“The Situation Will Most Likely Turn Ugly”: Corporate Counter-Insurgency and Sexual Violence at a Canadian-Owned Mine in Guatemala

Abstract

This paper offers a window into the terrain of corporate influence over violence in the mining industry. The research draws on over 300 pages of internal communications and other corpo-rate documents, which were produced by Vancouver-based Skye Resources and released pub-licly as an affidavit in a civil court case in Ontario, Canada. The documents demonstrate the roles of mining company executives and their collaborators in coordinating events that led to the gang rape of eleven Maya Q’eqchi’ women in Guatemala during a 2007 land eviction. Ana-lyzing the documents through a framework of corporate counter-insurgency (co-COIN), the pa-per explores the importance of international consultants and local elite networks in co-COIN campaigns. The case study explored in this paper contributes to the theorization of public-pri-vate repressive forces within co-COIN. The research also offers a visual tool to map actors in other instances of mining violence, which is intended for use by both academic researchers and anti-mining social movements.