Cattle, Displacement and Counterinsurgency in Guatemala

On May 29, 1978 between 600 and 1,000 rural indigenous farmers gathered in the town of Panzós, Guatemala at the military post. The farmers were there to confront local cattle ranchers about their land.

After a scuffle involving military guards, more than 100 men, women and children were massacred by the military. All of the victims were Maya Q'eqchi' people - indigenous small-scale farmers from nearby villages in the Polochic Valley of eastern Guatemala.

A week prior to the massacre, cattle ranchers and their gunmen forcefully evicted farmers from their land for not having official titles. Since the early 1970s, several major ranching operations had developed in the valley, including the Compañía Ganadera del Polochíc (Cattle Company of the Polochic). (1)

The Panzos massacre was one of 626 known massacres during the  Guatemalan Civil War  and counterinsurgency that lasted 1960-1996.

A long build-up of land-based tensions between indigenous farmers and colonists, then economic elites and foreign political interests set the scene.

Cattle are a piece of the story.

After WWII, the demand for beef in the US started to increase along with rising incomes.

US ranchers could not supply the entirety of this increasing demand fueled by fast food restaurants like the McDonalds franchise. Where would the US market source more beef to satiate America's taste for hamburgers?

In order to keep up with its own demand, the US offered other countries access to sell their beef to US consumers through import quotas. An import quota is a trade agreement that sets a limit on the quantity of goods that are allowed in a market.

Soon after Castro's 1959 rise to power in Cuba, the Alliance for Progress under President John F. Kennedy began to redistribute import quotas to 'friendly' governments in the region. Central American countries were significant recipients (3).

The Central American Cattle Boom of the 1960s and 1970s took off.

As exports of beef and veal to the US skyrocketed (7), land under permanent pasture increased in these 5 countries.

According to environmentalist  Norman Myers , it is a "hamburger connection" that links cattle production to landscape change and environmental decline:

While cattle production in Central America rose 160 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, the region had lost rainforest cover: before 1960 there were 400,000 square km of moist forest, which declined to 200,000 square km by the time of his writing in 1981 (8).

In Guatemala, government officials and the cattle industry worked together to identify the ideal land for cattle production.

Cattle ranching was expanding to pasturable land that was not being used for export agriculture. This land was in the northern region of Petén and the northeastern departments of Alta Verapaz and Izabal.

This potential cattle ranching land was not empty.

Indigenous subsistence farmers, such as the Maya Q'eqchi' of Panzos, made their living on these fields deemed 'peripheral' by the government. They often had informal land titles or no titles at all.

According to economist Robert G. Williams, "the map of potential cattle-raising areas published in the early 1970s would serve with little alteration as a military map of Guatemala's 'counterinsurgency' zone a decade later" (10).

In the 1960s, armed guerrilla movements emerged in the Guatemalan highlands. The rural Maya were organizing against targeted government oppression, dispossession and  genocide , fighting to keep their land.

In 1966, the success of some guerrilla tactics in the Northeast "sounded an alarm in Washington", and the northeast was declared a counterinsurgency zone. Two US-backed death squads were deployed to control the civilian population and suppress oppositional movements: La Mano Blanca (the White Hand) and Nueva Organización Anticomunista (New Anticomunist Organization). (11)

Whole areas were swept clean of subsistence farmers, whether they were guerrilla fighters or not, under the guise of controlling communist activity. For example, at least 6,000 people were killed in a 1966-1968 military campaign that was meant to confront a guerrilla army of approximately 500 people (12).

Violent land dispossession and cattle ranching expansion were not merely concurrent phenomena that benefitted the ranchers and elites. Rather, the "counterinsurgency forces backed by Washington served as eviction forces" for large-scale cattle exporters (13).

Can the "hamburger connection" be extended to link some of these civilian deaths to international economic interests?

What does this mean for US economic expansion around the world?