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Guatemala On My Mind II

October 11th, 2005

Where’ve I been, what’ve I been doing? I’ve been eating ribs and revising my last entry into this entry. Behold Version II (sent just now, like a ringing shot in the dark of my publishing world, to the NY Times Op-Ed editor Mr. David Shipley):

Surviving Guatemala

Mudslides in Guatemala have caused nearly 1400 deaths in another natural disaster, but it’s not just hard rain that’s to blame. Erosion control is a luxury lost when people living on steep slopes are forced to slash and burn every available acre for farming hardly categorizable as subsistence.

If any dim consolation is to be had in the coverage, it’s that these victims were identified as Mayan—the umbrella ethnicity for a population that speaks 23 languages and makes up more than half the citizens in a country the size of Tennessee. According to the reality television series Survivor: Guatemala—#7 in the Nielsen ratings last week with 17.3 million viewers—the Maya were an ancient civilization of stargazers, long since disappeared. And so they are in the world—invisible—except to the stars from the States who shoot on down to make a game of surviving in their ecosystem for a million-dollar cash prize incommensurate with the minutes they manage to tan in the limelight.

Despite its visitor status, the Survivor cast had home-field advantage in Guatemala. While peasants continue to divide and subdivide depleted soil, the Survivor: Guatemala crew enjoyed exclusive-use privileges to pristine national park land.

Another high-rolling North American concern, The United Fruit Company, enjoyed similar status through the first half of the last century until Guatemala’s first democratically elected government bought back a small percentage of its unused land in 1954 to distribute to Mayan campesinos to cultivate. The government paid what the company claimed the land was worth in its tax statements, which was below actual value. Eisenhower was to United Fruit what Cheney is to Halliburton, and suddenly the CIA had orchestrated the government’s overthrow.

The coup and 36-year civil war it triggered continues to seep instability into Guatemalan groundwater while we’re busy cleaning up our most recent overthrow. Mayans aren’t the only people with longstanding traditions. How long before Survivor: Iraq becomes real enough to move from CNN day parts to CBS primetime?

The piling up of insult to 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 a US-backed counter-insurgency strategy.

That Guatemala is in the news this week is news itself. Reagan cover-ups in the early ‘80s left some 200,000 Guatemalan cold war casualties unnoticed in mass unmarked graves. If fashions come around again every twenty years, as it is said, the Guatemalan mayors now declaring entire towns mass graves are right on cue.

Ten years after the war’s end, the country’s economy remains ravaged. With no jobs to feed their young families, sons pick up their fathers’ machetes, and strike-out on their own, hacking away at whatever scarcity of land they have left. The government, mired in red ink, couldn’t subsidize its farmers even were it so inclined. And Guatemalan’s corn and coffee growers are staring down CAFTA’s double-barreled shotgun in a marriage between US trade interests and their own country’s neoliberal oligarchy that will make profitable small-scale agriculture in Guatemala an even greater oxymoron.

The fruits of that unholy union will be reaped on US soil as Guatemala sends ever greater numbers across the desert to compete in what Guatemalans view as Survivor: US. For these, the game 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 the point, Guatemalans here have to literally stay below the radar, getting paid under the table in restaurants and hotels with bottomless cost-cutting mandates. If they do, the ranchera music will continue into the night long after the Survivor: Guatemala wrap party. Somehow, after conquest and genocide, mudslides and sweeps week, the Maya survive.

DS worked as a human rights monitor living with indigenous populations in Guatemala in 2004. His writing and photos have appeared this year in Report On Guatemala, Solidarity Update, and El Latino Expreso.

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