Water and Socio-Environmental Crisis in Guatemala City’s Metropolitan Area

Producing Marginality

Renewing the interpretation already reflected in early elaborations of historical materialism, Swyngedouw (1996: 66) describes the interweaving of social and natural processes in urban centers as follows: “There is nothing ‘purely’ social or natural about the city, even less asocial or a-natural; the city is both natural and social, real and fictional. In the city, society and nature, representation and being, are inseparable, integral to each other, infinitely bound up; yet, simultaneously, this hybrid socio-natural ‘thing’ called ‘the city’ is full of contradictions, tensions and conflicts.” Several works by Engels (1940) and Marx refer to the importance of thinking about what exists in terms of this interaction and coevolution between human beings, nature, and other material entities. Marx (1971: 216) defines “work” as the central process through which “man mediates, regulates and controls his metabolism with nature.” From this framework, the natural environment and human beings evolve and nature becomes an integral part of social life, often mediated by various relationships of control, appropriation, and ownership (Swyngedouw, Kaïka, and Castro, 2002).

While much of Marxist analysis tends to maintain a separation between the social and the natural, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that writers such as Smith (1984) and Swyngedouw analyzed the interactions between society and nature to trace the metabolic formations that emerge from spatial and temporal changes in relations between human beings and nature. This inspired an analysis of urban configurations starting with "a historical geographical production process of socio-nature" during which everyone and everything becomes a cyborg, "a mediator, part social, part natural" (Swyngedouw, 2004: 17–18). In an effort to transcend anthropocentric conceptions, these writers understand nature as a system that provides its own organizational principles and physical laws for interacting with social life. The metabolic perspective is applicable to a multiplicity of processes, including the distribution and administration of water as expressed in the construction of retaining walls, the diversion of rivers, and the intubation of water sources. The dynamics of uneven geographical development (Brenner, 2009; Harvey, 1989; Smith, 1984) configure spaces at multiple scales and create contradictory patterns of differentiation—based on the differential functionality of the respective spaces for capitalist production—and homogenization stimulated by commercialization that converts spaces and people into interchangeable values. The outcome of this “dialectic of simultaneous interconnection/differentiation” (Brenner, 2009: 29) is cities with a “dual” constitution, where spaces for regeneration or well-being contrast with the areas of widespread poverty that surround them (Harvey, 1989: 16).

The geographic projection of development in particular contexts is mediated by institutional forms and social forces. The prevailing understanding of “power” in urban political ecology (e.g., Heynen, Kaïka, and Swingedouw, 2002; Swyngedouw, 2004) and the geography of development (e.g., Harvey, 1985; Smith, 1984) is “dominance” (Lukes, 1974) or “power over” (Holloway, 2005), a resource used by certain actors to organize processes and interactions. This conceptualization is applicable to the most visible operations of power in Guatemala, characterized by a pronounced political and economic hierarchy and social stratification resulting from long-term historical processes in which authoritarianism and repeated stages of dispossession have predominated. To complete this notion of “power as domination,” Foucault’s effort to trace the evolution of paradigms of power toward biopolitics opens another analytical dimension. Starting from a critique of the strong emphasis on sovereignty and the “legal-discursive model of power,” Foucault (1979: 82) proposes decentralizing analyses to the multiple power relations that are generated in modern societies. He highlights the relational character of power, which cannot be divided between those who retain it exclusively and those who do not (Foucault, 2003: 29). Power is inherent in all social interactions, and its effects reproduce and conjoin in a complex way to project themselves on meta-political scales. The “productive” character of all flows of power generates processes that adjust behavior and social forces and is indispensable to the development of capitalism and the configuration of docile and governable subjects. Thus, the analysis approaches the impact of power on the micropolitical level or, in Bourdieu’s words (1977), the “morphology of everyday life,” as social principles are directly discharged into the body without mediation by processes of rational calculation, discourse, or other forms of representation.

Linking these theoretical deliberations with empirical context, I argue that elites and political centers in Guatemala City’s metropolitan area mobilize resources to reinforce structural processes of differentiation inherent in capitalist geography and contribute to the creation of a mosaic of physical and symbolic divisions. Spatial differentiation converges with unequal distribution of access to public services such as water and the patterns of marginalization that characterize the impoverished areas of urban centers. At the same time, power as domination triggers a series of effects that feed back into a second dimension of power that is projected through bodies, emotions, and practices. Based on these “power effects,” resistance, nonconformity, and struggles emerge in the barrios. However, these effects also result in other processes that reaffirm domination, deepen the effects of exclusion, and increase the disarticulation of collective action.

Urbanization and the Consolidation of Marginal Zones

Guatemala City and its metropolitan area originated in a combination of social and natural factors. The country’s capital was Antigua until 1776, when earthquakes and exposure to volcanic activity in its surroundings led to its relocation to its current site, which was believed to be more secure. From the beginning, private logic supported by the economic and political influence of certain social groups prevailed over notions of the public (Gellert, 1994). Because of their proximity to the city council, large merchants and landowners, among them immigrants from the North of Spain, found it possible to improve their socioeconomic positions and acquire real estate in the relocation of the capital city (Langenberg, 1989: 243–244). ³ At the same time, the social crisis concurrent with this process continued. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the population of the city barely exceeded 20,000 residents, the dynamics of socio-spatial segregation intensified. The differentiation was especially reflected in the development of road networks, drainage systems, and water supply, from which the residents of the marginal neighborhoods were excluded. As Gellert (1994: 20) points out, urban institutions were practically nonexistent in the periphery. Everyday life in these areas was characterized by the absence of services, poor living conditions, and separation from the political centers of influence and prestige.

The economic configuration of the country, which was dominated by a feudal rural economy and coffee monoculture, impeded the emergence of a dynamic urban economy and population growth comparable with those of other Latin American cities for many years. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the first factories and cement, beverage, and textile companies were established, while workshops and small artisan factories continued to predominate (Tischler, 2001). The great majority of the urban elite lived in the city center. However, a new dynamic emerged in the 1940s with suburbanization and an expansion of residential developments to the south and southeast of the city, resulting in the gradual abandonment of the central areas by the upper class in the 1950s and 1960s (Gellert, 1994).

Various events had an impact on the sociopolitical and economic fabric of the country and accelerated urbanization. After a brief democratic interlude, the restoration of the domination of estates after the coup of 1954 negatively affected the socioeconomic conditions of the rural population. Also, the city’s growth fomented an overdue increase in service, trade, and the activities of state institutions (Avancso, 2003: 105). This prompted massive land invasions and accelerated the growth of marginal areas and settlements in at-risk areas, together with a crisis of employment, serious problems of housing, and an increase in urban violence (Avancso, 2003: 108–109). The great majority of these settlements occupied the ravines surrounding the city and other areas that were undervalued or poorly suited to residential use (Morán Mérida, 2011: 41).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the implementation of counterinsurgency policies in rural areas caused displacement and a massive exodus of people, thousands of whom settled in the capital. Persistent fears for security and the breakdown of identities linked to people’s places of origin in many cases impeded their return to these places (Bastos and Camus, 1997). The February 1976 earthquake accelerated this migration and gave rise to more than 126 settlements (Gellert, 1994). A new wave of massive land invasions in the city’s periphery coincided with the densification of already populated areas. Whereas some 250,000 people lived in precarious areas before the earthquake, this number was approximately 400,000 a decade later (Gellert, 1994: 60). Spatial differentiation increased with the development of vast areas of increasing impoverishment, social marginalization, and lack of basic services that contrasted with a striking concentration of capital and assets among a highly reduced privileged sector.

The neoliberal period intensified the contrasts of this socio-spatial sketch of the metropolitan area without public administration’s counteracting the structuring of the market. Segregated islands of luxurious housing, gated communities, and shopping centers bordered on poor residential areas that in turn were flanked by ravines filled with more than 400 precarious settlements in which around 700,000 people lived (SEGEPLAN–World Bank, 2015). The differentiating and marginalizing effects of urban expansion were also expressed in environmental vulnerability due to inadequate attention to solid waste and water, an inefficient transport system, and the segmentation of water and drainage services.

Hydropolitics and Water as a Privilege

Guatemala City’s metropolitan area ⁴ is located on the divide between the two big basins—the hydrographic slope of the Motagua River and the Villalobos River subbasin—that contain the system of deep ravines that constitutes the Valley of Guatemala. Precarious settlements have been established here, frequently coinciding with drainage areas that have become open sewers (Morán Mérida, 2011: 67). The network of aqueducts and wells for supplying potable water to the metropolitan area was built in the second half of the twentieth century to connect a network of wells surrounding an area of springs, the Ojo de Agua. A national aqueduct was constructed to bring water from two rivers in the neighboring department of Chimaltenango. However, the election as mayor of Manuel Colom Argueta, a leftist university professor, in 1970 generated a real boost to urban and water planning in the establishment of a public water company ⁵ and the metropolitan department’s master scheme, an ambitious project of urban sanitation. The project envisaged the construction of large underground collectors to capture and pipe sewage and an extensive network of drains. Despite constant attempts by the military government to sabotage the advances, the following administration of Leonel Ponciano León (1974–1978) initiated the construction of a sewer system. However, the combination of the 1976 earthquake, the assassination of Colom Argueta, and the direct intervention of the military regime in naming the mayor in 1982 halted the administration’s progressive vision for the metropolitan area. The election of Álvaro Arzú in 1985 marked the direct incursion of the traditional economic elite into metropolitan political administration. The consolidation of a power bloc in the administration of the capital city was for a time electorally outlined as a dispute between the Arzú clan—backed by the García Granados business group—and other branches of the Guatemalan oligarchy. As of 2000, this bloc’s internal balance definitively leaned toward the Arzú family, which with the use of municipal resources wove clientelistic networks among the electorate and consolidated its control of the municipal council (Reynolds, 2007). On the basis of its influence in the National Association of Municipalities, it also determined the room for maneuver of the mayors of the other municipalities of the metropolitan area. This development was reflected in a change in priorities, and the water and drainage systems were abandoned.

In 2010, campaigns launched with the slogan “Drop by drop the water runs out” represented a discursive cover-up of various aspects of the problem, seeking to present a sensitized municipal administration concerned with containing excessive domestic use of water resources. The absence of public investment and of alternative strategies for collection was key, along with the municipal administrations’ corrupt privatization of the system. Municipal companies have had only enough resources to supply some 70 percent of consumers. To supply the rest, public companies have been obliged to buy some 20 percent of their water from private suppliers (González Chavajay, 2018). These deals have involved nontransparent transactions between public and private companies to the benefit of the latter. The overvaluation of services, their financing through trusts without audit, and illegal collusion between private providers and the public company have become common practice and part of broader corruption schemes in the municipal administrations of the metropolitan area. ⁶

Private companies have taken over water distribution in areas with industry and commercial centers that are middle-class or upper-middle-class, where there is a “high guarantee of payment.” González Chavajay (2018) shows that, despite representing only 2 percent of domestic users, these areas are the ones in which the highest volumes of water are consumed. The correlation between access to water and the price of real estate means high-quality private service for sectors of the population with resources and low-quality public service limited to certain hours or days for those whose resources are scarce. The lack of land planning in the metropolitan area, inadequate attention to water recharge areas, absence of alternative mechanisms for collecting water, and the contamination of practically all surface waters contribute to this differentiation in water service. In addition to population density, these elements translate into overexploitation of underground water sources.

The water crisis is exacerbated by the absence of a legal framework for regulating the issue of water at the national level, the development of which has been stalled since the first democratic constitution in 1985. Civil society’s various attempts to promote regulation and a policy that guarantees the right to water have met opposition from economic elites (Padilla Vassaux, 2018). Elites have been satisfied with a ruling that guarantees their exploitation of private water sources and de facto unlimited use of them (Colom de Morán, 2005). The impasse over legislation is thus largely explained by the accumulation strategies of these elites (Carrera et al., 2017; Padilla Vassaux, 2018).

Since 2005 the crisis of access to and contamination of water, aggravated by the presence of extractive and hydroelectric companies, has been one of the key factors in the emergence of a wave of organization for territorial defense among rural communities. Here, the water issue has become one of the unifying features of various protests. In the metropolitan area, in contrast, despite facing a similarly alarming situation, the issue of water has not resonated in the same way. Since 2015 urban mobilizations have developed sporadically and maintained a bourgeois democratic framework not linked to the demands of rural communities (Illmer, 2018b) or the metropolitan area’s marginalized classes. Among these latter groups, collective articulations have been more dispersed, decentralized, and contingent—largely local expressions that momentarily activated collective ties in the affected communities but were soon overshadowed by daily challenges and needs. An analysis of elite control over public administration is not enough to understand the dynamics of this fragmentation and demobilization. It is also necessary to explore the micropolitical effects of this form of domination, which deepens tendencies toward disarticulation among neighbors.

Fragmentation and Clientelism in Neighborhoods

By the end of the 1990s the Guatemala City I knew in the late 1970s and into the 1980s had gone up in smoke. What revolution? What radical movement? The language of popular culture that used concepts and terms such as exploitation, class, bourgeoisie, and capitalism had vanished, and as the twenty-first-century advances, discourses of the Left have not returned.

In this revealing passage Levenson (2013: 203) points to a sociopolitical development of the twentieth-century organizational field of the metropolitan area that is linked to three dynamics: (1) the decline in the capacity to convene, affiliate, and mobilize of the mass organizations of the 1960s and 1970s and those of political parties, the army, the unions, and the Catholic Church (Núñez, 1996); (2) the widespread replacement of ideology and critical consciousness by individualism, self-promotion, and competition (Levenson, 2013); and (3) the trauma associated with displacement and rural-to-urban migration, which made it difficult for affinity networks to become consolidated in many marginal areas (Bastos and Camus, 1994).

The collective networks formed in the course of urban land invasions, especially in the 1990s, are an exception to these dynamics of fragmentation and demobilization. Doña Eleodora described her arrival on the land that was an extension of Zone 6 of Guatemala City and is today Ciudad Quetzal as follows: “I came to live here in 1990, but there was never a water well here. As neighbors we suffered much because we bought water by the barrel. . . . So, then we formed a committee. We mobilized many people and channeled water from the springs to supply our water” (interview, Ciudad Quetzal, April 24, 2018). Settlements such as the ones located below Puente de Belice constructed restraining walls, roads, means of access to drinking water, home drains, and electric lighting, all through work performed by neighbors. The collective experience of resistance on occupied land and coordination for ensuring the legalization of the occupied land and promoting the implementation of basic services reinforced patterns of self-organization and the creation of a social fabric. However, formal recognition of land tenure did not translate into an extension of guarantees. Rather, it implied both inclusion and exclusion by incorporating residents of the settlements formally as citizens but marginalizing them with regard to rights and the provision of public services. This process coincided with the rise of neoliberal logic among the ruling classes, discouraging public social spending. In the absence of state attention, the neighborhood committees turned to the international aid agencies, thus often deepening the divisions between different sectors of the neighborhood communities (Gellert, 1999; Levenson, 2013).

Changes in the organizational spectrum coincided with the deployment of clientelistic political networks to use settlement residents as a source of votes in exchange for offers of better living and service conditions, a form of relationship used by the military governments of the 1960s (Morán, 2011: 43). The neighborhood committees and community development councils were consolidated as channels of formal representation for dialogue with the municipality and as platforms for clientelistic engagement. Transactional relations between political centers and settlements were institutionalized, and social programs such as the so-called solidarity exchange became bargaining chips.

The impact on the local power map took the form of the empowerment of operators “recognized” by the municipality or the government for their ability to mobilize residents for electoral purposes. These individuals acquired a mediation role and might administer public works projects and assist with social programs or trips for seniors in the community. They were compensated with jobs in public agencies for their relatives and friends. While the organizational and partisan expressions of the left in the postwar period moved away from working-class neighborhoods, co-optation of leaders and deployment of these clientelistic networks increased. The Unionist Party of the municipality of Guatemala was particularly effective in this regard. Its activities were paid for with public funds, and every municipal worker was converted into a vote getter to ensure its dominance for the past five legislative terms (CICIG, 2019). The former mayor Álvaro Arzú’s proud announcement of “not requiring an electoral campaign” (Gordillo, 2018) was less a reflection of his popularity than of his ability to operate and feed this complex web of clientelistic relations.

The deteriorating economic situation of broad sectors of the urban population deepened dependence on these clientelistic programs in the construction of subjectivities and expectations. As a neighbor from Puente de Belice pointed out, “What [municipal authorities] love is that people act like they are blind or stay passive, waiting for them to give them something they were offered” (interview, Puente de Belice, April 11, 2018). In the same vein, members of social organizations in Villa Nueva expressed their frustration at a new deployment of social programs: “When they deliver solidarity baskets, at 4 in the morning, people are waiting with their little stools and ponchos. But if you say to them, ‘Let’s go to the march,’ they don’t go. They’re not interested. They’re only interested in handouts” (interview, Villa Nueva, April 8, 2018).

In the absence of public policies, clientelistic relations become rational for many residents and allow them to obtain some benefits (Sáenz de Tejada, 2015). However, they reinforce a notion of citizenship based on patterns of subordination and distort the idea of political representation. The fate of large segments of the population depends on a powerful actor or, in the words of Agamben (1998), “a sovereign” who does favors instead of encouraging them to make demands of the state. The material and survival needs expressed in the daily lives of much of the population encourage the reproduction of this subjection.

Individualizing Patterns of Marginalization

A brief review of the metropolitan area’s socioeconomic data provides figures on the dimensions of the problem of inequality and marginalization. A third of the residents live in poverty, the majority of them in the 400-some precarious settlements (SEGEPLAN–World Bank, 2015). Since the 1980s, neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, factories, state institutions, the military, and the service sector have been displaced not only as points of reference of social relations but also as sources of income. Today the few economic activities offering jobs in the formal market, among them maquilas, call centers, and security companies, are characterized by low wages and scant regulation and unionization. “I wish we were speaking of proletarians,” commented Padre Paco, a priest in Colonia Puente de Belice, in analyzing the socioeconomic situation of residents. Instead, he used the term “lumpenproletariat” to refer to settlement residents, whose daily lives were characterized by the harshness of their struggle for survival, dynamics linked to chronic unemployment, and deep insecurity in public service provision. Given the lack of an organizational structure, he said, it was “very easy to pit some against others” and “instigate dynamics of fragmentation” (interview, Puente de Belice, March 25, 2018). Despite this, ephemeral moments of the collective perception of injustice did call attention to common interests. Some incidents in the municipality of Villa Nueva in January and February 2018 revealed one of these sporadic moments of convergence. The municipal administration of Edwin Escobar (2012–2020), a construction businessman and a state contractor, had been trying for many years to install water meters in all homes, but it had been met with resistance from the residents of marginal settlements, who insisted on paying a fixed fee and on several occasions confronted municipal workers to halt the meter installation. In January 2018, the administration changed strategy and, without warning, imposed an increase of 300 percent on charges for water in neighborhoods classified as “precarious.” As the information filtered down, a community organization called for neighbors to gather in the central plaza. More than 2,000 persons attended, and they decided to occupy the municipal offices and block the roads in other parts of the municipality. Faced with this pressure from residents, the mayor agreed to a dialogue but also launched a counteroffensive by denouncing the mobilization on local radio, creating divisions among the neighbors and isolating the representatives chosen for the meeting. “There was no other option. They left us alone, and we had to accede to the pressures,” one of the representatives explained with a shrug. As quickly as the mobilization had appeared, it vanished, leaving a trail of rumors that the leaders had “given in” or “negotiated some personal benefit.” As political actors encouraged fragmentation tactics and daily concerns regained centrality among local residents, the movement disintegrated.

To grasp the fragility of moments of convergence, it is important to consider other patterns that operate in the shadow of socioeconomic precariousness in marginal neighborhoods. “It’s individualism as a mental and ideological structure,” Doña Tomasa from Puente de Belice pointed out (interview, Puente de Belice, September 13, 2018). The socioeconomic networks and attempts to create community that Nuñez (1996) had perceived in the 1970s were displaced by the expansion of economic rationality and the promotion of radical individualism. As Foucault (1988) indicates in his sketch of homo economicus, one facet of neoliberalism is the conversion of individuals into entrepreneurs. In the neighborhoods, the decline of community networks and the absence of institutional support means that resources and supports for everyday life have to be produced individually. Other processes are articulated with this neoliberal subjectification. Writers such as O’Neill (2011) and Pine (2008) emphasize the compatibility between individualizing conceptions of neoliberalism and the preaching of the Pentecostal churches, which have seen sustained growth and displaced the Catholic Church. As neighbors pointed out, spiritual conversion is also fueled by its projection toward the emotions. The churches’ teachings are focused on individuals’ being responsible for their failures and for personal transformation, promoting forms of self-monitoring and changes in behavior to improve one’s prospects for success. On this political-cultural level, the Pentecostal effect is complemented by alienating discourses that especially motivate the young to pursue the fleeting and always incomplete capitalist consumer utopia.

As Davis (2004: 28) suggests, in Central America’s marginal neighborhoods the combination of economic precariousness and the dynamics of fragmentation lead to a Darwinian competition for survival and the residues of the market that ends in confrontations among neighbors themselves. As individuals grow accustomed to facing challenges on their own, the reinforcement of patterns of segregation and exclusion and feelings of injustice, desperation, and rage spurs violent interaction, another disarticulating element in these communities.

Macro- and Micropolitical Views on Violence

Pearce (2010) and Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004) have pointed to the importance of observing the multiple consequences and dimensions (historical ones among them) of the dynamics of reproduction of violence. Guatemala has been cyclically marked by episodes of extreme violence, whether between elites or between the state and segments of society. As in other Latin American countries, the power groups never abandoned the possible use of coercion in their attempts to defend their privileges and cycles of accumulation (Pearce, 2010). Violence in the exercise of power was effective in the dominant bloc’s consolidation of its preeminence.

One perspective that considers multiple aspects of violence is imperative for understanding this phenomenon in Guatemala City, which has one of the highest rates of homicide in the world. Historically, the legacy of armed conflict is key in explaining the reproduction of violent interactions and insecurities of contemporary society in its psychological dimensions (Thomas, O’Neill, and Offit, 2011:12). While the violence is no longer largely political, its impact on the social fabric in marginal areas has deepened. Some of it is attributed to drug-trafficking groups and organized crime focused on car theft, kidnappings, and contraband. Most of the symbolic and discursive representation of violence is centered in youth gangs, mainly the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Since their emergence in the 1980s with the deportation of young people from the United States, their structures have evolved, and they feed on the invention and reproduction of collectivity in terms of aggressive codes of social distinction (Camus, 2011: 55).

The breakdown of social ties in the neighborhoods has created fertile ground for the consolidation of gangs. Neighbors’ accounts frequently reference cases of parental abandonment, addiction, and domestic violence compounded by economic problems and, as Doña Delfina from Canalitos pointed out, the fact that all the responsibility for educating youth falls on mothers. “There is a lot of family disintegration, separations, and situations in which the mothers have to raise children on their own and earn income. . . . They cannot give them enough attention” (interview, Canalitos, April 11, 2018).

At the same time, the gang presence and high rates of violence contribute to increasing socio-spatial differentiation and segregation, and this encourages discourses that negatively define settlement residents and legitimate the administration’s arguments for privatizing services. In the case of Puente de Belice, after various attacks on waste collectors the municipality refused to enter the neighborhood to remove trash. Likewise, water companies have refused to provide services in red zones of the capital, claiming insecurity. Class stigmatization and discrimination especially affect the young. Not even attaining formal education guarantees that they will be exempt from these prejudices. “After finishing [school] they look for work, but seeing that they come from a red zone, they are not hired—there is much stigmatization. This makes young people very angry, and neediness makes them think ‘I have to steal because there is no other way’” (interview, Puente de Belice, April 11, 2018).

The territorial reach and activities of different local gangs vary, but in certain areas of the city they have their own transport companies, develop complex networks with businessmen and political organizations, take on jobs as hitmen, and participate in drug trafficking. Mechanisms of violence are central in generating income and territorial control, with extortion being the main source. Practically every economic activity that takes place at the neighborhood level is identified and obliged to pay “taxes” to the gangs. The repercussions of this insecurity and violence in residents’ collective action are direct, as a member of a neighborhood organization in Villa Nueva said. The local council tried to form a citizen security committee in reaction to a series of murders in the area. In response, local gangs threatened to eliminate the committee members one by one, and this led to the breakup of the committee. Since then, attempts to form another committee have not been very fruitful: “We recently held a meeting in my neighborhood to form a new COCODE [security committee], and three people showed up, three people” (interview, Villa Nueva, March 18, 2018).

In addition to paralyzing organizing activities, everyday experiences of violence and fear fuel petitions for hardline policies or even motivate residents to take matters into their own hands and fill the void left by the state (Camus, 2011: 63). For example, in Colonia Santa Isabel II, neighbors exasperated by extortion and insecurity hired hitmen to “clean” their settlement of gangs, increasing the spiral of violence. These expressions reflect another micropolitical effect of contexts immersed in violence: an authoritarian citizenry emerges that endorses the elimination of individuals and prioritizes the pursuit of security over the rights of others (Pearce, 2017). Feelings of injustice and revenge resulting from everyday insecurity not only motivate short-term actions to confront violence but also hinder the development of a common perspective on the structural conditions of exclusion and marginalization in access to water.

Conclusions

This article has examined the water crisis in Guatemala’s metropolitan area with the objective of breaking down the different dimensions of power that interact and deepen the marginalization and disarticulation of broad urban sectors. Examination of the social and environmental processes surrounding the distribution of water reveals its articulation with the administration of political power. The distribution of water demonstrates a differentiation between marginal areas, which receive inferior public service, and middle- and upper-class areas, which require private service that benefits their gated communities, shopping centers, and condominiums. An analysis of marginal neighborhoods affected by the water crisis reveals a set of micropolitical effects of power on forms of behavior and patterns of interaction. The elites’ arbitrary and corrupt exercise of power in institutions not only causes the marginalization of broad sectors of the population but is fueled by clientelistic dynamics, economic subsumption, and violent interaction that end up deepening segregation and determining the political possibilities for collective action. Parallel to the lack of collective interaction, problems such as the water crisis continue to worsen.