NPR Xeni Tech: Guatemala Project Builds Grassroots Tech

Today on NPR "Day to Day," the fourth of a 5-part report I brought back from Central America -- "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." In the series, we learn how new technology is being used to solve old problems, and this fourth segment is all about infrastructure tech devices hecho a mano -- made by hand -- in Guatemala.

Link to today's episode, "Grassroots Technology at Xela Teco," with streaming audio (Real/Win), and some short video clips. MP3 Link. Link to narrated slideshow. Here are more photos: Link.

Link to series home page.

"Xeni Tech" home, and podcast feed. Here's a reporter's notebook blog with more background on these stories: Link

Many of Guatemala's rural indigenous communities lack infrastructure basics such as clean drinking water, sanitation and electricity.

A group of American eco-engineers in the United States from the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group is working with a number of Mayan villages to change that.

At Xela Teco, a workshop in the town of Quetzaltenango (or Xela for short), tech-minded Guatemalans build eco-friendly devices. The workshop is a small business supported by the U.S.-based nonprofit Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group.

Xela Teco builds environmentally friendly technology that can be used to bring survival basics to poverty-stricken villages in the Mayan highlands: clean water, electricity and fuel.

While Americans are part of the Xela Teco effort right now, their goal is to step aside. The hope is that arming rural communities with certain skill sets will help break a cycle of poverty, disease and malnutrition.

If the effort is successful, Xela Teco may end up becoming a blueprint for the future of development work.

IMAGES: 2007, Xeni Jardin. SPECIAL THANKS to Alex Lee, a longtime BoingBoing reader who emailed and suggested this story in the first place! (Link

Previously:

NPR Xeni Tech: Guatemala: Digital archives may help find "disappeared." (part 3)

NPR Xeni Tech: Guatemala: Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala (part 2)

NPR Xeni Tech: Guatemala: A Database for the Dead. (part 1)

NPR Xeni Tech - Guatemala: digital archives may help find "disappeared."

Today on NPR "Day to Day," the third of a 5-part report I brought back from Central America -- "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." In the series, we learn how technology is being used to solve historic problems in Guatemala.

Link to today's episode, "Guatemalan Archives May Help Locate Missing," with streaming audio (Real/Win), and some short video clips. Link to series home page.

Link to narrated slideshow. Here are more photos: Link.

"Xeni Tech" home, and podcast feed.

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In rural areas of Guatemala, work is under way to recover and identify remains from mass graves dug during the country's civil war. But in the country's capital city, thousands of people also disappeared. The answers to their fates may lie buried in a massive police archive — one that wasn't supposed to exist.

At a police compound in Guatemala City, each dark room overflows with documents, some as old as 100 years.

These archives may shed light on early US involvement in Guatemala. In 1954, the CIA backed a military coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president, and a long series of military dictatorships followed.

The national police were believed to be responsible for so many atrocities during the civil war that their organization was dissolved and replaced by a new institution when the conflict ended.

Buried in this enormous, dingy compound are answers that the Guatemalan people have waited for for decades. The archive was discovered by accident, during an investigation of a munitions dump. For years, authorities denied these archives existed. The space and all it contained were left for the rodents and the bats.

The Project for the Recuperation of the National Police Historic Archives (PRAHPN) works under the Guatemalan government's human rights ombudsman, trying to build a digital library so that the information on these crumbling pages will last. Patrick Ball and the US-based nonprofit Benetech are helping the police archive project -- Benetech produces free, open-source software specifically designed to record and store data about human rights abuses.

IMAGES: 2007, Xeni Jardin.

Previously:

NPR Xeni Tech: Guatemala series, Part 2: Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala

NPR "Xeni Tech" - Guatemala: Unearthing the Future. Part 1, ""A Database for the Dead."

NPR Xeni Tech: Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala

Today on NPR "Day to Day," the second segment in a 5-part series I filed called "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future," about how technology is being used to solve historic problems. Today's piece follows the FAFG, a group of forensic scientists who are working to exhume and identify the remains of victims buried in a mudslide caused by Hurricane Stan.

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Link to "Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala," a profile on the work of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, with streaming audio (Real/Win).

MP3 Link for today's segment.

Link to narrated slideshow. More photos here.

"Xeni Tech" home, and podcast feed

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Before the mudslide, there were more than 50 homes in the Tzujutil Mayan village of Panabaj. Now, the houses and hundreds of the people who lived in them are 10 feet underground. Along the edges of the site, makeshift memorials stand as monuments to the dead.

The Guatemalan government cordoned off the zone as a high-risk area, and had no plans to recover the dead. But survivors resisted and joined with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) to unearth the victims.

For more than a decade, the FAFG has exhumed mass graves from political massacres that took place during Guatemala's decades-long civil war. This time, they are working in the wake of a natural disaster. The country's army has offered to help with the exhumation, but the mudslide survivors have refused. The military killed 13 unarmed civilians in Panabaj in 1990.

Along with tractors to clear the 400,000 square-foot mudslide site, FAFG is using mapping software and other technology to create a secure database on the remains. As of today, the FAFG has uncovered 82 sets of human remains, and identified nearly 60. They believe there may be as many as 500 bodies in all.

IMAGES: Top, FAFG workers exhume victims of the October 5, 2005 mudslide in Panabaj. (photo - courtesy FAFG). | A makeshift memorial marks the site where one family was buried alive (photo - Xeni Jardin) | When a corpse is unearthed, forensic anthropologists with the FAFG radio their tech team for a code that will help to track all that becomes known about the victim. (photo - courtesy FAFG) | 8-year-old Juan Ramirez survived that night, and said villagers at first thought the noise was an airplane, not a mudslide. (photo - Xeni Jardin)

Previously:

NPR "Xeni Tech" - Guatemala: Unearthing the Future. Part 1, ""A Database for the Dead."

NPR "Xeni Tech" - Guatemala: Unearthing the Future (and new podcast)

This week on NPR "Day to Day," a five-part series of reports I brought back from Central America: "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future."

One European visitor in the 1800s called this country "Land of the Eternal Spring," and its volcanoes, ancient ruins, and rich Mayan culture make the place feel mythic even today. But suffering also defines Guatemala, and scars from a decades-long civil war have yet to heal. The war that claimed more than 200,000 lives ended ten years ago, but its lingering effects have left some 80% of the population in poverty. In this series, you'll hear stories from people who are trying to fight that, applying innovative, home-grown technologies to solve old problems.

The first of these reports focuses on a group called the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), a nonprofit comprised of technologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists who unearth mass graves from political massacres. They work to identify the dead and return the remains to their families for dignified reburial. The process begins with the hard work of the exhumation itself, but they also use DNA forensics and software they develop themselves, so they can identify a greater portion of the remains, and preserve evidence that could be used in criminal trials against the perpetrators of these atrocities. FAFG staff routinely deal with death threats from those who do not support their work.

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Link to "A Database for the Dead," streaming audio (Real/Win).

MP3 Link for today's segment.

Link to narrated slideshow.

Also today, NPR is launching a "Xeni Tech" podcast where these reports (and everything else I file for the network) will be available in DRM-free MP3: Link.

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Images (2007/Xeni Jardin): Above, FAFG anthropologist Raquel Doradea logs information about another incident -- this information will be entered into their database, along with testimony from survivors. Below, her colleague Patricia Ixcoy works on remains from a 1982 massacre that killed 26 K'iche Maya people in Kanakil, a rural pueblo in the department (think:state) of El Quiché. The bones look charred because the victims were first shot, then set on fire.

Guatemala: E. Howard Hunt and the CIA

E. Howard Hunt Jr. died last week at age 88. The former CIA officer is best known for his role in the bungled 1972 Watergate break-in, which later led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.

But Hunt is also linked to a significant turning point in the history of Guatemala: he assisted in the planning and execution of a CIA-backed coup in 1954 ("Operation Success") which overthrew the democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz. Soon after, a decades-long civil war began, and would ultimately claim the lives of more than 200,000 Guatemalans, many of whom were Mayan peasants or dissidents.

Hunt was also involved in the Bay of Pigs incident, and wrote more than 80 spy and detective novels under various pseudonyms: more on that in this NYT story.

Slate has republished an interview he gave A.L. Bardach in 2004. In it, Hunt gloats over his role in the Guatemalan coup and other exploits, including the assasination of Che Guevara. Asked if he had any regrets, Hunt replies, "No, none. [Long pause] Well, it would have been nice to do Bay of Pigs differently."

Slate: So it seems you were the architect for the Guatemalan operation?
Hunt: It was mine because nobody else knew more than I did. I would say that I had more knowledge about it than anybody did. I knew all the players on both sides.

Slate: How did you run the Guatemalan operation?
Hunt: We set up the first Guatemalan operation/shop at Opa-Locka [airport in Miami, formerly an Army base]. There were three barracks, and we used the airstrip to fly in people from Guatemala and to send our people into Guatemala. These were known as "the black flights." They always occurred at night; they are a secret and officially do not exist as having happened.

Slate: Do you think the Guatemala coup went well?
Hunt: Yes—it did. And I'm glad I kept Arbenz from being executed.

Slate: How did you do that?
Hunt: By passing the word out to the people at the airport who had Arbenz to "let him go.

Slate: To whom did you give the word?
Hunt: It was a mixed band of CIA and Guatemalans at the airport and their hatred for him was palpable.

Slate: You were worried they would assassinate him right there?
Hunt: Yeah. … And we'd [the CIA and the United States] get blamed for it.

Slate: Some 200,000 civilians were killed in the civil war following the coup, which lasted for the next 40 years. Were all those deaths unforeseen?
Hunt: Deaths? What deaths?

Link. Image: Associated Press.

Guatemala: American aid worker killed in traffic accident

Earlier on this blog, I pointed to "Recycled Life," a documentary film by Leslie Iwerks and Mike Glad about an aid organization that helps children who live inside a Guatemala City dump.

The name of that group is Safe Passage, and its founder, 36-year-old Hanley Denning, has been killed in a traffic accident in Guatemala. She was known to many in Guatemala as "La Angel del Basurero," or "the guardian angel of the dump dwellers."

News reports: 1, 2, and here is a Hollywood Reporter story about the bittersweet news that "Recycled Life" has been nominated for a 2007 Academy Award.

Previously:

Guatemala: Recycled Life, film on dump residents

Guatemala: Accused mass murderer Montt to run for congress

Image: anti-Montt grafitti in Guatemala City (2007, Xeni Jardin)

Former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, who is accused of having ordered the killings of more than 70,000 dissidents and indigenous peasants, has announced that he will run for congress this September. If his campaign continues and succeeds, the move would represent a major setback for an ongoing case against him in Spain, in which he is charged with crimes against humanity (he has so far evaded extradition). Why? Members of congress cannot be prosecuted unless a court suspends them from office.

Snip from AP item:

"I am certain and sure" of getting a seat in Congress, Rios Montt told a news conference. He ran for the presidency in 2004 and came in third.

A Guatemalan court is still considering whether to order the arrest of Rios Montt for crimes allegedly committed while he ran the country from 1982 to 1983. Rios Montt has denied any wrongdoing.

Rios Montt ruled during what was considered the bloodiest period of Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war, in which 200,000, mostly Mayan Indians, were killed or disappeared. Spanish Judge Santiago Pedraz has issued warrants against Rio Montt and others on charges of genocide, torture, terrorism and illegal detention.

The case stems from charges levied in Spanish courts by Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu against five ex-military officials and three ex-government officials in the disappearance of Spanish priests and a fire at the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City that killed Menchu's father and 36 others.

Here's a recent story in Guatemala's Prensa Libre newspaper: Link. Amnesty International has issued a statement on Montt's announcement here: Link. Related information: Link to killerfile, Link to Wikipedia entry, here's an excerpt:

Ríos Montt's ties with the United States military go back fifty years when he received training by the Pentagon. In 1950, Ríos Montt graduated as a cadet at the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, which at the time educated students in counterinsurgency tactics for the purposes of combating potential "communist" influence in the region.

In 1954, the young officer played a minor role in the successful CIA-organized coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who was alleged to have embrace socialist ideologies largely as a result of his efforts to break the economic monopoly of the United Fruit Company, a US firm with strong ties to Washington.

Montt is also an ordained Pentecostal minister. His daughter Zury currently serves as a member of the Guatemalan congress, and is married to the American congressman Jerry Weller (R-IL).

Guatemala: political refugees in US face deportation threat

My NPR News colleague Mandalit del Barco recently filed this report:

Civil war drove hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to the U.S. two decades ago. Many have sought legal status ever since. Now U.S. authorities are threatening to deport thousands.

Link to audio.