Images of Guatemala
Emily Hall, who in 2020 is about to spend a year working in Guatemala, looks through her aunt June’s photos, taken in October and November 2007.  She likes this mysterious image of the Lago de Atitlan, a lake in a volcanic crater

”Guatemala, alma de la tierra’ – soul of the earth – at Santiago Sacatepéquez on November 1st, the Day of the Dead, when the Mayans release the souls of their ancestors from their graves. The souls fly on the huge paper-and-bamboo kites, which families and groups manufacture for weeks beforehand.’ Why are the girls all wearing the same clothes? wondered Emily. Is it some sort of uniform?

‘Family watching the kites fly from the cemetery, which becomes a park for the day, filled with flowers.’ Is that a grave in front of them, Emily pondered? Why is the older women wearing a cloth on her head?

‘Paper kites, each with a central message. These are too large to fly.’ Is this art, or religion, or an excuse to have a holiday and make money, and why don’t the men bother with the special costume? Emily wished she had asked when aunt June was still alive.

‘The wicked saint Maximón, in his shrine at San Andrés Itzapa. Believers bring their problems to him, and offer alcohol, cigars, candles, to solicit his support.’ Why do people trust a wicked saint? Emily couldn’t understand. Is he on the side of lawbreakers? Is it like witchcraft?

‘Saint’s day procession down the steps of Santo Tomás church, Chichicastenango. It was very noisy with firecrackers exploding. The religion here is nominally Catholic but blended with ancient Mayan rites.’ Religion was a big deal in Guatemala, thought Emily. I don’t think religion mattered much here then, but it does now, I suppose, for lots of people.

‘The Volcán de Agua from the Parque Central in Antigua, the former capital. The cathedral is on the left. Only a small part is in use, the rest is a mass of collapsed stone that has lain where it fell during a horrendous earthquake in 1773.’ It looks peaceful, thought Emily, not the sort of country where people are gunned down in their thousands every year.

‘Corrugated iron features a lot in Guatemalan housing, and armed men are everywhere, as police, security guards, soldiers.’ Emily decided that this photo hinted at the menace of poverty. She remembered aunt June saying that it was quite scary taking photos of people carrying guns.

‘Temple III in the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, in the Petén, northern Guatemala. The city was abandoned after years of drought. It is thought now that the destruction of the rainforest, to build and supply the city, reduced the rainfall. The city itself had become too large for its hinterland to support.’ Oh yes, Emily remarked to herself, I remember reading ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond, and he wrote about the Maya.

‘The city of Antigua is full of ruins, the result of many earthquakes. Especially severe earthquakes happened in 1773 and 1976.’ Why build with stone if it’s all likely to come crashing down, Emily asked herself, before considering that conquerors want to impress, and they had a lot of impressing to do, considering the Mayan heritage of massive stone monuments.

Emily closed the album and thought about the changes she might find when she, too, arrived in Guatemala.

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.

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?

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.