Written by Emily Hall’s aunt, June Spears, in 2007. It is 2020 and Emily is about to travel to Guatemala herself.
Vanquished: Guatemala part 3
The indigenous Mayans are still a conquered people, almost five centuries on from the Spanish invasion. They form about half of Guatemala’s population of maybe 15 million (no one is quite sure of the numbers). They live in the highlands, in villages of shacks, surrounded by tiny farms often less than one acre, on steep, eroding hillsides. There is plenty of good land in Guatemala, but it is owned by the dozen or so ruling families, and by multinational companies such as Chiquita and Del Monte, which grow bananas and other crops for export.
The school in Jocotenango where I helped out, Escuela Proyecto La Esperanza, provides children with food and clothes as well as education. Most arrive hungry, and become excited shortly before 10am, watching for the arrival of milk and filling snacks. If they were not attending La Esperanza, they would not be in school at all, as their parents could not afford to send them. The state schools in Guatemala are not ‘free’: parents have to pay an annual registration fee for each child, and buy all books, stationery, equipment, uniforms and meals. Even then, government primary schools are not open for the whole day, but either in the morning or the afternoon, and are closed completely for extended holidays, the longest from the middle of October to the middle of January. Teachers in state primary schools do not have to be qualified, they just need to have finished high school. Parents who can afford it send their children to private colegios, independent schools that offer pathways into secondary education.
Fourth-grade class in La Esperanza. The students range from 10 to 16+.
For the older ones, this is their first chance of education. Their teacher, Manuel, is in the centre of the back row.
Escuela Proyecto La Esperanza is funded by a British charity based in Nottingham, Education for the Children (www.eftc.org.uk), which also finances a nearby secondary school and improves conditions in the tiny tin-shack homes in which many pupils live. Guatemala is a low-tax low-welfare state, with corporations benefiting from low taxes and the populace suffering from low wages and low welfare. One Saturday, on a coffee plantation I was visiting, I saw Nestor, a pupil in La Esperanza. Nestor’s father works on the plantation, earning around $27 a week, £14 at the exchange rate late in 2007. This small sum has to try and cope with a cost of living that is almost at a European level. The plantation itself is owned by Guatemalans of recent European descent. Especially during the 19th century, Guatemalan governments encouraged Europeans to come and plant coffee plantations.
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Diary, Sunday October 7th 2007. “Yesterday we drove through dusty countryside, where farm workers were spraying no doubt noxious chemicals onto young crops, without masks or gloves or overalls – I pity their life expectancy. Many of the remaining smallholdings are tiny – half a hectare to one hectare – on steep slopes, far too small for sustenance. The best land, in the valleys, is in large farms and plantations. It seems to me that no money for agricultural improvement reaches the Maya…”
“Electioneering was under way in the village of San Antonio Palopo, on the shore of the volcanic crater lake Atitlan. Voters were being wooed by the UNE, Union Nacional de l’Esperanza, whose candidate is Alvaro Colom Caballeros. He’s in the run-off for president with ex-General Otto Peréz Molina of the PP, Partido Patriota, whose slogan is ‘La Mano Duro’ – the Iron Fist. My heart sinks. Peréz Molina is very well funded, to judge from the number of posters, wall paintings and roadside symbols. These elections must be costing a fortune, money that would be better spent on health, education, and the creation of a sustainable economy…”
“The Maya have been pushed to the margins and to the steepest land, where their tiny farms are vulnerable to erosion. They live in shacks of tin, concrete blocks, wooden planks, or sometimes adobe. Mayan rights do not feature in the election priorities of either UNE or the PP, although UNE appears more inclined towards a modicum of improvement socially, if only in terms of economic expansion to create over 700,000 new jobs and better wages for teachers.”
Friday October 12th 2007. “We followed the CA9 highway north-east out of Guatemala City to El Progreso, Rio Hondo and Quirigua, where there are intricate Maya carvings. Quirigua is in the Motagua river valley, which reaches the Caribbean at Puerto Barrios, Guatemala’s only significant port on the Caribbean. Most of the valley land is owned by corporations, with fruit plantations and horticultural crops for export, the latter protected by acre upon acre of plastic. The bananas are plastic-protected too, encased in perforated blue plastic to protect against rain, dust and wind. What a lot of plastic to replace when the oil runs out. At Quirigua the plantations belong to Chiquita Brands (descendent of the infamous United Fruit Company) and to Del Monte.”
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Travelling north through the Petén from the Motagua valley to the ruined Maya city of Tikal, I passed a succession of shiny new evangelical protestant churches (financed from the USA), set in decrepit villages. The farms visible from the road were either under two hectares or vast, containing much unused land. Most of the land north of the little town of Frontera, where the Lago de Izabal narrows into the Caribbean-bound Rio Dulce, is controlled by a handful of powerful families. They used to run cattle, tended by peasant campesinos, but since the road was hard-surfaced a decade ago, the labourers have migrated away, to the slums of Guatemala City and as illegals to the USA. Staying overnight in Finca Ixobel, a country guesthouse owned by an American widow whose Guatemalteco husband was assassinated by a death squad in the civil war, I read in Revue magazine for June 2007 that over a fifth of the population, 21%, have to exist on less than $1 a day, and well over half the people, 58%, subsist on less than $2 a day.
The Petén is, according to Pablo, who works as a guide in Tikal, the world’s fifth largest forest reserve, and the biggest in Central America. The reserve also functions as a drugs highway. Drug runners are constantly building air strips deep in the forest for the lucrative narcotrafico, which finances grand villas behind high walls, and four-by-fours with tinted windows. Drugs are more important to the local economy than tourism, despite the presence of amazing Mayan monuments. “Each year around 150,000 visitors come to Tikal,” said Pablo. Increasingly, they fly in to Flores Airport, to avoid the hazards of Guatemala City. Flores Airport is bringing ‘development’ to the Petén, shopping malls plonked incongruously in the rural landscape. Pablo was pessimistic. He said that poverty is increasing because subsistence farmers do not have enough land. The landlords are opposed to any process of land reform, even though their own land may lie idle. Now the landowners are looking forward to a golden era of biofuels, a scenario in which campesinos do not feature. Fewer families can afford to send their children to school, and in Pablo’s view the illiteracy rate is escalating again, above the low point of 40% estimated in 2002.
In Guatemala the law of the jungle applies. There are courts, and prisons, but legal procedures are slow and uncertain, and often people take the law into their own lands. La Prensa Libre of October 18th 2007 had photos of a man and his wife being publicly beaten in Chichicastenango, retribution for selling quack medicines that did not cure people.
The apparatus of the state in Guatemala, as far as it exists, is deployed to protect existing power structures. The welfare of the people comes way down this agenda. Politicians and businessmen – often the same people – have little interest in working to abolish hunger in the land, to provide affordable healthcare, or to create a thriving countryside where families can produce enough food for themselves and their neighbourhoods.
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Saturday October 20th 2007. “I remember the emblems of Guatemala City as fluorescent M’s locating McDonalds, Esso, Shell and Texaco signs marking filling stations, and high-rise blocks housing US hotel chains, encircled by tin-roofed shacks, unfriendly streets, potholes, rubbish and guns.”
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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.