A verification

I had another interview this morning, with a middle-aged Guatemalan
gentleman who works with the Italian NGO Movimondo (not associated with
the Telefonika line of prepaid cellular phones). It was a fantastic
interview--he clearly had the time to talk, which sure helps, but I
think I may be getting better at the whole interviewing thing. About
damn time.

Anyways, I have three things to write about, but I think I'll leave the
second and third ideas for another day. The first of these things is a
confirmation by this guy that some of my ideas about the civil war (that
is, the Guatemalan armed conflict), civil society and social capital,
collective action dilemmas, and historical institutionalism

First, broadly, a number of the ideas presented by historical
institutionalists like Steinmo, Thelen, and others, deals with the
notion of "punctuated equilibria," in which exogenous shocks lead to a
change in an existing political equilibrium, and that, given an
exogenous shock, there is a rapid change which results, eventually, in a
new equilibrium.

More specifically, when you look at the history of Guatemala over the
last fifty years, one of the primary dynamics is the military regime
that ruled Guatemala until recently, and the civil war that took place
in a particularly brutal way in this part of the highlands.

We might view the civil war as an "exogenous shock," which has altered a
pre-existing equilibrium in a particularly unpleasant way, leading to an
equilibrium, at least in places like Uspántan, which resembles a "race
to the bottom."

What happened, basically, from the mid-1960s until the mid-1990s,
especially in the early 1980s, was that the Guatemalan Army pursued a
scorched earth campaign in those parts of the highlands which were
perceived to be sympathetic to the Marxist guerrillas who (the Army
thought) was sheltered there by the local population. They burned
villages, relocated the people, and killed, drove off, or intimidated
community spokes-people.

Without any prompting, during my interview today, the guy who I was
talking to basically told me a story that I had hypothesized for a long
time.

In the process of eliminating alternative sources of power (because the
Army viewed any independent organizations as potential guerrilla
supporters, so they tried to eliminate any organization and any
leadership in society, except for that which was associated with
anti-Marxist paramilitaries), the Army did a very good job of "cutting
the social fabric" of these rural highland communities. The result is
that these communities are "not well organized," and have a hard time
creating and enforcing rules about forestry and timber harvest, among
other things.

When they killed local leaders, they eliminated the people who could
have orchestrated local collective action, either because they were the
people who were viewed with respect by the local population, or because
they were the centers of social networks around which collective action
could be organized.

When they eliminated local organizations, the Army eliminated the
"political spaces," fora, and pre-existing networks for collective
action which could have been used to agree on and manage rules about
timber management.

Therefore, my hypotheses are as follows:

First, where the civil war was most severe (measured, presumably, by
indicators of the intensity of violence, like deaths), forestry-related
outcomes will be poorer, because civil society networks were eliminated
in those places, making collective action more difficult.

Second, where civil society bonds are stronger in general (that is,
where social networks are "thicker"), and therefore, where collective
action is easier, forestry-related outcomes will be better.

So what I need (if such things exist), is a dataset with municipal-level
data on the severity of the armed conflict, and another one on the
thickness of civil society and social bonds.

These are ideas which I've had bouncing around in my head for a while,
but which literally came right out of the mouth of an individual who
lives and works here, and has worked with the Guatemalan government and
NGOs in development for over thirty years.