The Raccoons make their mark on Guatemala City

(above, from left: Karla Maldonado, Mario Gonzalez and Maria José España)

By Tracy L. Barnett

GUATEMALA CITY – You wouldn’t know it from a drive across town, but crisscrossing the chaotic sprawl of Guatemala City is a network of lush green forests and streams, inhabited by wildlife, birds and, occasionally, people. I saw a bit of it my first day in the city, staying with a family in Ciudad Nueva, a comfortable residential neighborhood not far from the Centro Historico. Green tree canopies peeking up behind walls of corrugated sheet metal, but no way to get inside, at least as far as I could see. A shabby little park, all locked up behind a wall, was the closest thing I found to public space in my morning runs.

What I didn’t know that first few days in the city was that this shabby little park and the walled-off, tree-filled canyon behind it had a story, and behind that story were the Mapaches – and in a roundabout way, so was the giant sinkhole that swallowed a factory at an intersection in the same neighborhood, just a few blocks away.
I heard about the Mapaches my first weekend, when I went cycling with Critical Mass Guatemala.

“Let’s see if the Mapaches show up – they’re almost always here,” said Manuel, the leader. “Mapaches?” I asked, curious. Cycling raccoons? What an image!

They didn’t show up that day, and it wasn’t until a week later that I ran into Mapache Maria José España, a communications student who was in Xela at a conference for the Movimiento Agua y Juventud, Movement for Water and Youth, and she told me the story of how the Mapaches got their name.

They got their start in 2008, just a few neighbors and friends from Ciudad Nueva, trying to promote the city’s plan to turn the barranco into a city park. They led walks in the park, explored the trails and blazed new ones with their machetes, attended meetings and talked to neighbors and officials.

It wasn’t happening, and there was a reason why: the mayor had already decided to use it for a warehouse for construction supplies and as a dump for construction waste. Their petitions were ignored.

They contacted the city’s Human Rights representative and she came out to have a look, and they rallied the neighbors, only to be met with the riot police. Not a good sign.

The whole campaign ended with the city sending in the bulldozers and leveling the area, leaving a tiny bit of fenced-in grass – which quickly turned to dirt – for a soccer field. That was the locked-up park I saw on my first visit to Guatemala City.

The worst part was the day after the massacre, when they discovered several dead raccoons tossed into the bushes in what was left of the barranco. They were devastated, and they took the emblem of the playful animals as their own.

“Mapaches are smart and strong and organized, and they are very clean – they always wash their food before eating it,” noted Karla Maldonado, a freelance editor who is in many ways the driving force behind the Mapaches.

After the loss of their beloved barranco, they considered their options. The whole experience had made them painfully aware of the lack of public space in their city. It also sensitized them to the need for grassroots organizing in a city where all too often neighbors were afraid to open their doors to each other.

They sponsored an ecology festival each year, on Independence Avenue, the main street in their neighborhood, on Independence Day. This spring, they joined forces with Julio Morales, curator of the botanical garden at the University of San Carlos, in a project to identify and photograph many of the blooming plants in the few green spaces that remained in Ciudad Nueva.

The best of these were compiled in a beautiful, glossy two-year calendar, together with information about the plants, their medicinal properties and other facts, and distributed to neighbors throughout the zone. The project was funded by grants from the University of San Carlos, the National Institute of Biodiversity of Costa Rica, and the government of Norway. (see below for information on how to get the calendar)

The neighbors were delighted with the project, and the Mapaches started getting feedback, e-mails, friendly smiles and even donations from neighbors who had never been interested in them before.

Then came the volcano that spewed ash all over the city, and then Tropical Storm Agatha. When the famous sinkhole appeared in the middle of the downpour, one of the Mapaches, Mario Gonzalez, was one of the first on the scene, and it was he who called the police. Since it’s their neighborhood, they were quick to see that the response of the government was to assign blame to various parties, and nobody was attending to the emergency.

The group shifted its focus and began sharing food and resources with the neighbors who lived around the sinkhole and had lost their power. Then, Karla put her research skills to work. They used their Facebook page, and their blog, “Ciudad Nueva Unete” (Ciudad Nueva Unite), to create an archive of news and other reports, and they put together a detailed history of what happened and why … basically a history of neglect that has left the city sewage system, which began as the first and most ambitious in Central America, in a state of complete disrepair, with wastewater ending up back in their beloved barrancas.

The Mapaches have become the go-to place for everyone up to the local media who is looking for information on the history of sinkholes in the city.

“What we’re hoping to do is to arm citizens with information about what’s happening here,” said Karla. “This, unfortunately, is our environment too, and if we don’t do something about it, who will?”

The Mapaches 2010-2011 Wildflower Calendar
GuatemalaPlantasCiudad-Calendario2010-2011
(The calendar is available for download here; it is free, but if you’d like you can make donations to The Mapaches by contacting Karla Maldonado at karlamaldonadop@gmail.com.

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