | 45% | 23% |
| F | 83% | 83% | 83% | 17% |
| G | 10% | 90% | 25% | 10% |
| AVERAGE | 64% | 70% | 50% | 30% |
The evidence from the survey shows that political candidates and party operators are much more prone to promises, of a general or personal nature, than to opening the coffers to provide tangible benefits. And when they do opt to make use of campaign funds for material inducements, they are more likely to be of an insignificant nature (party shirts and hats, food, etc) than a contribution of materials to a community project, or carrying out a project on their own.
Is this good news for political consolidation in Guatemala? Its hard to say. If it is a demonstration that political parties are shifting away from vote buying to more ideological and policy based platforms, this would be a positive step. However, if it is simply a political calculation that investing in material vote buying is less cost effective than broader advertising campaigns, then it may not signify any improvement in Guatemala’s weak political party system. In either case, in the absence of more stable political parties that represent the interests of the majority of Guatemalans, the country’s democracy will remain fragile and even superficial.
polis: Governance is Key in Addressing Urban Poverty.
Check out my post on the blog Polis related to urban governance. It draws a few quick and basic lessons from my dissertation research on low-income urban areas in Guatemala. The basic idea is that a lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms at the municipal level, combined with little organization and political agency by the urban poor, leads to a situation where such communities are not well served by local infrastructure and services and subject to political manipulation by local political actors.
polis: Can ‘Co-Production’ Bring Infrastructure to Informal Settlements?.
I came across this blog post while (re)rewriting one of the essays for my dissertation. I was intrigued because it was written by a master’s student working for SPARC, an organization in Mumbai that I have been a fan of for a while now. The topic of the blog is co-production in slum upgrading, focusing on evidence from Nairobi, Kenya (I’ll be examining co-production-ish activities in slums in Guatemala City). The author highlights the real possibility of co-production schemes solidifying informal (and second class) service-provision arrangements, but notes that “But when done well, [co-production] can address gaps in services and policy that government or private firms alone can’t solve.” However, if one posits that governments (or private firms) “can’t solve” a challenge like urban service provision to slum communities, the caveat must be added “under the dominant paradigm of neo-liberal urban governance”. I’ll again refer back (this is becoming a habit) to Raj Desai’s piece I reviewed a few weeks ago. The issue for governments isn’t so much “can’t” as “isn’t induced to”, because the urban poor do not (generally) constitute a cohesive political block that can effectively wield political agency. City budgets respond, to a greater or lesser extent, to those with political clout (which can also take the form of financial clout). Case in point: on the outskirts of Guatemala City the government constructed a new $3 million overpass to facilitate the entrance and exit to a gated community for wealthy families. Three million dollars were invested to shave a few minutes off the daily commute of (at the most) a couple hundred people. How many families living in Guatemala City’s many slums could have been provided with basic water and sewer service for $3 million?
So my intention in starting a blog was to write in it at least once a week (I know all my readers await my posts with bated breath). However, I’ve been going back and forth a bit with USAID because there is a possibility that the powers that be need to approve my blog posts. But I figured I might as well forge ahead, while the situation gets resolved.
Last week I posted an editorial written by friend of mine that I found quite provocative (Spanish readers can find the article here) in Facebook. I would like to consider that piece in more detail here. Essentially, the author goes through a list of the shortcomings of Guatemala’s democracy, including:
This is clearly just a sample of Guatemala’s democratic deficits and dysfunctional public institutions. The author could have gone into the corruption of public servants, the ineffectiveness of the justice system, or the complicity of elements of the security sector in the trafficking of drugs, weapons and human beings. Yet the few examples provided are enough to remind any reader familiar with the Guatemalan context of the superficiality of country’s democracy. Retail democracy, according to the author, is not the selling of democracy so much as it is the treating of the state as a business that exists for the private benefit of those elected or appointed to be its custodians.
The author laments that Guatemalans complain of the situation in which their country languishes, but do not set foot out the door and become part of the change. He cites movements against austerity in Spain and of students demanding public education in Chile, and correctly points out that citizens must safeguard democracy, rather than leaving that most important of tasks up to the government (particularly governments enmeshed in the very democratic shortcomings elaborated earlier).
The solution to democracy’s problems, it has often been said, is more democracy, and often more participatory democracy. That is what the author is arguing. Citizens must participate in order for democracy to function. Fair enough. But how?
Lets look at some recent examples of citizen participation in Guatemala over the past couple of years and see if they represent a nascent movement that might address the country’s flawed democracy.
What, if anything, can we learn from these different citizens movements that have arisen in Guatemala in recent years? The first is that there do exist circumstances under which Guatemalans will take to the street and raise their voices. In most of the cases above, the issue at hand relates directly to the quality of life of those involved in the movement or protest. In the other cases it was the death of a loved one, and subsequent impunity, or latent anti-Colom sentiment that found an outlet in the accusations against the then-president.
The second lesson is that middle and upper class individuals are more likely to form spontaneous movements, whereas the poor often need some kind of organizational base to generate and maintain citizen involvement. This lesson is neither surprising nor new. Yet it does focus attention on the need to strengthen organizations working to mobilize those with legitimate grievances, but less capacity to participate.
Third: movements are prone to political manipulation. The Rosenburg death was orchestrated by anti-government elements and the subsequent protest utilized by the opposition, both with the intent to weaken, if not overthrow Alvaro Colom. In the Totonicapan protest, it seems that a legitimate movement was somewhat manipulated by opponents of the government, again with the objective of weakening the president. In this case, it is unclear what, if any, complicity community/organizational leaders had in this manipulation, but in any case it leads to another point.
Fourth. Movements need to be accountable to their base. Historically, organizations in Latin America have been hierarchical and leaders have been authoritarian. Unfortunately, this legacy persists, and even organizations espousing egalitarian ideals and authentic democracy fall into this trap. When transparency and accountability mechanisms within a movement or organization are weak or nonexistent, the possibility of manipulation or corruption increases substantially, benefiting a few leaders at the expense of other members. (This point applies universally in Guatemala, as many community organizations face the same challenges)
Fifth, and finally, Guatemalan governments are not particularly responsive to citizen’s movements. If we leave aside the Rosenberg protests, which unraveled as facts about the case emerged, the remaining 4 movements have little to show for their efforts. The constitutional reforms are moving ahead (if haltingly), the rural development law and other proposals have yet to materialize, Christina’s killer remains at large, and mining operations have expanded at an ever-quickening pace.
Why have these organizations and movements struggled to achieve their explicit goals? Does this imply that such efforts are in vain? To address the second issue first: no, clearly not. The pressure generated by these movements has resulted in some gains. The Justice for Cristina movement led to the arrest and charges of obstruction of justice of Christina’s husband’s mother, a former head of one of Guatemala’s high courts. This was no mean feat. Some of the mining protests have kept mines shut down, keeping money out of the pockets of owners and politicians alike and (hopefully) making a negotiated arrangement more likely (especially in the wake of the Totonicapan massacre, which led to a ban on military involvement in protest activities).
Yet, there is an important caveat. Only the anti-mining referendums have used a legal mechanism to channel their demands (however ineffective this has been). The other movements have indeed taken to the streets, but have not generated the number to paralyze a country, such as recently demonstrated in Spain and Argentina, or even give vote-conscious politicians pause for thought. One key difference, between the aforementioned countries and Guatemala, in the former, powerful unions were involved in the protests. Guatemala lacks such unions (the most visible is the teachers union, which is a textbook, pardon the pun, case of the capture of an organization by corrupt and unaccountable leaders). The CNOC is not a union per se, but rather a federation of organizations, which can mobilize thousands, but not hundreds of thousands.
In each of these cases (again, leaving out the Rosenberg protests), the government has made symbolic (and perhaps even authentic) efforts to listen to protesters’ demands, but ultimately, has not felt compelled to take significant actions. Why? It is the difference between the Occupy and Tea Party movements in the United States. The former took to the streets, and stayed there, the latter took to the polls and elected dozens of law makers. In Guatemala, diverse protests and movements have not made meaningful political alliances that would allow their demands to be more meaningfully considered within the states decision-making apparatus (in either the legislative or executive branches). Opposition leaders have been glad to utilize movements and then discard them, but have made little effort to bring protesters into the party as constituents. This is due to the weak and fragmented nature of the political party system in Guatemala, in which parties are built around money and personality, rather than any policy platform, much less explicit ideology (though the overwhelming majority of Guatemala’s 2 dozen or so parties are clearly to the right of the political spectrum, representing the interests of their financial backers). Thus, citizen’s organizations and movements have few possibilities of channeling their participants’ votes in way that would generate the changes they are seeking.
Political parties and elections are the primary means of translating popular demands into policy and holding governments accountable in most democracies. In Guatemala’s case, both components of this mechanism are dysfunctional and must be strengthened. Citizen’s movements and organizations would be wise to press for the passage and implementation of the current reform proposal for the country’s Political Parties and Elections law, which could be an important, although likely modest, step forward. Citizens must also take advantages of organizations like Accion Ciudadana, which trains volunteers to monitor congresspersons’ votes so that they can be held accountable. Other transparency efforts might diminish the public money channeled into vote buying schemes, thus forcing political candidates to address meaningful issues in order to win political support. Increasing use of social media, while not making a (second) Guatemalan Spring likely, does present an opportunity to build awareness and strengthen participation of young people (with the Rosenberg case again serving as an important warning of potential manipulation). Finally, strong citizens movements must be internally democratic, instituting mechanisms of accountability and inclusive decision-making, if they are to remain credible and effective.
To conclude, I will mention that is is the urban popular classes that perhaps lack a clear movement or organization that might serve to channel their interests. And it was likely to this population that my friend was speaking in his editorial when he urged greater participation. This points back to Raj Desia’s work on the political agency of the urban poor, which I reviewed last month.
Citizen’s efforts must take place both within and outside of the democratic system, and must use varied strategies, both protest and collaboration, in order for meaningful change to result. Movements should also look at avenues for action at the local level as well, particularly on issues such as mining or development. In sum, more Guatemalans do need to step out into the street if their country is to become more democratic, but the capacity of democracy-seeking organizations and movements must be built and strengthened as well, if citizens are to have a mechanism to channel such participation that is (reasonably) free of manipulation and can enhance the agency of individuals to be instruments of change in the public arena.
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Musings on Cities, Citizenship, Urban Development, and other things I find interesting
Musings on Cities, Citizenship, Urban Development, and other things I find interesting
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