Fact: March 25th 2009:  Gladys Monterroso is kidnapped from a restaurant in Guatemala City and tortured. Her husband Sergio Morales, Guatemala’s special prosecutor for human rights, has a few hours previously published “The Special Report of the Historical Archives of the National Police: the Right to Know”. The right to know includes evidence of murder, torture and corruption in the name of the state. How will Guatemala change by 2020? Will it be better or worse than my imaginary ‘Colonial Future?’ What needs to alter in Guatemala to bring justice — and enough to eat — to the impoverished majority?

Colonial Future

November 12th 2020. Janie is reading an email from Emily, who is working in Guatemala, in the school in which her late aunt June was a volunteer 13 years previously. Guatemala is separated from the USA by Mexico.

“Jocotenango, November 11th 2020

Hello mum and dad

As I said in my last email, I decided to try and find out what happened to the children that aunt June taught. I discovered that many of their families still live here, and last Saturday I went on the bus to San Juan del Obispo, on the lower slopes of the Agua volcano, to meet Rosa Ramos, who was 17 and in the secondary school when June was last here. Rosa told me she had to decide between marrying Gilberto and going with him as an illegal into the USA, or staying in Guatemala as a primary school teacher, work you can do after completing secondary school, without any extra training. Anyway, she married Gilberto and they made it through Mexico to the border. Three times they were caught by the border patrols and sent back into Mexico, but the fourth time they made it. Rosa told me that it was a bitter disappointment, as Gilberto smashed his right hip and both legs in a road accident when she was at work one day. The police found him and soon realised he had no papers, so he was taken back over the border. They’d been staying with a cousin who rented a small apartment, and Rosa had no idea what had happened to Gilberto until one of his sisters rang by mobile phone to say he was in a charity hospital back in Guatemala, very weak and crippled. Rosa had found a cleaning job that paid $30 a day, so she didn’t really want to return home, but felt she had to as Gilberto would need to be cared for, and she thought she’d be able to get a job as a teacher, which she has, but it’s only temporary. Gilberto depends on her because there are no welfare benefits, so otherwise he’d have to rely on hand-outs from his family, or beg in the street.

It’s better for Miguel Montejo, his English was so fluent that he was taken on by the Banco Comercial and works in the business division, where he often has to talk to North Americans. Guatemala is still a tax haven — I remember aunt June told me that in 2009 there were great hopes that tax havens would be abolished, but it never happened. Money comes from the USA and goes back to the USA, and hardly any of it benefits Guatemala. Miguel has a little boy and is saving up to be able to send him to a private school. Miguel says the private schools are massively better than the state ones. It’s quite funny where he lives in Antigua, as over the road there is an evangelical church and right next to it a little hotel where people rent rooms by the hour. While the evangelical pastor preaches very loudly about sinners, little children play in the street outside while their mothers are in the ‘hotel’. Miguel’s own life is not easy, he leaves Antigua on the bus for Guatemala City at 5am every morning, two hours later arrives at the bank, and he doesn’t get home again until past 7pm. He says it’s too dangerous to live in Guatemala City, the murder rate goes up and up. Aunt June told me that in Guatemala as a whole nearly one person in 2,000 was murdered or died violently every year when she was there, now it’s more like one in 1,750.

The children I teach have a mid-morning snack, lunch and a supper at school. In the half-hour before the morning snack at 10am it’s hard to get them to concentrate as they are watching and waiting for the food. The charity that funds the school really struggles to raise enough money these days. The children have to share textbooks and they are not allowed to take them home. There’s no library locally, either. In fact there’s no public library service at all.

I do feel quite far away but there are plenty of other volunteers here, mainly from the USA. The internet cafés have become expensive but I can afford to go online for two hours or so a week.

Look forward to hearing from you, love from Emily”

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).

Smash and Grab
The Mayan people believed that man was just one part of the natural order on Earth, a natural order that needed to remain in balance. When their practice departed calamitously from this tidy theory, their civilisation declined.

The Maya loved mathematics and astronomy, a legacy that persists today in Mayan children, who in school are fascinated by numbers and are skilful in arithmetic. Over a thousand years ago, Mayan enthusiasm for astronomy, time and mathematics came to dominate over their theory of ecological balance, with catastrophic results. Their huge temples and monuments, representing astronomical and chronological meanings, required large numbers of craftsmen and labourers to build and maintain them, and so socially and occupationally complex cities, such as Tikal in northern Guatemala, surrounded the monuments. The cities absorbed too much of the Mayans’ collective energy, and demanded too much food, fuel and construction materials from the rural hinterlands. The forest was felled, interrupting the water cycle. Less rain fell.

As their water, food and fuel resources dwindled, Mayan tribes fought intense wars to try and seize as much as they could of the remaining supplies. So much for the ideal of natural harmony! The knock-out blow at Tikal was a 30-year drought around 1000AD. The occupants of Tikal walked away, and many of their descendents – still poverty-stricken — live in the western highlands of Guatemala, on steep, infertile land which the conquering European families and the multinational corporations have not wanted.

The relationship between trees and human survival is too often overlooked. Jared Diamond, in his 2005 book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive, points out that forests

“….function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing that carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion, and sediment runoff into streams. Some forests, notably tropical rainforests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the cleared land infertile.”
– p.469 in the 2006 Penguin edition of Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive

This is what happened at Tikal, and at innumerable settlements all over the world, from Norse Greenland to Haiti in the Caribbean, from Easter Island in the Pacific to Rwanda in Africa. Deforestation ends societies, even civilisations.

Free of human interference, the jungle returned to Tikal and clothed the monuments, which slept undisturbed for centuries. Spanish invaders conquered the Mayans, who over the intervening years have been dragged unwillingly into a capitalist economy.

There is a facet of Mayan culture that annoys western entrepreneurs: Mayans are relatively indifferent to consumer culture.

“An enormous disadvantage for this country is that the Indians [the Mayans] won’t work more than just enough to fill their basic needs, and these are very few. The only way to make [a Mayan] work is to advance him money, then he can be forced to work. Very often, they run off, but they are caught and punished very severely.”
– from the story of a German who emigrated to Guatemala in 1892, told in Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain: stories of terror, betrayal and forgetting in Guatemala, p.38. Silence on the Mountain was published in 2004 by Duke University Press.

This German immigrant, Friedrich Endler, ran a coffee plantation. The plantations struggled to find enough labour, so the government instituted a form of slavery, the labour draft. What made the Mayans go to work on the plantations? Daniel Wilkinson explains:

“The labor drafts. Upon the request of a plantation owner, the governors of each department would round up a work gang of fifty to one hundred Indians and send them to work on the plantation. An 1894 law provided Indians with one way to escape this form of forced recruitment: become an indebted worker for a plantation.”
– Silence on the Mountain p.76-77.

The pass laws, so hated in South Africa later in the 20th century, already existed in Guatemala:

“ ‘We were slaves because of the law of Ubico,’ recalled the next elderly peasant we talked to. He was referring to President Jorge Ubico, who had governed the country from 1930 to 1944, and the ‘slavery’ he described was not debt peonage but the vagrancy laws that had replaced it. ‘We had to carry a booklet, like an identity card, which showed what plantation we worked in and how many hours we had worked that year. If you didn’t carry it, the government could jail you and make you work without pay’.”
– Silence on the Mountain p.97.

Even if the Mayans’ obsession with monuments had not led them to environmental destruction, and they had protected their forests, their later history may not have been markedly different. The Spanish invaders had superior weapons and a disregard for the rights of indigenous peoples, who were enslaved and forced to live by the rules of the conquering ‘culture’. Why should the future be any different? Can we change the pattern of history by opting to co-operate and to share resources, instead of grabbing what we can? If we save our trees, won’t others come and cut them down?

Guatemala and the USA, part 2

Written by Emily Hall’s aunt, June Spears, in 2007. It is 2020 and Emily is about to travel to Guatemala herself.

The leader of the Partido Patriota (PP), one of the strongest political parties in Guatemala, is the former head of the Army Intelligence Directorate, General Otto Pérez Molina. The retired general was one of the two candidates in the run-off election for president on November 4th 2007, but he lost out to Álvaro Colom Caballeros, leader of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE). The violence that marked the election campaign continued afterwards. On December 21st Marco Antonio Xicay, a newly elected member of Congress representing the Partido Patriota, was shot dead. Nothing unusual: the annual murder total in Guatemala is around 6,000, or about one person in every 2,000. The odds are lot shorter if you are a politician, a trades unionist, a human rights activist, or an investigative journalist.

Criminals operate within Guatemala’s political parties, reinforcing the webs of extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking that kill latent democracy in the country. For the ordinary Guatemalteco, it does not matter much who is the nominal president, because the threat of violence hangs over every attempt to improve social justice and reduce poverty. In the 21st century, Guatemala is source of cheap labour for foreign companies that locate factories – called maquiladoras – there, and a market for toxic pesticides, veterinary pharmaceuticals and other products that are no longer permitted in ‘advanced’ economies.

People die young in Guatemala. So many children die that cemeteries have special zones for them. The only people who receive any sort of pension are ex-government employees and a few fortunate private-sector employees for whom a pension was part of their benefits package. If you are old and don’t have a pension or an affluent and caring family, you are on your own. If you are ill you cannot expect free medical treatment, for there is no health service, so again you are on your own.

Guns are everywhere, in the hands of criminals and of the armies of security guards, who often look no more than 15 or 16 years old. There are armed guards in chemists’ shops, in supermarkets, on Coca-Cola delivery trucks, and inside and outside banks. It is unnerving at first, but you get used to it alarmingly quickly. Local buses are often attacked, to rob the passengers, and the attacks frequently turn violent. The British Embassy does not allow its staff to travel on local buses. I went on the bus to school every day, and felt quite safe, but the journey was just a few kilometres, from Antigua to the next town, Jocotenango.

Guatemala produces more food than it consumes. The food is exported, while almost half the children suffer from malnutrition. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations calculated that in 2004 Guatemala produced 0.32% of the world’s food and consumed only 0.16%.  The export revenues – US$1.417bn in 2004 — do not benefit the population, only the international shareholders of the multinational corporations – including Chiquita, the modern incarnation of United Fruit Company — that control the country’s best land. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, power and the hidden battle for the world’s food system, uses the term “bottleneck corporations” to show the power that they wield over the whole food supply chain.

Government in Guatemala is all about creating attractive conditions for corporations.  This was the main theme of the 2007 presidential campaign. Improved social justice got a mention in the campaign of the winner, Álvaro Colom Caballeros, but way down his agenda. The losing candidate in the run-off between the top two in the first round, the retired general Otto Peréz Molina, had promised more security and more opportunities for business. His vice-presidential running-mate, Ricardo Castillo Sinibaldi, is a member of one of Guatemala’s elite business families. The Castillos have 82 companies in their holding organisation, Corporación Castillo Hermanos, including Consorcio Cervecero Centroamericano, a huge beer and drinks business. Colom won because of support from the indigenous Mayan peoples. They supported him not because he had a vision for a new Guatemala, but because he was the least bad option.

Business as usual. This is how the USA likes Guatemala to remain: a de facto colony south of Mexico.

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.

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.

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