The Myth of the Charismatic Individual: Richard Hansen as a chain in the US / Mormon anti-communist, anti-Indigenous, capitalist-imperialist project

“There’s no such thing as an egalitarian society. Somebody can always run faster, somebody’s always the better shot, the better fisherman–they’re the ones that are going to excel. When you see changes in society, they’re never done by society. They’re done by charismatic individuals.”

- Richard Hansen

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Richard Hansen sees himself as a “charismatic individual” manifesting the destiny of El Mirador in his battle against Maya and Ladino communities. I see Hansen as a common result of the US / Mormon capitalist, anti-socialist, imperial culture in which he grew.

Of the Mormon-influence in his work Hansen nearly shouted, “It’s irrelevant!” Yet, every step of his archeological journey is founded in his religion.

Hansen started as a child looting arrowheads from his father’s farm on Shoshone Bannock lands stolen by our People. He studied archeology at BYU, was invited to this project because he spoke fluent Spanish from his mission in Bolivia and his work in Guatemala is funded by The BYU Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies.

As he seeks to privatize lands collectively owned and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, his work is directly rooted in the anti-communist, extractive-capitalist, U.S. military and CIA backed oppressions in Guatemala.

From the 1954 U$-backed coup against Guatemala at the behest of the United Fruit Company (Chiquita) to Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” these projects are seeded in the U.S. imperialist Monroe Doctrine (and Mormon Apostle / U.S. Ambassador J. Reuben Clark’s “Clark Memorandum.”)

While Eisenhower signed off on this anti-socialist coup to end Guatemalan agrarian reform, anti-communist, John Bircher, and Mormon Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, was Secretary of Agriculture, cutting aiding to farmers here.

Hansen was a youth during the Ezra Taft Benson era with his anti-communist, anti-civil rights, U.S. Nationalist, racist rants. Now, deeply embedded in these ideologies Hansen perpetuates them.

​His determination to make Maya lands private-property under the banner of “protecting the forest” is a literal continuation of this Mormon / U.S. settler-colonial, capitalist, imperial, anti-Indigenous, anti-socialist, neoliberal project.