Paper short abstract:

The case study is based on three months fieldwork at the Cooperativa Nuevo Horizonte. It focuses on the analysis of the forms of peasant resistance and environmental rhetoric facing the new neoliberal policies of land access as well as the proposed new law regarding GMOs intellectual property.

Paper long abstract:

Within a discourse that announced a resource scarcity and that hid the political causes related to their redistribution, the objective gaze of development shifted from people to nature. Therefore, it has emerged an attempt to secularize resources and to subtract their connection with the social and political management systems. Through capitalization and privatization of those natural elements that are exclusively considered economical resources, we started to observe not only the biological environment deterioration, but also the "semiotic conquest" (Escobar) of nature. The 'Life Sciences Industry' and GMOs not only represent one of the instruments of this conquest but also one of the manifestations through which we observe the attempt of the "imperial configuration" (Van der Ploeg) to despoil local knowledge and practices, where those instruments are engaged. These trends will be observed through the case of the Agricultural Cooperative Nuevo Horizonte - Guatemala, a result of the land reallocation program, activated following peace agreements of 1996, which ended a civil war, which lasted thirty-six years. All the Coop members are ex guerrilleros reinstated to civil life. In this context, their experiences of war not only has determined the relationship my interlocutors had with the forest in which they lived during the long war, but also has influenced the environmental resistance rhetoric. Today, this rhetoric is used by the Coop members to oppose the introduction of GMOs, that are considered a sophisticated domination system that compromises not only the plants roots, but the roots of an entire way of life.