When Local Troubles Become Transnational: The Transformation of a Guatemalan Indigenous Rights Movement

In the early 1990s, Guatemalan massacre survivors mobilized to demand the exhumation and burial of relatives killed during government repression in the 1980s. Using connections -with transnational activist networks, this local movement successfully implicated not only the Guatemalan government but also important international actors such as the World Bank in the atrocities. In contrast to Keck and Sikkink's boomerang model, which proposes that movements go global when domestic channels are blocked, I argue that the shift from local to transnational mobilization leads to substantive changes in a movement'sdiscourse and its interpretation of grievances, strategies, and targets. Further, in contrast to Keck and Sikkink's "short causal chain" linking problems and solutions to justify collective action, the Guatemala case suggests a "long causal chain" whereby successful transnational activism requires extension of causal links from local problems to powerful global actors to create the conditions for convergence of interests among members of a transnational network.