Producing an Extractive Frontier: Private Property and Nickel Mining in Northeastern Guatemala

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyse documents leaked from the servers of the Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel to explore the ‘work’ done by private property to produce an extractive frontier in northern Guatemala. The mining company uses its private property rights to access mineral resources, secure strategic transport corridors, produce and police ‘nature’, and as a bargaining chip in conflict resolution. The company does not always achieve its aims, but the paper argues that some territorial dynamics are increasingly mediated through property relations. As states have taken on a less interventionist role, capital takes on more protagonism by exercising the ‘bundle of powers’ bestowed by property ownership to reorder and fix human activity in space. How much power property bestows is nevertheless contingent on local histories of property relations—in Guatemala's case, a racialised property regime built on indigenous dispossession and exclusion—and that power remains subject to contestation.