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Guatemala On My Mind

October 9th, 2005

Attn: David Shipley
NY Times Op-Ed Editor
658 words

Surviving Guatemala

Guatemala is in the news this week and that—defying the no-news maxim—can only be good news.

Torrential rains have caused mudslides and hundreds of deaths there in another tough-luck natural disaster du jour. Except, when people living on steep lakeside slopes are forced to slash and burn every available acre to carryout farming that could scarcely be categorized as subsistence, leaving no cover for erosion control, it’s not just a hard rain that’s to blame.

The piling up of insult to injury on injury lies stinking like the layers of bodies and splintered homes in the mud. One village shunned the rescue efforts of the Guatemalan military; last time they showed up, it was to massacre their men, women, and children as part of the dictators’ strategy to win Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. While engaged US citizens take grassroots action against Darfur’s plight in the face of fair and balanced reporting, Reagan cover-ups in the early ‘80s—unless they occurred in Nicaragua and involved Iran—were taken at face value, leaving some 200,000 Guatemalan cold war casualties in mass unmarked graves. Fashions come around again every twenty years, and the Guatemalan mayors now declaring entire towns mass graves are right on cue.

If any dim consolation is to be had in recent coverage it’s that these victims were identified as Mayan. According to the hit reality television series Survivor, the Maya were an ancient civilization of stargazers now lost. And so they are in the world—invisible, despite the 23 separate languages they still speak in a country the size of Tennessee—while hale new comets-to-be bop on down to make a game of surviving in their ecosystem for cash prizes commensurate with the minutes they manage to tan in the limelight.

Also in the news this week comes a 60% US farm subsidy cut. It’s a potato chip US farmers, looking for greater export opportunities with Europe, are bargaining against Brussels sprouts. Guatemala’s corn and coffee growers have no government subsidies or fair trade laws on their side. Instead they stare down CAFTA’s double-barreled shotgun in a marriage between el Norte and their beloved oligarchy. The reception will be held on US soil, hosted by US service industries with Wall street’s cost-cutting blessing, and the ranchera music will continue into the night long after the Survivor wrap party.

For the even greater number of Spanish speakers that will cross the desert as a result—their backs wet with sweat and polluted river water—the big game of survival won’t end once they’ve slipped past the vigilante militias patrolling the already militarized borders to stem the invasion. Can they get jobs or driver’s licenses? Can they avoid deportation? Unlike television’s reality where staying in the public eye is an advantage, here they have to literally stay below the radar, in kitchens, in fields, in the vacancies of hotel rooms checked-out of.

If we can see the human hand in our own New Orleans disaster we can surely begin to own up to our responsibility in Guatemala. Watershed violence in the post-Columbus Americas was levied when we tampered with Guatemala’s ability to direct its own path with the CIA-led coup to overthrow Guatemala’s first democratically elected government whose 51st anniversary we did not just honor, too busy cleaning up our most recent overthrow effort. Mayans aren’t the only people with longstanding and rich traditions. How long before Survivor Iraq becomes real enough to move from CNN to NBC primetime?

Whether it’s an entertainment or environmental episode, a political or personal problem, national or natural, one thing is certain: Guatemala is in the news this week and that’s good news. Because the bad news is old news and that, say Funk and Wagnall, is not news. The good news is that after conquest and genocide, mud slides and sweeps week, there are still Mayans, and that for once their sufferings are not being ignored on the world stage.

DS worked as a human rights monitor living with indigenous populations in Guatemala in 2004. He has published articles this year in Report On Guatemala and Solidarity Update and photos in El Latino Expreso.

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