Students Explore Communities in Guatemala

This Winter Term, a group of Oberlin students along with Professor of Chemistry William Fuchsman, went to Guatemala as accompaniers. Here they tell the story of displaced peoples and communities, their hope and future.

As the 'Guatemalan Delegation', we arrived in Guatemala and studied Spanish for two weeks while living with host families in a town called Quezaltenango (Xela). We then proceeded to the capital, Guatemala City, and spent a few days meeting with various people, usually with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), who were willing to talk to us about their work, and of the current situation in the country now. We then flew to the village of Santa Elena, a returned refugee community in the western Ixcan jungle region of Guatemala, where we spent the next four days. Santa Elena, founded in 1996, is a community of about 50 Mayan families (250 people) who reestablished themselves in Guatemala after over a decade of refuge in Mexico. These people had previously lived in a different Guatemalan village but were forced to abandon their home in the early 80s to escape the most brutal part of the civil war, or as the U.S. government called it, the "internal conflict." During their years in refuge, many members of the community were separated from one another so that it is only since their resettlement in Santa Elena that they have been able to begin rebuilding their lives as Guatemalans.

As part of the resettlement process, the refugees requested that international accompaniers be present in the hopes that this presence of an individual connected to a concerned international community would prevent the military violence and other human rights abuses that initially destroyed the communities. Several of our group leaders are associated with SEPA, the Santa Elena Project of Accompaniment, an organization based in Oberlin that works to support and send accompaniers to the community. Our visit to Santa Elena was a way to show support and build solidarity with the community members. During our stay in Santa Elena, we ate meals in their houses, visited the new, three-room school house to speak with the school teachers, met with the Junta - the village's governing body, bathed in the river that runs through the community, ate oranges and grapefruit from collectively owned village trees, and were challenged to a couple of basketball games by the group of young school boys. We seemed to be very successful at being entertainment and distraction from school for the youth of the community.

Disrupted Communites

Underneath all of the fun that we were having, it was hard to ignore the extreme poverty the community was living in. On any other trip to a foreign country, one notices many marked social differences. It is important to understand some of the basic ways that the traditional Guatemalan culture differs from our Western approach to the world before we can begin to solve some of the social and economic problems which plague the nation.

The Church actually has been very successful in achieving this. The importance of religion to daily life in Guatemala has become undeniable over the course of the past two decades. The Catholic Church in particular has played an integral role with respect to the struggle for human rights. They work under the United Nation's definition of Human Rights, being that no human should be denied certain rights such as food, shelter and safety. During and after the Guatemalan civil war that peaked during the early 1980s, key figures within the Catholic Church, such as Archbishop Gerardi, worked for the rights of the Guatemalan (particularly the indigenous) people. Unfortunately, many of these people, (and as it turns out, Gerardi himself ) were murdered by members of the Guatemalan Army for their beliefs and their efforts.

Today, while visiting any rural village in Guatemala you may find a family in which several of the children share the name Elena, Santos or Moises. It's not uncommon for parents to give many of their children the same name. Shannon Lockhart brought up this point in a small talk on January 21, 2000. Lockhart is an American social worker working in the Office of Human Rights of the Archbishop in Guatemala City. She explained this tradition of child naming as one that is linked to the unique sense of identity in Mayan culture. It is an honor to have these names passed down to you from your grandparents. Identity is less individualized and more of a group question of "Who are we?" rather than "Who am I?" Lockhart emphasized that this Mayan cultural value in the communal collective was a target of the military violence. The violence worked to tear villages apart and turn them against each other to further the cultural destruction of the people.

Horrors of the Past

During the counterinsurgency war in Guatemala from 1978 to 1985, many military techniques of violence were used to destroy the community. Many villagers were ordered to kill each other and neighboring villagers. Lockhart spoke of one account of a man who was forced into the military and instructed to murder a woman with a cowl over her head. He couldn't see her face, but he was told that she was with the Guerrilla and that if he didn't kill her, they would kill him. He took a machete and cut off her head. After her cowl was removed, he saw that he had killed his own daughter.

Agriculture

Land distribution continues to be a problem in Guatemala, with five percent of the population owning 80 percent of the arable land. As a result, there are primarily two different types of agricultural plots: Latifundios (large estates) and minifundios (subsistence farms). Latifundios use large tracts of land that are ideal for farming or grazing. Cash crops such as coffee, suga, and bananas are planted in a monoculture and eventually exported to countries such as the United States. Coastal plains are used as grazing land for cattle, which is also exported as beef. Owners of latifundios often employ chemically intensive methods of farming such as the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, which can pollute waterways and adversely affect human health. Minifundios, on the other hand, are small plots of land created by slashing and burning a forested mountainside; land that is hardly suited for agricultural purposes. They are usually owned by families that depend on a successful harvest to survive. As we saw in Santa Elena and various mountainside farms, corn and black beans are the primary crops grown, and are supplemented with vegetables such as cabbages, beets, and pumpkins. These crops are usually planted as several small monocultures that are rotated in order to maintain adequate nitrogen levels in the soil. Small amounts of fertilizer and herbicides are used if the families can afford it. It is very difficult for an entire family to survive by subsistence farming on their minifundio, so many people are forced to work on a latifundio or relocate to urban areas in order earn money to buy the food that can't be grown by the family.

From an environmental perspective, neither latifundios nor minifundios are the ideal method for producing food. However, it is important to realize that the peasants responsible for deforestation are forced to do so since the latifundio owners have controlled the majority of land in order grow more profitable crops for export. Land redistribution initiatives have the potential to increase the standard of living for the majority of minifundio landowners while simultaneously decreasing the negative impact on the environment in Guatemala. The history of the country has shown that foreign interests have a strong influence over land use policy in Guatemala, and as citizens of the United States we must work to ensure that the pursuit of the interests of American corporations does not result in another atrocity like the Guatemalan civil war.

One thing we kept hearing from the members of the community was that they hoped we would take a lot back with us from our trip. They hoped that this delegation would be the second of many more to come, and that we would go home and let people know about the issues these people are facing. For more information about SEPA (The Santa Elena Project of Accompaniment), please contact SEPA President William Fuchsman at william.fuchsman@oberlin.edu.