Format/Structure

Focused on land rights, this workshop proposes a post/disciplinary technical/method to study land rights in context with lack of historical key information, colonial past, and persistent colonialism on government institutions, countries like Guatemala.

Long Abstract

The indigenous peoples in Guatemala historically have been suffered by colonial violence on lands, water, bodies, spiritual beings and their places. Since the Peace Agreement that end the Internal Armed Conflict (singed my leftist guerillas and the national government) and the neoliberal reform on State and economy during 1990s, an extractive boom has grabbed indigenous territories. Particularly, the growing international demand on agricommodities like sugar cane products (for food and energy industries) and palm oil (for food, cosmetics and chemical industries), make the most fertile lands in Guatemala a target for business grabbing, including whether they were forests, peasant lands, or indigenous communal lands. Recently, the academia in Guatemala has interested on “Bussiness and Human Rigths” to study de affectations caused by agri-industries on lands, environment, water, health and labor rights on local indigenous communities and their territories.

Focused on land rights, this workshop proposes a technical/method to study land rights in context with lack of historical key information, colonial past, and persistent colonialism on government institutions, countries like Guatemala. For this, the workshop will present a non/disciplinary approach based indigenous traditional knowledge technics (oral), participatory mapping using Geographical Information Systems, cultural reading on historical archives and cosmological principles of geographical data (place names, spiritual value), applied in Guatemala during the last decade.