Ambient audio: Antigua, Guatemala, at night.

(Images: Ivan Castro)

Click on the embedded audio below, and you'll hear a 10-minute chunk of ambient sound I taped one night in the old colonial city of La Antigua (literally, "The Old"), Guatemala: centuries-old church bells, popping firecrackers, rumbling mopeds, and a Kakchikel Maya family walking home on ancient cobblestone streets.

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[Browser-compatibility note -- The audio link in this post appears as embedded Flash, and is brought to you by our sponsor: HP's iPaq 510 Voice Messenger. If your web reader doesn't allow you to access Flash, here's a direct MP3 Link. ]

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I taped this outside my bedroom window there in November, 2006, while in the country working on a series of reports for NPR News. I'd been out in the field all day taping interviews. I was sun-fried, road-weary, hunched over a Marantz digital audio recorder and backing up what I'd taped that day to portable hard drives, ipods, and CDs for redundant safekeeping.

I heard a bunch of loud explosions -- pulled off my headphones for a sec -- an escalating cluster of pop pop pop, again and again, and the churchbells ringing nonstop. WTF? Firecrackers are familiar sounds there, lit for any and every birthday or saint's day, any excuse it seems. But the bells were just going and going and going this time. Some big Catholic holiday? An emergency? Are those guns mixed in with the firecracker sounds? Couldn't figure it out, and neither could the family in whose home I was staying.

Anyway, the editors and producers I learn from at NPR always tell me, tape first, ask questions later. So I stuck my mic out the window and hit "record."

Never did figure out exactly what was going on.

But when I listen to this recording now, it transports me back. I keep this file in my iTunes playlist and fall asleep to it sometimes. I remember the things that filled my senses, while falling asleep there: warm tortillas cooking over wood fires; copal resin burning in the church next door; cool breezes from nearby pine forests; diesel fumes from overburdened trucks; and the volcan de fuego puffing ash and intermittent red sparks off in the distance.

I hope you enjoy it. I love this old place like you might love a person. This sound reminds me of that.

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PHOTOGRAPHS of nighttime Antigua, Guatemala in this post ganked from the flickr stream of Ivan Castro, a prolific and (obviously) very talented photographer based in Guatemala.

Related: Link to an archive of my posts from the road in Guatemala.

March for civil war "desaparecidos" in Guatemala: photos

Snip from independent photojournalist James Rodriguez' first-person account of a demonstration that took place in Guatemala City on June 30:

The March for Remembrance, organized by H.I.J.O.S. (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence) [ Ed.: in Spanish, "hijos" means "children" ] , brought a number of activists and families of victims from the civil war together with the goal of halting the parade which commemorated the 136th annual Military Day.

The demonstration congregated in Jocotenango Park, formerly Morazan Park, in Zone 2 of the Capital City. Those drawn on the sheets represent only a small fraction of the more than 200,000 victims killed during the 36 year internal conflict.

A member of H.I.J.O.S. waves a flag depicting the image of one of the many victims killed by Guatemalan security forces during the civil war. In many cases, the person represented on the flag is the flag-waver’s own father or mother.

(...) Meanwhile, the military parade continued just a block behind the anti-riot forces.

Today is not for celebrating
It’s for struggling and protesting
Because forgiving is not enough
Those who carried on genocide must pay (...)

Who kidnaps, tortures and assassinates?
The Genocidal Army.
Children of the motherland, Children of the Quetzal,
Which son of a bitch took my father?

A demonstrator, while still recovering from the effects of tear gas, adjusts a homemade gas mask in case of a second skirmish.

Link 1, Link 2 (English), Versión en Español aquí.

James Rodriguez has many, many photosets on Flickr, including 11+ from Guatemala (where he's based). You might just want to start at the top of the stream and scroll back, tons of absolutely incredible photography in here. (Gracias, Margarita).

Snip from an advisory about "HIJOS," dated 2000, from Amnesty International:

HIJOS is a new human rights group, made up of young people, many of them students, who were children when their parents were ''disappeared'', killed or massacred and have joined together recently, some of them returning from exile, to try and establish what happened to their parents and who was responsible for it. They also want to help educate the new generation in Guatemala about what happened during the years of repression. Amnesty International shares their view, that understanding what happened, who was responsible and who allowed it to happen are vital in efforts to make sure that no such future violations will be either repeated or tolerated.

HIJOS work to discover the fate of their family members who were victims of the civil conflict which raged in Guatemala over a period of more than 30 years. Before the conflict was formally ended with the signing of the final Peace Accords in 1996, it is estimated that some 200,000 people were extrajudicially executed or ''disappeared'' at the hands of the Guatemalan security services or the civil patrols and so-called ''death squads'' acting under their command. The number of cases where the perpetrators have been identified and brought to justice can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Previous BoingBoing posts about Guatemala: Link.

Guatemala: very large earthquake

I just spoke to a friend in Guatemala who says there's just been a very large seismic event -- at or over 7.2, is what local news says. No official reports of injury or damage, and no report from Guatemala's institute of Seismology. I'm hearing it was centered near the southern coastal area of Escuintla, 70 miles away from the capital, Guatemala City -- and that the quake was very deep, but they're not expecting tsunamis.

I spent the better part of the last month working on a documentary series in Guatemala. The area where this quake hit was heavily waterlogged from intense rains over the last few weeks, there was flooding and some small mudslides... I wonder if there will be reports of further damage of that kind, it's possible that a quake this strong would dislodge wet soil.

I've spoken to a number of people on the phone since the quake hit, and it was felt in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala City, and as far north as some of the small indigenous towns in the upper part of the department of Sololá.

The quake just happened within the past hour.

Update: Reuters says 6.8: Link (in Spanish). Ah, here's a CNN report (thanks, Seth Rosner). The quake hit at 3:29PM ET, 1:29PM Guatemala Time. People felt it as far away as Mexico and the capital city in El Salvador, and the activity even registered on seismographs 1,800 miles away (!) on Midway Island.

Early reports indicated some homes were damaged and people may be missing, journalist Patzy Vazquez told CNN en Español. Torrential rains have made telephone communication difficult, hampering efforts of rescuers trying to reach the region. The USGS has received no confirmed reports of damage or casualties, and no immediate reports of aftershocks, the agency's Rafael Abreu told CNN. As a precaution, authorities were evacuating high-rise buildings and homes that might be vulnerable to damage if there were any aftershocks.

(map image ganked from cnn.com)

Central America: snapshots from the road

I'm grabbing a bunch of little detail snapshots while I'm wandering around through Central America. Here's the growing flickr set of little stuff that adds up to my memory of texture here. Most of what's uploaded now is from urban areas, though I've been elsewhere, too. Includes: internet laundry, tortillas and more tortillas, a bus named Daniela, telephone utility covers in the street, an interesting "no pets" sign, local citizen journalism, baby cocos, coca cola chickens, trompe l'oeil en el mercado, political paint jobs, lots of patterns to recognize, ethanol rides, pan dulce, economic indicators, footwear for honkys, and salas de video juegos.

Central America: notes from the road -- Palenque, old books, DNA

( posted from Guatemala / Xeni ) -- "It is by no means improbable that these fantastic forms, and others equally whimsical, were the delineations of some of their deities, to whom they paid an idolatrous worship, consistent with their false belief and barbarous customs."

Here's a post on the excellent Bibliodyssey blog that points to a collection of texts at Mesoweb about the Mayan ruins at Palenque.

Referenced publications include a scholarly work about evidence of physical deformities that may have been genetically transmitted as a result of heavy intermarriage within the god-king class in preColumbian Mayan society.

Physical Deformities in the Ruling Lineage of Palenque, and the Dynastic Implications," By Merle Greene Robertson and Marjorie S. Rosenblum Scanidizzo and John R. Scandizzo.

Central America: Notes from the road

Image: snapshot of a religious poster in Antigua, Guatemala -- blood-soaked Christ. (Link 1, Link 2 / Xeni).

I'm in Central America for a few weeks -- in Guatemala right now following up on stories I reported earlier this year for NPR, and exploring others.

Where I am right now, the coffee and wifi flow freely, wisps of smoke puff out of the volcan de fuego nearby, and all is well.

A quick skim through TV and the daily papers today (Prensa Libre, Siglo 21, and the like) shows several top stories as common themes. I'll recap them quickly here.

Much of what's in the news in Guatemala right now involves the upcoming presidential elections in September. TV and radio are saturated with campaign ads. Concerns over transparency and potential electoral fraud are high (not that we'd have any such worries in the US).

Crime is the dominant theme in the Guatemalan election campaigns, and it's a big problem here. A number of particularly violent attacks have taken place on public transportation in the nation's capital, Guatemala City, in recent weeks. People are asking if some of the attacks may have been orchestrated with political motives, because a climate of destabilization could help certain political parties running on a law and order platform. Billboards everywhere for one party promise "a strong hand" against crime. Some folks I've spoken with fear that this could presage an abandonment of human rights protections hard-won in peace accords after Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Link.

"El femicidio." The ongoing, growing problem of murder and violent sexual crimes against women. Nearly 600 killed in Guatemala in the past year, according to one source. Thousands of cases in the past few years, too few resources dedicated to investigating and punishing the crimes, and almost no criminal convictions.

Amnesty International released a statement about the widespread violence against women in Guatemala recently, and this was covered in local papers this week. More here.

Editorials in Guatemalan papers and conversations with people who work on this issue generally come down to this idea: the femicide epidemic is the direct, logical result of decades of impunity for human rights violations committed during the civil war. "The highest officials in our country got away with torture, disappearances, and murder for nearly four decades, and still walk among us as free men" one human rights worker told me, "of course impunity leads to more violence."

I haven't seen the Canadian documentary film "Killer's Paradise" yet, but it sounds like a truly worthy project. The director, Giselle Portenier, has been following the story closely for years. Here's the film's official website, and here's the trailer.

Efraín Ríos Montt, the former head of a military regime responsible for some of the worst atrocities during Guatemala's civil war, is running for office again. Several Guatemalan papers ran op-eds this week from people who are basically asking (summarizing with some editorial liberty here): "WTF? How can this mass murderer be running for office again? Are we insane, that our country could even consider this -- when he should be in jail for war crimes?" Link to related item.

Police in El Salvador this week found the corpses of two young men identified as gay, and four (or more?) women identified as sex workers, in a house near the capital. The young people who died were tortured, sexually assaulted, then killed in particularly violent ways, according to news reports here. Some of the bodies were smashed, then half-buried under large rocks. Much discussion about the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and of sex workers. I can't find the story online, but read it in a cafe this morning. It ran with a photo of the father of one victim, crying as he recognized the body of his child.

Reports of violence, break-ins, theft, death threats, and killings of human rights workers are on the rise in Guatemala: Link. Some of the most recent victims include people who work to protect the Mayan biosphere (an ecological protection zone), others who are working for the rights of indigenous farmers/peasants, and a group that provides legal support to people seeking justice on behalf of relatives killed in massacres during Guatemala's internal armed conflict.

Pollo Campero, the Guatemalan fried chicken franchise with an international cult following, is taking over the world. They're launching sites in China and Indonesia now, and this report says they've opened 600 sites in the past 7 years: Link. Overhead bins on the flights from Guatemala City to LAX are always packed with family-sized cartons of the stuff. To me, the stuff tastes like D-list KFC, but -- (shrugs).

Image above: from a series of Guatemalan street life photographs by Atlanta-based photojournalist Allen Sullivan.

Sandra Guamux, 21, sits with her 5 month old son, Alfredo, at an abandoned gas station in Zona 4 of Guatemala City. About 20 otherwise homeless people live inside the station and most are addicted to huffing paint thinner to numb the cold and their hunger pains. Guamux said another baby was stolen from her five days after it was born last year, and she is convinced the baby went into an illegal adoption system. She said that the police told her they would not investigate the situation since she had no photographs of the child.

Adoptions: Guatemala is one of the top "sender" countries for foreign adoptions -- 4,000 Guatemalan babies were adopted by Americans last year. Guatemala signed on to an international adoption treaty this week, committing to bring adoptions under government regulation and make sure babies are not bought or stolen:

Guatemalan law currently allows notaries to act as baby brokers who recruit birth mothers, handle paperwork and complete foreign adoptions in less than half the time it takes in other countries.

But U.S. officials have urged Guatemala to tighten up the procedure amid concern brokers were paying or threatening mothers to give up their babies.

Link. In some of the Mayan communities I've visited here -- extremely poor places where this is a big problem -- the phenomenon is known as "el robo de los ninos," the "theft of the children."

The virgin birth of a child to Cheney's gay daughter is totally weird news here. It's all over the tabloids. Guatemala is way Catholic, the Iraq war is extremely unpopular here, nobody likes Cheney, so this news is perceived as bizarre on many levels. Screenshot below.

Guatemala: "tattooed terrorist," "Antichrist" denied entry

It's hard to imagine a country more traditional, and more religious, than Guatemala. For that reason, news that the country is denying entry to a cult leader who tattooes "666" on his arm, calls himself The Antichrist, and whose (alleged) 2 million followers describe him as a living deity -- it's pretty much the last thing you'd expect there.

Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda (Wikipedia link) is the head of the Florida-based Growing in Grace church. He runs a 24-hour Spanish-language television network, and hosts a radio program broadcast on 287 stations. This week, he tried to fly on his private jet to Guatemala, where he apparently has a big following, to celebrate his 61st birthday.

But Guatemalan officials flagged him as a terrorist, and say he's a security risk because he provokes conflict with Roman Catholics and evangelicals.

Photo at left (Alexandre Meneghini, AP): A follower of Miranda holds a baby with "SSS" painted on her head. The letters stand for Miranda's motto, "salvo, siempre salvo," or "saved, always saved."

Snip from an AP story:

He often takes aim at the Catholic Church — the most powerful faith in Latin America — calling all priests child molesters and saying chastity vows go against the Bible's teachings. Members of his church have torn up images of saints and other religious symbols in El Salvador, and marched in Guatemala and Honduras.

He preaches that sin and the devil do not exist. In January, he revealed tattoos of the numbers 666 on his forearms and declared that he and his followers were Antichrists because their beliefs supersede those of Jesus Christ. The Bible describes the Antichrist as someone who will fill the world with wickedness but be conquered by a second coming of Christ.

Despite the Guatemalan government's security block, his supporters say...

"It has been predestined, and angels will make it happen," said Axel Poessy, Miranda's media director. "He is, after all, God himself."

Link to that AP story. Well, that didn't work out. Miranda was indeed denied entry to Guatemala. Miranda spun the story of the nixed visit as his choice:

He had vowed to defy the ban but canceled Saturday and will instead address the gathering in a video teleconference, said the sect's head pastor in Guatemala, Jorge Batres. "We're a church respectful of the law and we will have to wait until the judge gives us an injunction," Batres said.

Batres said De Jesus Miranda's Guatemalan followers will "firmly fight within the law so that he can come and let the world know that Jesus the Man is in Guatemala."

Link.

The church's website appears to be a very important part of their "Antichrist ministry."

The most interesting part of the site, to me, is this photo gallery documenting "Day of the Tattoo," where followers of de Miranda all got tattoos of "666" and "SSS" ("salvo, siempre salvo") on their bodies to proclaim their faith.

Related posts on BoingBoing:

Xeni's NPR series "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future"

Xeni's notes from the road in Guatemala

Mayan priests to "purge" Iximche after Bush's visit

Guatemala: Photos from indigenous protest of Bush visit

More BB posts about Guatemala

(via Warren Ellis)

Guatemala: Photos from indigenous protest of Bush visit

Click on any of the photos in this post to view a larger (900 px wide) version.
(image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4).

Allen Sullivan, a photojournalist currently working in Guatemala who shot these images, says:

These images were made in Tecpán, Guatemala on Monday, March 12. US President Bush, Guatemala President Oscar Berger and their entourages visited the nearby Mayan historical site, Iximché, while Bush was on his Latin American tour.

I was working with Marc Lacey, a New York Times writer, the previous week on a story about child labor in Guatemala. On the day of Bush's visit, I decided to head to Tecpán instead of Guatemala City because I knew there would be protests there, too, and I wanted something that said "Guatemala" more than another riotous metropolis like those in his previous stops.

My assistant and I had little trouble getting there, even though they were closing the road to Tecpán well before Bush arrived. The police here seem to have much more respect for the press than some I've encountered in the US. Marc tried to head to Guatemala City, but got tied up in crazy roadblocks and traffic. He turned around to join me in Tecpán.

I've covered heated demonstrations before in the US, but this was my initiation to doing so in Guatemala. I had a few reservations about how I would be perceived by the demonstrators. Turns out I had no trouble at all from them, the police or the army. Oddly, a Brazilian photographer did get a bit of trouble from the crowd, but I'm not sure exactly why.

All in all the demonstrations were peaceful, but of course boisterous at times. They were made up of indigenous groups, farmers co-ops, and various others with mostly leftist leanings. A local boy told me he'd never seen any of them in Tecpán; seems they mostly came from other parts of the country. They tried to get past the police blocks at times by taking back routes, but to no avail. It was half protest, half party.

The "high point" for the demonstrators was when Bush's motorcade speed down through the road to Tecpán. Slogans yelled, fingers flipped, signs waved, etc., but no violence. Forty-five minutes of rest and the motorcade returned the other way, the fingers and shouts again. Not long after, everyone dispersed. I heard two people were arrested near the site itself, but otherwise I know of no incidents. Protests are quite common here and sort of expected.

It was said that some Mayan priests were going to "cleanse" Iximché after the presidents' visit, but I hung out there for a while and didn't see anything like that.

Previously:

Xeni's NPR series "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future"

NPR Xeni Tech - Reporter's notebook: Guatemala

A five-part series I produced with the NPR News program Day to Day, "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future," concludes with this "reporter's notbook" -- an overview of how innovative uses of technology are creating change in this Central American nation. From forensic scientists using DNA to identify death squad victims, to digital archivists preserving once-secret police documents from the civil war, to grassroots infrastructure tech providing electricity and clean water to Mayan villages.

Link to part 5 on Day to Day, "Technology in Guatemala: An Overview."

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

Previously:

Guatemala: Xela Teco Builds Grassroots Tech (part 4)

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

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

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

IMAGES: 2007, Xeni Jardin, under this cc license. Top: a macaw on the grounds of a luxury hotel in Antigua, Guatemala. Center: I'm standing with Gustavo Cosme of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), inside a room where they store boxes of human remains of death squad victims, prior to reburial. Bottom: a centuries-old monk's skull, at the site of a 15th century monastery in Antigua.

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.

Guatemala: Market Report

Quick walk through the mercado central in Antigua, Guatemala, shot on an Altoids-sized camera. Link to 1:11 video (in Flash or Quicktime).

Guatemala: art in response to "femicides"

Blogger arte-sano writes (my ham-fisted translation of their more eloquent Spanish):

My friend Rosa is an artist of Mexican heritage from the Bay Area who has strong connections to the Guatemalan community. She recently began working on an art project about "femicide" in Guatemala. The project is designed to create awareness of the crimes against women, to create solidarity among the families and friends of the victims, and above all -- to denounce the impunity that prevails in our country [Guatemala] which has allowed to proliferation of this type of violence. Rosa has sent out an invitation to participate in the project, and it occurred to me that by sharing this on my blog, perhaps more people might want to collaborate on this project, so here it is.

Link to full text in Spanish. The artist, Rosa Valdez, can be reached at rosavaldez at hotmail.com.

Background: Amnesty International has more information on femicide in Guatemala here. By various estimates, approximately 2,000 women were murdered in Guatemala from 2001 through March 2006. AI states,

Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize many of the killings. Some of the victims had their throats cut, were beaten, shot or stabbed to death. Many of their bodies show signs of rape, torture, mutilation or dismemberment.

Previous posts:

* Film -- Killer's Paradise
* Thousands of women protest wave of "femicides"

Technorati Tags: art, femicide, guatemala, photos, sex

Guatemala: vintage video about evil volcano near Antigua

Found on archive.org: a sensationalist (and racist) newsreel film from 1934 about indigenous communities that live near the volcan de agua near Antigua, Guatemala. The room where I stayed during my time in Antigua looked out over this "menacing monster volcano." This 72-year-old film is full of offensive comments that reflect the bias of the time -- at one point, the narrator refers to the "semi-barbarous" Mayan people as "human mules" -- but the images of daily life are amazing. In some communities in Guatemala, those daily scenes have changed very little since 1934. Link to "Menace of Guatemala" on archive.org (about 9 minutes long) where you can stream or download.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, video

Guatemala: vintage video, "Journey To Banana Land"

A corporate promotional video produced by United Fruit Company in 1950, four years before a CIA-backed coup protected that firm's interests in Guatemala by overthrowing democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz.

If the company's foreign policy ambitions had a name: Bananifest Destiny.

Link to archive.org page where you can download or stream the video, which is about 20 minutes long.

Previously:
Guatemala: internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, video

Guatemala: internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup

Was noodling around on YouTube, archive,org, and Google Video for material related to the 1954 CIA-backed coup of democratically elected Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz, and found:

Documentary: "A Coup: Made In America," written by Alan Mendelsohn and Nadine Pequeneza, originally aired in 2001 on Canadian television program "Turning Points of History." Patrick at Guatemalan Solidarity Network blog wrote about this here, and arte-sano (who pointed me to these videos via comment on this blog -- thanks!) wrote about it here. A Google Video embed of one clip is below, but I found a bunch of sections on YouTube, too: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Then-vice-president Nixon says in this clip, below: "In other words, the Arbenz regime was not a Guatemalan government, it was a foreign government controlled by foreigners."

"The CIA in Guatemala, 1954" -- snip from a documentary on U.S. intervention in Guatemala and the 1954 coup, mostly in Spanish. I'm not sure who produced this, but it opens with former CIA agent Philip Agee.

And an odd related find on YouTube -- a bunch of film clips from the 1944 Guatemalan revolution, set to motion over the Radiohead song "Sail to The Moon."

The GSN video blog points to a number of other interesting Guatemala-related video finds online, including more recent documentary films produced by Guatemalan filmmakers: Link.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, CIA, video

Guatemala: Is "Apocalypto" Racist?

The actual title of the essay in question was "Is 'Apocalypto' Pornography," but IMO that gives perfectly respectable porn a bad name. Here's a critical analysis of Mel Gibson's colonialist co-opting of Mayan history for his latest vanity vehicle. The author is Traci Ardren, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, who...

...has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "Apocalypto," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.

Snip from Ms. Ardren's essay:

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?

I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic.

Link, via Tom Zeller's "The Lede" blog at the New York Times website.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous

Guatemala: Market Report (video clip)

A mid-day walk through Antigua's mercado central. Link to video (in Flash or Quicktime). Some still screengrabs below, more here. (Tech notes: shot with Canon SD630 Elph. What cheap ultracompacts like this lack in ability to produce quality footage, they make up for in unobtrusiveness.).

Technorati Tags: antigua, guatemala, indigenous, photos, video

Guatemala: mercado snapshots

Flickr photoset here: Link.

Religious items for sale in a marketplace stall.

Magic STFU powder.

Between a stand that sells fried pork rinds and another that sells shredded green mango with chile, the exceedingly popular sala de videojuegos.

Technorati Tags: guatemala, indigenous, photos

Guatemala: over 21K women annually hospitalized with botched abortions

Abortion is illegal in Guatemala, unless it can be proven to authorities as necessary to save the life of a mother. That fact combined with widespread poverty, sexism, and lack of health education results in some of the most dismal women's reproductive health statistics in the hemisphere. Over 21,000 women in Guatemala each year require medical treatment for complications related to unsafe abortions, out of a total 65,000 annually attempted. And many of those women die.

Those figures are based on data gathered in 2003, and released in a new report from the Guttmacher Institute, a global health nonprofit. The report is the subject of news reports today in Guatemala. Here's my clumsy translation of an item that appeared in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre:

The legal restriction on abortion in Guatemala doesn't stop women from seeking abortion, and the lack of access to contraception only makes the situation worse," explained Edgar Kestler, a doctor who participated in the [Guttmacher Institute] study.

Many women, most of all in rural areas, attempt to interrupt pregnancies with herbal brews or pills of various types. They seek help from comadronas (midwives/healers) or at the pharmacy. They also visit curanderos (traditional/spiritual healers) or women known ass "señoras”, who introduce foreign objects into the womb to induce abortion, for instance, metal wires. These cause hemmorage, and damage to the womb. Very few women who seek abortions try to get help from doctors, because the cost is higher.

Kestler said that many women who have problems after an abortion try to solve them in their homes, or with help from a comadrona, because they fear social retribution or because they don't have economic means to do otherwise. They arrive late to hospitals, and because of their wounds, many die or it becomes impossible for them to get pregnant again.

It's a problem that affects many women who are silenced, but the problem is known by everyone, and the authorities need to take steps to reduce it," Kestler said.

Link

Technorati Tags: femicide, guatemala, indigenous, sex

Guatemala: Coffee Porn (video clip and photos)

I've been traveling throughout Guatemala since early November. On the days I spent in Antigua, each morning, the second-story room where I stayed filled with the most luscious roasted coffee smell. Surely there is no incense more fragrant, no perfume more enticing, in all the world. I followed the scent-trail downstairs and discovered a neat little cafe run by a very nice guy named Fernando.

He roasts local beans every morning, and brews amazing coffee there. Rich, foamy, just the right ratio of bitter to sweet. And you can buy a desayuno tipico for like $3 or so... tasty breakfasts with handmade tortillas, black beans, friend plantains, and eggs however you like 'em. Oh and KILLER COFFEE.

I shot a little video with a tiny handheld camera (Canon SD630 Powershot), and took a few stills. Not the greatest quality, but hopefully you get a feel for the place. I wish you could smell it, though!

Link to video (2:30 long, in Flash or Quicktime -- on Revver, where they're revamping their whole site UI today...). Link to Flickr photoset: Fernando's Kaffee.

If you're in Antigua, stop by and please say hi for me. The people there are really cool. Fernando's Kaffee is right on the corner of 7a Avenida Norte and Calle Campo Seco, near two budget class hotels popular with North American tourists: Posada La Merced, and Casa Cristina (both of which offer free WiFi to guests, btw).

Technorati Tags: antigua, coffee, guatemala, photos, video

Guatemala: museum exhibit of teeny-tiny Xmas creches

Reader Juan E. Aguilar says,

I hope your travels in Guatemala are continuing well. If you are in Guatemala City between today and the 12th, you can visit a Miniature Creche Exposition at the Museo Ixchel to benefit the "Asociación Fomento de Oportunidades para Guatemala." It is an exposition of 600 miniature nativity scenes from 61 countries collected by my mother and father over the past 25 years, facilitated by his globetrekking work for UNICEF. I am attaching a scan from today's Prensa Libre about the show.

JPEG Link to Juan's scan, and you can read/see the article online here, at prensalibre.com: Link.

Robert Gates and CIA history in Guatemala

Image: "Two former CIA directors, George Bush, Sr. and his long-serving acolyte and protege, Robert Gates."

A good place to begin, GWU's National Security Archives file on Robert Gates: Link.

First, the man nominated by President Bush to lead the Pentagon advocated bombing Nicaragua in 1984:

The memo from Gates to his then-boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was among a selection of declassified documents from the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal posted Friday on the website of the National Security Archive.

In the memo, Gates, who was deputy director of the CIA, argued that the Soviet Union was turning Nicaragua into an armed camp and that the country could become a second Cuba. The rise of the communist-leaning Sandinista government threatened the stability of Central America, Gates asserted.

Gates' memo echoed the view of many foreign policy hard-liners at the time; however, the feared communist takeover of the region never materialized.

Link to Nov. 25, 2007 LA Times article by Julian E. Barnes.

Snip from "CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents," by Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, from the GWU National Security Archives, printed on 14 August 1997:

These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. (The Agency's press release stated that more records would be released before the end of the year.) An excerpt from the assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, May 31, 1997.

The small, albeit dramatic, release comes more than five years after then CIA director Robert Gates declared that the CIA would "open" its shadowy past to post-cold war public scrutiny, and only days after a member of the CIA's own historical review panel was quoted in the New York Times as calling the CIA's commitment to openness "a brilliant public relations snow job." (See Tim Weiner, "C.I.A.'s Openness Derided as a 'Snow Job'," The New York Times, May 20, 1997, p. A16)

Arbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a process of socio- economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its memoranda as "an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic.'"

The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president--a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE--was authorized by President Truman in 1952. As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personel to be disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be neutralized "through Executive Action"--murder--or through imprisonment and exile.

The "A" list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names--all of which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents.

Link to story.

Snip from a related New York Times story from 1997 about the CIA records release announced by Gates in the '90s (thousands of documents about the CIA's history with Iran were "lost" by the agency, but critics said they were methodically destroyed):

The CIA has proved that it can release history-altering documents. On Friday, it declassified 1,400 pages on the Guatemala coup in 1954 and two historical papers, including [historian and former CIA staffer Nick Cullather]'s 116-page account of the operation.

Cullather said the records on which he based his work were preserved only by a quirk of history: a lawsuit seeking the documents, filed under the Freedom of Information Act in 1982 by Steven Schlesinger, an author of "Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala," (Doubleday, 1982).

"The CIA is presenting the Guatemala release as evidence of good faith and openness," Cullather said, "but it's the exception."

He said the breadth and depth of the documents' preservation "generally doesn't happen with CIA operations."

Using the documents preserved by the lawsuit, Cullather produced an astonishingly frank account, written in 1993 and printed in 1994, which may be a high-water mark in CIA openness.

His account says the CIA directly lied to President Dwight Eisenhower when it told him that only one of the agency-backed rebels had died in the Guatemala coup. In fact, at least 43 rebels were killed. The account also says the Guatemala operation, which "went into agency lore as an unblemished triumph," was marked by poor security, bad planning and third-rate reporting.

It describes the leaders installed by the CIA as repressive and corrupt. The coup, it says, destroyed the political center in Guatemala, which "vanished from politics into a terrorized silence," and led to a series of brutal military governments and a "cycle of violence and reprisals" that "claimed the lives of a U.S. ambassador, two U.S. military attaches and as many as 10,000 peasants" in the 1960s.

"The CIA never learned from the experience," Cullather said, so the Guatemala coup became a model for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. "Legend replaced reality. It's a classic case of the CIA not learning from its own history," a history that was secret.

Link to "CIA Destroyed Files on 1953 Iran Coup" by Tim Weiner in the May 29, 1997 issue of The New York Times.

Technorati Tags: guatemala

Guatemala: Menchú forms indigenous political party

Human Rights advocate and 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum today announced during a visit to Costa Rica that she is forming an indigenous political party in Guatemala.

The goal: win power in the 2012 general elections, and rule Guatemala. Rough translation from Spanish:

“I will be one of the people involved in the development of this party, which is now at its formative point”, declared Menchú. She assured that the indigenous people of Guatemala, who are 60% of Guatemala's 12.2 million inhabitants, will look to emulate the example of Bolivia's president, Evo Morales.

Link

Technorati Tags: guatemala, indigenous

Guatemala: veladoras (video clip)

Quick video snapshot of devotional candles on an altar in a Catholic church frequented by Mayan faithful, in Guatemala. Link to video (in Flash or Quicktime).

Shot with ultracompact Canon SD630 PowerShot, and edited in iMovie on a Mac.

Still snapshots: one, two.

Technorati Tags: guatemala, indigenous, religion, video

Guatemala: Terremoto

According to the USGS, a moderate earthquake (5.9) hit Guatemala Sunday. It was centered about 60 miles southwest of the capital on the Pacific coast, and felt in the highlands. No damage reports at this time. Link to English report.

BTW, here's the organization that issues earthquake data in Guatemala -- it's their USGS, if you will: INSIVUMEH stands for Instituto Nacional de Sismologia, Vulcanologia, Meteorologia y Hidrologia, or "National Institute of Seismology, Vulcanology, Meteorology, and Hydrology." No, they do not study Spock: the "vulcanology" part refers to volcanoes. The INSIVUMEH site seems to be on the fritz right now, but this other website shows a list of volcanoes in the country. There are many here.

Technorati Tags: guatemala

Guatemala: snapshot studies in Petén

Link to set.

Technorati Tags: guatemala, photos, puppy

Guatemala: Medical aid for Mayan communities near Lake Atitlán

Reader Gil Mobley says,

I hope your travels in Guatemala take you to Lake Atitlán. I am a physician that helped start/re-open the hospital that serves our hemisphere's largest community of indigenous people of one tribe: the Tz'tujil Mayans of Santiago Atitlán. Prior to our assistance, the area had among the highest maternal mortality rate in the hemisphere. Check out our story on www.puebloapueblo.org, please. After a miraculous opening, the facility was destroyed by a killer mudslide just a year ago. That didn't keep us down for long, as you'll read on the website.

Because of their geologic isolation and sheer numbers, (35,000) these Mayans have held on to their ancient culture more than any other.

One of my main jobs, currently, is to recruit docs to volunteer at the hospital to help and train the indigenous docs. I sponsor a continuing medical education course for state-side docs to learn 3rd world medicine and expose service volunteer opportunities in the area. As such, I love to tell the stories of the Tz'tujil Mayas and introduce my guests to a fascinating array of culture. That's the story behind www.tropicalmedicine101.com. The docs come to learn medicine and fall in love with the people. They then become donors of meds, equipment or money or come back to volunteer their time, the ultimate goal!

Image: "T'zutujil Maya traditional first bathing of a baby."

I asked how folks who wanted to volunteer could get in touch -- drgilmob at yahoo dot com is best. He adds, "I lead non-medical group building-trips to Guatemala's highlands regularly as well. That is how we rebuilt the hospitalito. Anyone can help!"

Also on Dr. Mobley's website, this personal account of the mudslides in October, 2005, written and photo-documented by a visiting doctor: Link

Technorati Tags: guatemala, indigenous

Guatemala: Film - Killer's Paradise

Another documentary I want to get my hands on soon, this one about the increasing number of "femicides" in Guatemala (nearly 600 women killed in 2006 alone, see this previous post). Snip:

Olenka Frenkiel and Giselle Portenier (Murder in Purdah, Israel’s Secret Weapon) document the story of the brutal killings of women in Guatemala. Since 1999, more than 2,000 women have been murdered there, with the numbers rising every year. In 2005 alone, 640 women, nearly two a day, were killed. That’s one woman in every twelve thousand murdered last year, almost ten times as many, per capita, as in Britain. And in Guatemala, the murders are rarely investigated. Few statistics are kept, details rarely are logged, potential forensic evidence is often ignored or contaminated, so the killers invariably go free and no one, not even the country’s president, has any idea who they are or why so many women are murdered. The answer, at least in part, is the failure of Guatemalan authorities to pursue justice for perpetrators of abuses during a civil war which killed 200,000 people. Three generations of killers have gone free; though the country is trying to show it has changed, old habits die hard. KILLER’S PARADISE documents the story of Claudina Isabel Velasquez, a 19 year old law student murdered in summer 2005, as her family urges the authorities to investigate who killed her.

Link (via Human Rights Watch, thanks Rudy Giron)

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, femicide

Guatemala: Film - Estrellas de la Linea

This film looks amazing -- it screened in Antigua on Saturday, but I was elsewhere. Chema Rodríguez' "Estrellas de la Linea," or "The Railroad All-Stars," documents the lives of a group of Guatemalan sex workers who work an area near the railroad that passes through Guatemala City on its way to the country's eastern and western boundaries. Snip:

All of them dream of being treated with respect, and that the violence against them will end.

In order to publicise their plight – that also includes regular police harassment – they decide to found a football team. After weeks of training, they register for a local championship. But they are barred from taking part – simply because they are prostitutes. Their disqualification unleashes some hefty controversy that has a significant effect on their lives.

“We are women and mothers first, prostitutes second”, is the pronouncement at the top of their list of demands.

Link, another link, and another link with trailers.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, sex

Guatemala: some headlines in news here this week

The International Federation of Human Rights is demanding that Guatemalan authorities detain and extradite the military leaders responsible for genocide during Guatemala's years of armed internal conflict, or judge them here. "With the motive of a meeting against impunity which is celebrated this week in Guatemala, and which will bring together numerous human rights groups from Latin America, the FIDH and other groups take the 'historic opportunity' presented.'"

Specifically, they're asking for generals Benedicto Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt y Humberto Mejía Víctores, who are among those named in a suit brought forward in the Spanish courts by Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Link.

And in a related story about that case in Spain, the Vice President of Guatemala, Eduardo Stein, said: "There exists a general principal that there should be justice here in Guatemala for the cases of human rights violations committed against Guatemalans." Link.

Children of the disappeared marched this week in the capital to demand the capture of Mejía Víctores (image above, Victorino Tejaxún, courtesy of Prensa Libre newspaper). The government issued a warrant for his arrest a few weeks ago, but his lawyers soon managed to get that revoked. Link.

The human rights ombudsman's office has issued a report documenting alleged abuses by the National Police in the course of an anti-drug operation at a techno rave. There are billboards all over the country that say "Demand a strong hand against crime/drugs/gangs," with a raised fist. The crime stats here are extremely high, and the current wave of police action comes with concomitant abuses.

Quick translation, with my limited abilities: "The human rights ombudsman stated that state security agents committed aggressions, mistreated physically and verbally, robbed personal items, and illegally detained people during an operation during a rave." Link.

And from the town of Santa Cruz del Quiché, in the Quiché departamento (like a state): "A book titled 'A Global Vision for a Mayan Justice System' was presented last Friday by a group called 'Indigenous Defense Wajxaqib' no'j.' Spokesperson Lucas Argueta said, 'This Mayan system is an inheritance based on the knowledge and world vision of our ancestors.'"

The book contains interviews, investigations, and recommendations from authors who are indigenous leaders, elders, and specialists in human rights for indigenous people. Link.

And among the numerous murders this week in Guatemala, an attorney named Ericka Eugenia Cajas Juárez de Pineda. The 33-year old had complained to authorities this past January of receiving death threats. Her body was found on the side of a highway last weekend, naked and with marks on her neck which indicated death by strangulation. The voluntary ambulance squad in the area received a phone call from an anonymous male which led them to the specific site where her corpse was found.

Snip from report (translated as best I can with my crude Spanish):

Her corpse was found at 6AM last Saturday, according to testimony from witnesses interviewed by the police. The night before, they heard of 4 individuals who arrived in a white taxi.

Link to news account.

Nearly 600 women have been murdered in Guatemala in the past year.

Guatemala: Chicken Bus of the Sky

Our ghetto-fabulous plane, a small Saab craft which shows its age, takes off from Guatemala City for a jungle destination in the Petén region of Guatemala. One of my Chapín flight-mates calls it the camioneta del cielo, or Chicken Bus of the Sky. It squeals like a stuck pig at takeoff and landing, and you know that ain't right. Assuming we arrive alive, I'll be posting video and photos from the selva soon.

Guatemala: Volcán De Fuego

I've been traveling all over the country since I arrived last week, but for now I'll just post pics of Antigua, which has been more or less my home base between treks. Much of what I'm doing elsewhere involves stories I'm not ready to share yet.

Here in Antigua, one of the nearby volcanoes (specifically, the Volcán De Fuego, 3763 m and S/SW of town) has been belching humo y polvo for a few days. I overheard some local residents saying there was lava action, too, but I haven't gone up there to see first-hand.

This activity is pretty mellow. But one resident explained to me that whenever it acts up more seriously, the most vulnerable community is a little village called Yepocapa, which sits at the volcano's northwest slope (it's on the opposite side of the volcano from Antigua, and much closer to the lava source).

We saw a lot of smoke on Wednesday, even when we were traveling through the lowlands and sugar cane plantations further south... azucarero country.

This pic above from today is kind of a crappy snapshot, but you can see that there's a steady, grey stream of smoke rising from the peak, even in full light at midday. Link.

The volcano is about the warmest thing in town right now. There's been an extreme cold wave in Guatemala this past week -- the coldest in 15 years, with really strong winds. On Thursday, some places dropped as low as 32 degrees. Places like Huehuetenango, Sololá, and Quetzaltenango were hit the worst, and the capital was pretty bad, too. One resident told me today that like 10 or so people have died from the cold -- some of the worst hit are urban poor who live on the streets or in makeshift "casas de carton," shelters from cardboard and plastic sheeting, no real protection from the elements.

Here's an article about the cold wave in Prensa Libre: "El día más frío de noviembre," Link.

FWIW, it's night now, and I'm really frickin' cold. (Image: Xeni Jardin)

Guatemala: thousands of women protest wave of "femicides"

Rough translation of news, from Spanish:

"Thousands of women took to the streets today in Guatemala City's Historic Center to demand an end to the violence in the country against them. In Guatemala, more than 540 women have been murdered in the past year. 'Over our body, we decide,' cried hundreds of women during the march to the center of the capital, which caused heavy traffic congestion..."

Link to news article.

Tomorrow is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women: Link.

And in related news, a human rights group named after a female journalist slain during Guatemala's internal armed conflict today received an award from the king of Spain. Again, my rough translation from Spanish:

"The Myrna Mack foundation is 'proud' to receive the Human Rights Prize of 2006 from Spain, said its senior representative Hellen Mack. 'We feel very satisfied, because the recognition of our work for human rights and democracy in Guatemala.' "

Link.

Guatemala: Haciendo tortillas (video clip)

Link to video (in Flash or Quicktime).

Doña Mati and Doña Anamaria fixing lunch today in Doña Anamaria's lovely home. If there were Iron Chef competitions in Guatemala, they'd shred the competitors like cheese. Doña Mati's tortillas are the stuff my food-dreams are made of. This flavor does not exist outside of Guatemala, and this flavor alone is reason to return. True soul food. When she finished making this stack, she tucked them in to a straw basket. I pulled the little cotton blanket aside and huffed the corn fumes, like sniffing glue.

We had lomito and frijoles volteados, too, and some killer-hot chiletepin. Where: Antigua, Sacatepequez, Guatemala (lat: 14.567 lon: -90.733 alt: 1601 m)

Guatemala and bandwidth policy reform

Snip from a Globe and Mail column by Neil Reynolds about the relatively radical spectrum reforms in Guatemala, where bandwith is now assigned as personal property that comes with its own legal title.

Guatemala (population, 16.5 million) introduced its reforms in 1996, when it got rid of Guatel, a state-owned telephone company managed for years by the military. Guatel had traditionally allocated bandwidth by bribery. El Salvador (population, 7.5 million) introduced its reform in 1997. In both countries, the reforms expressed a novel principle -- that unused radio waves should be made available, either by public auction or by first-come, first-served -- to anyone who wanted to use them.

Guatemalan law now defines property rights in bandwidth in single-page documents called TUFs, titulo de usufructo de frecuencia, or title to frequency use. These deeds state that TUFs may be sold or leased, traded or swapped. They may be used as collateral or as equity.

People who hold them can change ownership simply by writing on them the names of the new owners. TUFs expire at the end of 15 years, but will be renewed for another 15 years on request. TUFs grant owners exclusive control on the use of the bandwidth they govern.

In 10 years, Guatemala has granted almost 4,000 TUFs, including 590 to amateurs. Although it is among the poorest of Latin American countries (with GDP of $1,500 U.S. per capita), it possesses the highest quantity of spectrum for wireless communication: 140.0 megahertz. Only Chile, with four times Guatemala's GDP per capita, matches it. El Salvador ranks third with 137.8 MHz.

Link

Guatemala: 15 die in marketplace fire

At least 15 people died in a fire at Guatemala City's La Terminal market, which comprises a vast, complex maze of stalls. I've been there before, and it's easy to imagine the horror of being trapped in that place with a fast-moving blaze.

The fire is said to have been caused when someone dropping a lit cigarette near one of the illegal fireworks stands. Sergio Morales, human rights ombudsman of Guatemala, said Thursday (my clumsy Spanish translation) -- "The people who sell those fireworks know that they are dangerous, but they sell them anyway, because it's a profitable business."

Link to story in Prensa Libre about the blaze (Spanish), and here's an English-language item: Link.

The thing about fireworks here is -- they just seem to go off constantly. Antigua's been my home base here between trips from one part of the country to another, and sometimes it sounds like the city is being bombed. Whenever you have a birthday party, you have loud fireworks, same for other festivities. Seems there's always an excuse to light them off.

Image: A worker carries plastic bags out of the burned-out market. Émerson Díaz, for Prensa Libre. Where: Lat: 14 38 N Lon: 90 31 W.

Guatemala: Murders of transgender/transvestite people on the rise

Two transvestite sex workers were shot dead in Guatemala City on Wednesday -- right in the middle of the day, in the street, outside of a bar. Violence against transgendered and transvestite people is on the rise here, in a country with an overall muder rate nearly ten times as high as the USA. One teenage, transgendered sex worker was shot dead two months ago in the capital, her tongue reportedly cut out by the gang member whose sexual advances she refused. Snip from Reuters story:

Police are rarely interested in finding the killers of transvestites and are sometimes involved themselves, gay rights activists say.

In December last year, Juan Pablo Mendez, or Paulina, was killed and another transgender prostitute was wounded by three people witnesses identified as uniformed police officers.

"The general level of violence in Guatemala has increased exponentially over the past few years with most crimes going unpunished," said Sebastian Elegueta, a Central America researcher for Amnesty International.

"But it's the most vulnerable groups in society, like women, sex workers or transgender people, that are targeted first and those that are afforded the least amount of protection from the state," he said.

Oasis Director Jorge Lopez said transsexuals are particularly at risk because the majority work as prostitutes, trawling the dangerous streets of Guatemala's old city in short mini-skirts, wigs and platform heels.

"Transgender people end up in sex work because they've been kicked out of their homes, their schools, their jobs," said Lopez. "The only options left for them to make a living is prostitution or working in a hair salon."

Link

Guatemala: Marimba players (video clip)

Link to video (in Flash or Quicktime).

Marimba band playing at a popular restauraunt in Antigua called La Fonda de la Calle Real (the food there is quite tasty). Where: Antigua, Sacatepequez, Guatemala (lat: 14.567 lon: -90.733 alt: 1601 m)

Guatemala: Piñatas Encarceladas

Link. Where: Antigua, Sacatepequez, Guatemala (lat: 14.567 lon: -90.733 alt: 1601 m)

Guatemala: mercado snapshot - 2 kids share an apple.

Two Mayan toddlers hanging out at their mom's fruit stand decide to share an apple after playing tug-of-war with it for a few minutes. Link.

Guatemala: vendiendo nisperos en el mercado

Quick screengrab from a video shot on Canon PowerShot Elph SD630 in the mercado yesterday morning. I'm tinkering around in iMovie and FinalCut, editing little short form videos using two kinds of footage: lower-res stuff shot on this tiny device, and HD video shot with the Sony HDR-HC3 (shoots video in high-def or standard format to miniDV). The great thing about video on the altoid-tin-sized SD630 (and similar ultracompact devices) is that the device is absolutely unobtrusive. You can move through public places with camera in hand, and not attract unwanted attention in crowds. The Sony HC3 is very small for a camcorder, but -- it's still a camcorder, and it attracts attention in circumstances where crowd attention is not a safe thing. The tradeoff is always stealthability/mobility versus image quality.

Tiny, inexpensive cameras are great for shooting video "notes" for yourself, or capturing snippets of environmental ambience. Nobody's going to want to watch 2 straight hours of this stuff on a big screen, but if the end result is online anyway, the limited res capability isn't a big sacrifice. Thank you, YouTube, for lowering image quality expectations!

Just as with still photos, it seems the camera you have with you at all times is the best one.

Guatemala: Visit with Don Victoriano

Link to larger size image. Far right: Don Victoriano, 56, is a K'iché linguist from Sololá who has contributed to the development of textbooks and dictionaries for the K'iché Mayan language in Guatemala. In the middle, his grandson Claudio, 13, wears a homemade uniform for the indigenous school in their village where kids study K'iché language and culture along with general education courses. Their economic circumstances are extremely harsh. Claudio's father is no longer with the family. His single mother now raises him and his 4 sisters on a weaver's meager income. Claudio is suffering the physical effects of malnutrition. It's hard for a kid to learn on an empty stomach. At far left, with the big giant blonde head, me.

Guatemala: La sirena fountain, Cafe Condesa (video clip)

Link to video (Flash or Quicktime), or click the embedded clip above. Still photos: 1, 2.

A fountain inside the very old Cafe Condesa in la Antigua, Guatemala.

(Tech notes: shot on ultracompact Canon SD630 Elph, edited in Apple iMovie).

Guatemala: "heartbreak device" spotted in mercado

In last week's edition of the Boing Boing Boing podcast (Link, episode #8), Mark Frauenfelder talked about a string of incidents (Link) in which children found themselves happily imprisoned inside these machines where you try to grab fuzzy toys with a mechanical claw. Our guest that week, John Hodgman, calls them "heartbreak devices" because "they are not particularly responsive to the poor reflexes and ill coordinated movements of a 5 year old, so very little comes of it except for tears -- and the enjoyment of watching a claw."

Anyway, I saw one of these things in a mercado in Antigua, Guatemala today, but lacked a child to cram inside.

As Flickr user timmycorkery points out, "Possibly the best part of this photo is the counterpoint of the Hodgman quote with the sign in the back of the machine asking that the user not smack the glass with the claw, i.e. precisely what the poor reflexes and ill-coordinated movements of a five year old will cause to happen."

Link 1, Link 2.

Guatemala: Recycled Life, film on dump residents

I haven't seen this documentary by director Leslie Iwerks yet (narrated by Edward James Olmos), but it looks incredible. My adoptive father took me to this place once in the late 1980s to visit the home of an elderly Mayan woman (one of many thousands of displaced people who lost their homes during Guatemala's internal armed conflict). Her home consisted of plastic bag strips and carboard boxes, and she subsisted here, like others, by scavenging the dump. Snip from film synopsis:

For over sixty years, children have been born and raised here, parents and grandparents eat and survive here… Thousands of families have thrived in the largest and most toxic and dangerous area in all of Central America. For decades, the Guatemala City Garbage Dump and its inhabitants ("guajeros") who recycle the city's trash have been shunned by society and ignored by the government, until a disastrous event in January 2005 forever changed the face of this landfill and the many people who call it home.

Link to "Recycled Life," alternate Link. Trailer: Quicktime Link. The end of the trailer says, "For screening info contact Leslie@leslieiwerks.com."

And here's an organization that works with children from the dump: Link to safepassage.org. (Thanks, Anonymous)

UPDATE: I swapped emails with the film's director, Leslie Iwerks, and she tells us,

The film has been selected as a semi-finalist on the short list for the Academy Awards. We took almost ten trips to the Guatemala City dump and photographed the lives of the people living there, and the changing events that took place over the time we visited, including the fire in 2005. Edward James Olmos narrates the film, and it has won six top film festival awards since the middle part of this year.

Guatemala: 2 interesting places to stay near Antigua

I haven't been to either of these places, but they both sound cool. One is owned by a fan of BoingBoing who introduced himself by email, and the other is owned by a couple of his friends.

The centrally-located Black Cat hostel opened in Antigua earlier this year, and from the sound of some of the posts on the Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forums, it seems quite popular among backpackers already. This little guy appears to be the resident mascot.

Earth Lodge offers treehouses, cabins, or dorm-style accommodations a short drive out of Antigua on a mountaintop avocado farm. An American and a Canadian opened it in 2003. Looks lovely online. Above: the view from Earth Lodge (photo courtesy earthlodgeguatemala.com.) You may see a volcano erupt now and then.

Guatemala: Caffe Opera (video clip)

Link to video (Quicktime or Flash).

A peek inside my favorite cafe in Antigua, Guatemala. Old opera memorabilia lines the walls, and Maria Callas blares from the boombox. I covet this one amazing black and white photo-poster there of the great and beautiful Anna Magnani circa 1953: Photo link. (Tech notes: shot on ultracompact Canon SD630 Elph, edited in Apple iMovie).

Infrastructure tech for Guatemala's rural poor

Alex Lee of Cambridge, MA writes:

I noticed on your blog that you’re currently in Guatemala researching some stories. I’m a long time boingboing reader, and thought to pass along some information that you may find useful and interesting while you’re there.

My brother and a good friend started a non-profit organization focused on providing the rural poor with appropriate infrastructure technology – things like bio-digesters, solar hot water heaters, wind-turbines, and micro-hydro derived energy. All the technologies are open source, all their systems (project mgt, accounting, web) are done in open source, and the organization is self-sustaining. That is, each workshop (the first is in Quetzaltenango, aka Xela, the second will be in the Dominican Republic) hires local engineers, and each project is created and serviced locally – so each shop is a small, self-sustaining business, providing jobs and opportunity for local workers.

PS: Xela, Xeni... it’s almost too perfect.

Link to The Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group

Guatemala: Aquí no hay RIAA

In a popular internet café in Antigua, Guatemala, a loyal perrito waits while his owner downloads some Daddy Yankee MP3s from illicit filesharing networks. You can sip delicious café cortaditos and lattes here, and there's a big "BURN CDS!" sign on the wall next to the international VOIP calling rates. I peeked over this man's shoulder to see what app he was using. It seems that he either works at the cafe, or he's a local resident. He searched for different recording artists on Google, and then, if I'm not mistaken, he switched to some Windows-based file indexing app. Like iTunes but not iTunes. I'm not entirely sure what was going on, but I think there's some kind of motherlode of shared songs at this café that can be burned to CDs for tune-sick travelers to enjoy on the road.

Link to photo.

Photos: Antigua, Guatemala

Here's a set of a few days' worth of snapshots in Antigua, Guatemala. This colonial town dates back to the 1500s, and is now frequented by American and European tourists.

Included in this set are photos from in and around the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, an ultra-high-end resort built on the remains of a monastery that was constructed in 1547. It's the gothiest hotel in the world, for sure -- there are many crypts on the premises, full of the remains of nuns and monks.

The concierge desk is a big altar. Downstairs, mannequins are dressed up like nuns, self-torturing with ancient devices to pay pentitencia for their sins. Piped-in Gregorian Chant muzak wafts through the halls. Red macaws screech in Spanglish at guests. Impromptu Catholic masses with loud, off-key hymns en Español form every now and then in the courtyard, while bikini-clad tourists sun themselves at the pool nearby.

It's a popular corporate retreat site, too. I saw signs on conference rooms for "Save the Children," Purina, Cargill, and several big agribusiness conglomerates.

You might think the idea of a resort on an ancient holy site would upset devout Catholics here (of which there are many). And the hotel does upset some portion of the local population, but not necessarily because it's seen as a sacrilege. One local family I spoke with said that some portion of Antigua's longtime residents object to the fact that this historic site was converted into a commercial profit-making venture. "It's part of our national heritage," said the mom who shall remain nameless, "it belongs to all Guatemalans." One could also argue that businesses like this provide employment and income for residents.

Like other higher-end hotels in Antigua, Casa Santo Domingo is frequented by norteamericanos who come here to adopt children.

I spoke with several women in Antigua this week who identified themselves as US residents here to adopt through "independent" means. One woman said she was adopting her second Mayan baby, and paid her broker in American dollars for the transaction. It would appear that indigenous children born to poor women have become one of Guatemala's biggest cash crops.

The scene at Casa Santo Domingo -- impeccably manicured gardens, brightly colored birds, ancient colonial ruins, white people with Mayan babies on their backs -- is made all the more surreal by the fact that this walled compound is an oasis of opulence surrounded by poverty. Rooms for the living at this luxurious crypt-hotel range from about US$200-360 per night. That's more than some indigenous Guatemalans earn in an entire year. About 75% of the country lives beneath the poverty line, a little over half the country is literate by some estimates, and many indigenous people survive on less than $2 a day.

But disparity and proximity between rich and poor shouldn't feel alien to American visitors here. After all, back in the town where I live, it's only a 15 minute drive from Beverly Hills to LA's Skid Row.

(Tech notes: shot with ultra compact Canon SD630, organized in Apple's Aperture.)

Guatemala

I'm in Guatemala for a while, researching some stories here. I'll be posting photos, video, and other notes from the road here on xeni.net/trek. Hello to you from Antigua, Guatemala -- where I can hear 400-year-old church bells ringing right now in the dark, along with night birds. The air smells like cooking fire smoke. Twin volcanoes of ash and water are sleeping soundly tonight (this is a good thing), and I will be in a few moments, too.

Image: The weeping virgin, at a 400+ year old church here in Antigua (2004, Xeni Jardin, under this CC license)