CAMINOS
Newsletter - April 2003
Dear friends and family,
One of my favorite
college professors says that the key to good teaching is connecting
the known to the unknown . As a human rights
accompanier here in Guatemala, I have been trying to understand
my current situation through my previous work, life, and travel
experiences. Growing up in a small town in Central Wisconsin,
working in college as a backpacking guide in New Mexico, and traveling
three different times to the Philippines during the 1990’s have
proved especially useful as I make the transition from US high school
English teacher to human rights worker in Guatemala.
The small town of Ilom, where I spend 80%
of my time, has nearly 3000 inhabitants and in some ways resembles
the adjoining towns of Colby and Abbotsford where I grew up, went
to school, and worked part-time during my childhood. Like my original
“hometowns,” there are political divisions in Ilom that date back
decades and have produced some hard feelings and non-cooperation
on projects that could have benefited both sides. The major difference
is that the divisions here stem from racism, land grabs, and civil
war atrocities.
School
children in Ilom
In Ilom those on the north side of town
are called Ladinos, people of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry.
On the south side you find Mayan Ixils, indigenous people who
settled and began farming in the Cuchamatane mountains of the Ixil
area long before the Ladinos ever arrived. Because of cultural,
political and language differences, not much socializing goes on
between these two groups. Ixil women often cannot speak Spanish,
while Ladino women generally prefer to speak Spanish. Most Ixil
men speak some Spanish but prefer to use their first language which
is Ixil. Many Ladino men learned Spanish in school and prefer
to speak Spanish. So like Colby and Abbotsford, Ladinos and Ixils
live side by side but tend to socialize within their own groups.
One other similarity is that Colby, Abbotsford, and Ilom’s economies
are heavily dependent on agriculture, but here in Ilom they produce
coffee and cardamom rather than milk.
The major difference between this Guatemalan
town and Wisconsin towns is money. Ilom has no streetlights, no
middle school or high school, no park, no postal service, no fire
department, no police station, no garbage pick-up, no dump, no sewage
plant, and no water treatment plant. The only electricity in town
comes from a gas generator that powers the TV and VCR of the town’s
kung fu ‘cinema’ and the 360 solar panels recently installed on
the roofs of 360 homes by a group of engineers working for an appreciative
politician who won his congressional thanks to the Ilom vote.
On a sunny day the panels provide enough power to run a few ultraviolet
lights that illuminate the dirt floor of the family sleeping room
or the kitchen area where the mother does all the cooking over an
open fire. The 140 families without solar power rely on flashlights,
candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to see after dark.
Early on I asked myself, “How can people
live under these conditions?” (Basically, some do not. Just last
week two babies in Ilom died from high fevers and chronic diarrhea.)
The bigger question is why can’t Ilom and 1000’s of towns just like
it provide these services to the people?” In a nutshell, I believe
it is government corruption that impedes infrastructure development,
but more importantly, it is the meager compensation that these farmers
receive for the cash crops they grow and harvest.
For example, in Ilom the main cash crop
is organic coffee. For each one-pound bag of coffee that is sold
in Europe for $10, the farmer in Ilom receives 50 cents. Only
5% of that $10 goes to the person who cleans the field, plants the
coffee, picks the berries, removes the pulp, and dries the coffee
beans in the sun before selling them to local buyers! The rest
goes to shipping companies, the warehouses, the truck drivers, the
government officials, and the retailers. I am no business expert,
but something about this whole system seems extremely unfair to
both the producer and, to a lesser extent, the consumer who absorbs
the 1900% mark up in price. I cannot imagine how Wisconsin dairy
farmers could make a living if they only received 19 cents for every
gallon of milk that sells for $3.80 at the local supermarket.
My research shows that dairy farmers receive nearly 50% of the proceeds
that come from the sale of a gallon of milk. If family farmers
in Guatemala received a fair price for their products, perhaps Ilom
would have the revenues necessary to build a high school, a post
office, a water and sewage treatment plants and other essential
systems for the people in this town.
Fair Trade vs. Free Trade
A man in Denver
shares my belief that the producers of our consumer goods deserve
a bigger piece of the pie without further gouging the consumer.
Kerry Appel has been buying a lot of shade grown, organic coffee
from indigenous farmers in Chiapas, Mexico since 1997. He sells
the coffee to people in Denver and around the world through his
web site www.thehumanbean.com
and pays the coffee growers twice the free trade “market” value.
This is a concept known as “fair trade.”
Fortunately, fair trade is no longer just
a fringe idea. Many people are seeking out fair trade websites
like www.globalexchange.org
when they want to buy presents for friends and family. I
realize people in the US can easily buy something cheap at Wal-Mart,
Kohl’s or other chains, but how can they do that in good conscience
when they know it perpetuates sweatshops, poverty, and wealth inequality
around the world? I laugh when I hear business executives say
that their corporations are providing jobs to people who would otherwise
be starving. That’s like saying Southern slave owners in the 18
th and 19 th centuries did blacks a favor by providing them jobs,
a place to sleep, and food to eat. Like my father used to say,
“A fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Backpacking Job Pays Off
As a backpacking guide at Philmont Scout
Ranch, I spent four summers teaching Scouts and Explorers about
low impact camping, water purification, washing and sanitizing eating
utensils, and properly disposing of trash and human waste. Here
in Ilom I have applied many of these concepts to my own daily regimen
and explained some of them to a few community members interested
in the rationale behind these practices. Perhaps the most important
practice for my own health has been the filtering and purifying
of my own drinking water.
At Philmont I taught young people three
methods of purifying water: boiling it for 10 minutes, filtering
it through a high quality water filter, or chemically treating the
water with iodine or chlorine. Here I have used my Katadyne filter
to get rid of the amoebas, parasites, and bacteria in the water.
Then I add two drops of chlorine per liter to kill viruses and
anything else that might have made it through the filter. The
good news is that I have not had any major intestinal problems since
I arrived in community. The bad news is there is no way to completely
avoid getting “traveler’s flu” in a place where hygiene is a luxury
and to some extent, the causes of waterborne intestinal illnesses
are a mystery.
Perhaps another reason for our overall
good health is the new accompanier policy of carrying our own eating
utensils to the homes of the witnesses and support families where
we eat. After each meal with a family, we return to our living
quarters in the former health clinic and wash our own eating utensils
using soap and chlorinated water and then drying them with towels
we know to be clean. Some previous accompaniers regularly became
ill with intestinal amoebas and parasites due to the dishwashing
methods used by the Ixil women who washed plates with untreated
water and served the food on wet plates. Most adults in Ilom say
that they rarely get sick from the water they drink; however, they
admit that young children often suffer from diarrhea and fever.
Obviously, the adults have developed an immunity to most things
living in the water, but their small children suffer periodically
from diarrhea until their bodies’ immune systems learn to fight
them off.
The Director of Teachers in Ilom recently
invited my fellow accompanier and I to give a demonstration to students
about various low cost methods of purifying untreated tap water.
We first used a sulfur chemical test provided by COMENSA, a local
NGO that assists communities with potable water projects, to show
students how they can check for the existence of bacteria in their
water. We showed them that water taken directly from the tap,
boiled water, water treated with chlorine, and water in clear plastic
bottles placed in the sun for 24 hours turned golden when the chemicals
were added; however, after 12 hours the tap water turned black because
of the presence of living bacteria while the others remained golden,
meaning they were bacteria-free. Students came away from our presentation
with a better understanding of why they and their siblings often
have diarrhea and what they could do to lessen their chances of
getting sick.
Until January of 2003 people from Ilom
and previous human rights accompaniers had to hike three hours along
mule trails to get from the El Cruce bus turnaround to the community.
The bus drops people off at 8:30 a.m. and the first part of the
hike takes you through cool, unspoiled jungle and crystal clear
waterfalls, but the last half of the hike is on hot, steep jeep
trails that pass through the stinky town of Sotzil and then past
fields of cardamom and corn. Since the end of January the road
to Ilom has been improved to the point where pickups can travel
over it safely. Although I have done the hike twice, I must admit
that we have ridden in the back of the pick-up six times and found
it to be well worth the $3.25 they charge passengers.
Is This the Philippines?
During the 1990’s I lived
and worked in Tokyo for three years and spent Christmases with my
uncle´s children and grandchildren in Manila and in towns outside
Manila. When I arrived in Guatemala I was struck by the number
of similarities between Guatemalan and Filipino society. These
two countries produce textiles at sweatshop prices for the developing
world, and both places grow a lot of food for internal consumption
and for export. More importantly, both places are full of friendly,
creative people who work hard and believe in God. Yet both countries
have a high percentage of people living in poverty; they suffer
from high levels of government corruption; and they have both lost
many people to the United States through war, brain drain, and immigration.
As is the case
in many Filipino rural villages, many of the family dwellings in
Ilom look like makeshift log houses; some are wood plank, two-room
houses; and a few families live in cinder block houses with cement
floors. There are many churches in town - most in Ilom are evangelical
churches while the Philippines is full of Catholic churches. In
small towns there are several shops that sell snacks and basic foods
like eggs, sugar, cooking oil, batteries, and candles. You have
to throw your toilet paper in a trashcan rather than flush it due
to the small size of the pipes. And you really have to watch your
stuff when you travel because there are plenty of pickpockets who
prefer petty thievery to working in sweatshops, or farming under
the blazing hot sun.
Perhaps the most glaring similarity is the
lack of services and infrastructure due to the overall levels of
poverty. In Manila I saw a 50-foot mountain of garbage in a small
park that will never get picked up because it was created while
garbage workers were on strike. In a small town outside Manila
I saw malarial mosquitoes swarming around children who were using
an electric fan to keep them away until the power went out. In
Guatemala elementary teachers contracted by the Ministry of Education
just completed a 50-day strike and risked losing their pay to demand
that the government increase spending to help schools that lack
desks and basic materials like textbooks. In Ilom a woman with
epilepsy recently suffered third degree burns to her hands and arms
when a convulsion sent her flying into the cooking fire. She was
unable to receive treatment because her husband does not have the
money to send her to the hospital. The Cuban doctors working in
Ilom do what they can, but they believe she will probably die from
the injuries. Her four-year old son and two-year old daughter
will likely grow up without a mother. In the Philippines and throughout
Latin America these stories and thousand like it play themselves
out every day in the squatter shacks, garbage dumps, and isolated
rural villages that lack the basics. Meanwhile, the governments
of Latin America are too busy stealing from the public coffers to
fix the problems, and governments in the developed world are too
busy taking advantage of the cheap labor found in countries where
poverty is not the exception but the rule.
2nd Chance to Join International Community
So how am I doing? I am fine. Unfortunately,
not all the people in Ilom are fine. Two babies are dead, an epileptic
mother with burnt arms is slowly dying and three people have recently
been diagnosed with tuberculosis. In addition, there has been
a bit of political unrest as of late due to the government´s promise
to give ex-civil defense patrols their back pay for services rendered
during the 36-year armed insurgency. Since the government is strapped
for cash, the current party in power is looking for ways to avoid
paying the $2700 they promised each of these former soldiers.
The FRG, Guatemalan Republican Front, is trying to blame their
inability to pay on opposition parties and “human rights groups”
that harass them and criticize them. What is even more disturbing
than this pathetic attempt at scapegoating is that a few of these
ex-patrulleros actually believe this baloney.
On January 26, 2003 President Portillo’s
government stepped over the line when a presidentially appointed
governor from Quiche province spoke to people in Ilom about the
reasons why the ex-soldiers had not yet been paid. He specifically
mentioned a group called CALDH, Center for Human Rights Legal Action
as one of the forces impeding the process of delivering the back
pay to the ex-PACs. This is the same group that the witnesses
in my community are working with in their genocide case against
former dictators Efrain Rios Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcia!
The human rights community responded
to this inflammatory rhetoric by issuing an Urgent Action to its
members. Amnesty International and NISGUA, the Network in Solidarity
with the People of Guatemala, encouraged its members to write letters
to the Guatemalan president and send copies to the US ambassador
to Guatemala and local newspapers. Since the letter-writing campaign
began, I have not heard of any more incidents of government officials
blaming human rights groups for the FRG’s inability to deliver the
money. If you didn’t get a chance to write a letter after reading
my last report, I am offering you a 2 nd opportunity to increase
the safety of the people I work with as well as my own personal
safety as I continue to monitor human rights in the Ixil area during
a presidential election year. If you know anything about Guatemalan
politics, you know they are dirty. Bribery, threats, misappropriation
of government funds, voter intimidation, and political killings
are not uncommon in Guatemala, the country our government likes
to calls a “democracy.”
The details of whom to write to and what
to say can all be found on the following web page www.nisgua.org
and once you click on the Action Alert button, you will see
a March 2003 posting entitled “Guatemalan government threatens human
rights organization.”
Thanks for taking time out of your war-watching schedule to read
about another part of the world that deserves some attention as
well.
Poverty, hate, or greed can lead us to war, but cooperation and
justice are needed for peace,
Rick Clifford
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