Guatemala, which has the highest number of femicides in Central America, launched a women-only bus service in 2011, to prevent sexual harassment. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 2 2013 (IPS)

Douglas Cuc, a 32-year-old clown, entered the courtroom with the same smile on his face as when he told jokes for coins on the buses in the town of San Miguel Petapa, near the Guatemalan capital. But this time there was no greasepaint on his face, he did not wear his clown’s nose, and he was in handcuffs.

A year and a half earlier he visited his ex-wife, Evelin Pacheco, on the pretext of taking something to their 10-year-old daughter. Neighbours said that on the night of Jan. 25, 2012 they heard screams and then complete silence. The next morning, the young mother’s lifeless body was found at the foot of the stairs.

Cuc was later taken to the scene of the crime, where he tried to persuade the investigators that his ex-wife had fallen down the stairs. But her body showed signs of strangulation and bruising.

Based on the forensic evidence, the history of violence in the relationship and the testimony of neighbours and other witnesses, the public prosecutor’s office charged him with femicide – gender-based murder – in a trial that is being held in a new type of court specialising in violence against women.

Cuc, who by day made bus passengers laugh, by night became a tyrant who repeatedly beat the 26-year-old Pacheco, who worked full-time to support the family.

Eventually she left him, but her ex-husband continued to attack her and make death threats. Pacheco denounced the harassment to the authorities, and on three occasions requested restraining orders, which were granted. But as her mother told the court, weeping and holding her photograph, none of this prevented the tragedy.

Pacheco is one of 708 women who suffered violent deaths in Guatemala in 2012, according to the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF). During the first half of this year there were 403 deaths, 66 more than in the same period of 2012.

The Central American Integration System (SICA) and the Council of Ministers for Women in Central America (COMMCA) rank Guatemala as the country with the highest number of killings of women in the region.

This Central American country is also one of the most violent in the world overall, with a murder rate of 48 per 100,000, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Central American Human Development Report 2009-2010. That is in comparison to a Latin America average of 25 per 100,000 and a global average of nine per 100,000.

Justice with a gender perspective

The first hearing in Cuc’s trial was held Jul. 15 at the court for crimes of femicide and other forms of violence against women, in the province of Guatemala, where the country’s capital city is located.

The court, composed of three women judges, is the result of advances in Guatemala which in 2010 became the first country in the world to create specialised courts for femicide and other forms of violence against women.

The “law against femicide and other forms of violence against women”, which created the specialised courts, was approved in 2008 in response to the wave of murders of women in this impoverished country.

It establishes preventive measures, criminal offences and penalties that seek to guarantee women the right to a life free from physical, psychological, sexual, moral or economic violence.

The specialised courts have been set up so far in the provinces of Guatemala, Chiquimula, Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz, which together account for the majority of violent deaths of women in the country.

The National Centre for Judicial Analysis and Documentation (CENADOJ) told IPS that while in ordinary courts only 7.5 percent of cases of femicide and other forms of violence against women result in conviction and sentencing, in the specialised courts the proportion is already over 30 percent.

The key to their success has been addressing the violence from a gender perspective, analysing each case in the context of inequity, discrimination and misogyny, Ana María Rodríguez, the presiding judge of the court trying Cuc, told IPS.

In the case of Pacheco, for instance, the public prosecutor’s office and Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivors Foundation), an NGO that represents the young woman’s family, are trying to prove that the actions of her ex-husband sprang from deep-rooted machismo, as he regarded the victim as his property.

With the exception of two male judges in Quetzaltenango, the cases before these specialised courts are heard by women judges who were trained in gender and justice issues at the judicial branch’s School of Judicial Studies.

The courts also employ a psychologist and a social worker, and have daycare facilities to look after children while their mothers testify, so that they are not hindered from participating in trials by the difficulty of finding childcare.

Angélica Valenzuela, the head of the Centre for Research, Training and Support for Women (CICAM), told IPS that the specialised courts have had a positive impact. But she pointed out that they are still not operating all over the country, and the cases that they deal with must be filtered through courts of first instance, which determine the classification of crimes but do not have direct contact with the victims.

Judge Miriam Méndez of the femicide court in Guatemala province said that prosecutors skilled at arguing cases are as important in the prosecution of a crime as having specialist courts for crimes against women.

She said one of the problems is that “testimony remains the chief evidence,” due to the shortcomings in the use of other types of evidence, like forensics.

As Norma Cruz, the head of the Survivors Foundation, told IPS: “The goal is zero deaths and zero impunity,” and there is still a long way to go to make this happen.

Jaime Valladares in Guatemala City uses four solar heaters to provide hot water to his renters. Credit. Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Julio Godoy, Edgardo Ayala, and Danilo Valladares
BERLIN, Dec 27 2012 (IPS)

A recent agreement between El Salvador and Germany, with the latter supporting two renewable energy projects that would increase installed capacity in the Central American country by 94.2 megawatts by 2013, points to a promising alliance for carbon-free energy.

The first such project is the 14.2-megawatt ‘15 de Septiembre’ solar plant, slated to be one of the biggest of its kind in Latin America. The second initiative is the expansion of the ‘5 de Noviembre’ hydropower plant to increase capacity to 179.4 megawatts.

The two plants would supply 129,000 homes with power, according to an official communiqué from the Río Lempa Executive Commission, a government agency.

According to José Francisco Rodríguez, an expert on climate change in El Salvador’s Environment Ministry, “A policy launched this year by the national energy council has two objectives: reduce dependence on oil and by-products and keep the environmental impacts of energy production to a minimum.”

Since 2005, El Salvador has had in place a law to promote renewable energy sources, offering incentives in the form of tax exemptions for projects generating anything between 10 and 20 megawatts of power.

Geothermal sources currently provide 23 percent of all energy produced in El Salvador. A study published this year by the Japan International Coordination Agency (JICA) estimates that geothermal energy could generate an additional 89 megawatts by 2020.

“In addition, wind power is expected to generate 60 megawatts, and two hydroelectric plants are to be expanded: the abovementioned ‘5 de Noviembre’ will increase production by 80 megawatts, and El Chaparral, currently under construction, by 65 megawatts,” Rodríguez added.

Obstacles to production

Recent collaborations between German and Central American experts on renewable energy made one thing clear: governments in Central America will need to launch comprehensive industrial policies if they are to harness the full capacity of renewables.

Several Central American engineers from the private sector, in Germany for an educational tour sponsored by the German government back in October, told IPS that a lack of coordination between different sectors – such as education, finance, and technology imports – is hindering efforts to expand and optimise the renewables sector.

Germany has valuable lessons to share in this regard. Last year Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to phase out nuclear power by 2020, thereby further forcing innovation in the renewable energy sector.

The government hopes to increase energy supplied through offshore wind turbines to 25,000 megawatts by 2030. In terms of solar power, the country has an installed production capacity of more than 25,000 megawatts.

A year ago, Germany added 7,500 megawatts of capacity to the existing solar park, by utilising an eight-billion-dollar government subsidy.

But Germany’s model is not easy to replicate in Central America.

Raffaele Trapasso, administrator of the Rural Development Programme at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and author of a new study, ‘Linking renewable energy to rural development’, told IPS that industrial policies in the developing world need to take a holistic approach to renewables.

However, so far, “National and regional governments such as those in Central America tend to treat renewable energy as a single policy issue… deploying large-scale installations dealing with a small number of developers whose only interest is to get subsidies, grants or tax credits.”

In Guatemala, where energy innovation is based on the 2003 Law of Incentives for the Generation of Renewable Energy, production does not meet commitments on paper, despite regulations that ensure grants and tax and tariff exemptions.

José Granados, an expert in renewable energy sources, told IPS that Guatemala only produces 853 megawatts of solar power, far below installed capacity. Geothermal potential is also strong at 1,000 megawatts but the country only produces 49.2 megawatts annually.

The gap between potential and actual production is similar in the case of biomass, solar and wind power, he said.

Claus Schieber, an engineer who has been promoting the use of solar energy in Guatemala for nearly 30 years, recently in Germany at the Berlin-based Renewables Academy (RENAC), told IPS that renewable energy practitioners are forced to jump bureaucratic hurdles and navigate a dearth of credit, poorly-qualified technicians, and high customs duties when importing technology.

Furthermore, he said, Guatemala’s education system churns out post-graduate renewable energy specialists, but does not do enough to train and educate technicians, electricians and plumbers.

“Many of my highest-qualified colleagues have to carry out even the most simple technical tasks, which robs them of time they could be using more efficiently in conceiving new systems and promoting new projects,” Schieber said.

Coordinated national action could also help Central American governments extend power to rural areas, which are largely cut off from the electric grid.

In Guatemala for instance, the ministry of energy and mines reports that only 82 percent of the population has access to electricity. The 18 percent without power – about 530,000 households – are located in rural areas.

In El Salvador, only 83 percent of rural households have access to power, compared to 97 percent of urban dwellers.

The OECD reports that deployment of renewable energy into rural areas could benefit local communities, by providing affordable electricity and professional capacity building, as well as creating new revenue sources for the local governments, by increasing the tax base of their communities.

* Edgardo Ayala (San Salvador) and Danilo Valladares (Guatemala City) contributed to this article

Just five percent of the population own 80 percent of the farmland in Guatemala. Credit: Wallygrom CC BY-SA 2.0

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

An “integral rural development law” to promote access to land, employment and other rights for small farmers is bogged down in the Guatemalan Congress due to opposition from large landowners, who see it as an attempt at land reform.

“The bill contains 10 proposals that would contribute particularly to development for women and indigenous rural communities,” activist Irene Barrientos, of the Committee of Campesino (small farmer) Unity, told IPS.

“The rights to land and clean water, and the promotion of economic, social and labour policies and food security” are addressed in the bill, which was defeated once again on Nov. 29 when it failed to win at least 105 votes in the 158-member single-chamber parliament, as required to pass legislation of “national urgency.”

Campesinos in Guatemala are especially worried, because that day was the last day of ordinary sessions, and Congress will have to hold a special session to debate the bill before year-end, which they fear will be “an uphill struggle,” Barrientos said.

The vote in Congress left a sour taste in the mouth of campesinos, who need land for their family to farm.

“The legislators have mocked the people, because in March the president of Congress and the heads of the parliamentary blocs promised to approve it, but when it came to the crunch it was apparent their votes had been bought by the Chamber of Agriculture,” which is against the bill, she said.

This Central American country of 15 million people has some of the worst social and economic indicators in Latin America. And the indigenous majority living in the country’s rural areas are the most vulnerable.

Fifty-four percent of the population lives in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, according to the 2011 National Survey of Living Conditions, while half of the children under five suffer chronic malnutrition, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

There is also enormous inequality: 80 percent of Guatemala’s fertile land is in the hands of barely five percent of the population, while 80 percent of the overwhelmingly indigenous rural dwellers, equivalent to 61 percent of the total population, are poor, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Barrientos regretted the position taken by the Chamber of Agriculture, which represents large landowners. She said “the bill itself does not implement land reform measures, or the confiscation of lands…They are really defending their interests in the extractive and monoculture model that hurts small farmers.”

The integral rural development bill promotes policies in 10 areas: economic, agricultural and social, and related to labour, food and nutritional security and sovereignty.

It also creates programmes for production of basic grains and soil conservation for sustainable farming, and gives a boost to the campesino economy and to financial services.

According to Álvaro Caballeros of the Guatemalan Coordinating Committee of NGOs and Cooperatives (CONGCOOP), the bill “would guarantee the formulation of public policies with an emphasis on the campesino family economy,” which has gone downhill as a result of the strong support given to the agroexport model.

“The expansion of monoculture production and extractive industries has been promoted in the last 22 years, and this has been disastrous for many rural families, who have been forced to sell their plots of land, hemmed in on all sides by African palm plantations, or whose water sources have been polluted,” he said.

“The law is important because it responds to significant longstanding demands, such as food sovereignty, sustainable agricultural production, health, housing and employment,” Caballeros said.

The president of Guatemala, rightwing retired general Otto Pérez Molina, and Vice President Roxana Baldetti have also expressed support for the bill.

“We are committed to the rural population in the matter of the approval of this law, as it is one of the five main pillars of the National Agenda for Change,” said Pérez Molina, who stressed that it is in no way a “land reform” strategy.

The bill is also backed by the United Nations office in Guatemala, which called it a task that has remained pending since the 1996 peace agreement put an end to 36 years of armed conflict between leftwing guerrillas and state security forces, in which 200,000 people – mainly rural indigenous campesinos – were killed and disappeared, primarily by the army and its paramilitary allies.

Approval of the bill is complicated for the time being, said Cynthia Fernández of the Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES), a local NGO. She described the bill as a stride forward in terms of rural development.

“The model that holds sway at present is extremely prejudicial to state intervention for the benefit of the rural population, because it does not facilitate access to land or credit, and it does not give them any assistance,” she complained.

“We believe the bill itself contains a series of general principles that provide a framework for regulation of rural development, backed up by constitutional provisions,” she said.

But the owners of large landed estates remain fiercely opposed to the bill. Carla Caballeros (no relation) of the Chamber of Agriculture told IPS that, if passed into law, “it would result in increased poverty for rural people, more children suffering from malnutrition, and higher unemployment.”

She said the law “would create more disorder and ineffectiveness among state agencies, and would create a super-ministry that would cost more than 200 million dollars to set up, only to perpetuate the same ineffectiveness and corruption.”

The bill also “violates the right to private property, the freedom of industry, commerce and labour, and the supremacy of the individual enshrined by the constitution,” she said, adding that it would “create chaos in the country’s institutions.”

The Chamber of Agriculture presented an appeal to prevent Congress from debating the bill. But it was thrown out by the Constitutional Court.

Deforestation threatens the natural beauty of Punta de Manabique. Credit: Courtesy of Daniel Ariano/Consejo Nacional de Áreas Protegidas

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

“Many tourists come to this area for bird watching, but the terrible deforestation is leading to the disappearance of so much of our flora and fauna. The cleared land is used for cattle ranching,” said Haroldo Figueroa, who works as a guide in nature reserves along Guatemala’s Caribbean coast.

The statistics bear him out. The province of Izabal along Guatemala’s northeast Caribbean coast is one of the areas with the highest deforestation rates in the country, according to two government studies on forests, covering the 1991-2001 and 2006-2010 periods.

Forests in that province shrank from 373,000 hectares in the 1991-1993 period to just over 264,000 hectares in 2010, according to the two studies carried out by the National Institute of Forests and the National Council on Protected Areas, with the support of two private universities: Valle de Guatemala and the Jesuit-run Rafael Landívar.

“Deforestation is caused by people or landowners who don’t take into account the consequences that it has on global warming, fishing and tourism,” Figueroa told IPS. “And whoever has money can do whatever they want here.”

There are 12 nature reserves in Guatemala’s Caribbean coastal region, which local communities depend on for their survival because of the water, firewood, fish, wild fruits and nuts, and opportunities for tourism business activities provided by the jungle areas.

One of the protected areas is Punta de Manabique, declared a wildlife refuge by Congress in 2005. It is home to innumerable species of coral, fish, crustaceans, shellfish, birds, and mammals.

The 43-km Dulce River runs through the 151,878-hectare refuge, which is one of the most important coastal marine wetland systems in Central America.

Since 1955, the Dulce River National Park has been a sanctuary for species like the manatee – a large aquatic herbivorous marine mammal also known as the sea cow. The Chocón Machacas Protected Biotope was created within the park to protect one of the last remaining habitats of the endangered Caribbean manatee (Trichechus manatus).

The 47,500-hectare Cerro San Gil Protected Spring Reserve, whose 19 rivers supply more than 50,000 people in surrounding communities with water, is also found in the province of Izabal.

But deforestation is a major problem in the province, and is hurting the livelihoods of local communities.

According to the most recent data, from the 2011 National Survey on Living Conditions, 54 percent of Guatemala’s 15 million people are poor, and 13 percent are extremely poor, mainly in rural indigenous areas.

“The loss of these resources is irreparable for the country in terms of production, because these forests offer environmental goods and services, such as water, that are vital to the population,” activist Walter Chávez with the Foundation for Ecodevelopment and Conservation, a local NGO, told IPS.

The widespread, uncontrolled felling of trees also aggravates the threat to local populations posed by extreme weather events.

“The forest provides protection for the riverbanks in the face of catastrophic climate events,” he said. “Our country is at high risk of the effects of climate change, and the deforestation is increasing our vulnerability and destroying one of our most important barriers.”

Chávez said the deforestation affecting Izabal and threatening the province’s nature reserves was caused mainly by cattle ranching and “the profits it represents.”

“People think a forested area has no real value. That is sheer ignorance, but it is one of the idiosyncracies of the people who live in the area,” the environmentalist said.

He said there were mechanisms for protecting forests, such as the government’s Forest Incentives Programme, which fosters reforestation by means of economic compensation. But he pointed out that the programme “is voluntary.”

Chávez said the state presence in the protected areas “is very limited, and there is no specific prosecutor’s office to follow up on reports of destruction of our forests.”

Meanwhile, the agricultural frontier continues to expand.

“The only thing you see back there are cattle ranches,” the owner of a small local hotel, Carlos Bartolomé, told IPS. “I have no idea if there are any controls, or how things are managed. I suppose they cut down trees to plant pasture for their livestock.”

“Deforestation causes many problems like landslides and migration of birds,” he added, stressing that “it is nature that draws tourists to this place.”

Punta de Manabique, declared a wetland of international importance by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, is one of the places facing the most severe threats from deforestation.

Gerónimo Pérez, an agronomist at the Rafael Landívar University’s Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment, told IPS that “This area offers protection for coral reefs in the Caribbean, is home to innumerable species of animals and plants, and provides environmental services, like water for local communities.”

But it is being destroyed. “Even though it is protected, deforestation is advancing quickly throughout Punta de Manabique because of the expansion of cattle farms,” he said.

Guatemala’s law on national protected areas states that the conservation and management of wildlife is “fundamental for achieving sustained social and economic development in the country.”

It also orders the protection of these areas by demarcating them, creating categories of management, and establishing controls over the exploitation of resources within their boundaries. But enforcing the law has proved difficult.

As the mining industry booms in Guatemala, local communities are increasingly opposed to the operations of the mainly foreign companies because of the potential negative effects on the environment and on their villages.

But the firms themselves say the opposition is limited to small groups who are misinformed and manipulated by outsiders.

The latest episode in the increasingly violent disputes occurred on Nov. 19, when local residents of Mataquescuintla, a town in the southeastern department or province of Jalapa, set fire to five vehicles belonging to the Minera San Rafael, a subsidiary of Canada’s Tahoe Resources Inc.

Since 2008, the company has run the El Escobal mine in San Rafael Las Flores, in the southeastern province of Santa Rosa, which borders Jalapa. For 25 years, starting in 2014, the mine will produce silver, lead, zinc and gold.

“The worry is that the mine will pollute the Los Esclavos river, which runs through the department of Santa Rosa, the Ayarza lake, and the underground aquifers,” Moisés Divas, the representative of the Diocesan Council for the Defence of Nature, told IPS.

Minera San Rafael plans to invest 325 million dollars in the mine, which is to create 800 jobs. But local residents overwhelmingly expressed opposition to the mine in four local referendums held in its area of influence.

“In 2011, the first three votes were held in the municipalities of Nueva Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa de Lima and Casillas, in accordance with what is established by the municipal code, and this year another was held in Mataquescuintla, and 99 percent of the people voted against it,” Divas said.

The company has forged ahead nonetheless, drilling enormous tunnels and challenging the results of the referendums in court. “That has upset people, who see it as going against the will of the people,” the activist said.

Canadian companies are predominant in the industry, whose total earnings soared from 8.6 million dollars in 2005 to 935 million dollars in 2011.

But the state only took in 9.2 million dollars in royalties and taxes from the mining industry last year, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

That represents a mere two percent of GDP, partly because the royalties are limited to one percent of gross sales, in accordance with the country’s mining law – an aspect that exacerbates the anger of local residents and activists.

But while the industry is growing year by year, so are the conflicts.

The El Tambor gold mine began to operate in 2011 between the towns of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo, 28 km northeast of Guatemala City.

“There is not one single mine anywhere in the world that has not been destructive for the local communities,” Antonio Reyes, who lives in San José del Golfo, told IPS. “And things are even worse because of Guatemala’s mining law, which authorises companies to use the water and the chemicals they need, without any controls whatsoever.”

Since Mar. 2, local residents have been blocking the entrance to the El Tambor mine, operated by Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates and Radius Gold Corp of Canada.

“Our resistance is not based on a whim; it is in response to the historical manipulation and utilisation of the people,” Reyes said.

Villagers in the area are asking for support for development alternatives to mining. “We are focusing on diversification in sustainable crops which, rather than degrading the soil, repair, preserve and protect it,” Reyes said. “We also believe in ecotourism projects.”

But instead of alternatives, what have come are attacks. Yolanda Oquelí, a leader of the resistance against the El Tambor mine, survived an attempt on her life on Jun. 13. Although the crime has not been solved, Reyes said it is clear that the attack was motivated by the activist’s fight against the mine.

Yuri Melini, director of the non-governmental Legal, Environmental and Social Centre of Guatemala, told IPS that “we have had a series of governments spellbound” by the mining industry, “but all they have done is foment negative social and environmental impacts.”

Since 2005, 1.25 million people in this impoverished Central American country of 15 million have voted against mines in 65 local referendums held around the country – all of which were ignored, he said.

“This is a time bomb, and the government refuses to understand that the opposition of local communities is based on the knowledge of the severe damage caused by mines, especially to the surface and groundwater,” José Cruz, an activist with the local NGO Madreselva, told IPS.

In May 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demanded that the Guatemalan government suspend operations at the Marlin gold mine, owned by Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of Canada’s Goldcorp Inc.

The IACHR ruling stated that the mine was polluting rivers and the water supplies of 18 indigenous communities in the western province of San Marcos.

But Marlin is still operating.

A study titled “The economic dimension of mining activity (the case of the Marlin mine)”, conducted by the public University of San Carlos, questions the economic benefits of the industry.

“In 2009, Guatemala sold each troy ounce of gold to Goldcorp Inc. at Q550.25, equivalent to 69 dollars, and the company received Q8,064 per troy ounce of gold, or 1,008 dollars…The mine keeps the earnings while the poverty of the local population” and the social and environmental conflicts are growing, the study says.

Magaly Arrecis, a researcher at the University of San Carlos institute that carried out the study, told IPS that the mining law should be reformed to “increase the compensation for communities around the mines and to address environmental issues.”

But the mining companies see things in a very different light.

“The mining industry is probably the most highly regulated in the world in the areas of the environment and workplace safety,” Regina Rivera, a representative of the Gremial de Industrias Extractivas, the industrial association that represents the mining companies, told IPS.

“And all international companies are governed by the strictest environmental and worker safety standards,” she added.

Rivera said she did not believe there was “fierce” community opposition to the mines. “What there is,” she argued, “is a great deal of misinformation and many interests that have managed to manipulate small vulnerable groups, to turn them against the industry.

“In most cases, the conflicts are brought to the communities from areas or communities completely outside of the companies’ areas of influence,” she said.

“The companies generally have good relations with the communities where they operate and with their real leaders, always making an effort to keep up a positive dialogue pointed in the direction of the development of the communities,” Rivera added.

“I was surprised at how hard it was to learn more English. I had looked for work in a bank, but I would have earned only half what I make here, and I’d have had to work more hours,” said Carlos de León from his cubicle in a call centre, part of a rapidly growing industry in Guatemala.

De León, a 20-year-old university student, works for one of these call centres, which already employ between 16,000 and 18,000 people in this Central American country and are driving technology development, according to the Guatemalan Exporters Association (AGEXPORT).

Guatemala has 75 call centres, although only 15 of them are involved in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). They employ 10,000 young people who are bilingual in English and Spanish, and another 6,000 to 8,000 who speak only Spanish, according to AGEXPORT.

Germán López, of AGEXPORT’s call centre and BPO commission, told IPS that the industry injects some eight million dollars per month into the economy in the form of wages, which vary from 562 to 625 dollars a month on average.

Call centres are a booming activity in Guatemala. Credit: vlima.com/CC BY 2.0

“This goes towards paying for social security, value added tax, supermarket bills, housing, entertainment. And for each of these jobs, four more are created indirectly,” he said.

According to AGEXPORT, call centre revenues amounted to 194.9 million dollars in 2011, 46 percent more than in 2010, while this year a 24 percent increase, to 242 million dollars, is expected.

López said the call centre industry has expanded in Guatemala since 2003, when it began to cater to the U.S. market.

“Our proximity, the competitive prices we can offer the United States, and the compatible time zone are features that make Guatemala an attractive country to the U.S. market,” he said.

Call centres and other forms of BPO in Guatemala offer technical support and problem-solving in different areas, mainly telecommunications, electricity, banking and finance.

The buoyant growth of this industry here, which has attracted capital from India, Canada and the United States, where the largest centres are to be found, is also stimulating the growth of software technologies, web applications and digital development.

“Industries request ever increasing services. As a company, for instance, we have an agreement with another software development firm by which, if they have a client that wants programme development and a contact centre (which manage all client contact through different mediums such as telephone, fax, letter and e-mail), we can offer that,” said López, a manager at the Allied Global call centre.

Furthermore, “as an exporters association, AGEXPORT is looking into the possibility of positioning the country as a provider of technology covering contact centres, software and digital services,” he said.

This impoverished country of 15 million people has made strides towards closing the digital gap. Since 2010, for example, a Technological Campus has operated in the capital city, designed as “a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness.”

The area, where 100 companies in the information technology sector operate, specialises mainly in the production of special effects for films, video games, and software for mobile phones and the internet.

This year a Guatemalan company, Surtidora de Alta Tecnología, created the CybeTech Pad CT8003, Guatemala’s first tablet computer, assembled in China, to compete with global brands.

Meanwhile, a South Korean company, Sollen-Guatemala, is about to commence operations here to make touch screens for iPad and iPhone with a view to distributing them throughout the Americas.

So call centres are just a part of the range of opportunities for technological development and bolstering competitiveness in Guatemala.

José Calderón, of the Language Learning Centre at the public San Carlos University of Guatemala, told IPS they were working on a project with AGEXPORT, the economy ministry, and other universities, to encourage young people to study English.

“The idea is for young people to learn English from the time they enter university, so that within five years we will have between 40,000 and 50,000 young people who know the language,” he said.

As part of this effort, San Carlos University will have to make provisions for its over 150,000 students to study English. “This will allow them to work in a call centre, and to pay for their studies,” Calderón said.

“The call centres are encouraging young people to learn English or perfect it, because they may know the language, but not at the level required for this type of work,” Patricia Mendizábal of the Instituto Guatemalteco Americano, which offers private English courses, told IPS.

The future of the call centre industry looks rosy.

Roberto Mancilla of the mixed agency Invest Guatemala told IPS that this country, “because of its geographical location, similar time zone to the United States, and teaching of English with American pronunciation, has made a substantial leap forward towards competitiveness in this kind of outsourcing.”

However, he admitted that proficiency in English continues to be a challenge.

Elderly Kiché Maya people of Guatemala await the start of the new era. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

The Maya Indians of Central America and Mexico will have little to celebrate when the current era comes to an end on Dec. 21. The extreme poverty and marginalisation they face contrast sharply with the plans for lavish celebrations to lure tourists.

According to the ancient Maya calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 will mark the end of a grand cycle of 13 144,000-day “baktuns”, lasting 5,126 years.

“It’s offensive, it’s an insult, and it is contradictory for indigenous people to continue to be steeped in poverty while public funds are squandered on celebrating,” activist Ricardo Cajas, of the non-governmental Guatemalan Council of Maya Organisations (COMG), told IPS.

“There is nothing to celebrate,” he said. “This is an event involving traditional wisdom, which allows us to make an analysis of the ‘internal colonialism’ we see in Guatemala, where a dominant class keeps indigenous people in a state of subsistence and extreme poverty.”

In Guatemala, indigenous people make up close to 40 percent of the population of 15 million according to official statistics, although native organisations put the figure at over 60 percent.

But Guatemala has never had an indigenous president, and only 19 of the 158 members of the single-chamber Congress are Indians. And the only member of the cabinet who identifies himself as native is the minister of culture and sports, Carlos Batzín.

Governments in “Mesoamerica” – a cultural area extending from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, where advanced civilisations like the Maya flourished before Spain’s colonisation of the Americas – are planning major celebrations of the end of the Maya long-count calendar.

This vast impoverished area is highly vulnerable to earthquakes, like the 7.4-magnitude quake that struck Guatemala’s Pacific coast Wednesday, leaving at least 52 people dead and 22 missing.

The hype and promotion surrounding the end of the current era has led to a surge in global interest in the ancient Maya civilisation and to an explosion of tourism to Maya historical and cultural sites in Mesoamerica.

According to historians, the 13th baktun began on Aug. 11, 3114 BC and ends Dec. 21, 2012, and a new era begins the following day.

The end of the current baktun has also given rise to predictions of catastrophes and even prophecies about the end of the world, which have been debunked by indigenous leaders.

Doomsday tourism

In Guatemala, for example, tourism industry authorities report that 15 official ceremonies will be held, including a major multimedia presentation on the legacy of the ancient Maya on Dec. 20 at Tikal, Guatemala’s most famous Maya archaeological site, in the northern province of Petén.

The preparations for the ceremonies have cost the Ministry of Culture and the Guatemalan Tourism Institute some 8.5 million dollars, according to the non-governmental Indigenous Observatory.

Thanks to government promotional campaigns, Guatemala, Honduras, El
Salvador and Belize are expecting some five million visitors, and Mexico around 10 million in its southern states alone – an average of 10 percent more than last year, according to the Maya World Organisation, which groups the region’s tourism institutes.

But while state coffers will swell with the increased revenues, the authorities will continue to ignore the needs of indigenous people in their budgets, native leaders complain.

Cajas laid the blame on the free market-based “20th century neoliberal socioeconomic system” which “does not have ethics and morals, and tramples the rights of indigenous people,” including the right to land.

Around 80 percent of Guatemala’s farmland is in the hands of just five percent of farmers. But 61 percent of the population is rural and 80 percent of the mainly indigenous rural population is poor, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“In Central America, indigenous people have historically been among the poorest segments of the population,” Néstor Pérez, an activist with the Central American Indigenous Council (CICA), based in the capital of El Salvador, told IPS.

Paradoxically, “indigenous territories have great natural and mineral wealth, but in many cases economic interests are put above the collective rights of native people, in violation of the national and international laws that protect their rights,” he added.

Pérez lamented that the end of the 13th baktun was being used to draw in tourists, with a focus that displays indigenous people and their traditional practices “merely as folkloric shows.”

He said that what were needed were public policies aimed at improving the economic and social conditions of native people.

From splendour to dire poverty

Highly complex, advanced societies with enormous cultural, scientific and biological wealth, such as the Maya, Olmec and Aztec, flourished in Mesoamerica until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

Latin America is home to an estimated 400 native groups, representing around 50 million people. Ninety percent of Latin America’s native people live in the Andes highlands regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and in Mesoamerica.

Indigenous people continue to face severe marginalisation in the region, said Dalí Ángel, an activist with the Mexico City-based Alliance of Indigenous Women of Central America and Mexico.

The native people of Honduras are one illustration, said Timoteo López with the private Chortí Maya National Indigenous Council. “Our development is limited in part because power has only served to protect the interests of those who are governing,” he told IPS.

The Chortí Maya people of Honduras, where Indians represent seven percent of the population of 7.7 million, have made progress in the area of education, he said, but “at the cost of political activism that has even led to death threats and murders of leaders.”

Ángel, meanwhile, was especially concerned about the concessions that the Mexican government has granted to transnational corporations in indigenous territories without carrying out proper consultations with local communities affected by mining, oil industry, logging projects or hydropower dams, as required by the International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.

“The Mexican state has always granted concessions to industries, but lately foreign companies have been given greater facilities to operate here, by means of constitutional reforms,” the Zapoteca activist told IPS.

Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest indigenous population in absolute numbers, which is variously estimated to make up between 10 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who speak an indigenous language).

The country’s native inhabitants are largely concentrated in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, according to the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. In these two states and in the neighbouring state of Guerrero, one of every three people lives in absolute poverty, the Observatory of Social Policy and Human Rights (OPSDH) reports.

“They’re selling everything, even the air,” Ángel said. She complained that the country’s outgoing president, the conservative Felipe Calderón, recently inaugurated a wind power project in the Tehuantepec isthmus in southeast Mexico “where he used deceit to force local communities to sign contracts to yield part of their territory to Spanish companies.”

The activist also mentioned the case of Wirikuta, a 140,000-hectare territory in the Chihuahua desert in the central state of San Luis Potosí that is considered sacred by the Wixarika or Huichol people. According to the National Human Rights Commission, mining projects threaten the environment there.

Red marks the route that Nicaragua’s canal will take; green shows the Panama Canal. Credit: Jonadab CC BY-SA 3.0

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 1 2012 (IPS)

From satellites to inter-oceanic canals, the most innovative or ambitious investments in Central America are coming from China – even though six of the seven countries in this sub-region do not have diplomatic ties with the Asian giant.

But Central America is failing to convert China’s major expansion in trade and industry here into increased exports to that giant market.

“China’s interests have grown, and like any world power, what it has to sell is more than it wants to buy,” Jesús Garza told IPS. The cooperative he belongs to forms part of the Association of Non-Governmental Organisations of Honduras, which promotes sustainable business development.

In eastern Honduras, for example, the Chinese state-owned dam builder Sinohydro is building the Patuca III hydropower plant at a cost of 350 million dollars.

And Honduran President Porfirio Lobo met in September with executives of the China Development Bank to explore further investment in energy and communications.

But China’s presence is much more ambitious in Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega signed a memorandum of understanding in September with the recently created Hong Kong-based HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co to finance and build a canal linking the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean – a dream long cherished by Managua.

According to Nicaragua’s estimates, the canal will cost 30 billion dollars, and will take 10 years to build. HK Nicaragua, headed by Chinese telecom mogul Wang Jing who is chairman of the Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, is to build a waterway that will serve larger ships than the Panama Canal, as well as a “dry canal” railroad for freight.

It will also construct a deep-water port at Monkey Point, on the Caribbean, and upgrade Corinto, the country’s main Pacific Ocean port.

Managua is also negotiating with the China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) for the development and purchase of Nicasat-1, a 300-million-dollar third-generation satellite that will offer modern telecom, internet and digital TV services to Nicaragua and other countries in the sub-region as of 2016.

An agreement for that could be reached before the end of the year in Beijing between the Instituto Nicaragüense de Telecomunicaciones and the CGWIC, which has manufactured satellites for several countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

In El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala, China has invested in different industries, including solar energy, oil and telecoms, through companies such as Huawei, Suzhou Guoxin Group and the China National Petroleum Corporation.

Garza said that despite the positive economic effects of this investment flow, it was necessary to monitor “what conditions it takes place in – whether labour rights and environmental standards are respected, because that is the area where negative impacts could be seen.”

In Honduras, for example, the non-governmental Patuca Association denounced irregularities in the environmental permit granted to the Patuca III dam construction project by the Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment in 2011.

But Central America does not have competitive conditions to sell its products to China. The enormous difference in population size – 42 million people in this entire sub-region against 1.3 billion in China – is just the most obvious aspect.

Most of what Central America produces is in agriculture. “But it is not cost-effective for China to buy beans or fruit here because of the distances and costs involved,” given that volumes are relatively small, Garza pointed out.

Nor has Central America managed to establish a customs union, which would bring a single tariff and common trade, customs and sanitary regulations and laws, facilitating foreign trade and competitiveness, according to the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration (SIECA).

And although Central America’s sales to China have increased, the trade balance is still heavily skewed in favour of China.

Five of the sub-region’s seven countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua – sold 196 million dollars in goods to China in 2004. The total went up to 220 million dollars from January to May 2012, according to SIECA figures.

But imports from China by those five countries amounted to nearly 1.44 billion dollars in that same period.

“In the area of trade, China cannot be denied,” economist Paulo De León, with the Guatemala-based consultancy Central American Business Intelligence, told IPS.

But the benefits to the region “are not as obvious as the benefits seen by Chile, which is the world’s largest producer of copper, with China its biggest buyer.”

Because of the distance and cost of transport, it is not convenient for China to buy commodities from Central America because “the cost would be too high,” De León said.

In his view, the region should focus on the much closer U.S. market.

“We have to look more towards the United States,” he said. “We have a big market one and a half hours away by plane; we also have Mexico and Colombia, with which we have free trade agreements.”

On the other hand, China can benefit the region with investment, because of Central America’s “big needs for energy, for which Guatemala, for example, does not have the necessary capital,” he added.

Central America is also constrained because it has chosen diplomatic relations with Taiwan over mainland China.

But in Costa Rica, the only country in Central America that has official ties with Beijing, things don’t look much different.

In agribusiness, “we’re talking about coffee, sugar and one or two other agricultural products,” Gilbert Ramírez, a member of a farming cooperative, told IPS. In Costa Rica, the establishment of formal relations with China in 2007 “has not had a big impact on trade.”

Nor has the free trade agreement signed by San José and Beijing in 2010.

“We have talked to Chinese companies about selling coffee and sugar, and about microcredit or credit, to consolidate our business model through Costa Rica’s export promotion agency. But even though some time has passed, we haven’t reached an agreement on any specific project,” Ramírez said.

He also said the U.S. market is still the most attractive because “it is closer, and it understands us better,” he said, referring to cultural barriers between Central America and China.

But Central America continues to seek trade opportunities in China.

Pedro Barnoya, a businessman with the China-Guatemala Chamber of Cooperation and Trade, told IPS that on Oct. 19 a trade office opened in Shanghai, China’s financial and commercial hub and the world’s largest cargo port, “to look for buyers for our products.”

He also said “we are working with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and with private institutions, to create a permanent committee for negotiations with this region.”

In addition, a Guatemalan delegation was at the sixth China-Latin America and Caribbean Business Summit, held Oct. 17-18 in Hangzhou, 180 kilometres from Shanghai in eastern China.

Barnoya said “the most important thing is to make headway in Asia, because that is where the purchasing power is.”

Poverty and malnutrition are serious problems in rural Guatemala. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 29 2012 (IPS)

“I heard about the Zero Hunger plan on television, but unfortunately it has not arrived here,” complained Elías Ruíz, a small farmer in the southern community of Santa Odilia, about the Guatemalan government’s flagship programme to end poverty.

“Projects to increase production would benefit us, because without them, we have no way to support ourselves. They could help us with maize seeds, plantains (starchy bananas for cooking) and fertilisers, and techniques to improve production,” said Ruíz.

Every rainy season, Ruíz and 307 other families in Santa Odilia, in the municipality of Nueva Concepción in the province of Escuintla, have to deal with the fury of the Coyolate river which bursts its banks and floods their houses and food crops.

“Our cattle die and our maize and plantain crops are all destroyed; we have to start over,” he told IPS.

Like Ruíz, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans suffering from food insecurity are still waiting for the Zero Hunger plan to reach them and their communities.

The programme was launched in February by right-wing President Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general, a month after he took office. But it has yet to become a reality for many of its potential beneficiaries.

“Too few resources are devoted to the fight against malnutrition, and there is a lack of coordination among the different institutions and public policy programmes,” said Jonathan Menkos, executive director of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), a local NGO.

By the end of September, according to a study by ICEFI, only 55 percent of this year’s budget for food security and nutritional programmes, integrated into the new macro plan, had been executed

In the case of another programme, the “1,000 Day Window” which supports mothers from pregnancy until their children are two years old, only 36 percent of the budget had been disbursed.

Menkos told IPS that one problem of the package of programmes is its insufficient budget. As an example, he said investment in food and nutritional security for 2012 is 668 million dollars.

“Neighbouring countries like Honduras and Nicaragua, with lower levels of malnutrition, have invested about twice the amount Guatemala has done in recent years,” he said.

Menkos said another problem with Zero Hunger is the lack of clarity with respect to its resources, because it groups together and updates existing programmes and establishes new ones. When he inaugurated it, Pérez Molina said the plan would require 260 million dollars more than the present budget for the areas covered.

The plan brings together a series of scattered initiatives into a united programme of action, but its management is still uncoordinated between the ministries and agencies responsible for its different components.

This country has the highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in Central America, and one of the highest in the world, at 49.3 percent of children under five, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

In Guatemala, 54 percent of the country’s 15 million people live in poverty, and 13 percent in extreme poverty, especially in the rural areas that are home to 54 percent of the population.

To deal with these situations, Pérez Molina launched Zero Hunger, which includes actions like the programme for mothers, promotion of business chains for small rural producers, financial support and production of fortified maize tortillas, the staple food.

Among the government’s goals is tending to over one million children suffering from chronic malnutrition and reducing their number by 10 percent by 2016, the end of this government’s term of office.

However, there are several problems still to be solved in order to reach this goal.

“There are major challenges regarding institutional integration and coordination, and there is also a need to evaluate what is being done,” said Menkos.

This last point is key, according to Iván Yerovi, the deputy representative of UNICEF in Guatemala.

“In my view, this is the great commitment the country must make. It would be ideal to have more resources, but it is even more ideal to monitor and know how those funds are being used,” he told IPS.

“Unless we analyse each one of the interventions that are being made, it will be too late when we reach the sixth or eighth year to carry out a survey of mother and child health to find out the results,” he said.

Yerovi agreed with Menkos in his concern over the lack of disbursement of the budget for combating hunger in the country.

“This late in the year, the figures are not showing adequate implementation of the funds. This is a lesson we have learned, and this should be corrected,” he said.

NGOs also criticise the plan’s methodology.

Alejandro Aguirre of the Guatemalan Coordination of NGOs and Cooperatives told IPS “the government’s current policy is based on clientelism and paternalism, which in fact maintains poverty.”

Aguirre was referring to “Bolsa Segura”, a programme for distribution of food provisions to low-income families initiated by the government of social democratic president Álvaro Colom (2008-2012) that was heavily criticised as being used for political ends.

“They’re giveaways for the population that don’t solve the fundamental problems of malnutrition and guaranteeing the right to food,” he said.

Instead, Aquirre favoured productive projects for growing basic grains, with technical assistance to strengthen the peasant economy.

“The resources devoted to fighting malnutrition are minimal. The Zero Hunger programme is not taking off, and we are seeing a fragmented strategy, without interconnection between the different ministries in charge of the plan,” he said.

Despite everything, in Menkos and Yerovi’s view it was positive that the plan had put the issue of hunger higher up on the government agenda, reinforcing the trend of recent years.

And in September, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, on behalf of his foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, recognised and honoured Pérez Molina’s efforts to reduce malnutrition through the Zero Hunger plan.

Gang members in a Salvadoran prison. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Walter García and Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 22 2012 (IPS)

El Salvador has managed to bring down one of the world’s highest murder rates thanks to a truce between gangs that was lauded by the United Nations as an example to be followed in other countries of Central America.

But experts question the sustainability of the truce and call instead for government policies focusing on prevention and social reinsertion.

“Efforts should focus on keeping young people from joining gangs,” said Armando Samayoa, with the Institute of Social Cooperation, a non-governmental organisation in Guatemala that offers non-formal education and provides recreational spaces for youngsters, to help prevent them from falling into gangs.

The activist told IPS that once young people had joined the gangs – known as “maras” in Central America – and were involved in criminal activities, it was a much more complex task to rehabilitate them, one which required a major investment in funds.

“If we look at public spending on the security forces compared to what goes towards prevention programmes, there is a vast difference,” he said.

The truce

The truce between the Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs in El Salvador brought immediate results: the number of homicides in that country of 6.3 million people dropped from 13.6 a day in February to 8.2 in March, when it went into effect, according to a United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report released in September.

The study, “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean: A Threat Assessment”, reports that the murder rate in El Salvador stood at 69 per 100,000 citizens in 2011, six percent up from 2010.

The homicide rate is also high in the other two countries of the so-called “northern triangle” of Central America: 91 per 100,000 in Honduras and 39 per 100,000 in Guatemala in 2011.

The situation is different in the rest of the sub-region, where the maras are not active, with the exception of isolated incidents, according to the local authorities. In Panama, the homicide rate is 22 per 100,000; in Nicaragua, 13 per 100,000, and in Costa Rica 10 per 100,000.

According to the UNODC, Honduras and El Salvador have the highest murder rates in the world.

The UNODC believes the truce in El Salvador could serve as a model for other Central American countries to follow, as a mechanism to fight crime.

Prevention first and foremost

But Samayoa emphasises that programmes of non-formal education such as the ones offered by his NGO, which include courses in English, carpentry, baking and cooking skills, computer training, sports, and running a small business, help prevent youngsters from falling into the hands of gangs in the first place, while a truce can break down at any moment.

“I remember a case in Villa Nueva, on the south side of the capital, where the gangs reached an agreement,” he said. “But the next day, they came to our organisation to say that they had to feed their families,” which meant that they had to continue committing crimes, he added.

Alma Aguilar, with the Guatemalan organisation Paz Joven (Young Peace), also said public policies in the region should be aimed at preventing youngsters from joining gangs, as well as at fighting crime.

“It is a multifactorial problem, and thus should be approached from many angles,” she told IPS. “As young people, we believe that the important issue is to prevent youths from becoming involved in illegal activities.”

She said governments should guarantee, “at the very least,” education up to the first years of secondary school, and should make an effort to ensure that young people have employment opportunities, “which unfortunately is not happening.”

Aguilar said the Salvadoran truce “is a successful experience to be taken as a case study,” although “the government should guarantee peace and order in conflict-stricken areas with the full weight of the law coming down on those involved in crime.”

The maras originated in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities where Central American migrants and refugees became gang members and were later deported to their countries of origin. Thousands of young people in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are now involved in maras, which have morphed from violent youth gangs to organised crime groups.

On Oct. 11, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was adding the Mara Salvatrucha to its list of the most dangerous Transnational Criminal Organisations “for its involvement in serious transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, human smuggling, sex trafficking, murder, assassinations, racketeering, blackmail, extortion, and immigration offences.”

Under U.S. law, this gives the Treasury the authority to target the gang with economic sanctions

The governments of El Salvador and Honduras have unsuccessfully tried to curb the growing power of the maras with tough anti-gang laws, which make it possible, for example, to arrest youngsters merely on suspicion of belonging to gangs.

The controversial truce reached in March by the main gangs in El Salvador was agreed without the participation of the government of moderate left-wing President Mauricio Funes, although the administration was widely assumed to have played an unspecified role as a facilitator.

The government is now taking early steps towards possible negotiations with the two gangs, to get them to put a definitive end to their criminal activities.

“The truce has produced good results in terms of reducing homicidal violence, but that’s all,” lawyer Ismelda Villacorta, with the Foundation for the Study and Application of Law (FESPAD) in El Salvador, told IPS.

The expert hesitated to say she was “absolutely optimistic about its results,” since other kinds of crime “are still as serious and worrisome as they were before the truce, or even worse in some areas.

“This entire situation shows that the reduction in homicides brought about by the truce is balanced on a weak platform that could collapse at any moment, and things could return to the way they were – or the number of homicides could soar even higher,” she said.

She suggested that the starting point to make the truce and the reduction in violent crime a lasting phenomenon should be to promote a programme of prevention at all levels, including the reinsertion and rehabilitation of gang members.

Isabel Aguilar, a human rights defender with the Guatemalan organisation Interpeace, told IPS that “the truce will be sustainable if it helps usher in a broader dialogue in which all segments of society would be involved and would contribute, with determination and commitment.

“The important aspect is that the truce makes possible, or generates the openness necessary for, prevention and reinsertion activities to be carried out in more fluid, sustainable ways, on more fertile ground,” added Aguilar, the coordinator of the multisectorial Central American programme of public policies to prevent youth violence.

In that sense, she was more optimistic, saying the truce “is an example to be followed, especially because it is demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing the high rates of violence.” She said, however, that it would have to be adapted to the situation of the different countries in the region.

But for now, the right-wing presidents of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, have ruled out the possibility of promoting agreements of this kind between gangs in their countries, or seeking any kind of negotiations between their governments and the maras.

The deaths of eight indigenous demonstrators taking part in a protest against the Guatemalan government in the southwestern province of Totonicapán have provoked outrage within the country and abroad. The protesters accuse the army of shooting into the crowd.

“Now more than ever we are sure that it was them (the military) who opened fire. We were not armed,” Carmen Tacam, president of the indigenous organisation that led the Thursday Oct. 4 protest, told IPS.

That day, some 3,000 native demonstrators blocked the Pan-American Highway, which runs to the Mexican border, to protest reforms that expanded the study programme for becoming a schoolteacher from three to five years, and increased rates for electricity “which some people are billed for without even receiving the service,” as one protester said.

The protesters were also demonstrating against several constitutional reforms promoted by the government of retired general Otto Pérez Molina.

The army was called in, and according to the protesters the troops opened fire, leaving eight dead and 40 injured.

“Our demands still stand, but now we have two more: reparations for the victims’ families and the clarification of who was materially and intellectually responsible for the deaths of our compañeros,” Tacam said.

Right-wing President Pérez Molina claimed that several soldiers fired shots “into the air” and, backed up by the ministers of the interior and defence, accused a private security agent of shooting at the demonstrators.

On Friday Oct. 5, seven soldiers put at the disposal of the legal system said they had fired their guns in the air.

But on Monday, after meeting with foreign diplomats to explain what happened in Totonicapán, the president said he would respect the result of the investigation by the public prosecutor’s office and urged the protesters to engage in dialogue and not to hold further demonstrations.

The tragedy revived memories of the 1960-1996 armed conflict between government forces and left-wing guerrillas, which left 250,000 people dead or disappeared, most of them rural indigenous villagers, with the army being responsible for 93 percent of the human rights crimes according to the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH).

“Unfortunately we are regressing to the days of the armed conflict, but it is not our intention to take a confrontational attitude. There will be no mobilisation on our part, because we respect the mourning and pain of the families,” Tacam said.

Award-winning human rights activist Helen Mack, the founder and president of the Myrna Mack Foundation, said the incident should serve as a wake-up call to the authorities.

“The army should never be involved in actions of law and order,” Mack told IPS. “Their doctrine is to kill, and what was happening there did not call for any killing.”

Calls for an investigation into the incident also came from abroad.

On Monday Oct. 8, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion, Frank La Rue, said the use of the military to resolve social conflicts was a “grave mistake.”

And the secretary general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza, said it was “urgently necessary” to clarify what happened, as an “indispensable step towards calming tempers and paving the way to dialogue.”

The incident in Totonicapán forms part of a pattern of abuses by the security forces against civil society in this impoverished Central American country, where a majority of the population is indigenous.

Activist Jorge Santos, director of the International Centre for Human Rights Research (CIIDH), cited the 2004 murders of 12 peasants on the Nueva Linda estate in the southwestern province of Retalhuleu.

He also mentioned evictions of peasant farmers from estates in Polochic Valley, in the northwestern province of Alta Verapaz, in which three people were killed and 18 injured in 2011.

In both cases, the security forces were involved, and “today we see them once again involved in violence…But now…with the army being used to crack down on social conflicts,” Santos said.

In his opinion, the events of Oct. 4 were an example of what he called “the racist thinking” of police and government officials.

Santos said the offices of the public prosecutor and the human rights prosecutor should carry out exhaustive investigations, and the government should “demilitarise” the bodies in charge of citizen security.

Native activist Rosalina Tuyuc said she holds Pérez Molina responsible, “because the army acts under the president’s orders.”

“When this has been cleared up, we will be able to say there is confidence in the justice system. But if that doesn’t happen, this case will end up in impunity, like so many other cases,” she told IPS.

Tuyuc defended the use of roadblocks in protests as “the only way to make ourselves heard.”

Guatemala has a high level of social conflict and enormous inequalities between rich and poor.

The heavy concentration of land ownership is one of the main sources of conflict. Nearly 80 percent of the country’s productive land is in the hands of just five percent of the population, according to the U.N. Development Programme.

“Our economic situation improved a great deal because we obtained more income for our families” as a result of setting up a social enterprise, Matilde García, who makes fashion jewellery in the municipality of Pastores, 60 km west of the capital of Guatemala, told IPS.

“Now we send our children to school in the urban area and we can pay for their transport and food,” said this proud mother of three, who gave up working as a domestic employee with a monthly wage of about 40 dollars to set up a small-scale factory of necklaces, bracelets and fashion accessories employing 25 women.

Social entrepreneurship and cooperatives are offering rural families the opportunity to generate income in Guatemala, where 54 percent of the country’s 15 million people live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, especially in areas where most of the population is indigenous, according to the state National Survey of Living Conditions of 2011.

García’s group is one of 15 firms made up of 350 people, mostly women, who operate in eight of Guatemala’s 22 departments or provinces, making fashion jewellery for the social enterprise Kiej De Los Bosques, which in the Maya Cakchiquel language means “deer of the woods.”

“This is changing entire communities,” said Ligia Chinchilla, head of the Saquil group to which the Kiej De Los Bosques enterprise and the non-governmental Comunidades de la Tierra (Communities of the Earth) belong.

Kiej De Los Bosques is a private company that markets the products manufactured by the women under the Wakami label, while Comunidades de la Tierra develops their capacities and “incubates” them into formal businesses within two years.

“This country’s problems, such as poverty, are very complex, and it is everyone’s job to solve them. That’s why we created this with the goal of increasing incomes in rural areas,” said Chinchilla, one of the three founders of the social enterprise.

Chinchilla placed social entrepreneurship “a step ahead of social business responsibility.”

“Social responsibility is: ‘I do business and I see myself internally as being responsible,’ while the focus in social entrepreneurship is ‘I do business and I also take responsibility for those on the outside,’ ” she told IPS.

Wakami products, made by Guatemalan artisans, are currently exported to 17 countries, including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Participation by these rural groups in productive activities has opened up development opportunities in terms of health, basic services and other benefits that have helped them to improve their quality of life.

Rony Mejía of Counterpart International, a non-profit international development organisation, told IPS they are working in partnership with Saquil on the incubation of five groups of artisans made up of women and young people in the northwestern province of Totonicapán.

But the support for these groups goes further. “Once they began to generate income, opportunities had to be sought for wise investment and, since the prime need is to improve health and nutrition, partnerships were sought with social businesses making water purification filters, solar energy and better ovens,” he said.

“At the end of the day, social businesses tend to combine to some extent the interests of government, NGOs and the private sector, with the difference that they do not depend 100 percent on aid, but on a business model” with social benefits, he said.

Social entrepreneurship is not the only window on development available to the country’s most vulnerable communities; another one is cooperatives, another kind of productive organisation that is on the rise.

This is due to the fact that cooperativism “offers property, participation and human development, especially in the rural areas, as a business with a social vision,” Rodolfo Orozco, executive director of the Guatemalan Confederation of Cooperative Associations, told IPS.

Twenty years ago there were only 160,000 cooperativists who produced mainly basic crops like maize and beans, while now there are 1.3 million, producing a long list of agricultural products as well as participating in other sectors like housing, finances and health, Orozco said.

According to his estimates, cooperatives account for at least 22 percent of the country’s GDP, showing “its importance for the national economy.”

Cooperatives have grown so much that they are now the major shareholder in the Rural Development Bank, the third largest in the country by asset holdings. “We own 80 percent of the shares. This is rural development with a social vision,” Orozco said.

The 2012 International Labour Organisation report “Visión panorámica del sector cooperativo en Guatemala” (Overview of the cooperative sector in Guatemala) leaves no room for doubt about the importance of cooperativism for social development.
“Ethics and a concern for people have guided cooperatives throughout their more than 110 years of existence, contributing to building more just societies that have a higher respect for human values and human rights,” the report says.

These historical precepts upheld by mutual aid organisations are the focus of the International Summit of Cooperatives being held Monday Oct. 8 to Friday Oct. 12 in Quebec, Canada.

As part of this year’s International Year of Cooperatives, the meeting poses the premise that this kind of collective action is capable of promoting a transition towards a more socially responsible economy.

One of the victims testifying before the judge, with the support of a psychologist and a translator. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

“In the garrison they had rooms where they would rape us; sometimes there were three, four or five soldiers,” Rosa Pérez*, one of the women used by the Guatemalan army as a sex slave during this country’s civil war, testified in court.

With her face covered, and with the support of a psychologist and a translator, a crying Pérez told a court hearing this week that members of the army kidnapped her husband and turned her into a sex slave and servant in the Sepur Zarco military garrison in the municipality of El Estor in the northeastern province of Izabal.

She and 14 other Q’eqchi Maya Indian women who were subjected to sexual and labour slavery between 1982 and 1986 testified at a preliminary hearing held this week in a court in the Guatemalan capital.

Charges have been brought against 37 members of the military in the case.

“Go to the garrison, the soldiers need someone to wash their clothes, cook their beans, and make them coffee,” Peréz said she and the other women were told by military commissioner Miguel Ángel Caal.

She said they did not imagine the appalling treatment and abuse that they would suffer for so many months in the military garrison.

“They told me that if I didn’t let them, they would kill me, and they put a gun to my chest” while she was raped by different soldiers after washing their clothes and cooking and serving their meals from six in the morning, she added.

“Once I gathered my courage and went to complain to the lieutenant, and he told me that maybe I had got them used to doing that,” said Pérez, who miscarried as a result of the constant sexual abuse.

She also said that before she was taken to the garrison, the soldiers had kidnapped her husband, the father of her three children. She knew nothing about his fate until his remains were found decades later.

Some 200,000 people – mainly Maya Indians in the country’s highlands – were killed and 45,000 were forcibly disappeared in Guatemala’s 1960-1996 armed conflict. The bodies were buried in secret mass graves, unmarked graves in cemeteries, or on the grounds of military installations, according to the Historical Clarification Commission.

In its 1999 report, that U.N.-sponsored truth commission found the army guilty of over 90 percent of the deaths, and reported that one out of four victims of the human rights abuses were women.

Hunger kills in the mountains

One of the most devastating testimonies was given by Juana Morales*, who told the hearing that she and her three children fled into the mountains in 1982 from San Marcos, a community on the border between Izabal and the neighbouring province of Alta Verapaz.

Morales said a group of soldiers came to her home, took away her husband – she still doesn’t know what happened to him – and then raped her.

“They put a gun to my chest and raped me. Three of them did it, the rest just watched. One of my kids, who was four years old at the time, was with me, and screamed when he saw what they were doing to me,” she said.

To save her own and her children’s lives, the Q’eqchi woman went into hiding in the nearby mountains. “We had nothing to eat, we had no tortillas, and my kids started to get sick,” she said.

“My daughter told me we should go back home, saying ‘there are chicken eggs on the table there’,” Morales said between sobs. One by one, her three children starved to death in the mountains.

After living in hiding in the forest for six years, she returned to San Marcos one day, but her home and her belongings were no longer there. “I had two houses, but they had burnt them down. I had nothing left.”

Lucía Morán, with Women Transforming the World, a local non-governmental organisation, told IPS that with this case, “Guatemala is setting a historic legal precedent for humanity, because a national court has never heard cases of rape and sexual slavery.

“Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, and it wasn’t until the 1990s, in the international tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that justice began to be done in these cases,” she said.

The activist pointed out that between 1982 and 1988 there were no armed clashes between the army and the guerrillas in the so-called Franja Transversal del Norte (northern transversal strip), where these communities were situated. But the army set up the garrison in Sepur Zarco to protect the economic interests of large landowners and the mining and oil industries.

In a 1982-1983 scorched-earth campaign, at least 440 villages were razed to the ground, and the inhabitants killed.

“That’s when they started making lists, to track down peasant leaders who were fighting for legal title to their land,” she said, adding that the husbands of the 15 women who testified at this week’s hearing were all rural activists, and were all forcibly disappeared.

Another of the victims described how she was raped and forced to work as a servant in
Sepur Zarco.

“I was sexually abused by five soldiers every day. I was there for six months, every other day,” said Marta López*, who had to leave her eight children home alone while she worked at the garrison from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

But before that, soldiers had come for her husband. “In 1982, the military came to our house and took him away, killed him, and dumped him in a pit,” she said.

The army’s version of events

As the women testified, former army reserves sergeant Ricardo Méndez Ruiz admitted that “the army committed abuses during the conflict,” but said “the guerrillas did too.”

He argued that “justice should be the same for everyone.”

In 2011, Méndez Ruiz, a businessman, brought legal action against 26 people for his 1982 kidnapping by left-wing guerrilla groups. Today he is a spokesman for the defence of the military personnel accused of civil war-era human rights violations.

“It is clear that the witnesses that the Public Ministry (office of the public prosecutor) is providing and the plaintiffs are people with very low levels of education. They don’t even have any idea of exact dates, which makes you think they may have been manipulated,” he told IPS, referring to the women who testified.

Méndez Ruiz has repeatedly claimed that the work of the prosecutor’s office is “biased” and is being used “to wreak vengeance on the army.”

And in this case, he said, the interest is also “for money.”

“On other opportunities, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has condemned the Guatemalan state to pay millions in reparations, which I’m sure go into the pockets of the plaintiffs,” he said.

* The names of the victims have been changed for security reasons.

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 25 2012 (IPS)

Since Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey became attorney general in Guatemala in 2010, a string of crimes involving military personnel who fought leftwing guerrillas, drug traffickers and organised crime have been cleared up.

The mild manner of this 46-year-old doctor in criminal law and human rights contrasts with her determination in carrying out her difficult task, to the extent that in August the U.S. magazine Forbes named her as one of “the most powerful women changing the world in politics and public policy.”

In March, Newsweek, another U.S. magazine, named her, among 12 Latin Americans, one of the 150 most fearless women in the world, and in 2011 she was given the International Crisis Group’s Stephen J. Solarz Award for her work “promoting peaceful, just and open societies in some of the world’s most conflict-affected regions.”

The murder of Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral is one of the high-profile crimes cleared up under Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

In this interview with IPS, Paz y Paz Bailey described how she has started restructuring the public prosecutor’s office, leading to the handing down of a large number of sentences. In this impoverished Central American country of 15 million people, 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished, according to the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

Q: Nearly two years after taking office, what do you think has been your greatest success?

A: Building a team to work together, in the attorney general’s office as well as in the different branches of the public prosecutor’s office. That team has allowed things to happen that were previously thought to be impossible, such as clearing up homicides, and pursuing drug traffickers, corruption and so on.

Q: What results do you value the most?

A: Emblematic cases have been solved on the basis of scientific evidence, for instance: the murder of Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral, the murders of mayoral candidates in San José Pinula, a municipality close to the capital city, and the fraud case involving the mayor of Antigua Guatemala.

Also, over 60 people belonging to Los Zetas (a violent Mexican drug trafficking group) have been sentenced, and extraditable drug traffickers have been arrested, among them many members of the Lorenzana family, as well as Horst Overdick and Juan Ortiz Chamalé.

The justice system had not produced these results in Guatemala before, but now this is happening, and it has also contributed to a 20 percent decline in violent deaths.

In 2009, the year with the highest murder rate, there were over 6,000 violent deaths, equivalent to 46 per 100,000 population, while in 2011 there were 39 per 100,000 population.

The murder rate fell by seven percentage points in that period and has continued to decline.

Q: How have you built your working team?

A: With two basic tools. One is knowledge from the outside of how the public prosecutor’s office works in different instances, such as investigations and diagnoses. And the other is a system of performance evaluation which allows us to assess each person’s work.

Q: Newsweek and Forbes magazines have recognised your work for its fearlessness and achievements. What does this mean to you?

A: The awards are very important because they support not only my action, but our joint action as an institution. One person alone could not do everything that has been done in these two years.

In reality, it is recognition of the work of a team of people. In fact, those who carry out searches or investigations and prosecute cases are a group of prosecutors, men and women.

And that international recognition is echoed in the voices of many Guatemalan citizens who are saying that the work of the public prosecutor’s office has improved. Even people filing charges tell me: I didn’t dare to bring an accusation before, but now I do.

Q: You have successfully prosecuted several military personnel for abuses committed during the 1960-1996 civil war. What outcome do you expect in the case of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), who is accused of genocide?

A: There are two cases in which genocide charges have been brought, one in Área Ixil, Quiché (a massacre of 371 indigenous people in the west of the country) and another in Dos Erres, Petén (a massacre of 201 people in the north), both of them perpetrated in 1982.

Ríos Montt is being prosecuted for both these cases. The defence lawyers have basically hindered the progress of the trials, rather than present arguments intended to show the innocence of the accused.

This strategy has blocked the Dos Erres case for nearly 10 years. A motion is made and if that doesn’t work, a constitutional appeal is lodged, and so forth.

The inter-American system of human rights has handed down rulings strongly condemning these practices, and there are also judges, both men and women, who refuse to play that game. I hope that now, in the 21st century, we can fulfil the constitutional promise of prompt and effective justice.

Both cases are extremely solid. We expect, of course, a conviction and sentencing.

Q: What would conviction of Ríos Montt mean for the Guatemalan justice system?

A: If there is a verdict of conviction in these cases, as in other instances of particularly violent crimes against life, gender violence or particularly costly crimes like corruption, it sends a signal to society that these things cannot be done, and if they are, there will be consequences in the context of the rule of law, in other words a conviction.

The rule of law is the same for all. It does not matter who the victim is or who the perpetrator, a crime must be punished. Perhaps the only consideration is the gravity of the crime, in making its investigation and punishment a priority.

And in this case, as in others, when we are talking about someone who was head of state, the message of equality before the law is strengthened.

Q: What is your assessment of CICIG’s work?

A: In terms of its work with the public prosecutor’s office, the most important aspect has been the transfer of capabilities in joint cases as well as the strengthening of the crime analysis unit, the financial analysis unit, the department of security and the office of witness protection.

As for the country, it has done away with the sense that the judicial branch was not up to solving certain types of case. CICIG has demonstrated that extremely complex cases can be cleared up with scientific evidence and within the context of the rule of law.

Q: How far will you be able to progress with the fight against impunity during your term of office?

A: The best and most important legacy we can leave is a strategic working method that on the one hand reduces impunity because crimes are cleared up and criminals are punished, while on the other it prevents further crimes being committed.

Excerpt:

A young boy works on the subsistence crops raised on his family’s parcel of land in Quiché, Guatemala. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY , Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

The Association Agreement between Central America and the European Union (EU) will increase environmental and social pressures on the region, warn experts and activists. But some observers stress its potentially positive impacts.

“We can expect an increase in the activities of extractive industries,” which bring about “negative environmental and social repercussions,” said Juventino Gálvez, the director of the Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment at Rafael Landívar University, a Jesuit university.

This is a delicate issue in several countries of the region. In Guatemala, for example, Montana Explotadora, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp, has been accused of contaminating rivers and affecting the water supply of 18 indigenous communities in the western department (province) of San Marcos, through its activities at the Marlin gold mine.

In May 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on the Guatemalan government to suspend the operation of the mine, but it continues to operate.

“National institutions are precarious, and there is a well-known tendency to disrespect legislation, which is vague and permissive to begin with,” Gálvez commented to Tierramérica*.

The entry into force of the Association Agreement, signed on Jun. 29 by the EU, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, depends on its ratification in the European Parliament and the legislatures of the six Central American countries.

The agreement establishes mutual commitments in three areas: political dialogue, cooperation and trade.

With regard to trade, it will eliminate tariffs on agricultural products (such as coffee, fruit, vegetables and meat), textiles and manufactured goods, while opening up markets to financial, telecommunication, transportation and other services, as well as government procurement.

As for cooperation, the agreement aims to promote technical assistance and exchange in the use of clean energies, mining, tourism, fishing, transportation, sustainable development and the environment.

The most significant section of the agreement with regard to the environment is found in this chapter, under Title V, which also addresses natural disasters and climate change – two key issues for the region.

In the area of political dialogue, one of the aims is to establish common ground in areas such as the rule of law, good governance, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rights of indigenous peoples, poverty reduction and migration, among others.

For Gálvez, when the “potential” expansion of monoculture plantations is added to the equation, the result will be greater conflict “due to competition between agroindustrial operations and rural communities for access to strategic resources.”

Oil palm plantations, which tripled in size between 2003 and 2010, have given rise to violent land disputes, especially in northern Guatemala, where hundreds of peasant farmers have been displaced and a number have been killed in clashes with the police.

Miguel Mira of the non-governmental Centre for Investment and Trade Research of El Salvador believes that “the only interest behind these agreements is to open up more markets to trade and investment for big transnational corporations, while labor and environmental issues are considered irrelevant.”

In Central America, with roughly 43 million inhabitants, half of the population is poor. And poverty is deeper in rural areas.

There is an obvious asymmetry with the EU, home to 500 million inhabitants and one of the wealthiest areas on the planet, which until now has represented barely 10 percent of Central America’s foreign trade.

In 2011, the EU sold 36 billion dollars in goods to Central America, and purchased the equivalent of 31.6 billion dollars, resulting in a trade surplus of 4.4 billion dollars for the EU, according to European Commission figures.

Central American sales are concentrated in telecommunications and office equipment (53.9 percent) and agricultural products (almost 35 percent in 2010). In the meantime, the main goods imported from the EU are machinery and transport equipment (48 percent) and chemicals (12 percent).

“The logic of the Association Agreement is that of free trade, and all other aspects of international relations are subject to this,” said activist Erik Van Mele of the international non-governmental organisation Oxfam Solidariteit.

Although the agreement addresses sustainable development and the environment, there is no guarantee of protection for Central America, one of the regions with the greatest wealth in biodiversity in the world.

Article 284 on trade and sustainable development “stipulates that these matters are excluded from the procedures established for the settlement of eventual conflicts,” Van Mele stressed.

Moreover, there are various interpretations of sustainable development, he said.

For example, the promotion of agrofuels as “green energy” to replace fossil fuels “could give rise to deforestation to allow for the planting of monocultures, or to hunger caused by an increase in the price of corn, a staple food in the region, due to its high demand for conversion into ethanol,” he warned.

An evaluation of the agreement requested by the European Commission in 2009 concluded that, in addition to its economic and trade benefits, it would generate greater pressure on land, coastal and maritime resources, with a specific warning on the potential increase in monocultures. It also recommended measures to minimise the impacts, to be adopted in the framework of cooperation.

Gustavo Hernández, the coordinator in Brussels of the non-governmental Latin American Association of Development Promotion Organisations, told Tierramérica that the sanctioning mechanisms for non-compliance stipulated “are not binding” and that there is “little participation by civil society, particularly the majority sectors of the population who will be the most affected” by the agreement.

As far as Luis Muñoz of the Guatemelan Centre for Cleaner Production is concerned, however, the experience of the free trade agreement with the United States, in force in Guatemala since 2006, demonstrates that agreements like these can generate positive demands.

“When the environment is linked to the economy, it is more advantageous for companies to invest time and resources in environmental aspects,” he explained.

Moreover, the transfer of technology and the drive for competitiveness also need to be considered, he added. “Before, the pressure to approve environmental laws was very low, but after the free trade agreement with the United States, regulations on wastewater were adopted,” he noted.

Muñoz recognises that all industries generate impacts, but believes that it is necessary to “seek a balance.”

“Without the profits from coffee, for example, how many people would be left without an income? And I’m not talking about the plantation owners,” he said.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

Indigenous village on the hillside above Lake Atitlán. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 3 2012 (IPS)

In a country as vulnerable to natural disasters as Guatemala, a “state of public calamity” is frequently declared – to the joy of contractors, which find a good opportunity to line their pockets.

Tourists visiting this mountainous Central American country for its natural, archaeological, and ethnic attractions are inevitably surprised to come across a brand-new mountain road destroyed every few kilometres by rockslides and mudslides, and rebuilt in short order.

The destruction is the result of landslides caused by heavy rains on the unstable, bare hillsides. The underlying cause, deforestation, is not addressed. Instead, the road is destroyed and rebuilt, over and over again.

That is because the construction of roads, as well as the distribution of food, form part of the “big disaster business,” activist Guido Calderón, with the non-governmental Civil Convergence for Risk Management in Guatemala (COCIGER), told IPS.

The decree of a state of public calamity allows the government to waive formal tendering processes in order to expedite the emergency procurement of goods and services in case of disasters caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, drought or famine.

But when governments decree “states of calamity, there is often emergency procurement of poor quality, over-priced food and medicine, and contracting of poorly-built bridges and roads,” Nineth Montegegro, a lawmaker with the centre-left Encuentro por Guatemala party, told IPS.

On Feb. 16, right-wing President Otto Pérez Molina, who had taken office a month earlier, declared a state of calamity in the hospital system, in order to increase the flow of funding to the system and solve the chronic shortages of medicine, equipment, and beds.

By June, the health ministry had spent 11 million dollars on direct purchases without public tenders or price comparisons, marred by serious irregularities, Montenegro’s party denounced.

One of the irregularities was the purchase of more than 149,000 vaccines from a pharmaceutical company for 3.2 million dollars, even though the cost was 68 percent higher than the vaccines offered by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), according to Montenegro.

The comptroller-general’s office reached the conclusion that there was no overpricing because the two offers contained different products. But it did rule that there was an “over-supply” of 22,000 doses, whose shelf-life expires in November, which means they will go to waste.

The minister of health himself, Jorge Villavicencio, has a dubious record. He was appointed minister on May 2, and was suspended 10 days later when it came to light that he had not obtained a “finiquito” – a legal requisite for holding a public position.

In his service record, Villavicencio has 22 notifications of administrative faults while he administered a public hospital, charges from the court of auditors for the irregular transfer of supplies, and two criminal complaints for manslaughter.

But in the space of one week, the office of the public prosecutor and the comptroller-general’s office dismissed all of the charges, and Villavicencio returned to his post.

Profiting from catastrophes was also seen in past administrations.

In February, the comptroller-general’s office filed a lawsuit for the misuse of some 7.7 million dollars by authorities in the ministry of agriculture and food of the government of social democratic president Álvaro Colom (2008-2012).

The funds were to go to the purchase of food aid for thousands of people in rural areas who had lost their homes and crops in 2010 to hurricane Agatha and the eruption of the Pacaya volcano in the south of the country.

The food was purchased, but it went instead to the government’s Bolsa Solidaria programme (today, Bolsa Segura), which distributes food aid to poor families, and was accused by activists and opposition leaders of being used as a patronage-based, corrupt system.

This impoverished Central American nation of 15 million people is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and climate disasters. Hurricanes Mitch (1998), Stan (2005) and Agatha claimed thousands of lives and caused severe damage to infrastructure and crops.

According to Montenegro, the Colom administration decreed a state of calamity 11 times, and granted more than 800 contracts without public tenders, for a total of more than 650 million dollars.

Over 90 percent of the contracts were granted in a “discretional” manner to rebuild roads and dredge rivers, according to the legislator, who exercises close oversight of public spending.

Colom has denied the accusations. But his own vice president, Rafael
Espada, admitted that declaring a state of calamity could be “a magnificent excuse for corruption.”

But “despite the denunciations, different administrations continue to favour the same companies that have been reported by the comptroller-general’s office, because they are the ones who are financing the campaigns of the political parties,” said Montenegro, who is second vice president of Congress.

The lack of transparency undermines the safety of the works that are contracted out.

On Aug. 15, the Beatriz de la Cueva bridge in the southern province of Santa Rosa collapsed due to poor construction, killing two workers and injuring six others. They were rebuilding the bridge, which had been knocked down by Agatha two years earlier.

The contract for the construction of the new bridge was awarded by the ministry of communications to a private company at a cost of nine million dollars.

“Infrastructure projects have been awarded to companies that probably have the economic, but not the technical, capacity. The construction firms do not have the right personnel to do the work, and in some cases, they don’t have professionals,” Julio Galicia, a member of the association of engineers, told IPS.

The companies sometimes even build poor-quality structures in order to win a new rebuilding contract when they collapse, “because it is an opportunity for a new business deal,” Galicia maintained.

He said the ministry of communications general office of roads has a manual on “general specifications for the construction of roads and bridges” which, if they were followed, “would keep errors to a minimum.”

Delfino Mendoza, with the general office of roads, claimed that “the majority of public institutions that carry out infrastructure projects use the manual,” although he admitted to IPS that the specifications are often ignored in the municipalities and in emergency contracts.

In order to uncover opaque contracts and companies that fund political campaigns, activist Hugo Higueros of the non-governmental Council of Development Institutions told IPS that better oversight is needed, as well as new electoral and party laws.

The suspension of the privatisation of a port company unleashed debate in Guatemala about the countless concessions granted to foreign companies in areas like oil, mining, railways and energy, where corporate interests are seen as prevailing over the common good.

“Instead of taking into account the benefits for the communities and the public as a whole, governments make decisions that are harmful to the interests of the state, to benefit transnational oil and mining companies and others,” Ramón Cadena, a lawyer with the International Commission of Jurists, told IPS.

To illustrate, he cited the case of the former executive secretary of the government’s National Council on Protected Areas, Sergio Veliz, who was sentenced on Jul. 31 to three years in prison for modifying the master plan for the Laguna del Tigre national park, a protected area of 334,000 hectares, to facilitate oil drilling.

The government of Álvaro Colom (2008-2012) also violated the country’s laws on hydrocarbons and protected areas when it decided in August 2010 to extend for 15 years the contract granted to the Anglo-French oil and gas company Perenco to operate in the park, which forms part of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the northern province of Petén.

“Rural communities are hit the hardest because they live near mining and oil projects that cause severe damage to the environment,” which compounds the poverty in which they live, said Cadena.

He also denounced that the government of President Otto Pérez Molina, in office since January, is stepping up the military presence in areas where corporations have invested, to protect the companies.

According to last year’s National Survey on Living conditions, 54 percent of Guatemala’s 15 million people are poor and 13 percent are destitute. Poverty is especially high in indigenous territories, which are often encroached on by mining and oil projects.

The debate on what real benefits are left to the country by concessions granted to foreign firms was sparked when the government temporarily suspended, on Aug. 10, a concession for leasing 350,000 square metres in a port on the country’s southern Pacific coast belonging to the Empresa Portuaria Quetzal, a state-run port company, to a Spanish firm, Terminales de Contenedores de Barcelona (TCB).

President Pérez Molina was forced to suspend the usufruct lease agreement with TCB in the face of accusations of corruption voiced by opposition politicians, trade unionists and businesspersons.

“The concession was granted in order for Guatemalans to have an opportunity to have a modern, efficient and competitive port,” said the president, a retired general, who is seeking the support of local mayors, trade unions and other sectors to ratify the contract.

The opposition right-wing Líder party, which filed three lawsuits against government officials in relation to the case, said that under the contract, the state would only take in four dollars for each container, compared to 400 dollars received by governments in other countries.

In 2011, the Empresa Portuaria Quetzal reported earnings of 11.6 million dollars.

Cadena said that, before granting a concession, the government should make sure that it will not be harmful to the public or the environment, and should determine precisely what benefits the state will receive.

Up to now, that has not been done.

José Pinzón with the Central General de Trabajadores, the country’s main trade union confederation, told IPS that services like telecoms, electrical power, and railways have been granted in concession to foreign companies, “which take in millions in earnings, leaving the country only crumbs.”

As an example, he cited the concession to the Palín-Escuintla freeway in the south of the country, awarded in 1998 to a Mexican firm, Marhnos. The concessionaire is allowed to increase the tolls every six months, and only has to pay one percent royalties.

“The concessions have never been granted in accordance with national interests,” he said.

Marhnos will have earned some 650 million dollars by 2023, when the contract expires, according to estimates by the local press.

In other commercial operations, the government of Álvaro Arzú (1996-2000) privatised the state-owned electricity, telecoms and railways companies – Empresa Eléctrica de Guatemala, GUATEL, and Empresa de Ferrocarriles – in operations lacking in transparency, which were rejected by broad segments of society.

Anthropologist Irma Alicia Velásquez told IPS that “the history of concessions in banana republics like ours is long: railways, postal services, ports, electricity and others; and the opinions of the local population have not been respected.

“The aim has been profits for investors, while the country has been left with very little,” said the academic, a member of the Quiche indigenous community.

One example, she said, is the Marlin gold and silver mine in the southwestern province of San Marcos, whose earnings climbed from 269 million dollars in 2010 to 607 million dollars in 2011, according to the company that holds the concession, Canada’s Goldcorp.

But Montana Exploradora, Goldcorp’s subsidiary in Guatemala, paid the state just 16 million dollars in royalties between 2005 and 2010, according to the company’s records. That is equivalent to a mere one percent – the proportion required by the company’s mining laws.

Velásquez said the biggest problem with these investments is that the human rights of local communities are violated.

In May 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered the Guatemalan government to suspend work at the Marlin mine, in compliance with its precautionary measures for 18 indigenous communities.

But Montana Exploradora, accused of polluting several rivers, continues to operate the mine.

“There needs to be careful consideration of what should and should not be granted in concession. There is an idea to privatise hospitals and basic services, which is dangerous for poor countries like ours, where minimum services are already inaccessible, and become completely out-of-reach when concessions are granted” to private companies, Velásquez said.

According to Luis Linares with the Association for Social Research and Studies (ASIES), an independent research centre and think tank in Guatemala, “there has not been a single concession granted in the history of this country in which the common interests of the citizens have prevailed.”

He also told IPS that all of the privatisations have been characterised by a lack of transparency.

The expert said legislation was needed to regulate concessions, to ensure that they served the common good.

Privatisation “is an instrument that could be used in certain cases, in which it is a good thing for the enterprise to be run by private owners. But it should be done through a public tendering process, to guarantee that the interested parties offer the best conditions for the country,” he argued.

The Centra Norte bus terminal under construction in Guatemala City. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 14 2012 (IPS)

“Service is definitely improving. Transmetro is good quality and Transurbano is using the prepaid system, which means they can’t charge you extra,” said Manolo Contreras, one of the thousands of users of the public transit system in the Guatemalan capital, which is under renovation.

The modernisation of the system, expansion of routes and construction of a second bus terminal are part of government and private initiatives to upgrade urban transport in Guatemala City.

“The construction of terminals is a really good thing, because it decongests traffic, generates employment, and makes things safer for passengers,” Lisseth Dávila said.

But both Contreras and Dávila, who spoke to IPS while waiting for the buses that they take to their jobs every day, say a complete renovation of the fleet is needed, as well as an increase in the number of buses, training for drivers, and improved security.

Between 2006 and May 2011, 1,201 people have been murdered on urban and suburban buses, according to the Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos – the office of the human rights ombudsperson. Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

The latest project for upgrading the urban and suburban bus service in the capital of this Central American country of 14 million people is the construction of the Centra Norte private bus terminal, which will have shops and restaurants, rest areas, a training centre, and clinics for drivers.

Some 70,000 people will switch buses every day at the terminal, which will consist of 60,000 square metres of construction on the north side of the city. The bus station is set to open on Nov. 15.

“This terminal will make things more comfortable, safer and cleaner for thousands of commuters,” Juan Pablo Paredes, an engineer who is one of the 60-million-dollar project’s supervisors, told IPS.

Paredes said construction of Centra Norte, by a Colombian company Conconcreto and a local firm, would keep 1,600 buses from entering the capital every day, which will cut down on traffic in the city. A similar terminal already operates in the south of Guatemala City.

The city government has also continued to expand the Transmetro system, which uses articulated and regular buses that run along exclusive bus lanes.

Municipal spokesman Carlos Sandoval told IPS that a new bus artery in the centre of the capital would begin operating on Sept. 15, bringing the total to three.

He said Transmetro, which began to function in 2007, is one example of how the mass transit system has been improving.

In a 2011 survey by the Prensa Libre newspaper, 62 percent of respondents described Transmetro’s service as “very good” – a higher approval rating than what was given to other municipal services like waste removal.

“Public transport has had many complications because of poor service, poor quality and lack of safety. But little by little, these problems have been addressed, with the incorporation of new options like Transmetro and Transurbano,” Sandoval said.

The Transurbano system began to function in July 2010, after the government and urban transport companies decided to renovate the bus fleet, beef up security, introduce electronic bus fare cards, install cameras, and place security guards on buses. They even created women-only buses, aimed at preventing sexual harassment, a widespread problem in the city.

The new service brought Guatemala City commuters hope of a safer and more comfortable transport system, although only 455 of the 3,150 buses that circulate daily in the capital have been replaced – in contrast with the much faster progress achieved by the Transmetro system and the bus terminals.

Transurbano spokesman Sergio Reyes declined to predict when the replacement of the entire fleet would be completed. “The vehicle manufacturer in Brazil has kept us on hold while attending to other priorities,” he said in a brief response to questions from IPS.

Transmetro was inspired by other rapid transit bus systems in Latin America, pioneered in the 1970s by Curitiba in southern Brazil. They have generally been successful, such as the Transmilenio system in Bogotá, Colombia. But there have also been relative failures, like Transantiago in the Chilean capital.

Bus rapid transit systems generally have dedicated lanes or bus-only right-of-ways, off-bus fare collection at stations – which become central elements of the system – and a control centre that schedules bus services and operations.

Other initiatives are also emerging in Guatemala. In July, the state-run railway company, Ferrocarriles de Guatemala (FEGUA), signed an agreement with Spain’s Ferrocarriles Españoles de Vía Estrecha (FEVE) to study the feasibility of an urban and suburban rail passenger system in the capital and several provinces.

“Service has generally improved in the city, principally because of the renewal of the Transurbano fleet, while Transmetro has been one of the best solutions,” activist Edgar Guerra, with the Urban Transport Users Association, told IPS.

With respect to Centra Norte, he said “it will be welcomed to the extent that it provides appropriate conditions of safety, hygiene and efficiency in bus transfers.”

Some 1.2 million people a day use urban transport in this city of four million people.

Although Guerra acknowledged that progress had been made, he said he was concerned that only four companies dominated service in the Transurbano system, “which is generating an illegal monopoly; if the project continues this way, it will be a failure,” he said.

Eduardo Velásquez with the Centre of Urban and Regional Studies at the public University of San Carlos agreed that things have improved, especially in the Transmetro system.

Other projects like Centra Norte and the installation of an urban and suburban rail system “were planned many years ago with support from the Multisectoral Urban Transport Commission,” made up of authorities, public transport companies, academics and commuters to propose mass transit solutions, he told IPS.

Velásquez foresees serious difficulties for the improvement of the urban transport system in the capital, and especially in suburban areas.

He especially criticised the Transurbano service, which he said was “a shady, monopolistic business deal through which millions of quetzals have been granted to the transport companies without any oversight.”

Urban transport in Guatemala is subsidised by the government, to keep the fare down to one quetzal (13 cents of a dollar).

According to the Ministry of Public Finance, government subsidies for public transport amounted to 275 million dollars between 2004 and 2011.

With regard to suburban passenger transport, Velásquez described it as “chaotic,” and said the drivers were rude and corruption was rampant.

Youngsters participating in military civic service get ready to rappel down a cliff. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Jul 27 2012 (IPS)

“I feel proud to be a part of this change. Malnutrition cannot be wiped out in just two or three years, but this is the beginning and I want to be a part of it,” says Isabela Tzoc, a civic service volunteer involved in a youth programme aimed at fighting extreme poverty in Guatemala.

“I’ve become so caught up in it that tomorrow I’m going to miss classes (at the university) because I have a training session with the group. Out of love for my country and because I made a commitment to Guatemala, I’m going to finish what I’ve started here,” added Tzoc in an interview with IPS.

The 21-year-old education student is one of a group of 157 volunteers who have been participating since April in “Jóvenes centinelas contra la desnutrición” (Young Sentries Against Malnutrition), an initiative sponsored by the National Youth Council.

Guatemala has the highest rate of chronic childhood malnutrition in Latin America. It affects one of every two children under the age of five in the country, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“Young Sentries Against Malnutrition” was created in the framework of the Civic Service Law, in force since 2011, which requires Guatemalans between the ages of 18 and 24 – both male and female – to serve their country for a total of 728 hours. They are able to opt for either military or social service, and are paid 1.10 dollars an hour.

According to the legislation, military service “trains Guatemalans for the armed defence of the homeland, within a doctrine that respects human rights and civic, political and moral values,” in addition to providing first aid and risk management training. Social service, meanwhile, promotes young people’s participation in areas like health, education, the environment and other social assistance-related sectors.

The new law, put into effect by the administration of former social democratic President Álvaro Colom (2008-2012), was welcomed by human rights activists because it regulates military service without making it compulsory – a practice that led to a series of abuses during the 1960-1996 civil war between leftist guerrillas and the armed forces, in which at least 200,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared.

According to the independent Historical Clarification Commission – the truth commission established after the end of the armed conflict – the Guatemalan army illegally forced thousands of young people, including children under the age of 15, to join its ranks and participate directly in the war.

The commission also concluded that 93 percent of the human rights violations documented during the conflict were committed by government forces and allied paramilitary groups.

Today, however, young people can freely choose between military service and social service.

Tzoc opted for social service, and ended up working in poor communities in Nahualá and Sololá, in southwestern Guatemala.

“We are studying their needs and preparing a report for SESAN (the Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security). It is an amazing experience to spend time with these families,” said Tzoc, who underwent military civic service training.

Farewell to war

Some 3,500 young Guatemalans are currently enrolled in the new military civic service training, said Colonel Rony Urízar, an army spokesman.

“The young people receive basic military training: army rules and regulations, first aid, familiarity with weapons, shooting practice, and a lot of training on natural disasters so that they can provide support in the event of any emergency in their own departments (provinces),” he told IPS.

“No one is forced into military service,” Urízar stressed. “It is an opportunity for citizens to fulfil their civic duty, and the army provides this space for society.”

“This is voluntary, and I think that’s great, because not everyone has the calling for a military career,” said Erick Tatagüin, a civic service participant in the Mariscal Zavala army brigade in Guatemala City.

“It helps people in the event of natural disasters. You learn what to do if there is a landslide or an earthquake, and how to attend to people who are wounded, if they are bleeding or have broken bones,” he told IPS while preparing for cliff scaling practice.

Tatagüin spends every Sunday at the Mariscal Zavala army base, from 6:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., in order to put in the required 728 hours of service.

Francisco Montenegro, of the Paz Joven (Young Peace) movement, told IPS that the importance of the new legislation lies in the fact that “it involves young people in the different government efforts aimed at reducing social gaps through strategic action.”
But he is wary of the potential for the authorities to use the new law for political and electoral purposes.

“Government institutions need to ensure transparency in order to guarantee that only young people carrying out their civic service obligations receive the corresponding remuneration, and that it is not tied to any political or partisan objectives,” he stressed.

While the new law has met with considerable public approval, some remain sceptical.

“Because it is overseen by the Ministry of Defence, it is still military in nature, and this prevents young people from providing service with a more democratic and community service-oriented vision,” activist Arturo Chub with the non-governmental organisation Seguridad en Democracia (Security in Democracy) told IPS.

Chub believes these programmes should focus on social initiatives such as literacy training, housing construction for low-income families, environmental impact studies and feasibility studies for community projects.

Nevertheless, he acknowledged, the fact that young people are no longer forced into military service does represent an advance in Guatemala, where 54 percent of the country’s 14 million inhabitants live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, particularly in indigenous communities that lack health and education services, according to the 2011 National Living Conditions Survey.

Cases like that of a little boy with an undetected metabolic disorder whose parents sold everything they owned to cover the costs of medical treatment that was ineffective prompted a doctor to create a vanguard institute of human genetics in Guatemala.

“A couple from a rural village, who longed to have children but were never able to, one day found outside their shop a box with a baby in it and a message asking them to take care of him because his parents couldn’t support him,” the director of the new institute, Gabriel Silva, told IPS.

They were happy to adopt him. But at the age of five, he had his first seizure. “His adoptive parents went to a private health centre, to pay for the first treatment. His illness continued, and they rushed to the hospital with him every time, until they ended up selling their shop and their house” to cover the costs, Silva said.

By the time they reached Silva’s clinic, the boy was disabled. “When I saw him, from the way he smelled, I deduced that it was a metabolic disorder,” he said. A test he carried out with the assistance of a biochemist in Germany confirmed his diagnosis, and treatment involving medication and a special diet solved the problem.

“The last day I was at the clinic, the father came with his son, who had already learned how to ride a bike, to thank me,” he said.

Silva was deeply affected by this case and many others while working as a pediatrician for 15 years in the northwestern province of Chimaltenango, where most of the population is made up of Maya Indians.

His passion for genetics and his zeal for helping people led him to specialise in genetics at Baylor University in Texas, and to found the Institute of Research in Human Genetics (IVEGEM) in 2010.

The institute, located in Santa Lucía Milpas Altas, a town in the highlands near the city of Antigua and 30 km from the capital, focuses its research on the genetic disorders that are most commonly seen in Guatemala and the rest of Latin America, and also offers services to rural communities.

The project was made possible with support from the private Rozas Botrán Foundation, the U.S. non-governmental organisation Faith in Practice, and other sources.

IVEGEM, which operates in a modern building that combines science and art, also gives a course in molecular biology to train its team of Guatemalan professionals who specialise in biology, chemistry and pediatrics, as well as students from other universities.

Claudia Carranza, who has a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Navarra in Spain, told IPS that she is currently working on two projects with leukaemia patients in public hospitals under an agreement with the National Council of Science and Technology, a government body.

In the case of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, “we see genetic markers that help with the prognosis. In Guatemala in the past, when a child had leukaemia, they started to treat him with one kind of chemotherapy and then another and another, and when he was completely exhausted and weak, they told (his family) that he needed a bone marrow transplant,” she said.

“This study indicates from the very start whether a bone marrow transplant is needed, or whether aggressive or mild chemotherapy is needed. This is better for patients, because they are given the right treatment in line with the prognosis,” she explained.

She said they also work with people with chronic myeloid leukaemia, who are given medication and subject to gene expression monitoring every three months, to follow the progression of the disease.

Carranza said that in the past, these tests had to be done in the United States, at a steep cost. But now even other countries of Central America can use the institute’s “high quality and lower cost” services, she said.

“We are going to work with the Salvadoran Social Security Institute and we will possibly work with Honduras, southern Mexico, Belize and the Dominican Republic,” she said.

Lack of access to healthcare is a serious problem in rural areas in this Central American country of 14 million people where 54 percent of the population lives in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, according to the 2011 national living conditions survey.

Against that backdrop, research in health is especially important.

Nonsyndromic deafness, muscular dystrophy in children, and the human papillomavirus, associated with cervical cancer are also the focus of research at the institute, which aims to come up with the most effective treatment for patients in Guatemala.

“The idea is to study each illness to design specific treatment adapted to the needs of the population without basing ourselves on studies from other countries which have different cultures, diets, social status, and, surely, genetic factors,” Carranza said.

PLoSs Genetics and The American Journal of Human Genetics are two of the publications that have published the institute’s studies, which have also been presented in Switzerland, Spain, Costa Rica and Argentina.

IVEGEM has also signed international conventions on technology transfer and scientific information sharing with Baylor University and the University of Navarra, the University Children’s Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Munich University Children’s Hospital in Germany.

Silva said one of the most ambitious projects is the study of congenital metabolic disorders, starting in newborns, “because the objective is prevention of disabilities caused by nutritional or metabolic disorders.”

“Sometimes the person lacks the equipment needed to break down amino acids. For example, if they drink milk or eat something that has that particular amino acid, the more they consume, the more they will be intoxicated, and that gradually causes brain damage,” he said.

Silva hopes that within five years, the 464,000 babies born every year in Guatemala will receive neonatal screening to detect congenital defects to prevent mental retardation or paralysis by means of diet or medication.

The research is only one part of the institute’s strategy for growth.

“We are developing a molecular biology course with university backing, which currently has 48 students who can put that knowledge to work in their jobs, and we hope to build a science university in two or three years,” he said.

The institute’s researchers are extremely dedicated to the work they are doing.

Allan Urbizo, a biologist, said it is a privilege to work in IVEGEM. “I often talk to the parents of children who have heart defects, and they tell me ‘What wouldn’t I give so that no parent would have to feel what I am feeling now?’ My biggest dream would be to prevent all that suffering,” he told IPS.

“We have received a great deal of support; doctors are sending us more tests, which means they are useful in order for the doctors to give their patients a good diagnosis and good treatment,” said Dámaris Tintí, a chemical biologist.

Access to justice for women who suffer sexual violence in Central America and southern Mexico remains limited despite the high incidence of rape and other crimes, of which underage girls are the main victims, experts say.

“This kind of violence is the most hushed up, hidden, and invisibilised, which means it enjoys the greatest impunity,” Marcela Suazo, the United Nations population fund (UNFPA) regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS.

The numbers bear this out.

According to El Salvador’s attorney-general’s office, only six percent of the 8,108 complaints of sex crimes filed between January 2008 and July 2010 led to convictions.

The situation is similar in Nicaragua, where 56 percent of the 1,133 complaints of sexual violence that reached the courts in 2008 were closed. Of this proportion, 70 percent were dismissed, 15 percent ended in acquittals, and only 15 percent led to convictions.

Graffiti in Mexico City: "No More Femicides" Credit:Dennis Bocquet/CC BY 2.0

A multiplicity of factors give rise to these bleak figures in Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the nine states of southeast Mexico – a region known as Mesoamerica, which is home to some 70 million people.

These include the reluctance of victims to report sexual violence due to shame or fear, the lack of an effective response by the authorities, and the unequal power relations between men and women, Suazo said.

The main victims are minors. “Girls and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 are the population group most affected by sexual violence,” the expert said, adding that they are often sexually harassed or abused by family members or by people close to the family.

“Access must thus be improved to information and education, and to justice – with interdisciplinary services including health, the police and assistance in the judicial process – and a timely, effective legal process must be guaranteed,” she said.

These difficulties and observations are outlined in the report Access to Justice for Women Victims of Sexual Violence in Mesoamerica 2011, published by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which puts a special emphasis on the cases of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

But despite the hurdles to access to justice faced by women victims of sexual violence, the study also reports progress made in the region.

Tracy Robinson, the IACHR rapporteur on the Rights of Women, told IPS that the adoption of laws to fight violence against women and the creation of new justice system institutions with a gender perspective were some of the advances made.

She also cited “the introduction of policies and protocols to guide the actions of everyone who should ensure justice for and protect the victims, and the development of comprehensive approaches to protect them and guarantee their welfare.”

Robinson acknowledged, however, that “many, many women” still do not have access to justice in cases of sexual violence, which means “the levels of impunity for sexual violence are very high.”

“Our main concerns include girls who are at particular risk and poor women who live in rural areas, because the search for justice for them implies an economic cost, above all, if they don’t live near places where legal services are provided,” she added.

Ángela Acevedo, coordinator of the gender secretariat in Nicaragua’s judiciary, told IPS that her country had made some progress in terms of access to justice.

“The proportion of cases that ended in convictions rose from 10 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2010. In other words, there has been an improvement in access to justice for women victims of sexual violence,” she said.

And Nicaragua hopes to significantly improve these figures, because of the passage of the Integral Law on Violence Against Women, in January.

The law, which goes into effect this month, defines the crime of “femicide” or gender-related murder, and creates penalties for physical, psychological, property-related, economic and workplace violence, and violence against women perpetrated by public employees or government officials.

But the challenges are still enormous.

“Social tolerance (for this kind of violence) means there is little sensitivity in society towards victims and little support for investigations, with respect to providing evidence, and victims are revictimised by the justice system,” all of which stands in the way of clearing up cases, Acevedo said.

Silvia Rosales, a Central American Court of Justice magistrate, told IPS that the Mesoamerican region has also improved in terms of coordinating law enforcement efforts between the police, prosecutors and judges, in the area of sexual crimes.

But “funds are lacking, as is specific training on the issue for judges and prosecutors,” he said. (END)

“Midwives in Guatemala attend to women during pregnancy, the birth and the post-partum period. They give the women warmth and support, because they speak the same language and belong to the same culture,” said Silvia Xinico with the Network of Organisations of Indigenous Women for Reproductive Health.

Xinico, a member of the Cakchiquel indigenous community, told IPS that the midwives “are treated as part of the family; they give people advice about how to solve their difficulties.” They are also called on when there is a health problem in the community.

Most indigenous women in Guatemala use the services of midwives. Credit:Danilo Valladares/IPS

The important role played by local midwives is reflected in the official statistics, which show that nearly half of all births in this Central American country are attended by midwives.

The 2008-2009 National Maternal-Infant Health Survey reported that 48 percent of pregnancies in the country were attended in the homes of the expectant mother or the midwife. But in departments (provinces) where most of the population is indigenous, the proportion reached almost 80 percent.

The survey also indicated that 43 percent of births took place in public hospitals and clinics, and just under eight percent in private health facilities.

The Health Ministry reported that midwives attended 45.7 percent of the 115,997 births registered in the country from January to October 2011.

The National Survey on Living Conditions carried out last year reported that 54 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty.

The worst poverty and lack of public services, healthcare and education are concentrated in indigenous provinces. (According to official statistics, 40 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million is indigenous, although native organisations put the proportion at over 60 percent.)

Despite the important role they play in providing healthcare, Guatemala’s traditional midwives are sometimes denigrated. “Because they are indigenous, they are discriminated against and treated with scorn by staff in the public health services” to which they turn when patients with complications must be transferred to the hospital, Xinico said.

“The doctors don’t let us go in the hospital, they only let the patient in, which makes us feel bad,” said Regina Patzán, a native midwife from San Juan Comalapa in the central department of Chimaltenango.

This happens even though many of the expectant mothers do not speak Spanish, only their native language, she told IPS.

Patzán, who has been a midwife for 16 years, says her skills are a gift from God.

“When I was just a little girl I wanted to know how babies came into the world. My great-grandmothers and my grandparents would get angry when I asked them,” she said, adding that she was even whipped a couple of times for asking about “adult things.”

But she was determined to know. “I wanted to receive the children when they were born,” she said. So she got involved in a non-governmental organisation, and was trained as a midwife, seeing her dream come true.

“When women come with complications, we immediately send them to the hospital. We are also visited by 14- or 15-year-old girls who come in with a stomach ache and we explain that it’s menstruation,” she said.

Her hunger for knowledge remains intact. “We would like to learn how to detect haemorrhaging when we are in the village and how we can help the women,” she said.

María Clara Mux, 55, another midwife from Chimaltenango, inherited her craft from her grandmother. “The first birth I attended was my daughter-in-law’s, because I had seen how my grandmother did it. Thank God everything went well. My grandson is now 13 years old,” she told IPS.

She strongly emphasises the need for family planning. “Now there are many planning methods to use. It’s not like before, when families had 16 kids. Things are difficult and we have to pay for school, clothing and food,” she said.

Mux is now receiving training at the local health centre and continues to help pregnant women and attend births, although she does so in precarious conditions.

“We need equipment – gloves, scissors and a syringe. The Health Ministry gave us some, but they eventually wear out. We also need a lantern, because some people don’t even have electricity and we can’t see a thing.”

The absence of health services in the most remote parts of the country means midwives play a key role in preventing maternal deaths.

Aracely Tórtola with the Asociación Pro Bienestar de la Familia de Guatemala – the Guatemalan association of family welfare, a local NGO – said the midwives “play a very important role in society, helping to curb maternal mortality, because many women are in areas where there are no hospitals.”

“These women also face economic and cultural hurdles to gaining access to hospitals,” the expert said.

Tórtola said midwives should receive training and education in the rights of women, family planning methods, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, prevention of risks, and breastfeeding.

“If the midwife provides good advice and information, if she tells women that they have a right to family planning, if she takes them to the hospital when the pregnancy is at risk, she is helping bring down the maternal mortality rate,” she said.

The latest available statistics, from the national survey on maternal mortality published in December 2011, indicate that the maternal mortality rate fell from 153 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 139 deaths in 2007.

But the ratio is three times higher among indigenous women, the Observatory on Sexual and Reproductive Health reports.

Leonor Calderón, the delegate of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Guatemala, commented to IPS that women play a fundamental role in society because of their contribution to maternal health. She said the state should recognise their skills and knowledge.

Calderón described traditional midwives as “agents of development” because of the social role they play in attending births, reducing maternal mortality and encouraging family planning.

The poverty-stricken countries of Central America will face major challenges when the Association Agreement to be signed in late June with the European Union, including commitments on trade, political dialogue and cooperation, comes into effect.

“The region could benefit if all of its products, especially fruit and vegetables, other crops and some manufactured goods, are given privileged access” to the European market, Jonathan Menkos, an expert with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), told IPS.

Menkos said this is the conclusion reached by impact studies carried out by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Under the European Union-Central America Association Agreement (EU-CAAA), both sides will open their markets to industrial products from the other. This will primarily benefit the EU, which will be able to sell its vehicles and machinery in this region, and invest in services like finances, communications and transport, experts said.

Central America, on the other hand, will be able to take advantage of quotas for the sale of beef, rice, sugar and textiles to the EU, a market of 500 million people, and of other concessions for the sale of coffee, bananas and rum.

In Menkos’ view, “the success of the agreement depends on generating public goods in the rural areas of our region that are today almost non-existent, such as education, health, roads, highways and other infrastructure for trade.”

Half of Central America’s 43 million people live in poverty, which is concentrated in rural areas. Because of this, Menkos suggested, the region should also aim at other markets, such as South Africa, Russia, China or India.

The EU and the governments of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama signed the basic agreement in May 2010, after three years of negotiations. Now, following lengthy technical adjustments, the final accord will be signed this month.

Javier Sandomingo, head of the European Commission delegation to Central America and Panama, announced that the definitive agreement would be signed Jun. 28-29 in Tegucigalpa, when Honduras hands over the rotating presidency of the Central American Integration System (SICA) to Nicaragua.

After the signing ceremony, the European Parliament and the legislatures of the Central American countries must ratify the agreement for it to enter into force.

Francisco Robles Rivera of the University of Costa Rica told IPS that the EU’s aim is merely “to consolidate the legal framework for its investments in the region.

“This is important in the present context, when Spanish companies, especially in the energy sector, are being nationalised in the public interest in Bolivia and Argentina,” he said.

“The EU wants new legislation on investments to safeguard, expand and facilitate the operations of European capital in the region, especially in the fields of mining, and insurance, telecommunications, tourism and other services,” he said.

Virgilio Álvarez, of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS that “unfortunately, all bilateral and multilateral trade agreements ultimately are of greatest benefit to the wealthiest partners, and are therefore asymmetric.”

Nevertheless, Álvarez said it was “important and necessary” to sign an association agreement with the EU. “It will allow us to move forward with Central American integration, and unlike the free trade agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA), non-trade elements are included,” he said.

The EU-CAAA includes cooperation goals for the region, such as improvement of the situation of indigenous people, justice, security, protection of the environment, fighting climate change, and transport.

It also encompasses an agenda for political dialogue, seeking to promote a series of common values between the parties, such as respect for democratic principles and basic rights.

“We could expect Europe to bring the wealth of its experience to the Central American integration process, but this will depend greatly on our capacity to absorb that experience,” said Álvarez.

Other organisations, in contrast, view the Association Agreement with the EU as a serious threat to Central America.

“Europe gave higher priority to its trading interests than to its traditional economic cooperation for the consolidation of democracy, governance and development in Central America,” says the Mesoamerican Initiative on Trade, Integration and Sustainable Development (CID), a civil society organisation.

“Central America obtained meagre access quotas for agricultural products such as sugar, textiles, beef and rice,” whereas the EU “gained full opening of Central American markets for a wide range of key agricultural and industrial goods, such as dairy products, vehicles, medicines and machinery,” it says in a communiqué.

Moreover, on intellectual property, CID questions the major concessions granted to the EU in terms of protected geographical designations, patents and copyright: in the area of services, the bloc was granted complete access in the fields of finance, transport and energy, among others.

Meanwhile, “Central America has yielded ground in terms of workers’ rights and environmental protection compared with other treaties,” since “the agreement with the EU does not provide for penalties for those who infringe these rights for the sake of commercial interests,” says CID.

The EU is one of Central America’s main trading partners, but the EU is by far the stronger partner, with a trade surplus in 2010 of 5.2 billion euros (6.4 billion dollars) and sales to Central America worth 25.9 billion euros (32 billion dollars), according to the European Commission.

Marco Antonio Barahona of the Central American Institute for Political Studies (INCEP) told IPS that Central America still has a lot of work to do on integration in order to be able to face up to these trade challenges. “We have not even been able to create a customs union in our region,” he said.

Besides, “we mainly export products that Europe can do without, such as bananas, coffee and sugar, as opposed to oil, for example, which fuels the economy,” he told IPS.

The ambitious Cuatro Balam project for the management and conservation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the northern department of Petén has been put on hold after the change of government in Guatemala, say environmental and other civil society organisations.

The Temple of the Masks at the Maya archeological site of Tikal, part of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Credit:Mike Vondran CC BY 2.0

“It seems to me that the new government does not want to continue the project,” activist Javier Márquez of the environmental group Defensores de la Naturaleza (Defenders of Nature) told Tierramérica. “It was a very good initiative, because they were beginning to plan what should be done with the country’s protected areas.”

“B’alam” means “jaguar” in a number of Mayan languages, and “cuatro” is Spanish for “four”, so the project’s name could be translated as “four jaguars”. “Cuatro Balam” also refers to the four main figures of the K’iche’ Maya sacred text Popol Vuh, linked to the four cardinal directions.

Launched in 2008 by then president Álvaro Colom, who left office in January of this year, the Cuatro Balam initiative was aimed at increasing ecotourism in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a protected area of more than 21,000 sq km that encompasses natural parks and archeological sites such as El Mirador, Tikal, Uaxactún and Piedras Negras.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared this area a biosphere reserve in 1990.

Cuatro Balam was designed to promote research and conservation activities over a 15-year period (2008-2023), through public/private investment, with active participation by local communities.

One of its objectives was to increase tourism to 1.5 million visitors a year. It included the building of infrastructure such as a silent electric train with a panoramic view that would travel through the rainforest at a speed of 16 km an hour.

It also envisaged the creation of the University of Biodiversity, which would focus on the study of the environment and the classification and genetic registry of native species, and the Centre for Maya Studies, devoted to research on the history of these indigenous peoples.

“It promoted civil society, private sector and community participation in strengthening sustainable development with the overall goal of consolidating the department of Petén as a tourism destination,” explained Márquez.

“There were big infrastructure projects that could have altered the biodiversity of the biosphere reserve, like highways and large hotels, but these were never materialised,” he added.

The Maya Biosphere Reserve is a vast stretch of rainforest in an area that borders on Mexico and Belize, and is home to thousands of animal and plant species and countless archeological sites, some of them thousands of years old.

Sites like Tikal and the less explored El Mirador were massive cities or urban complexes with thousands of buildings, temples and monuments.

Today this natural and cultural treasure is being threatened by activities such as drug, human and wildlife trafficking, land invasions, livestock farming, forest fires and illegal logging.

However, following the inauguration in January of Otto Pérez Molina, who will govern the country until 2016, this ambitious plan to protect the biosphere reserve has apparently been put on hold. Tierramérica found no reference to Cuatro Balam on the National Council of Protected Areas website, nor had it received any response from government sources to its queries on the subject by press time.

“There has been no further movement,” lamented Carlos Kurzel of the non-governmental Association of Forest Communities of Petén, which groups together 23 peasant and indigenous organisations for the management of forests as a means of subsistence through ecotourism and other activities.

Prior to the change in government, there has been “a great deal of openness to dialogue with local communities, which was one of the greatest merits of Cuatro Balam. Security was also considerably increased,” Kurzel told Tierramérica.

Through coordinated efforts among the army, police, government environmental agencies and civil society, the authorities had worked to improve governability in Petén.

One result of these efforts was the recovery in September 2011 of 138,000 hectares of natural forest that had been illegally occupied, according to the Agencia Guatemalteca de Noticias, a government news agency.

In addition, “there was a great deal of talk about tourism development in El Mirador, the construction of infrastructure and promoting tourism, although our participation was rather cautious, because we were concerned about whether economic development would directly benefit the local communities,” said Kurzel.

In addition to Cuatro Balam, there are a number of other initiatives aimed at creating opportunities in Petén.

The El Mirador Project was created to foster tourism development at this little-known archeological site, which dates from the pre-classic Maya period of 1000 BC to 300 AD.

One of the most notable structures in El Mirador is La Danta temple, considered not only the largest pyramid built by the Maya but also one of the largest in the world in terms of total volume. Measuring 300 metres wide, 600 metres long and 72 metres in height, it is still largely covered by vegetation.

Hilda Morales, coordinator of the project, told Tierramérica that so far, 480 people have been provided with training in quality management, Maya culture, basic English, cooking and other skills. Regulations for the management of forest concessions have been drawn up, and the Reino Kan brand has been created.

The project has been implemented since 2009 by the Foundation for the Development of Guatemala (FUNDESA), with 1.3 million dollars in financing, 70 percent provided by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the rest by the Guatemalan government.

According to Morales, the project was independent from Cuatro Balam, although the tourism development of El Mirador was one of the pillars of the government initiative.

“Unfortunately, when there is a change of government, a lot of initiatives get pushed aside,” said Morales. “The Maya Biosphere Reserve is the largest protected area in the country. It shelters invaluable wealth, and the challenges it faces are daunting,” she added.

Meanwhile, a team headed by U.S. archeologist Richard Hansen and the Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History, a government agency, have been working on the excavation of El Mirador since 1987.

The Mirador Basin Project, as the initiative is known, is aimed at studying the origins, dynamics and demise of Maya civilisation in northern Guatemala.

Cuatro Balam, working in consensus with local communities, “made it possible to harmonise public investment with international investment to strengthen governability and economic development in the reserve,” said Byron Castellanos of the non-governmental Balam Association.

These actions “should continue, and there is no need to invent new initiatives,” he told Tierramérica.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

President Otto Pérez Molina, next to Vice President Roxana Baldetti, lifted the state of siege in the town of Santa Cruz Barillas. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, May 21 2012 (IPS)

“People haven’t been coming in for the past month or so because they are afraid again, like during war-time,” complained Juan Gaspar, a shopkeeper in the northwestern Guatemalan town of Santa Cruz Barillas, where a fierce battle is raging between locals opposed to a hydropower dam and the security forces.

The conflict broke out in the town on May 1 when private security guards, police and soldiers cracked down on a protest by local residents opposed to the construction of the five-MW Canbalam I hydroelectric complex by the Spanish firm Hidralia. One local peasant farmer was killed in the clashes and two were injured.

In response, right-wing President Otto Pérez Molina declared a state of siege in the town and sent in troops and police with the order to “capture the ringleaders.” The measure was lifted on Friday May 18.

So far, 17 community leaders have been arrested. Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets on May 15 to demand that they be released, and that the state of siege be lifted.

Gaspar told IPS that before investing in a project such as a dam or mine, investors should engage in dialogue with the local population and take their views into consideration, in order to avoid regrettable incidents. “That’s how it should work,” he said.

When asked his opinion about the dam, the shopkeeper first said he did not support it. But immediately afterwards he said “We have nothing to do with these things; I don’t care one way or the other.”

Perhaps the abrupt turnaround was a result of the heavy police and military presence in the town, reminiscent of the 1960-1996 civil war.

The armed conflict between government forces and left-wing guerrillas left 250,000 people – mainly rural indigenous villagers – dead and disappeared. According to the U.N.-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission, the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings.

Santa Cruz Barillas highlights the root cause of innumerable clashes between local residents and the security forces in this impoverished Central American country, mainly in rural areas: the exploitation of natural resources such as minerals, oil and hydropower.

“There is no willingness to listen to the demands and needs of local people in the areas where the economic activities are being carried out,” Eduardo Sacayón, the director of the Institute of Interethnic Studies at the University of San Carlos, told IPS.

On the contrary, there is a tendency “on the part of the government to use force to show the companies and investors that it is willing to support them, regardless of the opinion of the majority of the population, who are affected by these activities,” he said.

In April, the government officially announced the creation of a 500-member military brigade in the town of San Juan Sacatepéquez, near the capital, “to fight drug trafficking and bolster citizen security.”

But that area is the site of social conflict, due to staunch opposition to the construction of a cement plant. The community is worried that the factory will hurt local water resources and crops.

“The problem is the lack of interest in studying the needs of indigenous communities, particularly with regard to the exploitation of natural resources,” Sacayón said.

“There is an economic logic that fits in well with the interests of the business community but clashes with the logic of indigenous people, in particular with respect to their relationship with nature, which is very different from that of businesses dedicated to exploiting natural resources,” he added.

According to official statistics, 40 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million is indigenous, although native organisations put the proportion at over 60 percent.

Like other countries in Latin America, Guatemala is enjoying a mining industry boom as a result of the high international minerals prices. Earnings from metal mining activities climbed from nine million dollars in 2004 to 522 million in 2010, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

But poor communities complain that they see none of the benefits, while the mines destroy the environment in their territories.

Domingo Hernández with the Convergencia Nacional Maya Waqib’ Kej, an umbrella group of indigenous organisations, told IPS that “the transnationals don’t do a thing to help a country develop; all they do is plunder the resources of the state, while the indigenous population continues to be poor.”

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries of Latin America, with 54 percent of the population living in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, according to the 2011 national census on living conditions. The poverty rate is especially high among the country’s indigenous people.

“There is more repression than dialogue, and if talks are held, they’re just an attempt for one side to impose its will on the other,” said Hernández. “We need to build new relations between the people and the state, marked until now by the state’s divorce from society.”

Environmentalists are also involved in the debate.

Yuri Melini of the Centre for Legal, Social and Environmental Action (CALAS) told IPS that his organisation is in favour of the construction of hydropower dams as a way to reduce use of fossil fuels, which are predominant in Guatemala’s energy mix.

“But the local populations should benefit by means of public-private partnerships, where shareholders participate through cooperatives,” he argued.

With regard to the use of toxic chemicals in metals mining, however, he did not mince words: “It should be banned in the country,” due to the pollution and social conflicts it causes, he said.

Melini condemned violence, “wherever it comes from,” and called for dialogue “free of radical ideologies.” (END)

Overwhelmed by climate change, worried about speculation in international prices and still hurting from the effects of the crisis in 2000, coffee growers in Guatemala are trying in various ways to recover the production levels they achieved 12 years ago.

Picking coffee in Guatemala. Credit: Roots and Wings International/CC BY-ND 2.0

The situation has forced farmers to diversify their crops, join certification programmes, aim at gourmet coffee production and compete more creatively in markets abroad, the destination of 95 percent of national output.

“Coffee will continue to be one of the economic mainstays of the country and of major importance for small farmers, but the focus needs to change,” Jairo Fuentes, a farmer belonging to the Adelante Chanmagua cooperative in the eastern province of Chiquimula, told IPS.

“The point is no longer to produce conventional coffee, but rather beans of the highest quality, and we have to seek certification because the time will come when we will not be able to sell our produce without it,” he said.

Global overproduction of coffee in early 2000 brought about a crisis in the sector, with prices plunging to below 50 dollars the quintal (one quintal is 100 pounds), the lowest level in 50 years, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Guatemalan coffee production fell from 6.3 million quintals in 1999-2000 to 4.3 million in 2001-2002, according to information from the National Coffee Association (ANACAFE).

Coffee growers have also had to overcome international price volatility, speculation, and excessive rainfall and drought attributed by experts to climate change.

In the face of these difficulties, producers have turned to certification systems like those of Starbucks, the International Fairtrade Certification Body (FLO-CERT), and Utz Kappé, in an attempt to boost competitiveness.

“(Certification) guarantees four areas: fair treatment for workers, non-use of banned chemicals, accurate reporting of coffee origin, and good quality. This gives an added value of between 10 and 20 dollars a quintal,” said Fuentes.

The Adelante Chanmagua cooperative, with 600 hectares of coffee plantations, has diversified its production to make it through hard times.

“So as not to depend only on coffee, we have an agroforestry programme intercalating coffee trees with fruit trees, which is working very well. We are also growing plantains to try to control our costs and, at the same time, provide shade for the coffee trees,” he said.

Fuentes said these measures are a response to the different challenges to coffee production today, such as climate change, speculation, international overproduction and the after-effects of the crisis of 2000.

“A lot of people at that time gave up investing in their farms, sold them and headed north (to the United States). Now we have been having trouble with the rains, and with the economic crisis in Europe, which is one of the biggest markets for Guatemalan coffee,” he said.

Coffee is Guatemala’s main permanent crop, accounting for 40.5 percent of the over 660,000 hectares devoted to perennial crops, followed by sugarcane, representing 28.4 percent of that area, according to the Fourth National Agricultural Census of 2003.

Coffee thus remains an important foreign exchange earner for this Central American country. In the 2010-2011 harvest, 4.7 million quintals brought in record earnings of 1.1 billion dollars, according to ANACAFE.

The main buyers are the United States, the European Union, Canada and Japan.

But keeping going has been far from easy. The Chicoj cooperative, in the northwestern province of Alta Verapaz, had to tighten its control of production costs, launched sales of leaf compost and foliar fertilisers, and added tourist services to its activities.

“We offer a coffee tour, and we are now building an orchid nursery that is adding value to our cooperative,” which has 124 hectares under coffee, said Raúl Caal, a Qeq’chí Indian belonging to the Chicoj cooperative.

The cooperative also has forestry plantations and sells timber, “but coffee continues to be our main crop,” Caal, who says price swings are a huge threat, told IPS.

“This season we only broke even with our costs, because the coffee price fell by 25 percent compared to last year,” he complained.

Climate change, too, is wreaking havoc. Gerardo de León, a manager for the Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives of Coffee Growers of Guatemala (FEDECOCAGUA), told IPS they had to lower their output projections for this year, previously estimated at 4.7 million quintals.

“In the course of the year we reduced our forecast to 4.6 million quintals, due to fungal infections, particularly coffee rust, arising from the rains associated with climate change,” he said.

De León, who is also a board member at ANACAFE, said they are promoting the fight against rust disease, the renewal of coffee plantations, and seed improvement.

Carlos González Arévalo, of the Association for Social Research and Studies (ASIES), an NGO, told IPS that coffee production is also affected by speculation, which “reduces or increases prices on the international market.”

In his view, “the ups and downs of supply and demand” of coffee on the international scene have led small-scale Guatemalan producers to organise in cooperatives to be able to compete and to improve the quality of their production.

“This is positive, because one has to be farsighted and produce high quality coffee, because there are many factors in play in this business,” he concluded. (END)

Rightwing President Otto Pérez Molina is keeping his promise to take a hard line on soaring crime in Guatemala, but his government is neglecting prevention measures. Analysts warn the strategy, along with upcoming legal reforms, may jeopardise human rights.

One of the first steps taken by retired general Pérez Molina when he took office on Jan. 14 was to send army troops out on street patrols together with the National Civilian Police (PNC).

He also created special task forces to investigate the causes of and propose solutions for robbery, extortion, homicide, kidnapping and femicide (gender-based killings of women).

A sixth military unit to guard the border, beginning with the northwestern department (province) of San Marcos, on the border with Mexico, is expected to become operational in July. Its mission, according to the authorities, will be to combat contraband, and trafficking in persons, drugs and arms.

In April, a new department on drug trafficking was established in the Interior Ministry, while the police are receiving training in rapid response and use of weapons.

So in his first 100 days in office, Pérez Molina has set in motion his main electoral promise: to combat crime with “mano dura” (iron fist). But analysts and activists emphasise the need for preventive measures to bring down the skyrocketing crime rates.

“The country lacks a democratic policy on crime that takes into account basic, elementary matters and regards punitive intervention as the last resort,” said Marco Canteo of the Guatemalan Institute for Comparative Studies in Penal Sciences (ICCPG).

Canteo told IPS that criminal policy in a democratic country should be based on crime prevention and on safeguarding economic, social and cultural rights.

But the new government’s strategy is based on aggressive law enforcement ordered by the executive branch, backed by legislative measures, he said.

For instance, lawmaker Fernando García of the governing Patriotic Party (PP) introduced a bill proposing chemical castration of those convicted of sexual offences.

Pérez Molina is also considering changing Article 8 of the Civil Code to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 12, and he is pursuing an anti-gang bill introduced by his party but bogged down in Congress.

“These initiatives are essentially repressive in nature, and do not meet minimum standards in terms of human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” Canteo said.

Studies by international bodies rank this Central American country of 14 million people among the 14 most violent countries in the world. Last year, 6,187 people were murdered, 706 of them women, according to the state National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF).

But repressive measures in reaction to the violence do not of themselves ensure a solution, experts say.

“Prevention must be emphasised in schools, where the state should invest more money and not regard it as an unwelcome expense,” Nicolás Pacheco, an activist with the Social Movement for the Rights of Children, Adolescents and Young People in Guatemala, told IPS.

“What 17-year-old teenagers are doing now (in the epidemic of youth gang violence) is happening because no work was done with them 10 or 15 years ago on issues like human values and citizenship, and now we are reaping the consequences,” he said.

Therefore, Pacheco said, the idea of criminalising children and adolescents is “worrying.”

He said the anti-gang law “stigmatises young people because of the way they speak, dress, and cut their hair.” In his view, when crimes are committed by minors, “the adults responsible for the children should be prosecuted.”

The previous government of social democratic former president Álvaro Colom implemented the “Open Schools” initiative, which allowed public schools to be used at weekends for learning, recreational and artistic activities, to help prevent violence.

Verónica Godoy, of the Public Security Monitoring and Support Group (IMASP), a local NGO, told IPS that projects like “Open Schools”, which has been suspended, “should continue but in a comprehensive fashion.”

As a positive example, Godoy cited Brazil, where society, state and private institutions and local authorities work with different social groups, such as single mothers and gangs, through recreational programmes, anti-drug campaigns and situational crime prevention.

Godoy considers it essential to develop prevention programmes that have an impact “that is not evaluated in the immediate term, but in the medium and long term.”

Education also deserves more attention, according to Janet Possié, a teacher. “If every government focused on education, crime levels would fall, but this country is one of those that invest least in this area in Latin America,” she told IPS.

Possié added that she knows of no violence prevention initiative adopted by this government. But she said that “it would be unfair to criticise it for the actions it is taking, because the people are demanding tough measures against crime.”

The economic crisis plaguing many countries in the European Union has forced Central America to look at preventive measures to mitigate the effects in this region, which could include a decline in tourism, migrant remittances, exports and investment.

The search for new markets and proposals for reforms to increase tax collection and impose exchange controls are some of the actions being taken in this region, made up of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, with the aim of strengthening the local economies and counteracting external shocks.

“This region needs to look more within itself and towards its neighbours, because the agro-export economic model based on products like coffee, sugar and cardamom is not working,” Jonathan Menkos, an expert with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), told IPS.

Menkos added that “these countries must diversify their production and exports and invest in security, justice, education, health and nutrition, besides coming up with a strategic plan for investment in economic infrastructure.”

Along those lines, in February Guatemala approved a package of tax reforms with which it aims to collect 154 million dollars this year, 552 million in 2013 and 579 million in 2014.

El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama also adopted tax reforms between 2008 and 2011 in the face of the global economic crisis that broke out four years ago in the United States.

The presidents of the central banks of Central America and the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, agreed early this year to adopt measures to ensure financial liquidity, create mechanisms for monitoring risk management and overseeing financial systems, and take steps to mitigate the effects of the crisis in the Eurozone countries.

Central American countries have also recently signed free trade treaties with Colombia and Peru, and are trying to start trade talks with the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. (Venezuela is in the process of joining as a fifth full member.)

Costa Rica, for its part, established diplomatic ties with China in 2007, and is awaiting approval of a free trade deal with Singapore and exploring other markets like India, all of which has given it greater economic independence, according to analysts consulted by IPS.

The stringent austerity policies adopted by the governments of European countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and the UK, to address their debt crisis, have caused recession, soaring unemployment and distortions of international trade.

This will impact the countries of Central America, analysts say. In first place, this region’s chief trading partner is the United States, which is affected by the situation in Europe.

In addition, while Central America depends on intraregional trade in second place, its next largest partners are the European Union and Mexico.

In 2010, exports to the United States represented 32 percent of the region’s total, and imports from that country amounted to 38.5 percent, according to the Secretariat of Economic Integration of Central America (SIECA).

“The crisis in Europe will be reflected in slower economic growth in the United States, which in turn will reduce growth in this region,” with effects on trade, international development aid, remittances sent home by migrants living abroad, and tourism, Menkos said.

Monthly economic activity in the region has already begun to slow down since November, says an ICEFI bulletin published in March.

The activities that have felt the slowdown are manufacturing, agriculture and fishing, the report says.

In Central America, which has a total population of 43 million, GDP growth averaged 4.7 percent in 2011, above the Latin American average of 4.4 percent, according to ICEFI.

But inequality and high poverty rates are still serious problems in this region, especially among indigenous people and the rural population.

Economic analyst Mauricio Garita told IPS that the risks posed for this region by the effects of the European crisis “are very large and can multiply because its big trading partner is the United States, and the second is the EU itself.”

But this also represents a major opportunity for the region, he said. “We can try to attract the investment that would otherwise go to Europe, and begin to make headway in areas in which they will fall short, like tourism and technological products,” said Garita, a former SIECA consultant.

The search for new markets can offer many advantages, he said. “There are countries like Nicaragua that have diversified their trading partners with good results, just as Costa Rica is doing with Canada, South America and Asia,” he added.

But Nicholas Virzi, director of economics at the Universidad Rafael Landívar, a private, Jesuit university in Guatemala, told IPS that “Central America lacks a long-term strategy based on free trade and the creation of a good business environment, marked by guarantees for property rights, the rule of law, legal certainty, and healthy money.”

Improving the business climate, establishing clear rules, providing security for people and their investments, freeing up trade, diversifying the portfolio of clients for exports, and flexibilising the labour market are, in his view, some of the measures that the region must adopt – “to start with” – to weather the impacts of the crisis in Europe.

But when will the effects be felt in Central America?

Pedro Prado, with the Association for Social Research and Studies (ASIES), a private local think tank, told IPS it would be “very bold to say exactly when.” He added that this would depend on when the full impact of the crisis hits the United States.

The securing of loans and development aid from the EU, trade, and remittances from migrants could all be affected, the analyst said.

But he added that “in our latest survey, variables like production and the expectations of the business community were very positive. I wouldn’t predict a negative impact in the short term, although it’s necessary to wait, before reaching a conclusion.”

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, May 2 2012 (IPS)

“It’s very hard for them to put food on the table, but they are very noble people,” Diego Orozco, one of the thousands of young urban Guatemalans who spent last weekend with a poor rural family, told IPS.

“They only ate a plate of beans, but they gave me the privilege of also giving me an egg and some boiled water,” added the 18-year-old, who comes from a middle-class family.

“The most significant thing was that I realised the importance of water. They get water every four days, and it’s really hard for them to be able to take baths and have drinking water. If they don’t have water they can’t irrigate their crops, and without crops, they don’t have food,” he said, after spending Saturday Apr. 28 and Sunday Apr. 29 with campesinos or peasant farmers in the western department (province) of Quetzaltenango.

Like Orozco, more than 6,000 middle- and upper-middle-class young people, mainly from the capital, visited 14 of the country’s 22 departments to stay with poor rural families and get an up-close view of the poverty and malnutrition they face.

The president, right-wing retired General Otto Pérez Molina, and cabinet ministers and other public officials also participated in the activity.

The initiative, “Todos tenemos algo que dar” (We All Have Something to Give), brings the private sector and the government’s Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security together to raise awareness among young people about poverty and malnutrition, and get them to take part in the search for solutions.

In Guatemala, which has the highest chronic malnutrition rates in Latin America, one out of two children under five is undernourished, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

And a full 54 percent of the country’s 14 million people live in poverty, while 13 percent – mainly indigenous people – live in extreme poverty, according to the government’s 2011 National Survey on Living Conditions.

“We waste water and we don’t value what our parents give us,” Orozco said. “We are all human and we should all have the same, not some less and others more. There are people who work very hard, and who have a really hard time trying to get ahead, and others who don’t have to struggle at all.”

The visitors stayed overnight in the public schools closest to the communities they visited, ate their meals with campesino families, took part in their daily work activities, and exchanged opinions about their lives.

Juan Carlos Girón, an 18-year-old private school student, spent the weekend with a family in Vixbén, a mainly indigenous community in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala’s western highlands.

“I visited a couple with nine kids,” he told IPS. “They’re poor, but very noble. They have a small woodstove, a few plates, a sheet metal roof with holes, and a dirt floor.

“The father told me that last week his children didn’t have anything to eat, because the family had no money. But they welcomed me with a special meal (sheep liver) that they used all their savings to buy, when they usually eat just corn tamales with coffee or water,” he added.

“I felt embarrassed and sad because I know that so many people in the world don’t appreciate or take advantage of what they have,” he said.

Girón helped the family wash the dishes and wash clothes, cut firewood, and take the sheep out to pasture.

He noticed that one of the youngest children “was five years old, but was the size of a three-year-old, and she was really skinny. They said they ate well, but you could see how things really were.”

He said that he realised he can’t complain about his own life.

Guatemala is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world. Nearly 80 percent of the country’s farmland is owned by just five percent of the population, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The organisers of “Tengo algo que dar” were pleased with the results.

“It was very positive and special, an encounter between human beings with the same vision, the search for joint solutions between two realities: urban Guatemala and rural Guatemala,” Luis Enrique Monterroso, the head of the Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security, told IPS.

But the initiative, which forms part of the government’s “Zero Hunger” plan to combat malnutrition, doesn’t end there.

The official explained that in May they would hold an exhibition on food solutions, where different experiences will be shared, and in June, a national “coperacha” or collection will be held, to provide tools for farmers and launch projects to attack malnutrition.

“And in July, we’ll go back to the communities, with a proposal for individual or collective solutions,” he said.

Businessman Emilio Méndez, one of the organisers, said that “until we manage to join forces, the problem of malnutrition won’t be solved. It will continue to grow bigger and bigger, and will lash back at us.”

“It’s a tragedy that 50 percent of Guatemalan children are malnourished. That means that 50 percent of Guatemala’s future is compromised,” he said.

Meanwhile, a seed of hope was planted in the communities visited by the officials and young people.

“I thought it was good they came, because the kids came from somewhere else to see the work we do every day,” Delvi Pérez, an 18-year-old farmer, told IPS.

His family, who live in the community of Huitán, often find it hard to feed themselves. “The truth is that we don’t have enough. We plant 11 to 15 cuerdas (between four and six hectares) a year in basic grains and vegetables, but since there are 11 of us, we have to lease land elsewhere,” he said.

“I think they’re going to do something for us. I’m not sure, but they could help with fertiliser for our land, so we could improve production,” he added.

Young people learning computer skills at Campus Tec. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Apr 26 2012 (IPS)

“We’re making a three-dimensional educational video game. The idea is to create virtual worlds where children can explore and interact with other people and objects,” said Carlos Villagrán, seated at a computer in the Campus Tecnológico in the Guatemalan capital.

The Tec, as it is better known, was conceived as “a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness,” according to its web site.

The campus is inspired by Silicon Valley, the technology park in California that is home to hi-tech giants like Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.

So far, the Guatemalan campus is thriving. The Tec’s seven-storey building, inaugurated in June 2010, is fully occupied by 100 companies in the information technology (IT) sector, most of whose personnel are young people.

They specialise in producing special effects for movies, video games, and software for mobile telephones and the internet.

The Tec building, located in Cuatro Grados Norte, a cultural district with pedestrian areas, parks and restaurants, also houses the technology institute of the private Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, all of which has generated great anticipation and enthusiasm.

“We were about to throw in the towel because of lack of support, but then we came here and found plenty of people developing their own projects and companies,” Villagrán told IPS.

“There are three dimensional designers and modellers here who are collaborating with us,” he said.

“We have found a place to work, and we are more enthusiastic now,” said this 26-year-old computer science engineer, who wants to see his project “expand all over the world.”

Villagrán participates in the Tec’s “business incubator”, a sort of technological seedbed for entrepreneurial startup companies that is also part of the campus.

The incubator programme “accelerates the process of creation, growth and consolidation of innovative projects and businesses,” María Mercedes Zagui, in charge of business development at the Campus Tecnológico, told IPS.

“We have over 200 enterprise projects that are constantly buzzing around us. These are people who are allied to and interested in us, but we do not have enough space in the building for all of them,” she said.

To cope with the demand, a new 14-storey building is under construction to house more companies, including international firms, while strategies to attract the attention of potential clients abroad are growing.

Zagui said plans are in motion to open a Campus Tec office in the U.S. Silicon Valley technology complex in August.

“That will give us a global presence, because having an address here is not the same as having one in the United States, in the world’s largest business incubator. In addition, there are opportunities for making contacts and securing financial resources there that we do not have here,” she said.

According to the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), this impoverished Central American country of 14 million people invests 12 million dollars a year on research and development, equivalent to 0.04 percent of GDP.

Direct government investment in science and technology represents only 27.9 percent of the country’s total investment in this area, while 21.7 percent is contributed by higher education, and the remaining 50.4 percent comes from abroad, the network says.

Meanwhile, the businesses at the Tec continue their struggle to innovate and open up a niche for themselves in the field of technology.

One of them is BigoMo, which does video postproduction and visual effects and is renowned for its work in “The Chronicles of Narnia” film series. Source Tour, meanwhile, has launched a virtual shopfront for tours and tourist activities in Guatemala.

“Being here has been good for our growth. I have met lots of people who work in the same field, but I see them as collaborators, not competitors,” said Mauricio Macal, the head of CG Armada, a multimedia production unit.

But the challenges are great. For one thing, the local market tends to undervalue these technological products, to the point that clients often do not want to pay the real value of their work.

Macal blames this on the fact that many people sell their work at far below market prices.

“There’s a lot of undercutting in the business. Some young people are making logos for 150 quetzals (20 dollars), and they are competing with companies that have fixed overheads, like office rent, and that use brand-name computers and legal software,” he complained to IPS.

In spite of the hurdles, the IT industry seems to be taking off at the Tec, for instance at Milk ‘n Cookies, another Guatemalan company devoted to multimedia production, web platforms and applications for cellphones.

“We have just tripled our office space,” Nelson Melville, the company’s project developer, told IPS.

The firm created the Minimundi site, an educational tool on the internet that teaches children about recycling and respect for the environment.

The site is sponsored by Ecoembes, a Spanish nonprofit association that works in the management and processing of recycled materials. Other companies like MTV and Discovery Mobile have also contracted services from the Guatemalan firm.

“The creative artists working here are expert at what they do, and their work is a labour of love. We have no reason to envy designers anywhere else in the world,” Melville said.

The countries of Latin America will raise their voices at the Sixth Summit of the Americas to condemn the “failed” war on drugs and propose alternatives, such as the controversial depenalisation, in order to curb drug-related violence, especially in Mexico and Central America.

All indications are that the summit, to be held Saturday and Sunday Apr. 14-15 in the Colombian city of Cartagena, will reach agreement on the need to reform anti-drug policies, but not on what their new direction should be.

“We have had a militaristic policy that has not been successful, while the drug traffickers have been successful in infiltrating state bodies and corrupting wide sectors of society,” Carmen Aída Ibarra of the Guatemalan NGO Movimiento Pro Justicia (Movement for Justice) told IPS.

In the circumstances, “seeking alternatives is a legitimate course of action, because if we continue the war, which is not having a significant impact in terms of the amount of drugs seized or arrests made, we will keep supplying the victims,” she said, referring to the Central American countries.

“In Central America, the escalating drug-related violence involving drug trafficking organisations has reached alarming and unprecedented levels,” worsened by corruption, poverty and inequality, according to the 2011 report of the International Narcotics Control Board, a United Nations body.

More than 70,000 youth gang members operate in Central America, which is used as a land bridge for the transit of drugs produced in South America to the United States. Annual murder rates are as high as 82 per 100,000 population in Honduras, 65 in El Salvador and 40 in Guatemala, the report says.

In Mexico, “over 35,000 people were killed in drug-related violence in the period 2006-2010,” it says.

Faced with these levels of carnage, Latin American presidents and former presidents are calling for a reform of the methods of fighting drug trafficking, which have so far been focused on repressive measures, backed by the United States.

Rightwing Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina will propose “partial or complete depenalisation of drug trafficking and consumption” in place of the “failed” war on drugs – perhaps the most controversial of all upcoming proposals.

“Consumption and production of drugs should be legalised, within certain limits and conditions,” Pérez Molina said in a column published on the eve of the summit by the British newspaper The Guardian. His view is directly opposed to that of the United States, the world’s largest consumer of drugs, whose authorities are against decriminalisation.

“This idea has sparked a process that will have positive results for changing a failed strategy that has had terrible effects, for instance in Mexico,” Edmundo Urrutia, the head of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Guatemala, told IPS.

Former presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and César Gaviria of Colombia reiterated their proposal for “regulating drug sales, advertising and consumption, without legalising them,” according to a letter sent to Cartagena summit delegates.

Meanwhile, presidents like Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia have shown openness to other anti-drug policy options.

“If we find that there is a better alternative that will undermine the profits of the criminal organisations, and that maybe the problem of consumption can be addressed in a more effective way, then everybody will win,” President Santos said this week.

International criminalisation of drug trafficking prevents each country from finding national solutions to its own longstanding problems, according to Ricardo Vargas, the head of Acción Andina Colombia (Andean Action Colombia) and an associate fellow of the Transnational Institute, a think tank based in the Netherlands.

“This is the cornerstone of the debate in Mexico, Central America and Colombia,” Vargas told IPS.

“In Central America, there is deep-rooted social conflict; there are states that are still authoritarian, like Honduras; conflicts over land; very powerful landlords; and discrimination against indigenous people,” he said.

According to Vargas, “the model that sees drug trafficking as associated with violence, and that responds by militarising the region, only makes matters worse…and the United States should re-examine the situation.”

Acción Andina, the Transnational Institute and six other civil society organisations signed another open letter in the run-up to the summit, calling for a review of the results of the war on drugs, which has brought about “the concentration, specialisation and diversification of organised criminal groups.”

Some people believe there is no other solution than to decriminalise drugs.

“The first step is to depenalise drug use and reinforce health and education policies in our countries, based on respect for life, democracy and the rule of law,” Erubiel Tirado, the coordinator of the diploma course on national security at the private Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, told IPS.

The United States “does not play an important role in combating the roots of the problem, because although it has recognised that its enormous domestic drug consumption provokes the war on drugs in the rest of the hemisphere, it does very little to reduce demand,” he said.

However, not everyone agrees with depenalisation.

The presidents of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama have rejected such a measure, which they see as counterproductive – the same view expressed by the U.S. government, most recently on Wednesday Apr. 11.

“President (Barack) Obama doesn’t support decriminalisation, (but) he does think this is a legitimate debate,” said Dan Restrepo, senior director for Western hemisphere affairs at the White House National Security Council.

The debate continues while the Summit delegations are pouring into Cartagena.

“Drug cartels have infiltrated the police, the prosecution service, and the judiciary. And in El Salvador even lawmakers have been on the drug traffickers’ payroll,” Salvadoran political analyst Roberto Cañas told IPS.

In Cañas’ view, “it is time to depenalise drugs,” since so far, the war on drugs “has failed.”

However, there are powerful interests that oppose such a move, he said, such as “money laundering, a major activity, for which no statistics are ever publicised in El Salvador.”

* With additional reporting by Constanza Vieira (Cartagena), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Edgardo Ayala (San Salvador).

Teenage pregnancies are on the rise in Guatemala, along with the drop-out rate in schools, family breakdown and many other related social ills.

More and more girls in Guatemala are having babies. Credit: Fiat Luxe/CC BY-ND 2.0

A graph of statistics from the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance shows a rising trend, with 41,529 pregnancies in girls aged 10 to 19 in 2009, 45,048 in 2010 and 49,231 in 2011, giving an average of 135 a day last year.

A long list of factors contribute to early motherhood, ranging from lack of sex education to the influence of the Catholic Church’s ban on contraceptive use, and impunity for statutory rape, according to Mirna Montenegro of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Observatory, a local NGO.

“Imagine! In 2011 there were 21 babies born to 10-year-old girls! What’s more, we have no social protection system for them,” she told IPS.

“We are one of the few countries where there are so many pregnancies among 10 to 14-year-old girls. In 2011 alone there were 3,046 births to such young mothers in Guatemala,” she said. “Pregnancy in an underage girl is the product of statutory rape, so logically there should be an equal number of court prosecutions under way, but this is not so,” she complained.

Montenegro said the Guatemalan justice system finds it problematic to punish offenders in these cases. “The younger the victim, the closer the family ties between herself and the rapist,” she said.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to using birth control methods and to a comprehensive approach to sexuality that includes avoiding unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is also a hurdle, Montenegro said. “It affects the development of attitudes within the family,” she said.

The Health and Education Ministries signed a cooperation agreement in 2010 to implement programmes to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the six provinces with the highest HIV/AIDS incidence, maternal mortality rates and other indicators of concern.

“Progress has been made in raising the awareness of teachers, developing teaching materials and learning modules, and analysing the context of the situation in the provinces. But these things have not yet reached classrooms, as they are bogged down in provincial and ministerial head offices,” Montenegro said.

The Family Planning Law, regulations for which were adopted in 2009, brought sex education into primary schools and facilitated access to contraceptive methods. The following year the Healthy Maternity Act was approved, which obliges health authorities to provide basic services and care before, during and after pregnancy.

But the new laws have not been successful in curbing teen pregnancies.

One out of five Guatemalan mothers are aged between 10 and 19, the highest adolescent fertility rate in Latin America, according to a 2011 study on the state of the world’s girls, titled “Because I Am a Girl: So, What About Boys?” by Plan International, a child protection agency.

Deep-rooted cultural factors also encourage pregnancies and prevent women from taking advantage of opportunities for a better life.

Cecilia Fajardo, a psychologist with the Family Welfare Association of Guatemala (APROFAM), told IPS, “We are still taught that women’s role is to be wives and mothers, which is our right, but we are not told about other avenues of self-improvement.”

Fajardo said there could be more child and teen pregnancies than those reported by the Health Ministry, since “many of the births take place at home, or pregnancies are terminated without the authorities’ knowledge.”

To help teenagers, APROFAM has created innovative programmes in schools for young people of both sexes to come to grips with practical aspects of pregnancy, fatherhood and motherhood, using aids like the electronic baby and the pregnancy simulator.

“The pregnancy simulator is a strap-on garment with an enlarged bust and belly weighing 25 pounds (11 kilograms), the average weight gain a woman experiences in pregnancy. It enables teenagers to experience 26 different signs and symptoms of pregnancy,” Fajardo described.

The electronic baby is a computerised infant-sized doll that mimics the behaviour of a newborn, including crying to signal that it is hungry or tired.

“We give young girls these experiences to give them knowledge about sexuality and reproductive health. We do not impose on them the idea that they should not be mothers,” Fajardo said.

This impoverished Central American country of 14 million people has an adolescent (under-20) birth rate of 114 per 1,000 women in rural areas, according to the National Mother and Child Health Survey for 2008-2009.

Silvia Maldonado of the National Alliance of Indigenous Women’s Organisations for Reproductive Health (ALIANMISAR) told IPS that dropping out of school, malnutrition and discrimination are among the consequences of teen pregnancies.

She said education was one of the most important factors for the prevention of adolescent pregnancy, which severely curtails life opportunities for thousands of teenagers and creates the phenomenon of “kids having kids.”

“It is essential to talk about sexuality in schools, and for parents to talk to their children in depth about this issue in order to prevent more teen pregnancies,” Maldonado said.

The lack of adequate management of electronic waste in Guatemala is posing a serious threat to the environment and health, as demand for electronic devices has soared to the point that there are more cell phones than people.

E-waste goes untreated in Guatemala. Credit: Alex E. Proimos/CC BY 2.0

Chrome, mercury, lead, selenium and arsenic are some of the most toxic substances in e-waste, which can cause serious damages to health, Mayron España, director of E-Waste de Guatemala, an NGO that collects such products for recycling, told IPS.

Brain damage, cancer, miscarriages, reduced male fertility and genetic malformations in foetuses are some of the health effects caused by exposure to these heavy metals, studies have found.

“And all of these metals end up in the water sooner or later,” because they seep into groundwater or because e-waste is dumped into surface water bodies like rivers, said España, whose organisation collects e-waste to be recycled abroad.

“Water is the big environmental buffer. It is also a finite resource on a global level, which means it will become scarce,” he said.

Guatemala does not even have general guidelines on the handling of solid waste, the expert noted. In the meantime, he said, the use of electronic devices is growing exponentially.

In the case of cell phones, “they are used for just six or nine months, because new models are constantly coming out,” he said. “Fashion, tastes, attitudes and habits are driving people to consume more and more things, even when they don’t need them.”

According to Guatemala’s telecoms regulator, the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones, the number of mobile phones in use in 2011 reached 20.7 million in this country of 14 million people – up from just 3.1 million in 2004.

And a similar increase has been seen in the case of computers, digital cameras and TV sets, and other products.

But these devices are highly polluting. A single nickel cadmium battery cell phone can pollute 50,000 litres of water, according to environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

A study on e-waste by the Guatemalan Centre for Cleaner Production, “Diagnóstico sobre la generación de desechos electrónicos en Guatemala”, concluded that by 2015, at least 13,000 tons of cell phones and 18,600 tons of computers and accessories will have been thrown out in this Central American country.

The report proposes the “three R’s”- reduce, reuse, recycle – to curb the negative impact of e-waste on the environment.

The study, carried out by two engineers, Sonia Solís and Andrés Chicol, calls for the formulation of e-waste management plans as part of a national strategy that should include activities aimed at raising public awareness about the problem.

Adriana Grimaldi, a chemistry professor at the private Mariano Gálvez University, stressed the urgent need to address the question of e-waste because of the serious risks posed to the environment and human health.

Grimaldi said PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), whose production is banned by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, are among the “most powerful and carcinogenic” substances used in electrical devices like transformers and capacitors.

She told IPS that people “should not fight with chemical elements, which can also be very useful, but must learn to manage them property, because otherwise they can pose serious dangers.”

Julio Urías, an adviser to the Red Giresol – the Guatemalan network of environmental promoters for prevention and integrated management of solid waste – says there is much to be done in the area of waste management in Guatemala, although he also mentioned important efforts by social organisations and private companies.

He said that an essential step is to draft and enforce “viable legislation.” He also called for “education and information for the population about consumption habits.”

In addition, the expert said “incentives and clear rules are needed in order to take advantage of the profits that e-waste management and recycling can generate. But just because a law is passed doesn’t mean things are going to work,” he added.

The government’s National Commission on Solid Waste Management estimates that just five percent of the 7,000 tons of solid waste produced daily in this country is recycled.

However, there are positive experiences with recycling, which show that it can generate opportunities for people who have none.

That is the case of Edulibre, a non-profit that donates old computers to public schools in poor areas.

“Companies donate their old computers to us,” Javier Hernández, a computer technician who works with Edulibre, told IPS. “We check them and install our own operating system that we have adapted for Guatemala, from free software.”

Since 2007, the organisation has also set up five computer labs in the capital and other parts of the country, which serve more than 1,000 children, while protecting the environment by reusing old equipment.

“We want land where we can live and grow food to feed ourselves,” said Pedro Ichich, one of several thousand indigenous farmers who marched to the Guatemalan capital to demand solutions to the ageold conflict over land.

Indigenous people in Guatemala are being displaced from their land. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The government of right-wing President Otto Pérez Molina met with representatives of the demonstrators this week, and they are now waiting to see what will happen.

Ichich, his wife and five children jointed the protesters on the 214-km march that started out on Mar. 19 from Cobán, in the northern province of Alta Verapaz, and reached Guatemala City eight days later, where they gathered outside the seat of government.

“We want to be where we used to live, where the blood of our compañeros was shed,” said Ichich, whose family was among the campesinos or peasant farmers who were violently evicted by police and soldiers on Mar. 15, 2011 from land in Polochic valley in Alta Verapaz, which sugarcane growers claim as their own.

Three campesinos were killed during the forced eviction of some 3,000 Q’eqchi Maya Indians.

“They left us in the street, with just the clothes on our back,” Ichich told IPS. “The police, the military and the sugar company’s private security destroyed our crops. Since then we haven’t had any work, and we have to ask people to let us spend the night on their property. So we are asking the government to do something.”

Chanting slogans like “water and land can’t be sold” and “No to evictions”, around 5,000 native campesinos from different parts of the country reached the Plaza de la Constitución in the centre of the capital on Tuesday Mar. 27.

The meeting between a delegation of protesters and Pérez Molina stretched from Tuesday evening into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

“The ball is in their court,” Daniel Pascual, a leader of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC – Committee for Campesino Unity), the small farmers’ association that organised the march, told IPS. “The agrarian issue and hunger have become a focus of national debate in these nine days. I don’t think the president can ignore this problem.”

Pascual said the protesters presented Pérez Molina with a list of more than 50 demands with regard to the land problem. But they agreed to put a priority on eight issues.

These urgent questions include the demand for a subsidy equivalent to 39 million dollars to help campesinos pay their debts on land; land for the displaced communities in Polochic valley; a moratorium on mining activity; and the removal of military bases from areas experiencing social conflicts, he said.

“It’s not that we’re giving up on the rest of the issues, it’s just that this is the first set of questions that we are putting a priority on, to facilitate a response by the government,” Pascual said.

Other demands are a halt to evictions from rural property and the cancellation of operating permits for hydroelectric plants.

Pérez Molina and the rural leaders agreed to meet again on Apr. 19 to work out the details of the eight agreements on the top priority issues and review the mechanisms to be put in place to address the rest of the demands.

Before meeting with the president, the campesinos met with legislators who want to pass a law on integral rural development, which organisations of small farmers see as crucial to giving them access to land.

They also met with representatives of the judiciary, to ask judges to take an impartial stance when it comes to issuing eviction orders.

In Guatemala, the gap between the rich minority and the poor majority is one of the largest in the world.

And in the countryside, the growing agribusiness sector is increasingly coming into conflict with indigenous communities, who are fighting for their right to land to grow subsistence crops.

A full 80 percent of farmland is in the hands of just five percent of the country’s 14 million people, while half of the population lives in poverty and 17 percent in extreme poverty, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) figures.

The campesino groups are now waiting for the authorities to live up to their promise to address the situation, although the outlook is not encouraging.

“Experience shows that the post-agreement stage is generally long and exhausting, with the campesino movement making a huge effort and the state failing to comply in the end,” Eugenio Incer, an activist with the Association for the Advance of Social Sciences in Guatemala (AVANCSO), told IPS.

He said that in this situation, there is a clash of two different visions of how to build the country, in social, political and cultural terms.

“On one hand, the communities want the capacity to make decisions on what is happening in their territories, and they want legal frameworks like (International Labour Organisation) Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous people to be enforced,” he said.

“On the other hand is the Guatemalan state’s deeply-rooted vision of not living up to these legal frameworks and facilitating the operation of economic activities that the communities are not necessarily asking for, such as mining, oil drilling, and extensive monoculture,” he said.

Incer said the debate should take place at the national level.

Otherwise, “we will have serious environmental sustainability problems in 50 years, because the level of damage caused to water and forests is severe. We have to see how to achieve a national pact to keep poverty levels and inequality from continuing to grow,” he said.

Other activists expressed doubts as well. Melvin Picón with the Manuel Tot Council of Peoples of Tezulutlán told IPS that the government’s economic policies are “incoherent” and fail to take into account that the country is considered one of the most vulnerable to climate change in the world.

“Despite this, the large-scale exploitation of our natural resources continues, and we are going to suffer the consequences,” he said.

Picón said “the local communities and all of us who are engaged in this struggle are more than willing to take to the streets again and demand justice for the country’s indigenous people.”

According to official statistics, indigenous people comprise close to 40 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million, although native organisations put the proportion at over 60 percent.

By Danilo Valladares and - -
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

“It benefits both our finances and our health, because the vegetables help prevent illness while they nourish our children,” says Lesbia Huertas, standing in the middle of her yard filled with containers sprouting vegetables in Palencia, 28 km northeast of the Guatemalan capital.

“I grow radishes, beets, parsley, leeks, carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers…this way I save around 15 quetzals (two dollars) a week on vegetables,” she says proudly.

As she waters the plants in her recycled plastic containers, Huertas explains to IPS that here in the front yard of her modest home she has planted 16 kinds of vegetables, which she harvests every day when she prepares the meals for her husband and two children.

For irrigation and household use, she has a 4,000-litre tank for harvesting rainwater, which she has learned to disinfect to prevent diseases.

Huertas is one of 562 women participating in a programme aimed at the supply and use of good quality water in urban and peri-urban agriculture to improve food and nutritional security, in the small towns of Chinautla and Palencia on the outskirts of Guatemala City.

The project has been run since June 2010 by the agriculture ministry with support from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

In Latin America, the initiative is also being carried out in Ecuador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

According to FAO, one billion people now suffer chronic hunger worldwide. And by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity.

Against this backdrop, protecting water and food security is crucial.

“What we are doing is training low-income people so they can plant family gardens in areas ranging from 12 to 15 square metres,” says Elder Berduo, with FAO Guatemala.

“Using a manual, we explain to them the basics of nutrition, which elements different foods contain and why they are nutritious, what each vegetable offers. And then we show them how to plant and care for a garden,” he explains to IPS.

Besides training, the project provides inputs like seeds, organic compost, and rainwater collection and storage tanks.

According to Berduo, the initial goal of the project is for the families to produce vegetables for their own consumption, while the second stage will focus on growing a surplus, which the families can sell to boost their incomes.

The results speak for themselves. “Everything I know I learned in the training, because I had never planted a garden before. All I grew before were mint and cilantro,” says Olga Foronda, who now grows 13 kinds of vegetables in cut-off soft drink bottles, trays, old pots and pans and other improvised containers.

“This benefits me in many ways, because the kids need to eat many different kinds of vegetables, and growing them at home means they’re healthier because we don’t use chemicals,” Foronda adds, chatting with IPS in her yard, in the middle of artichoke, carrot, onion and spinach plants.

The success of her garden has awakened the curiosity of neighbour women, who often stop by and ask her how to grow vegetables.

“They always come and ask me what they would need in order to do this,” says Foronda, who has learned how to garden, make compost and use water efficiently, while learning about the nutrients and benefits offered by each kind of vegetable.

This initiative is just one of a variety of efforts to fight hunger in Guatemala, where one out of two children are chronically malnourished – the highest rate in Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund.

Beatriz Juárez, the project’s nutritionist, tells IPS that before the families involved in the project began to plant their gardens, their nutritional levels were measured, and 33 percent of the project’s beneficiaries were found to suffer from chronic malnutrition.

“They used to eat perulero and güisquil squash, and oranges, which were the only things they grew. Also, they have limited access to markets, where at any rate there is only a narrow variety of food available,” the nutritionist said.

The project has focused on production of red vegetables, like tomatoes, which contain lycopene, a carotenoid and antioxidant that may lower the risk of cancer; leafy greens, which are rich in glucosinolates, which also protect against cancer; and white vegetables like onions, which have powerful antioxidants.

“The more varied our diet, the better we can avoid cancer and chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and obesity,” said Juárez. “And we can do that by eating more fruits and vegetables.

“In late April, we’ll carry out an evaluation of how people are eating, to gauge the impact of the project on the families, who so far have 531 gardens, and to assess the benefits for their health,” she said.

According to FAO, the project will end in November, and the goal is to have 800 urban gardens up and running by that time.

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