1 Topic Outline

Topic 1: Introduction: Guatemala: The Beauty That Hurts September 8 Topic 1: Introduction: The Beauty That Hurts 1.The Beauty of Guatemala • Geography • People 2.The "Hurts" of Guatemala • The colonial legacy: servitude and slavery o Indigenas o Ladinos o Colonialist • The “Finca” legacy: Life in a “Banana Republic” • A Brief reign of democracy and social justice: The Arbenz Regime • A long reign of terror and injustice: The 30 year civil war • The continued reign of poverty: second poorest country in Latin America 3. The Emergent "Help" for Guatemala • The Peace Accords • Favored Nation among Liberals and Human Rights Advocates: o Rigoberta Menchu biography and Nobel Peace prize, 1982 o NGO’s flock to Guatemala § Examples: Doctor’s without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, Heifer Foundation, • 4. The "International Service Learning" Program in Guatemala • How ISL “helps” to revive this beautiful country • The ISL program: beyond tourism, becoming an informed world citizen. o Cultural immersion in a developing country § Live with families § Do volunteer work § Learn problems of poverty first hand • Student work in Guatemala: building a house, working with children, building stoves, running a medical clinics. • Agencies that work with ISL: § ConstruCasa: Housing § Pop Wuj: Social Work and Medical Clinic § La Montana: Ex-Finca Community References and Readings for Further Investigation 1. ISL NGO affiliates: • ConstruCasa, Antigua www.construcasa.org • Pop-Wuj, Spanish Language School and Social Action, Xela [Quetzltenango] www.pop- wuj.org • La Montana: Language School:PLQE. www.hermandad.com/mschool.html 2. An excellent Guide Book, with good historical commentary. • Argueta. Guatemala: Moon Handbooks. History: 362-388 LECTURE TOPIC 1: INTRODUCTION; GUATEMALA: THE BEAUTY THAT HURTS 1. Introduction Guatemala is a beautiful country: its land, its people, its heritage as an ancient civilization. It is also a country that hurts because of the pain. There is suffering that exists beneath this deceptive façade of beauty . It hurts from wounds of the conquistadors, from the demise of its ancient civilization. from centuries of colonialism, from decades of corrupt and oppressive dictatorships. Most recently Guatemala suffered the loss of a brief rise of a humane democracy in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In the 1960’s this democracy was snuffed out by a 30 year civil war. It wasn’t until 1996 that Peace came to Guatemala, a peace mediated by the united nations and concerned nations of the world. This peace has seen the arrival of hundreds if not thousands of volunteer aid organizations providing essential help in an effort to revive this beautiful country…………attending to everything from housing to health to human rights. Amidst this new influx there is much hope. This is the essence of what this course is about: the beauty, the hurts, the help and the hope. GUATEMALA FACTS: Guatemala (pronounced /ˌɡwɑːtəˈmɑːlə/ ( listen); Spanish: República de Guatemala, Spanish pronunciation: [reˈpuβlika ðe ɣwateˈmala]) is Is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. Its area is 108,890 km² (42,043 mi²) with an estimated population of 13,276,517. (Nebraska: 77,000 sq. miles) According to the CIA World Factbook, Guatemala's GDP (PPP) per capita is US$5,000; however, this developing country still faces many social problems and is among the 10 poorest countries in Latin America.[36] The distribution of income remains highly unequal with more than half of the population below the national poverty line[37] and just over 400,000 (3.2%) unemployed. The CIA World Fact Book considers 56.2% of the population of Guatemala to be living in poverty.[38] Ref: Wikipedia: Guatemala Guatemala Xela\ \\\ Antigua 1.The Beauty of Guatemala: Photographic Essay [file: GuatemalaBeauty.ppt] 2. The "Hurts" of Guatemala The story of the hurts of Guatemala begins with the invasion by the Spanish “conquistadors” in the early 1500’s. Hernán Cortés, who had led the Spanish conquest of Mexico, granted a permit to Captains Gonzalo de Alvarado and his brother, Pedro de Alvarado, to conquer this land in 1521. The people’s conquered were the Mayans. This conquest marked the end of the Mayan civilization and its culture. To the Mayans, firearms and metal swords were signs of a superior culture and a superior Deity. The Mayans were psychologically overwhelmed. They not only gave into the Spaniards, they lost faith in their own culture. They became submissive and compliant. This passivity and subservience has persisted for centuries through today. Three groups emerged from the Spanish colonization: the colonialists, the “ladinos” and the “indigenas,” Mayans. Interbreeding between Mayan and Colonialist, created a group known as “ladinos” a Spanish speaking mestizo minority. Ladinos functioned for decades as the intermediaries between colonists and Mayan, doing the colonialists bidding. Because of the deceptions fomented upon the indigenas, tensions still run high between Ladinos and Mayan to this day. “Ladinos” and the Spanish were distained by “indigenas”, the Mayan. The Mayans did not adopt Spanish, speaking their native dialects instead, well into the twentieth century. There are 22 Mayan dialects. It is only recently that younger Mayans have begun to learn and speak “Spanish”. Mayans constitute 60% of the Guatemalan population. The primary benefit of the Mayans to the colonialists was as a source of cheap labor. Landowners and the catholic church were given the right to force Mayans to cultivate their fields and dig their mines as near slaves. By the late nineteenth century with the rise of coffee plantations, whole communities of Mayans were settled on the estates as laborers. They owned no land and could be ordered on or off the Finca, as plantations are known locally, at the whim of the “padron”. This unequal relationship between land, landowner, and landless indigenas still exists. The circumstances of the Mayan majority of Guatemala are that they have been kept impoverished throughout Guatemala’s history. Lack of land, food, and citizenship standing has made for a “hurtful” life. Guatemala is the second poorest country of Latin America, just ahead of Haiti. A glimmer of hope occurred in the 1940’s and 1950’s with the emergence of a humanitarian and democratic government. This brief reform peaked in 1954 with the election of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Arbenz proposed a Land Reform program requiring Finca owners to grant property ownership to all indiginas families living on their land. This effort was met with great resistance not only by the landowners but by the U.S. government. This occurred during the emergence of the cold war where fear existed among the capitalist nations, including the U.S., that a communist conspiracy was seeking to subvert nations around the world to a new sphere of influence. Arbenz’s actions were perceived not only as socialist but as part of the growing “communist menace”. The United Fruit Company, exporters of millions of tons of bananas and other fruits, had deep roots in the U.S. business sector and in the U.S. government. With the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency. a coup was staged to oust Arbenz and to facilitate a return to military dictatorship. However, encouraged by these recent developments and by the success of Fidel Castro and Che Cuevara in Cuba a civil war broke out that lasted for 30 years, 1960 – 1996. The U.S. was a major participant behind the scenes supporting the military. The brutality and genocide was as foul as any that we have heard of recently in Africa. These events “hurt” Guatemala, yet again. Hundreds of thousands of people had their lives and livelihood taken from them. The brutality and impunity with which the government metted out its vengeance prompted the attention of nations from around the world. The UN was brought in to lead peace negotiations which finally brought an end to the war in 1996….thirty years of violence and disruption. With peace restored an outpouring of aid surged into the country, NGO’s sprang up in every corner of Guatemala doing badly needed work to restore the country and to address the still persistent problems of poverty and human rights. Hurt Hidden by Outward Beauty The “beauty” of Guatemala hides its underlying poverty and hurt. To the passing tourist it is easy to assume the population is healthy and happy. Were it not for the civil war, this country could have easily been passed over for decades before world charity agencies payed it serious attention. Here is a recent article about the “hidden” hunger of Guatemala: Guatemala's green hunger Article By: Deborah Bonello Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:44 They call it the "green hunger." Here in the mountains of central Guatemala, one of the world's top exporters of sugar and bananas, vegetation is everywhere and yet the people are starving. Guatemala, which has a population of 14 million, has the highest rate of child malnutrition in Latin America. Half of all children under five are malnourished. In rural areas such as Jalapa, about 100 kilometres or a three-hour drive from Guatemala City, where many families scrape by on less than a dollar a day, that figure can rise shockingly to as high as 90 percent. Luis Alexander is nine months old and suffers from acute malnutrition. He appears weak and tiny in his mother's arms in front of their mudbrick house. Ronald Estuardo Navas, a hunger monitor at the international non-profit Action Against Hunger, measures Luis's arm with a tape that evaluates the nutritional health of a child via the size of the upper arm. "He has a perimetre of 9.9 centimetres — there's a high risk he could die," he said.

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