"We Have to Protect the Investors": 'Development' & Canadian Mining Companies in Guatemala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neoliberal schemes of mining, oil extraction, and hydroelectric projects, are embraced by post-conflict Guatemala as the way forward on the path to democratization. At the same time, the Canadian government's pro-business, pro-mining stance, through its Embassy's activities, is shaping the very nature of the development model for this Central American country. Neoliberal models are often associated with human rights abuses and an unwillingness to incorporate local knowledge or allow for locally-driven, smaller-scale development. In this paper, based on fieldwork in the summer months of 2004, 2006, and 2008, we argue that large-scale resource by Canadian mining companies and their Guatemalan subsidiaries on Maya traditional territories, lands to which they have limited rights, is negatively affecting local indigenous peoples' lives and realities. Through a rights-based approach to our analysis of 'development' we highlight the silenced voices of Maya community members in opposition to what they identify as unsound practices and President Oscar Berger's need to protect the investors rather than the lives of his country's own citizens. Keywords: Canada; development; natural resources; Guatemala; indigenous; neoliberalism; mining
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".