So I have been in Guatemala for over a week now.  Please excuse any typos I may have, navigating this Spanish keyboard is new to me, and my spell check only speaks Spanish, so we will have to live with mistakes until I find an English speaking computer.


I have enjoyed the week in the Mountains at  Escuela de La Montaña. http://www.hermandad.com Getting there is quite the adventure.  Guatemala is famous for their chicken buses.  They are old school buses from the U.S. that are painted bright colors.  These buses set records for the number of people they can pack into them, as well as their speed, and how loud they play music. You have not been to Guatemala unless you have been on a Chicken bus.  Trying to find the right bus is the beginning of the adventure.  All of the Ayudantes (the people who are the helpers on the bus, they take your money and put your bags on the roof) are shouting where the buses are going COLOMBA, COLOMBA, COLOMBA!

Minerva bus terminal in Xela

After finding the right bus and a little section of seat to sit on we are finally ready to go. The ayudante hoists peoples belongings on the top of the bus and climbs back in the bus as it is going full speed down the mountain.   It really is amazing how many people can pack on a bus!  I think that the laws of physics are suspended on Guatemalan roads.  50 people in a pick up, no problem, you have to see the ayudante acrobatics on the top of a school bus barreling down the mountain to believe it.  Landslides are common and there are rarely signs to warn drivers to move to the next lane, all of a sudden the bus is on the other side of the road and a few honks of the horn is all that the oncoming traffic has as a warning sign.  As entertaining as this all usually is, unfortunately it is not uncommon for there to be accidents.  Whene there is an accident the results are usually disastrous.  It is amazing that a collision between two vehicles can result in hundreds of injuries or deaths. Guatemalan newspapers are not shy about showing the carnage from the wrecks.  Bodies in pools of blood covered only by a tarp are often on the front page of the newspaper.

The XelaJu bus in Colomba

I have so much to share from the past week it is hard to know where to start.  I think I am going to begin with a brief history of Guatemala, it is very complex and I am sure I will be adding a lot more as I learn along the way. I just want to give folks a little bit of a context of why things are the way they are here, and in order to understand the oppression that people face today it is important to understand a little bit of the history of the country.

The legacy of racism and injustice of course begins with the Spanish conquest of Guatemala.  Guatemala gained their independence from Spain in 1821 when they were briefly a part of Mexico.  They later gained independence from Mexico in 1823.  The first major export crops of Guatemala were cochineal and indigo. Both are used to make magnificent dyes (red and blue).  After the invention of synthetic dyes the export crops became coffee, sugar and bananas.  This is where the history of exploitation really amps up.  In 1898 the dictator Manuel Estraba Cabrera granted 40% of the land of Guatemala to the United Fruit Company (UFC).  As well as control over Punto Barrios (the major Atlantic port), the railroads, communication systems and electricity.

The next dictator Jorge Ubico who ruled around the 1930´s, was famous for establishing a brutal secret police and starting the vagrancy laws.  The vagrancy laws required peasants to work for 90 days without pay.  They had to carry cards on them all the time to document that they were working. Of course the peasants were working for UFC.

In 1945 thanks to the October revolutionaries Guatemala had its first democratic presidential election since it became a country.  Juan Jose Arevalo was elected president.  He dissolved the secret police, established labor laws, allowed for labor unions, established a literacy program, health care, social security, equal rights for men and women, equal rights for indigenous people and much more.  The years between 1945-1954 are referred to as the democratic spring or the 10 years of spring in Guatemala.

In 1951 Jacob Arbenz was elected president.  He started the Agrarian reforms.  At this time a vast portion of the land in Guatemala was owned by the UFC.  Arbenz expropriated land from companies who where not using their land. The idea was for this land to be used by the poor landless Guatemalans so that they would be able to grow their own food.  Much of UFC´s land at this point was not in cultivation.   The government offered the companies to either pay back taxes or sell their land for the price that they had said it was worth. They of course had been undervaluing their land in order to pay lower taxes.  As you can imagine the UFC was not happy about this.  They either had to pay back taxes or get paid way less for their land that it was actually worth. At the time U.N. ambassador Henry Lodge, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the head of the CIA Allen Dulles were all major share holders in UFC.

In 1954 a US backed coup takes place in Guatemala. Castilla Armas takes power.
Armas reverses the Agrarian Reform and installs a brutal secret police. This is all takes place during the height of the ¨red scare".  The U.S. was spreading propaganda about the former government being involved with communist countries.

In 1960 the internal armed conflict began.  There were many different organizations that were resisting the government at the time.  In 1982 they all united to form the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity).  During this time Rios Montt was dictator.  He started the program ¨rifles and beans¨. The government would go into communities and say they either had to be with the government and they would be fed or if they were against the government they would be murdered.  Rios Montt among others was convicted of war crimes.  The atrocities that happened during the war are horrific.  People were put inside churches which were then set on fire, there were massacres of villages. Most of the casualties were indigenous people.  During this time the U.S. was funding the Guatemalan military and Guatemalans were being trained at the School of the Americas (Members of the Guatemalan military are still trained at the School of Americas today!). http://www.soaw.org/

In 1996 after 36 years the peace accords were signed. Up until this time around 200,000 people (mostly indigenous) were killed,  440 villages were razed,  1.5 million displaced, and 45,000 people disappeared.

It seems as though everything should be better once the peace accords are signed, but the violence was not over.  In 1998 Bishop Gerardi was murdered 3 days after he released a document that had the names of some of the worst abusers of human rights during the war.

Guatemala still exports bananas, coffee and sugar. U.S. corporate interest still influences the politics in the country.  People are paid wages that they can hardly live on, people are displaced from their homes in the interest of mining and agriculture.  I have heard stories of people having their basic human rights violated because they attempted to organize, but that is a story for another day.

Currently near the city of Coban there is a state of siege.  You can read more about it here.  http://www.guatemalasolidarityproject.org/

 Here are some other resources...
http://www.nisgua.org/home.asp



More soon....