Indigenous women's activism against 'Monsanto law'

Abstract

This thesis examines indigenous women’s activism against the so-dubbed ‘Monsanto law’, in Guatemala, in 2014. It aims at informing about the gendered aspects of activism that have been eluded in other research. Scientific inquiry was utilised to analyse this social phenomenon via its associated discourses in the media, more specifically from news articles written about it. The data consists of articles published online by independent and mainstream media outlets. It comprehends articles written in English and Spanish; from circa 50 initial articles collected, seven were analysed. Critical Discourse Analysis was the method utilised to analyse the discourses present in the data.

The subject was chosen due to the fact that it is about Global South indigenous women’s activism, and it is a struggle against a law that was an outcome of a free-trade agreement, CAFTA-DR. Being passed, the law would dictate the Guatemalan agricultural sector dependency on big American agrochemical and genetic engineering corporations, thus collocating at stake the indigenous and peasants’ lives, land ownership and food sovereignty. Moreover, this is a case in which the activism achieved its intents, enhancing my motivation toward its analysis. The purpose of the study was to determine how did indigenous women’s activism against the ‘Law for the Protection of New Plant Varieties’ manifest itself and how did gender, sex, race/ethnicity and class make part of that activism, unfolding the gendered aspect of this activism and formulating an understanding about a form of non-violent activism that worked toward the promotion social justice and equality.

Intersectionality is the methodology utilised to explore the multiple dimensions of the phenomenon and the coalition politics that emerge from it, whilst questioning canons. Hence, the theoretical framing initiates by acknowledging and analysing discourses and practices of racialisation/ethnicity, along with gendering, language, class differentiation, and religion regarding the Maya people in Guatemala, to understand how subjectivities and social differences are produced. The second part of the theoretical analysis concerns the structures of domination, such as patriarchy, racism or colonialism, and the power relations enmeshed in them. This theoretical framework is followed by the actual analysis of the data.

The data analysis shows that indigenous women’s activism manifested itself at different levels; from activism towards the protection of Nature, the body-territory, the Maya identity symbolised by the corn and the indigenous people’s right to food sovereignty. The research also reveals that gender, sex, race/ethnicity and class are all intermeshed in the activism of these women against the ‘Monsanto law’ in the same manner as they are intermeshed in the everyday lives of indigenous women in Guatemala. These aspects shape indigenous women’s lives, collocating them both at the margins of the social system and in the front row of every struggle towards social justice simultaneously. One conclusion that emerges is that, even though indigenous women are leading the resistance to colonial structures and neoliberal policies, the level of awareness regarding their struggle is very low; it is diluted within indigenous people’s activism as if it were a homogenous whole. A second important inference is that indigenous women’s activism, as in the phenomenon at study, is what truly leads to the (return) to sustainability as a way of living.