Local Democracy and Elite Backlash: Mining Battles in Guatemala and Honduras

• In Event: Multilevel Governance and the Subnational Turn in Latin America

Abstract

Do prior consultation mechanisms empower communities facing mining projects, or do they manage and dissolve opposition to projects? Drawing on interviews from fieldwork in Guatemala and Honduras, this paper traces the battle between elites and movements over the meaning and exercise of consulta processes and its implication for subnational popular sovereignty.

In both countries, communities and movements have used consultation processes to significant effect, creating paralysis and frustration in the mining industry. This comes despite each country's weak regulation and institutionalization of consultation processes. In Guatemala, mining opponents engaged a constellation of three different consulta institutions—community consultations, state-led consultations under International Labor Organization Covenant 169 (ILO 169), and municipal referenda—to suspend and prevent mining operations. In Honduras, while ILO 169 rights have been denied, dozens of municipalities have used the largely unstudied cabildo abierto (town hall) to declare themselves free of mining, halting mining projects underway and blocking exploitation licenses. These processes in both countries have undermined the legal certainty that mining capital relies on, generating risk and reducing investment.

Despite the similar chaos these processes have created for the industry in both countries, pro-extractive elites in Guatemala and Honduras responded with different strategies. Guatemalan elites moved from rejecting consultas to regulating them. First, they attempted to centralize all mining consultations under the Ministry of Energy and Mines, removing municipal and territorial autonomy over consultation. Second, they pushed to regulate consultas as dialogue tables without veto power to rebuild investment stability. In Honduras, elites took a more direct but fragmented approach instead of centralization and co-optation. First, elites sabotaged cabildos or ignored their results. Second, when faced with threats to mining, companies at existing projects organized and ran their own pro-mining cabildos, to counter the pressure from mining opponents.

From tracing these battles over the consulta, this paper argues that for prior consultation (and participatory institutions broadly) to be democratically meaningful—rather than spaces of depoliticization and manipulation—communities must be organized and capable of exerting power outside of the consultation institution. In the cases presented, this was necessary to maintain the community veto power that self-determination definitionally entails amid attempts from elites to regulate, ignore, sabotage, and defang popular consultations. In other words, the consultation right became more meaningful the less movements relied upon the consultation process and the more they converted it into a legal point of leverage among other sources of leverage, such as roadblocks, communal machinery evictions, and the organized rejection of mining capable of generating investment risk.

Author

• Nathan Edenhofer