News from the Loretto Peace Committee

The Guatamala Report Connie Newton

I have lived in Guatemala off and on for over 55 years. The details in this report are

heart breaking, for which two things are needed: 1) the grace to hold two truths in

tension (that while Guatemala is practically a failed state with oppressed and

marginalized indigenous people, it is simultaneously one of the most extraordinarily

beautiful places on the earth); and 2) When outraged, practice nonviolence toward

self and the enemy. As Richard Rohr says, nonviolence is a skill, just like learning to

read. Love is a skill. The transformation of anger is a skill. All these can be learned.

We cannot say we aren’t capable of nonviolence; all we can say is we are not willing

to do what is necessary to learn. - Connie Newton (Co-Member)

Immigration

In my hometown of Panajachel, Guatemala, a day seldom goes by that someone doesn’t talk with me

about going “North." I hear many reasons they want to migrate. The six they name most often boil down

to: 1) poverty, 2) unemployment, 3) violence, 4) corruption, 5) impunity, and 6) drought. These six are the

lived realities, which combine and compound into the powerful catalysts, propelling young people and

whole families to make heart wrenching decisions to leave their home and everything they know to make

an exceedingly dangerous journey in search of a better life.

POVERTY According to the World Bank, 59.3% of Guatemala’s 16.5 million people live below the

poverty line of $2/day. The Maya are those most affected with 79% of the indigenous living in poverty and

40% living in extreme poverty. Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world;

almost 50 percent of children under five are stunted. Children suffer most. Several years ago (before

Trump's draconian mandates) my Mayan friend Elena, a single mom, decided to go North. Her little boy

was 3 years old, she had lost her house-cleaning job, couldn’t find another, moved in with her parents,

didn’t have money for food and went in search of a coyote. She persuaded her parents to mortgage their

home to pay the coyote. The grandparents are raising Enrique. Elena got to Houston, sends money home,

and talks with her family on WhatsApp.

UNEMPLOYMENT Approximately 2o% of Guatemalan workers have salaried jobs in the formal

economy. They are entitled to government health care, maternity leave, retirement pensions and paid

vacations. Working at a call-center is considered a good job, but it is “contract work”, which pays no

benefits. The bigger picture is that many Guatemalans, particularly in rural areas, only complete the

sixth grade and lack the skills required in the formal economy. Consequently, 70% of Guatemalan workers

are in the informal economy, cleaning houses, tending gardens, farming little plots of land, selling fruit and

vegetables, eggs and chickens in the marketplace. When someone in the family gets sick, they often

borrow the money to pay for health care. The nonprofit that I’ve worked with since 1998 aims at poverty

alleviation by providing small loans to women for starting their own small businesses. Impact statistics

show that more of their children stay in school and fewer migrate.

VIOLENCE Besides the institutionalized violence of poverty that kills slowly, the everyday violence,

particularly in urban areas is a constant terror. According to GHRC, Guatemala has a multitude of criminal

groups that range from very sophisticated to rudimentary. They include former and active members of the

security forces and police as well as long-time smugglers, human traffickers and some Mexican and

Colombian drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). The DTOs are well entrenched in the Departments of

San Marcos and Huehuetenango. Every day they land small planes on clandestine runways scattered

throughout the country, particularly in more remote areas like the Peten near the Mexican border, where

the poorly paid and poorly educated police are weak or on the payroll of the smugglers.

Recently, a volunteer was working in one of those remote areas in a farmer’s fields. He had stayed with

the farmer and his family while completing a three-year agricultural project. When they returned to town to

celebrate their work, the farmer invited the volunteer for a drink. The volunteer watched in disbelief as the

farmer and other farmer friends did a line of cocaine while a policeman looked on and made jokes. The

volunteer left the project after agonizing over the broken relationship that revealed the depth of corruption

and the lack of the rule of law extending into their backwoods location.

The violence from drugs is everywhere, the violence from extortion is mostly on the rise in the cities.

Yesterday I spoke with a friend living in Quetzaltenango. She told me that she and her friends, who don’t

own cars, are afraid to take the public busses because there are daily murders of bus drivers and

passengers who are being extorted for money. When the U.S. military opened a base in her city, many

welcomed them for bring them more “security."

CORRUPTION The last four Guatemalan presidents have been linked to corruption, including extra-

judicial killings. The national judicial system has been compromised as well. The main counter corruption

force was CICIG, the international commission formed in 2007 by the United Nations. The investigative

journal, InSight, reports that Working alongside the Attorney General’s Office, prosecutors targeted more

than 1,500 individuals, of which 660 were successfully prosecuted for high-level crimes… This included

the arrest of former President Otto Perez Molina and his vice president Roxana Baldetti, on charges they

headed a vast customs fraud network…called “La Linea”. …With the arrival of Colombian prosecutor Iván

Velásquez in 2013 to head the CICIG, the commission went all in to fully investigate the vast corruption

networks in which the most powerful politicians in the country participated with the complicity of the largest

economic conglomerates.

An excerpt from a final CICIG report states: “Between 2012 and 2015, an illicit, political-economic network

took over the executive (branch), subordinated the legislative, manipulated and interfered in the election of

judges to high courts and, in addition to looting the state, promoted laws and policies favoring private

companies to the detriment of competition and the citizenry.” When Velásquez began to investigate the

corruption under the current president, Jimmy Morales, Morales put in his own Attorney General, blocked

Velásquez from entering Guatemala, and shut down CICIG.

The newly elected president, Alejandro Giammattei, will take office in January 2020. He will be the first to

hold office in the last two decades with no legitimate counter-corruption task force. Giammattei has been

associated with the military and the narcos. In an interview, Velásquez said, criminal groups in Guatemala

have achieved “a total co-optation of the state.” The rule of law is in further jeopardy. Impunity will rise.

The government will be a tool for private interests rather than the public good. Investigative journalists will

need protection.

IMPUNITY The details about corruption make it plain that impunity is maliciously woven into the fabric

of the culture. Further statistics include that in the past decade 94% of crimes went unpunished. In 2018

alone, the rate of impunity was almost 98%. Moreover, the impunity rate for the highest level of crimes of

corruption was 99%, according to Hector Silvia Avalos’s report of August 2019. (www.insight.org).

Nationally, that is the reality.

What is even more hidden is impunity on the local level. Domestic violence is ubiquitous in Guatemala,

especially in rural areas, where one NGO teaching women’s rights estimated that 85% of the women in

their program are victims of domestic violence. In one of the discussions on women’s rights, a mother

said, “but my husband says he has the right to beat me…is that true?” When women want legal protection

from abusers they often face a culture of machismo that blames them and local police who do nothing.

A valued colleague of mine endured years of beatings by her husband. She went to the police seven

times to denounce him and get protection. They did nothing. She finally ran away with her two small

children to her parent’s home. At least she had a safe option. There are almost no safe houses in

Guatemala. For those fleeing domestic violence and seeking asylum in the U.S., the Trump administration

has denied domestic violence as a legal justification for asylum.

Climate refugees fleeing drought were part of the migrant caravan

from Central America.

DROUGHT Environmental instability in Guatemala includes earthquakes, hurricanes, and more

recently extensive drought. All are related to immigration. Jonathan Blitzer of the New Yorker published a

series of articles on the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands. There farmers struggle to

grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer

wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.”

Persistent drought has decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which

roughly 90% of local farmers rely. Coffee is especially vulnerable to climate change, because the extreme

variations exacerbate a rust disease that destroys coffee plants. Generally, if you live in an agricultural

zone, come from long generations of farmers and can’t count on your crops any more, what else can you

do but leave?

Sr. Irma Avila and I remember speaking with a grandmother a few years ago, who told us that the corn

crop from her little farm used to feed her family for a year. “Now”, she said, “it only feeds us for three

months.”

That reality probably had something to do with drought, but it also had to do with population increase of

the number of relatives who moved in with her, because they couldn’t find employment elsewhere.

According to the World Bank by 2050 almost 2 million people are likely to be displaced from Central

America due to climate change factors. The number could be as high as 4 million “if regional development

does not shift to more climate-friendly and inclusive models of agriculture.” Every year more crops fail and

it’s harder to get clean water.

For years, legal advocates and scholars have been asking how to protect people displaced by

environmental conditions. Could they be protected under international law like political refugees? How can

responsibility be assigned for those who are harmed. Is it the wealthier countries who pollute more? What

will the global community do for all the displaced people who are suffering now and will suffer later from

what some call “climate apartheid”?

Militarization

How many of us have gone to SOA protests? And for good reason!! Various forms of U.S. military

intervention in Guatemala have gone on for years. The U.S. interventions were always cloaked in

verbiage about keeping Guatemala and Latin America “safe for Democracy." What that meant was

keeping the hemisphere safe for business interests.

In 1954, the CIA assassinated the first democratically elected Guatemalan president because he was

planning “land reform” that would affect the massive acreage held by United Fruit Company. In the

eighties President Reagan sent the National Guard to various bases in Central America, to “save the U.S.

from the communists” who he said would soon be invading San Diego. During the Armed Conflict in

Guatemala, Lorettos and many others denounced the training of Guatemalan military officers at Ft.

Benning, because it became clear that they had learned and were replicating the worst of U.S. military

practices from the Vietnam War, including scorched earth, model villages, kidnapping, rape, and

assassinations.

Today the forms of U.S. military intervention are less obvious. The DEA tries to combat drug trafficking.

However, in 2018 the donation of military equipment intended to go after the drugs was used instead for

internal political purpose. Currently, U.S. military intervention is mostly focused on immigration. On August

9th of this year, Guatemalans protested at the Mesilla border crossing between Guatemala and Mexico

over the “safe third country” agreement. It requires immigrants, passing through Guatemala on their way

to claim asylum at the Mexico-U.S. border, to first claim asylum in Guatemala. That effectively makes it

impossible for migrants experiencing the multiplicity of life threatening realities reported here to go any

further.

Besides U.S. military intervention in Guatemala, Guatemala’s own military continues as a source of

repression for any kind of political, social, economic, or environmental change. During the 36 years of

Armed Conflict, the military used the rise of the rebels as a cover for extending its influence and power

over a weak, incompetent, and corrupt state. Today, it is more focused on its own mercenary interests.

Many of the criminal organizations include former members of the military, intelligence agencies and

active members of the police. Those criminal elements of Guatemala’s military and intelligence apparatus

even have their own name, the Illegal Corps and Clandestine Security Apparatus (with the Spanish

acronym, CIACS). Their influence in the government behind-the-scenes means that some see them as

the “hidden powers” who run the country. This is not a pretty picture

Prayer reflection

Let us pray for the residents and refugees of Guatamala, and all those who must face or flee violence and

unrest in their home countries, that they can find safety and build a better life.

Thanks to Roberta Hudlow, SL, for her great work

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