Saturday February 15th 2020. Tim and Beryl Hall’s bungalow in Bracknell, Berkshire. Their son Rob arrives on one of his fairly regular visits, having travelled by train from Reading. He works shifts now, four ten-hour days followed by two days off. The idea is to cut commuting journeys, which was happening anyway because of the expense of all forms of powered transport, especially the car. People aren’t so bothered nowadays about finding the ‘right’ job, but any job near heir home. Rob retrained in horticulture when the construction company he worked for went bust in 2013, and he grows fruit, vegetables and nuts for one of Reading’s rising number of urban food co-operatives. His job has its stresses: crop thefts, hungry insects and small mammals like rabbits, drought and flash floods, and uncertain pollination by bees whose colonies have been unstable for well over a decade.

He sits down in the wooden rocking chair by the triple-glazed window in his parents’ living room, and temporarily forgets about the daily struggles to get by. He is fortunate to have a job, after all, and his wife Janie is still teaching. Their daughter Emily’s plan to teach as a volunteer in Guatemala, of all places, worries him because she would be away for at least a year, and it has become a long, complicated journey: the transatlantic liner to New York, down the eastern seaboard to Miami, and a third boat across the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean, to Puerto Barrios on Guatemala’s eastern coast. How strange it seemed now, to think back a little over ten years, to flying off on holiday with Ryanair or easyJet to Greece, Turkey and Florida. It began to feel uncomfortable back after September 2001, when those planes crashed into the towers at the World Trade Centre in Manhattan, and security at airports was racked tighter and tighter, so that by 2007, wasn’t it, air travel meant a three-hour wait at the airport for security checks, with the children becoming fractious. Then the ticket prices and the taxes went up and up, so that you were paying through the nose as well enduring a stressful experience.

Why had Emily become so fixated on Guatemala, a small, conflict-ridden Central American country? Rob remembers that his aunt June used to teach in a school in Guatemala, in the early 2000s when she was nearly 60, and Emily had read all her notebooks. Rob feels apprehensive, then tells himself that she is going to work, not to war, and he can still access the internet, most of the time, so they can keep in touch that way. He worries less about his son Josh, now 21 and an ecologist down in Wales, that lively little country stuck on the western side of England.

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Extracts from ‘My Visit to Guatemala, 2007’ by June Spears

The Volcano
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Diary, Wednesday October 3rd 2007. “Did I say that Coca-Cola is cheaper than water here? About half the price.”
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Dusk fell as we explored the glowing lava in the crater of Pacaya volcano, south of Guatemala City. Recent torrential rains had made the unpaved track up to the mountain village of San Francisco de Sales alarmingly slippery, and at one point we all had to get out of the bus while the driver skidded up a steep slope with an unfenced drop on the near side. We passengers, mainly young Germans and other Europeans, and a couple of older women like myself, trudged up in pouring rain and got back in the bus. In the village at the foot of the mountain path, energetic small boys rushed to offer plastic capes, walking sticks and ponies to us tourists, who are the source of most of their money. With guides at the front and rear for safety, we trekked up a narrow path at a pace I found difficult given the altitude, and after half an hour or so gratefully accepted the offer of a pony. The path rose through forest, to 8,300 feet and the rim of the crater, where cloud swirled and obscured any view. Throughout the crater, extrusions of red and orange lava slowly heaved their way in molten streams from deep in the Earth. Our soaking clothes and footwear dried in the heat, but as soon as we were comfortable again, it was time for the descent, this time without a pony. The rain and heat kept my glasses covered in steam, so I took put them in my pocket and set about coming down the slippery mountain in the dark, wet night, nearly sightless. Afterwards I thought about what would have happened if there had been an accident: health and safety concerns do not feature much in Guatemalan life, and there was no friendly mountain rescue team to call. An hour and a half later, the sounds of the village floated up the path, to the relief of the mud-splattered group. I had fallen once, rolling over and over, and must have looked like a mud wrestler after a losing bout.

Pacaya is one of the most active volcanoes in Central America, but usually safe enough to climb, unlike the Fuego volcano near Antigua, which smokes threateningly and spews ash onto its precipitous slopes. The dangers of Pacaya are generally more human than volcanic. If you walk alone in any quiet place, you risk robbery or worse. Robbery is an everyday hazard. At the Cerro de la Cruz, an elevated cross overlooking the Spanish colonial city of Antigua, visitors are requested to register with the tourist police, and then to wait for a couple of armed police escorts, at the bottom of the path leading through parkland to the cross. The escorts wait while their charges take photos, and then accompany them down again. And as Guatemala goes, Antigua is safe.

Gun Law
Life is cheap in Guatemala. Each year one person in every 2,000 is murdered. A contract killing costs just a handful of dollars, so I learnt from my mentor Manuel. Lurid reports of assassinations, attacks, crimes and revenge fill the newspapers. Violence is a critical element in the maintenance of political control.

The newspapers every day were full of murders, corruption, lynchings and crimes that are hard to imagine. The Prensa Libre, a serious newspaper, reported on October 18th 2007 that three social workers in the country’s largest public hospital, the Roosevelt, had been stealing new-born babies, telling the mothers that their babies had died, and selling the infants for adoption and for body parts. People have little confidence in the legal system, such as it is, and often take the law into their own hands. The Prensa Libre of November 7th told of five lynchings in just two months, in the town of San Juan Sacatepéquez, north-west of Guatemala City. Three of the victims were youths accused of extortion, who were burned to death. The local police chief had shrugged and said the crowd would not let the police intervene. Miguel, a friend of my hosts in Antigua, said it was normal for police to tell community leaders to deal with trouble-makers themselves.

Journalists in Guatemala with an eye to their own survival concentrate on murders, accidents and natural disasters. Those who investigate corruption have to be prepared for harassment, even murder. Until February 2006 it was a criminal offence for a journalist to offend the head of a state body, with a penalty of one to three years in prison. ‘Defaming’ a public body or official could result in a jail term of six months to two years. Retribution, though, was usually swifter and more drastic. The organisation Reporters Without Borders, in its 2007 report on Guatemala, said that the decriminalisation of these former offences has made scant difference: “this positive ruling did not stop dozens of physical attacks and threats against the media and journalists, often committed by police, soldiers, private security agents and former paramilitaries from the …civil war.” Hugo Arce, a journalist with a magazine called ¿Y Que? was found with a bullet through his head in a Guatemala City hotel room in January 2008. The police said it was suicide. Arce was the writer of several articles critical of President Alvaro Colom, who took office that month. Colom’s wife Sandra started a lawsuit against Arce in December 2007, accusing him of insults and defamation. Another journalist met a violent end in December 2007, a radio presenter called Miguel Angel Amaya Pérez who was shot dead in Santa Elena in northern Guatemala, on the fringe of the Petén jungles.

Guatemala is poor and violent, a violence that has festered for five hundred years since the Spanish conquest. Of course there was violence before that, when the indigenous Mayan tribes fought each other, but the atrocities now stem from entrenched racism, aggressive capitalism, and the drugs trade, the latter two not unrelated.

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Diary, Wednesday October 3rd 2007. “My hosts’ younger son Luis rang before breakfast to say there had just been a murder outside the office where he works in Guatemala City, and he was feeling nervous. The papers are full of murders. For example a baker called Josué Suazo was shot with 13 bullets on the Pacific Highway at Planes de Bárcenas. He was in his car, which crashed into a ditch. On the same road, the same day, a passer- by found the charred body of a murdered policeman. Later, on the bus going to Jocotenango, I noticed Antigua’s street decorations: broken glass cemented to the tops of walls to deter thieves…”

Thursday October 11th 2007. “At first I found it alarming to see gun-toting security personnel everywhere, some looking no older than 15 or 16, but I’ve got used to it, which is probably bad, an acceptance of an appalling situation. There are no ‘front gardens’ or verandahs here. People with money live behind high walls, often with broken glass and barbed wire on top. Their houses have heavy locked doors, and metal grilles over any window facing the street. The wealthier the person, the less likely they are to have any street-facing windows. There are armed guards on Coca-Cola trucks, on lorries carrying construction materials, in the supermarket and in pharmacies, in banks and outside banks, and I hate to think of the weapons there must be in the many armoured security vehicles. ”
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Guatemala and the USA
My introduction to Guatemala had been from the air, as the TACA-line plane from Panama City approached the mountain-girt capital, Guatemala City. From the air I saw a jumble of shacks and ravines, shiny hotels and modern malls. La Aurora airport was anonymous, unfinished, but fairly ordered. Outside in the street, .small boys ran up offering to help carry bags, and then demanded dollars in preference to the local currency, the quetzal. The road from the airport to the  ancient colonial city and ex-capital, Antigua, was lined with huge election posters, for it was September 2007, during the presidential election campaign. The posters more than hinted at preparation by expensive advertising agencies, in an extremely poor country. If you want to see aggressive capitalism in practice, visit Guatemala: the welfare state is non-existent, the illiteracy rate exceeds 40% and is rising, and three in every four people work in the ‘informal economy’, i.e. they do not have a job.

Subjugate a people, take their land, drive them onto tiny mountain farmlets with poor soils that agro-industry does not want, and you have the ingredients for violence. Each year about 150,000 Guatelmatecos set out for the USA. Around 125,000 are sent back, but most try again, and again. The Prensa Libre reported on October 11th 2007 that 1.5 million Guatemalan nationals are in the USA, but only 350,000 have residency documents. The rest, 1.15m, are illegals. Between January 1st and September 20th 2007 the legal and illegal Guatemaltecos in the US remitted back $2.961bn, representing 11% of Guatemala’s gross domestic product (GDP). On this basis, over 8.4% of Guatemala’s GDP is in dollars sent back by illegal immigrants in the USA.

The USA dominates Guatemala, to the extent that several of the children, in the school where I taught English as a volunteer, thought that Guatemala was part of the USA. Back in 1954, when the elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was implementing land reforms to slightly reduce the chasm between the ruling families and the indigenous Mayan peoples, conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the US government acted swiftly to defend the massive land holdings of American companies like the United Fruit Company. The law firm of John Foster Dulles, the USA’s Secretary of State, represented the United Fruit Company in an action against the Guatemalan state, which under Arbenz was planning to buy up swathes of uncultivated land from United Fruit, at the low price at which the company had valued the land in its tax accounts. The Central Intelligence Agency, headed at the time by John Foster Dulles’s brother Allen, masterminded a coup d’état, executed on June 18th 1954 by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who took power as president on July 8th and imposed a hard-right rule that long outlasted his own death on July 26th 1957, when a guard in his entourage, Romeo Vásquez, assassinated him.

Political assassinations are ordinary in Guatemala. The many past victims include Manuel Colom Argueta, uncle of Álvaro Colom Caballeros, who won the presidential election in November 2007 and took office in January 2008. Manuel Colom, mayor of the capital, Guatemala City, was riddled with bullets on March 22nd 1979, soon after registering an opposition political party, the RUR, Frente Unido de la Revolución, to campaign against the succession of military dictatorships that had tightly controlled Guatemala since 1954. Political opposition in Guatemala demands courage and an acceptance of a possible violent death, because the killings go on. Pedro Zamora Álvarerez, general secretary of the STEPQ trades union, the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Portuaria Quetzal, the Puerto Quetzal Dockers Union, was murdered on January 15th 2007, when 100 bullets riddled the truck he was driving.  When I was in the country in autumn 2007 Aura Salazar, secretary of the right-wing Partido Patriota in the Guatemalan parliament, and a security agent called Valerio Castañon, were gunned down as they sat in a car having breakfast before starting work.

To be continued

Background information

Meet the Halls, my mythical family:  Rob Hall, born on January 2nd 1970; his wife Janie (February 25th 1972); their children Emily (March 5th 2002) and Joshua (May 4th 1999). Rob’s parents are Tim (November 12th 1937) and Beryl (April 20th 1940). Janie’s parents are Shirley (April 22nd 1946) and Bill Priest (October 17th 1944).

The names and characters in this and other posts in the ‘Tales for the 21st Century’ series are entirely fictional, but June Spears’ diary is factual, written during and just after my own stay in Guatemala in 2007.