By Tracy L. Barnett
The Esperanza Project

It was a beautiful day for a hike – and a fascinating, if not always beautiful, route. The Fifth Annual Camina por Guadalajara, an event sponsored by the sustainable cities group Com:Plot, drew a lively and diverse crowd to Plaza Juarez on Avenida de la Independencia.

The idea of this walk – as with the previous ones organized by Com:Plot and a sister organization – Ciudad Para Todos, City for All – was to focus attention on a cross-section of the city, step by step and block by block. The entire day would be spent traversing this historic avenue, from the city’s historic center and beautiful plazas to the newly developing suburbs and beyond, to a spectacular surprise (for this reporter, at least) the very end. (These two groups were profiled in my 2010 visit to Guadalajara during the initial yearlong voyage through Latin America: Com:Plot conspires to take back a city and A city for all, not just for cars.)

Along the way, zigzagging back and forth into the neighborhoods that line this avenue, the group would observe and document the city’s historic treasures and glaring deficiencies – or, as the diplomatic Com:Plot leader Alfredo Hidalgo puts it, “opportunities” – sometimes just a few paces apart.

“The Calzada de la Independencia is a territories full of challenges, surprises and history, and it will surely give us an opportunity to reencounter the city,” said Alfredo in his welcome to about 100 people who had gathered to take part in the walk. “Here we will get to look at the city with an eye to the past but above all with a lot of optimism at the future.”

Alfredo, like many of those who joined the walk, is an architect and an advocate of progressive planning for a more inclusive, more sustainable and more walkable city. Guadalajara, despite its nearly 500 years of colonial history, is a metropolis that grew up with the automobile, like most U.S. cities, but with little long-range planning, and the modern metropolitan ills of congestion, pollution and deforestation plague an otherwise beautiful city.

A perfect example was the park to our immediate right, Parque Agua Azul. It’s a lovely, shady park alive with Tapatíos (Guadalajarans) enjoying a sunny Sunday – but the blue water the park was named for has diminished to a shadow of its former self. This entire area, almost as far as the eye could see, was an enormous lake, explained journalist and historian Guillermo Gomez, who narrated a fascinating section of the walk. During the Porfiriato – the time when Porfirio Diaz was president – elegant bathhouses lined the lake, and people would come and take the waters.

The advent of the automobile changed all of that, along with the rest of the city, Gomez said. The lake was gradually drained to build avenues like this one, and the river that fed Agua Azul was channelled under the street in an enormous storm drain. Now the once-grand Rio San Juan de Dios is long forgotten, just another carrier of the city’s sewage.

But not to dwell on unfortunate decisions of the past… the upbeat group headed off toward a lovely set of arches, past a florist shop and out into the sunny day, cameras at the ready to document the face of the Calzada, for better and for worse.

Soon we took a detour to the east into the nearly forgotten neighborhood of Analco. We hadn’t gone a block when the sidewalk disappeared.

“Where’s the sidewalk?” exclaimed an indignant Guillermo, pointing to a long stretch alongside the street where the foot traffic made its way along a long stretch of dirt and gravel. “It’s one thing to have a destroyed sidewalk, but quite another to have no sidewalk at all.”

The Analco neighborhood, Guillermo explained, had been a thriving hub of activity in its day, but had always been working-class. The more monied folk built their homes on the western side of the street, and to this day, a marked difference can be seen in the character of the neighborhoods. But Analco’s fate took a nosedive on April 22, 1992, the day a gas line exploded under the neighborhood, killing at least 300 people (according to the official count; unofficial reports put the number of dead closer to 2,000.

Jesus Arreola, a professor of urban planning at the University of Guadalajara, grew up in this neighborhood and remembers it as vibrant and full of life – a place where a young boy could easily go anywhere he needed to go on a bicycle. Now most of the young people have moved to the suburbs, leaving the elderly and marginal to inhabit the deteriorated infrastructure.

“We citizens need to convince the government to take on the necessary projects to bring life back to these barrios,” he said.

Abandoned lots filled with weeds and trash line the street near the corner where the explosion took place, twenty years after the fateful event.

Lots of opportunities here, he pointed out. A once beautiful art-deco building…

An abandoned corn-flour mill, where people would bring their corn for miles around…

A thriving local market, a bit dilapidated but still a historic gem…

And also home to the sweetest elotes in the city, according to Guillermo…

But also home to some serious problems.

Here we also passed by the once-glorious Coloseum Arena, the biggest and best of its day, where all the famous boxing and lucha libre giants of the ’30s and ’40s would fight for international glory.

Here, fortunately, it was time to head back to the Calzada – just a block back to the west. And what a difference a block or two or three can make! … as we were soon to see…

Monument to Mexican Independence

Site of the historic and formerly grand Alameda Theater, whose inaugural gala in 1942 was attended by the beloved Mexican Golden Age film stars Maria Felix and Cantinflas, it closed in 1980 and remained abandoned for 20 years, when it was demolished to make way for the shopping mall that is now home to McDonald’s and Cineplex.

Thankfully, the nearby Hospicio Cabañas enjoyed a much different fate. Built in 1791 as an orphanage and hospital, it continued to operate until 1980, when the Cabañas Institute took it over and restored it into a beautiful cultural center and home to some of the most spectacular murals of José Clemente Orozco.

Behind the hospicio could be found the likewise historic, vast and somewhat chaotic Mercado Libertad, more commonly known as the Mercado de San Juan de Dios, named for the neighborhood, which was named for the no longer extant river… here you can buy anything from traditional handmade candies and serapes and handcrafts to handguns and ammunition, Guillermo informs me – this latter comes as a surprise to me, because handguns are actually strictly regulated here in Mexico… or so I thought.

Here we were now in the famous Plaza de los Mariachis, also recently refurbished …

And then the beautiful Plaza Tapatía, one of a series of interlinked plazas lined with historic buildings and monuments that are the pride of historic Guadalajara.

We could have easily lingered in the historic center all day, watching the people, listening to music, exploring the iconic cathedral and museums and plazas filled with public art and tempting restaurants and cafes. But we were on a mission – the Calzada called – and we marched on.

Again, just a block or two away from the beautifully restored Calzada, a different face of the city was evident.

(Translation: Dear Virgin of Guadalupe, I am a sinner; send me the punishments that you want but please don’t send me another government by the PAN – the conservative National Action Party.)

But soon we were arriving at the recently restored Parque Morelos, considered by some historians to be the city’s oldest landmark. Still with its original kiosk and wrought-iron benches, the park is an oasis of green in a concrete jungle.

Now it was on to the historic Barrio Retiro, named for the fact that it was on the outskirts of the growing city at the time of its founding. The neighborhood became known for its thriving tannery industry and was home to the beautiful Templo de Nuestra Señora del Rosario…

… and for something completely different, a little architectural oddity, referred to by Norma, one of my walking companions, as “Guadalajara’s tiniest block.”

Soon I caught up with Patricio Alva from Ciudad Para Todos. He had taken along spray cans and stencils to draw attention to the most grievous errors in city planning that the walkers observed along the way – such as the lack of ramps for wheelchair users:

… spectacular holes in the sidewalk:

… and a wheelchair ramp so steep that to traverse it would mean an almost inevitable crash at the end:

Alfredo’s children quickly became Patricio’s alert assistants, spotting pedestrian affronts on every corner.

Another Cuidad Para Todos intervention was the widespread distribution of “wikimultas,” or citizen tickets left on the windshields of rude drivers who blocked pedestrian walkways or otherwise invaded the space of non-drivers.

In this case, a large swath of grassy green public park was fenced in and empty, while children played in a dirt-covered lot nearby.

“Why close up a park? Parks are meant to be open, and free…” lamented Jesus Arreola.

(Translation: FINED by vigilant citizens….We invite you to cooperate in the improvement, harmony and mobility of our city. Respecting each other we will achieve a city that is worthy of all of us.)

I also caught up with architecture students Andrea Cornejo and Juan Pablo Morett, who were on their first Caminata and loved the opportunity to see a much-traveled route from a different perspective.

“For one thing, you realize all the obstacles a differently abled person has to face,” said Andrea, “and you also realize that there are some areas that are very much taken care of by the government and others that are super deficient – but you also see beautiful parts of the city that are really beautiful that you never noticed before.

“I hope the government will realize there are many people who care about the city,” she added, “and that we are aware of the problems that exist, that it’s not enough to just put in a Macrobus to cover up the problem in one area.”

I also ran into Yeriel from GDL en Bici, another of the energetic and innovative groups that are pushing Guadalajara to be a better, more livable city – in this case, for bicyclists. On this particular walk, Yeriel was observing how the recently installed MacroBus – highly controversial before its installation, but heavily used now – has changed the dynamic of the avenue. The traffic flows much more smoothly now, he said. And there’s another big advantage, he added, only a little bit ironically. “We now have a huge super bike lane.”

As he spoke, a bicyclist pedaled swiftly down the Macrobus late – completely illegally – but also completely unimpeded by traffic, and probably much safer than he would have been in normal traffic. Yeriel says the cyclists usually hear or see the Macrobus coming and get out of the way but if not, the drivers will honk.

It was after 2 by the time we reached the stadium and the group broke for “lonches” – the tapatio word for sandwiches – and I made a break for the Plaza de Tecnologia, back in the center, where I had an errand to do. Sadly, thanks to traffic and parking issues, it was two hours later when I was finally able to catch up to the group. I missed the Guadalajara zoo, the beautiful colonial pueblo of Huentitan – now swallowed up by the metropolis but still filled with charm – and the only stretch of perfect sidewalk on the whole avenue, according to the ever-observant Karla Preciado of Ciudad Para Todos – in front of the Coca-Cola corporate headquarters.

I had grabbed the new Metro Bus, a highly efficient, clean and speedy bus line that traverses the length of the Calzada, and it whisked me past traffic and through the bustling neighborhoods of Independencia and Huentitan, then through an area that seemed under construction. Finally the bus stopped; it was the end of the line.

I was able to reconnect with the group just as they finished the walk – and this is where I was in for an amazing surprise.

Karla was waiting for me at the bus terminal and we entered a park called the Mirador, meaning lookout. Suddenly the trees opened and my jaw dropped. The vista at the end of the Calzada de Independencia is nothing short of spectacular. I shook my head and took another look. The grandeur of the Barranca de Huentitan, or Huentitan Canyon, spread out before me like a panoramic postcard.

And there, posed in front of the barranca in a perfect group shot, was our group of walkers – some 60 or so made it through the day to the very end.

For more information about Com:Plot, and to learn how they will follow up on this action, follow their blog at http://citacomplot.blogspot.com/

For more innovative actions from Ciudad Para Todos, or to download their wikimulta for your own use, see their blog at http://ciudadparatodos.org. They are also very active on Facebook.

To follow the wealth of activities sponsored by GDL en Bici and a plethora of other biking groups, go to their Facebook page and blog: http://gdlenbici.org/

And here’s another great GDL group I just learned about: Las Otras Caras de la Ciudad, The Other Faces of the City, on Facebook at Lasotrascaras Delaciudad.

VALLE DE CAUCA, Colombia – When Alicia Calle, an environmental scientist with Yale’s Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative, first told me of El Hatico Nature Reserve, her face lit up for the first time since I’d met her an hour ago. We’d been talking about the state of the environment in Colombia, a subject with much to lament, given the spread of mining operations, cattle ranching, vast monocultures of sugarcane and African palm and coca, deforestation, water contamination, the same story throughout the Americas.

What is it that gives you hope, I asked her, as I do in every interview. It was then that she pulled out a booklet and started showing me photos of El Hatico.

“Let me be clear: I don’t like cattle farming; I think it’s created terrible environmental problems and social inequalities throughout its development in Latin America. But this is a place I’d really like you to see, a place that’s turned a major problem into a part of the solution.”

I looked at the photograph and thought I was seeing my grandfather’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks: clusters of russet-colored cattle peacefully grazing among shady forests of mature trees. Nothing like the razed expanses that stretched to the horizons, cattle farms I’d seen throughout the Guatemalan Peten, the Argentine Chaco, in rural Mexico and Paraguay.

Cattle farmers have cleared millions of acres of rainforest and tropical dry forest to create fields for cattle, releasing untold tons of carbon into a steadily heating atmosphere, causing a wave of droughts and erosion, eliminating wildlife habitat and degrading the rivers that flow through. An estimated 27 percent of Colombian land is now used for cattle production, and deforestation continues at the aggressive rate of 300,000 hectares a year, according to an article coauthored by Calle and others published this month in the prestigious professional journal Forest Ecology and Management.

El Hatico, a nine-generation family farm that has become an oasis of biodiversity among the sugarcane deserts of the Cauca Valley in Southwest Colombia, chose a different path, and finally, industry and government leaders are beginning to take notice. Now, according to Calle, the El Hatico model is being replicated around the country through a new government program, and other countries are watching to see the results.

That’s how I found myself riding shotgun with Alicia’s sister, Zoraida, making our way through miles of sugarcane fields as she told me a bit of El Hatico’s history.

“We’re at a very exciting moment in the development of this system,” Zoraida was telling me. As a specialist in ecological restoration with CIPAV (Center for the Investigation of Sustainable Agropecuarial Systems), she sees El Hatico and its Intensive Silvopastoral Systems approach to cattle farming as a key component in the rehabilitation of degraded tropical lands. CIPAV has dedicated 19 years to this project, and she has never seen the receptivity that has opened up in the past year.

“Every year we’re receiving visits from two or three Mexican producers and technicians; we’re seeing farmers from Nicaragua, Panama, Brazil, Cuba and Argentina. They want to see how it’s possible to do what they are doing.”

Conventional cattle farming requires the application of 100 to 800 kilograms of urea fertilizer per hectare per year, costly imported fossil fuel-based fertilizers that create runoff into regional streams, degrading water quality and suppressing the fish populations. The tropical forests that once stretched the length and breadth of the Cauca Valley were felled more than a century ago for lumber and many hectares were converted to cattle farms; since then, the more lucrative business of sugar has supplanted most of the cattle, with even greater environmental impacts because of widespread herbicide and pesticide use.

Finally we are leaving the monochromatic landscape of cane and entering a promenade of graceful saman trees. An enormous bird swoops across the road in front of us, as if to welcome us to its world – a garrapatero, or yellow-headed caracara, Zoraida tells me.

A flock of black ibises with their curving red beaks flutters by and lands on the lush grass in the forest at our left. A cluster of white cattle egrets alights amid the roan-colored cattle to our right.

“Oh, look, it’s a cocli,” exclaims Zoraida as a huge and magnificent pair of birds lands in a field along the way. These birds are also nearly extinct in the region. “These birds are almost extinct in the Cauca Valley – but here they have a home.”

We have arrived in El Hatico.

We pull up to an elegant iron gate and Carlos Molina is there to greet us, the eldest brother in a family of six brothers and sisters who tend the heritage of their grandfathers and serve as agroforestry educators, agronomists and entrepreneurs. A tall, handsome man with an easy smile under his broad-brimmed straw hat, he’s delighted to learn of my grandfather, the agroforestry pioneer, and my mother, the organic farmer, and we connect immediately.

My grandfather passed away in April, and since then I have felt his presence with me strongly – especially on this day, as I invited him along for the ride. I think he was pleased with what he saw.

Carlos showed us around the house first, a graceful relic from the late 1700s whose terra cotta tile roof had survived its 230 years with little damage, but some of the beams were beginning to bow, and workmen were carefully disassembling it, replacing the bowed segments and marveling at the integrity of the original structure.
“Look at this giant reed,” Carlos said, shaking his head in wonder at the strength of the caña brava, a local species used to build the roof. “Just as strong as it was 200 years ago.”

The same could be said for this family and its farm, which has held together through two centuries of revolution and armed conflict, drug wars and economic crises and climate crises, an oasis amid the storms.

Soon we were joined by another of the Molina brothers, the equally charismatic Enrique, along with an agronomist and an environmental educator from Costa Rica who had come to tour the farm as well.
“The problem of the defense of the forests is of anguishing seriousness and the most terrible threat to the future of the region,” wrote Enrique and Carlos’ great uncle, Ciro Molina Garcés, in 1937.

By 1942, vast expanses throughout the region had been cleared by logging and cattle operations, as we see in the aerial photos that begin our presentation. By 1986, the landscape had been converted to a patchwork cane farms. Only the dark patch of Hatico remained as forest.

Today El Hatico is a mixed-use farming operation; 32 percent is organic sugar cane; only 5.5 percent is pure hardwood forest, but another nearly 9 percent is native bamboo forest, while 12.7 percent is under what is called SSPI, Intensive Silvopastoral System by its Spanish acronym, and this is the part that is being closely watched by industry leaders.

“When we talk to agricultural producers, they look around and say, oh, this isn’t good. Our fathers and grandfathers taught us you have to cut the trees down,” Carlos said. “But I tell them, look around; see for yourselves. We have 80 percent canopy cover here, and look at the quality and quantity of this grass. And this is with zero chemical inputs. Conservation and production do not compete; they work together.”

In terms of cost, the El Hatico balance sheet comes out shining. Due in part to improved production and in part to a greatly decreased cost in inputs – zero agrochemicals, zero soy supplements for the animals because of the higher nutritional value of their grazing plants, and greatly reduced irrigation costs and the associated electricity bill – El Hatico shows that conservation is good business.

In addition, the Molinas point out, they are providing priceless environmental services: carbon fixation, oxygen production, hydrogen cycle regulation, productive capacity of the soil and conservation of biodiversity.

But what really captured the attention of industry leaders was the production at El Hatico during the drought of 2009-2010, brought on by El Niño, which devastated producers throughout Latin America. In 2009, El Hatico actually had higher production than the year before – a result that was virtually unheard of throughout the industry. “And this was without irrigation,” emphasized Carlos.

Now it was time for the tour. Carlos and Enrique led us out the cast-iron gate and down the shady lane, where a pair of magnificent coclis were grazing in the tall grasses nearby. Enrique spoke of the challenge of transferring the family’s values to each new generation in an era when most young people leave the farm for other opportunities in the cities.

Here at El Hatico, each child on his or her third birthday is placed on a horse for their first horseback ride. The horse continues to be a tool to connect the children with the farm, and on their first communion they are presented with a small mare.

“It creates a sort of an addiction,” Enrique explained, “but a healthy addiction – it sensitizes them to the family heritage. These three elements – equine, human and natural environment – are a supremely beautiful way to provide environmental education for the children.”

Indeed, the tour of the entire farm is a supremely beautiful educational approach for all of us. The next stop is the under the enormous spreading branches of the grandfather saman tree that Carlos and Enrique’s father planted 70 years ago and has become a symbol of the farm.

Much of the resistance to agroforestry for grazing comes from the idea that broadleaf plants are a weed and must be eliminated, Carlos explains. In fact, shade eliminates the most problematic broadleaf plants, and the native plants provide good, high-protein forage – “so the ‘maleza’ becomes a ‘bueneza,’” he jokes, using a play on the Spanish word for weed (maleza = weed, mal = bad, Buen = good).

Back on the lane to the highway, a flock of fulvous whistling ducks takes flight and the visitors grab for their cameras. I realize I’ve seen more birds here at El Hatico than I’ve seen on several birdwatching expeditions during my journey.

I learn many things on this tour; one is that organic sugarcane can be just as profitable as its chemical-assisted counterparts, and can be companion-planted with other crops. Part of the Molinas’ sugarcane work crew was hard at work when we arrived: a flock of hair sheep, grazing on the weeds that grow up between the rows, eliminating the need for herbicides. When they first began experimenting with the sheep as a means to control weeds, they were very careful to use moveable fences to protect the fledgling cane plants from the animals. One day, however, the fence got knocked down, and the pastor observed, to his surprise, that the sheep didn’t touch the cane – only the broadleaf plants around and between the rows.

In the beginning, the neighbors worried that the sheep would escape and create havoc in their fields. Now, Enrique says, they’re getting a different type of phone call from the neighbors, who want to borrow the sheep for weed removal in their own parcels: “’Send in the contractors!’ they say.”

Perhaps more importantly is the Molina’s alternative to the slash-and-burn approach to waste management that predominates throughout the industry. At the end of each growing season, most cane producers burn their fields, leading to air pollution, vast amounts of carbon pouring into the atmosphere, and destruction of healthy soil ecology, requiring more chemical inputs for the next crop.

Instead of burning, the Molinas use their cane waste to produce a ground-protecting mulch that is returned to the soil with each new season. This biomass is laid between rows and protects the soil moisture, drastically cutting down on the need for irrigation, Carlos explains. He picks up a handful of the brown grassy mass in the irrigation ditch and wrings a stream of water from it to demonstrate its capacity to hold water.

“This was the system we used until the 1960s, when they started burning – because that’s what they used in California and Hawaii,” he explained.

Under normal conditions, it costs a cane grower $300,000 per hectare per year to irrigate, Carlos said. The Molinas were able to irrigate their fields for much less.

Nowadays, Carlos says, visitors to the farm leave enthusiastic about making a transition on their own farms. “People no longer see us as romantics,” he says. “They see us as pragmatics.”

The sun sets quickly here in the tropics, and the insects and treefrogs sing a farewell chorus as we reached the old homestead. Carlos and Enrique shared a farewell song with us as well, one that was written for El Hatico by a friend who is a songwriter.

The Molinas shared with us a sumptuous buffet of typical Colombian cuisine, including fresh orange juice and crispy fried plantains from their own farm, and saw us off with hugs and an invitation to come back soon. As we walked to our car, I looked up and saw a cloud passing the moon. Somewhere out there, I thought, Grandpa was smiling.

El Hatico is open for agroecology tours. It’s less than an hour from Cali and is well worth the trip. Contact CIPAV at rnhatico@cipav.org.co for more information. Meanwhile, here’s the virtual tour.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

SAN RAFAEL RESERVE, Alto Vera Department, Paraguay – “You are about to enter the most beautiful place in the world,” Daniel advised me as we bumped along on the rutted red road, which was growing more rutted and narrower by the minute as the dark forest closed in around us. Waist-high ferns and vine-draped trees rose in the darkness.

It had been two and a half hours since we’d left Encarnacion, Paraguay’s southern hub on the banks of the Parana, and it had been nearly an hour since we’d seen any kind of human habitation. Instead, miles and miles of wheat fields stretched to the horizon – the winter crop here, which will be harvested soon to make way for Roundup-Ready soy.

“The changes here in Alto Vera have been really dramatic in the past few years,” Daniel tells me. He’s watched as the vast Atlantic forests of his native land and the small farms that once dotted them have fallen, mile after mile, to make way for these fields.

“What’s happening is very sad,” he said. “The campesinos who have lived and farmed here all their lives are in a very precarious situation – if they have one bad season, they will be hungry all year. When a big producer comes to them and offers them money for their land, many of them can’t refuse. At $6,000 a hectare, it’s an inconceivable amount of money – they think they’ll be able to live on it for years, and they move to the city. Within a year or two, it’s all gone.”

My time in Paraguay has been colored in so many ways by the sadness of its history. I’ve come to San Rafael, however, to leave that behind for two precious days and nights in a place where a fragment of Paraguay’s former paradise remains, and a dedicated team of conservationists is working to preserve and restore it.

Among many other roles, Daniel Espinola is supervisor of operations at San Rafael and a member of the team at Guyra Paraguay, one of the country’s leading conservation groups. Its name is derived from the Guaraní word for “bird,” given that the organization’s founding mission was the preservation of bird habitat, but the group has grown far beyond its origins.

It was 10:30 by the time we arrived, and night had closed in on the forest long ago, so I would have to wait to judge the accuracy of Daniel’s description. “One always thinks their own land is the most beautiful,” he acknowledged, “so you will have to decide for yourself.”

The research station includes housing for up to 12 visitors; birdwatchers, scientists and ecotourists make their way here from all around the world to see some of the more than 400 different species of birds that make San Rafael their home.

Tomorrow, Daniel told me, I’m going to get to play forest ranger for a day. As I pulled up the comforter in the chilly night and blew out the candle, an absolute silence enveloped me and sleep descended like a warm blanket.

The light was just beginning to stream into my window when an excited commotion arose outside my cabin. It seemed that every bird in creation had gathered in our valley to put on a songbird symphony that very morning. The variety was tremendous; trills and chirps and melodious riffs interlaced in a tapestry of sound that seemed to envelop me in my half-asleep state.

I drowsed and listened for awhile, then threw open the shutters to see a gold-red peeping over the horizon. Joy was in the air; it was infectious. I understood what Daniel had meant.

Before breakfast, I saw a fork-tailed flycatcher, a southern lapwing and a – and was personally saluted by what looked like a versicolored emerald hummingbird who darted into my cabin door, hovered near me for a moment and darted back out. Afterwards I tried to settle in to do a bit of writing before our morning outing but the excitement going on outside my window was too much for me; I grabbed my binoculars and in no time had spotted a plush-crested jay and a ferruginous pygmy owl.

My day was filled with activities; I accompanied Ramon and Ariel on their rounds as they checked a series of sand “traps” set up to record the prints of the park’s feline species. I hoped to see a jaguar print and was disappointed, but we did see fox and armadillo prints. I put the binoculars Daniel loaned me to good use, In the afternoon we took a drive through the grasslands and watched as a trio of bright yellow-breasted carpintero campestres (campo flickers, a type of woodpecker) circled a giant termite hill in search of their six-legged prey and conspired to get some decent shots We spotted an amazing streamer-tailed tyrant, similar to a scissortail but with an even more dramatic double-plumed tail and beautiful cinnamon-colored face-markings, which I was also able to photograph.

Spring is bursting on the preserve, with wildflowers dotting the tallgrass prairie and the niño azote, a delicate pink mimosa-type bloom, sprinkling the forest. The male birds are wearing their most impressive plumage and singing their hearts out in hopes of attracting a mate, and migratory species linger in the vicinity, like the tyrannus savanna, the winsome black-and-white fork-tailed flycatcher I had seen in the morning.

Ariel accompanied me on a hike to the river; I watched a spectacular sunset over the mix of grasslands and forest that surround the station, and took in the riot of birdlife around its edges come back to life.

The time passed all too quickly, and soon I was on my way back to the city with Daniel, but not before visiting with a couple of the campesinos whom Guyra is working with to promote sustainable farming practices.

For more information about Guyra Paraguay, visit their website. The group manages four reserves and a wide range of programs and events in Asuncion and throughout Paraguay.

Meanwhile, a little photo tour of San Rafael:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Mark Camp, Operations and Interim Director, Cultural Survival

By Tracy L. Barnett

ANTIGUA, Guatemala – Between trips to the Guatemalan capital to stalk evasive Congress members and strategizing meetings with community radio activists from Huehuetenango to Lake Atitlan, Mark Camp is a tough man to slow down.

But I managed to catch up with him just as he prepared to pack up his big red truck and head north in his annual migration to Cultural Survival’s headquarters and his other home in Cambridge, Mass., to hear a little about what he’s been doing down here.

Cultural Survival is going on its fortieth year as the leading international organization in promoting indigenous rights and the preservation of indigenous cultures around the world. Mark, as its operations coordinator, can talk for a long time about needs assessments, political strategy, organizational development and the like.

But when he starts to talk about Miguelito, he really comes to life. Miguelito is the 8-year-old president of the youth auxiliary of Radio Sembradora, the community radio station of San Pedro La Laguna in Lake Atitlan, and in many ways he symbolizes the future of community radio and, indeed, the future of indigenous Guatemala.

Camp met Miguelito in a recent visit to the station, where Miguelito and his group of 8, 9 and 10-year-olds had created an alliance with local NGOs to organize a campaign to clean up Lake Atitlan. The iconic lake, once celebrated for its crystal-clear, volcano-encircled waters, has suffered epic proportions of wastewater and agricultural runoff, as well as a more visible problem: floating masses of plastic trash.

Miguelito’s group was broadcasting every Saturday morning, putting on a full lineup of environmental programming, encouraging listeners to fill up and bring in their plastic bottles to be used in building ecological housing.

“This guy’s going to be mayor one day,” Camp recalls with a chuckle.

Community radio in San Pedro and in towns and villages across the country has been giving voice to indigenous people young and old who are trying to preserve their environment, their cultures, their languages and their way of life, and Cultural Survival has tapped into this movement as a high-power way of supporting indigenous communities.

In Palin Esquintla, community radio helped to revive a culture and a language that was on the verge of extinction. In Sumpongo Sacatapequez, it brought a local musical tradition back to life. In town after town, community radio has given indigenous communities information about their rights, about their health, about local political and social issues, about their traditional teachings and much more – in their own languages.

Camp came to realize the potential of community radio when he was working on a publication for Cultural Survival called Voices, a publication aimed at disseminating information about indigenous rights and culture to indigenous groups around the world. The problem, he said, was that even with foundation funding, they were only reaching about 30,000 readers – less that a tenth of 1 percent of the 370 million indigenous people on the planet – and only in colonial languages – Spanish, English, French and Russian – not in their native languages.
Cultural Survival Quarterly, the organization’s venerable award-winning magazine, is an excellent publication, but it’s in English, and it’s mainly geared toward non-indigenous people.

Once the funding ran out, Camp was looking for other ways to get the message out among indigenous peoples.
“After thinking about it a very short while, the obvious choice is radio – and very local radio, because language in lots of indigenous communities is very local,” said Camp. “The people in the next alley might speak a different language – or at least a very different dialect. So we started thinking about community radio and how we could work with community radio stations to put more information on the air for indigenous listeners that might help them defend their own rights.”

In 2004 he began sounding out community leaders throughout Guatemala, and by 2006 they had found funding for a full-fledged Community Radio Project.

Access to community radio stations was one of the rights guaranteed to indigenous communities under the peace accords, but the government never followed through by setting up a system that would really give access to the communities. Frequencies were auctioned off to the highest bidders, and commercial radio operators were willing to pay sums that indigenous peasants would never dream of seeing in their lifetimes.

So the campesino groups decided to operate their stations anyway, and hundreds of them set up pirate operations in whatever facilities they could find and with whatever equipment they could cobble together. The stations were not technically legal, however, and they endured harassment from local government officials, raids on their stations, confiscation of their hard-earned equipment and even, in several cases, imprisonment of the broadcasters. Several associations of community radio stations had tried to get legislation passed that would solve the problem, but had failed. This was the situation when Camp came on the scene.

Cultural Survival’s goals were straightforward. First and foremost, the objective was to get all the community radio associations working together on a consistent piece of legislation guaranteeing each community the right to a radio frequency; second, workshops to teach radio volunteers how to generate high-quality content; third, to help the stations become financially self-sufficient; and fourth, workshops to help them with the nuts and bolts of running a professional radio station.

Three years into the project, the goals are well on their way to completion; most importantly, all the associations have agreed on the same piece of legislation and are working together, alongside Camp, for its passage. Camp is optimistic; all the major parties and many minor parties have signed on to the legislation, and folks at the grassroots, like Tino Recinos (see “Ex-Guerilla changes gun for microphone), are working hard to persuade the last holdouts.

A vote in the Guatemalan legislature is scheduled for Aug. 9, International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. Stay tuned to Cultural Survival’s page at www.culturalsurvival.org and to The Esperanza Project for news.

For excerpts from Mark Camp’s interview in Antigua, Interview with Mark Camp

We’re seated at his kitchen table now, in the home he designed and built, sharing a cup of the freshest coffee I’ve ever tasted. A soft-spoken Kakchiquel Maya with a loose ponytail and a gentle voice, Rony takes a sip of the fragrant brew and settles in to tell me his story.

The light filters in pleasantly from above through a skylight, an artfully placed series of bamboo tubes and the brown, green and white glass cylinders high above us that are set into the adobe walls. Later I learn, to my surprise, that these colorful cylinders are discarded bottles.

A tree trunk with its gracefully gnarled limbs emerges somewhere from the wrought-iron staircase; a lamp woven from bamboo hangs above us. The stone wall and arched door of the sauna in the background, the lush greenery of the garden out back and the savory aroma of home-grown and home-cooked food complete the picture of natural harmony.

I am at home with a permaculturist.

Permaculture, for the uninitiated, is a design system that incorporates everything from agriculture to architecture to community and organizational development into an elegant system that works in harmony with nature.

How permaculture came to this tiny village amid the volcanoes on the shores of Lake Atitlan is a story as winding as the canals Rony designed to slow down the torrential floodwaters here.

Rony was one of the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were blown apart by the 36-year civil war. He was just a boy when his father was killed by the army.

“My family was always involved in community development and organizing, and that was the reality in those days; anyone who was working with the community was perceived as a threat.”

His family, in fear for their lives, fled to the United States with the help of the Catholic diocese of New Ulm, Minn., which has a strong presence in this village.

Rony studied at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, earning a degree in cultural anthropology, but always with the idea of coming back home and applying it in a way that would make a difference for his people.
“I never wanted to gain knowledge just to put it in a book on a shelf,” he said. “For me, knowledge has to go beyond theory, it’s something you must put into practice.”

Returning home in 1994, when the conflict had calmed and negotiations were underway, he looked around for a project that could apply what he’d learned about his roots in the Mayan tradition, a tradition interwoven with the rhythms of nature.

“My idea was how to reconstruct and rescue the traditional, ancestral knowledge, and of course much of that had to do with agriculture, because that’s the base of our culture.”

On his own he read far and wide about alternative agricultural practices, and he began to dig into the ancient traditions of his own people. He found his first project on a piece of flood-prone land near the lake, owned by the Catholic Diocese. The land was compacted from many years of cattle grazing, and it flooded, along with the surrounding homes, every rainy season.

Rony asked for the land to try out the ancient system known in ancient Nahuatl as chinampas. The chinampa system is most famously illustrated by the design of ancient Mexico City, which was built by diverting the waters of a swampy lake into canals. Xochimilco, a historic neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, is the last vestige of the old chinampa system.

Here in the Guatemalan highlands, the Kakchiquel Maya had the same concept with a different name, but it fell out of use many years ago with the advent of modern agriculture.

Rony organized a group of subsistence farmers to help him analyze the situation and reclaim the land so that they could farm it, and they spent weeks digging the ditches that would slow down and channelize the rushing waters. But come rainy season, it didn’t work; the canals were clogged with sediment, and the project was swamped.

“Of course, in the anthropology books they tell you about the chinampas, but they don’t tell you how to build them,” he recalls with a laugh.

That’s when he was invited to a conference in the States on traditional agricultural practices, and he decided to make the trip with a dual purpose: to visit the Santa Fe-based center of Permacultura America Latina.

It was there at the “permaculture mansion” of one of the PAL board members that Rony began to realize the potential of permaculture to transform living systems. He explained his plan to PAL founder Ali Sharif, who took a look and quickly diagnosed the problem. The canals he had made were linear and angular – not like anything you’d find in nature. The trick to designing systems that work well is in mimicking nature, Sharif explained, working with nature instead of against it.

The trip was a breakthrough for him, and he ended up making another trip to Australia to study with the legendary Bill Mollison, one of the founders of the permaculture system.

Soon after his trip to Australia, he was joined by Rebecca Cutter, an artist, designer and educator from New York, who had heard about Rony’s group, then called Ija’tz, the Kakchiquel word for seeds. All she knew about the project was that it combined design and organic agriculture in some innovative ways. She came down to volunteer and ended up staying.

The new chinampa design was by all accounts a success. Rebecca took me on a tour and I was able to see the lush forest they had created on this urban tract of about 60 by 150 meters, where there once was only barren, compacted ground. It was raining, so I saw the canal system at work.

“What this does is slow the water down,” Rebecca explained. “Fast water is destructive.”

Runoff from surrounding hillsides carries tons of soil, silt, sand and other debris with it, which formerly ended up in the houses of the people who were flooded each year. Now the water as well as the soil it carries is retained on the land, and at the end of each rainy season when the canals dry up, the farmers empty them of that season’s load of rich soil, sand and silt, piling it up on the sides. In this way, mounds of rich, fertile soil a meter high or more has been built along the meandering canals.

A profusion of tropical plant life, much of it edible, sprouts from those hills. Rebecca shows me the house where they once lived on the site, and a “banana circle,” a permaculture technique involving a circle of banana palms used to treat greywater.

IxChel, Rebecca and Rony’s curly-haired, bright and energetic daughter, accompanies us on the tour, running off to gather wild strawberries and yellow flowers to share with us.

The growers collective who made up Ija’tz eventually decided to focus their energy around the production and commercialization of organic coffee. Rony and Rebecca supported their decision but wanted to continue promoting Permaculture with a focus on the protection of genetic diversity both locally and throughout Mesoamerica. So in 2000, Rony and Rebecca founded the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, or IMAP, and the two associations continue to collaborate and support each other.

In the decade since its founding, the group has organized local growers to produce seeds and vegetables organically and has helped to create fair trade markets and seed exchanges with farmers and organizations working locally and throughout Guatemala; set up a center that has adapted the permaculture system to a subtropical and indigenous setting; where they’ve taught hundreds of students, both local and international; and responded to the disaster created by Hurricane Stan with low-tech water treatment systems, soil conservation practices, community gardens and other appropriate-technology approaches to disaster relief.

Perhaps their biggest success has been the establishment of a seed bank, housing seeds from thousands of native plants and disseminating them among local growers to keep them in circulation. The seed bank is a concept that has been growing in response to an increased homogenization of agriculture, with corporate growers pressuring local varieties out of existence.

Now, however, it’s time for us to go, and the rain is growing stronger. My tour of IMAP and the seed bank will have to wait for another day.

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Just a few minutes ago, these sixth-graders were reciting the standard visitor’s greeting for me, then grilling me, along with a roomful of their peers – ordinary kids in an ordinary classroom. Now that it’s just the six of us, I’m passing the recorder and asking each of them to tell me their stories, and the tears begin to flow. Tears of grief, but also tears of gratitude.

These are the kids who fell through the cracks, but then were caught by a nurturing network of teachers and volunteers. The School for Street Children (Escuela de la Calle, or EDELAC) began as the quixotic dream of three teachers and a U.S. volunteer who quit their jobs to hold classes in the streets.

Fifteen years later, the project has grown into a well equipped school for 200 children, a shelter for the most needy of them, an internationally known trekking company staffed completely by volunteers and an innovative model for social entrepreneurism.

My first contact with the school was a couple of weeks ago when I prepared to climb Tajumulco, the tallest peak in Central America. I’d heard about Quetzaltrekkers, the tour group who donates all its profits to a school for street children, from Edgar Chitop, a local journalist who serves on the board. Naturally when I chose a trekking company, this was the one.

I encountered a lively group of volunteers, housed at the back of the bohemian youth hostel Casa Argentina, going over gear for the next day’s trek. Yes, they still had room for me, but there was no time to waste. The story of the epic trek is here.

Two days and a summit later, Alexa, a geography major from Pennsylvania, and Dara, a pre-med student from New York, shared a little of what motivated them to give three months of their life without pay to work seven days a week, trekking in the rain and mud, to this organization.

“It sounds like a cliché, but it’s really true – we do it for the kids,” said Alexa. “I came up here because I wanted to hike, but once I saw what was being accomplished, I ended up feeling really invested in the organization.”
Dara agreed. “I feel like I’ve been given so many opportunities in my life, and I’ve wasted a few. If I can do something to help a few people along the way while I’m doing what I love, why not?”

The volunteers take three-month shifts, and they run the organization itself, not only leading the treks but doing marketing, publicity, fundraising, budgeting, preparing the vegetarian meals that are hauled up the mountain on every trek – everything, in short, that is needed to make the program run. And somehow, for 15 years, they’ve made it work.

On the other end of the equation is a very different group of dedicated individuals – the founder, the teachers and the volunteers of EDELAC.

****

Las Rosas lies far off the beaten track for most travelers to Guatemala’s second city. Here in one of the city’s poorest districts on the edge of town, dusty gravel streets cut into the hillsides where traditionally-dressed women try to sell tortillas and sliced fruit to passers-by.

The bus deposited me at the bottom of a long climb, but helpful neighbors pointed out the way. The Escuela de la Calle is probably the only thing for miles around that draws an occasional international volunteer or intern.
A teacher dressed in traditional traje was out front, her students listening attentively from a grassy jumble of stones. “We have the right to… education, health, a family,” child-painted murals declaimed from the whitewashed walls.

I had arrived.

Claudia Cortéz, the director of educational programs, took me on a guided tour, beginning with the second grade. She no sooner mentioned my name when the group burst into a carefully coordinated and practiced greeting. One youngster raised his hand eagerly.

“We’re so pleased to have you hear, and we hope you will enjoy your time at EDELAC,” he recited.
We went from class to class, the children obviously delighted with the opportunity to show off their English and pepper me with questions.

Then Henry, Lesbia, Damaris and three other sixth graders joined me in a different room for an interview, and I was able to see the stories behind those fresh faces, stories I won’t soon forget.

Soon it was time to let them go, but first they led me out to the playground, where each of them posed for me in front of their symbol from the Mayan calendar.

Next I met with Guadalupe, who told me the story of how the school was formed.

“I kept seeing children in the streets, taking drugs, sniffing glue, and I said to myself, I have to do something about this,” Guadalupe recalled.

He was a teacher at that time at a special school for young people who were working at jobs, and two of his colleagues, Ubaldo Ruiz and Miguel Quiroa, were feeling the same way. Together, they decided to quit their jobs and they began gathering the children like modern-day pied pipers, giving classes to the children in the streets. Soon they were joined by an American student, Michael Shorr, and they were four.

“It was a good job I gave up, and here I was earning nothing. But gave us a lot of energy to be with the children – the eyes of the children, the faces of the children, the need of the children, and to see the children so small, 6, 7 years old, sniffing glue, it was so painful to see, and nobody doing anything about it.”

The young men began doing outreach to raise money for a school and a shelter for the homeless children, contacting restaurants for donated food and Spanish schools for donations of money and volunteers. That’s how they found Gavin Barker, an Englishman who started working with the group to help find ways to raise money.

Eventually he hit upon the idea of forming a tour company to sponsor trips to destinations that at that time were virtually unknown to visitors to Quetzaltenango – places like Tajumulco and Lake Atitlan and Santiaguito volcano – and to donate the proceeds to the school. Guadalupe knew the trails, so they recruited volunteers and he taught them the routes, and they were on their way.

In the first years it was extremely challenging; they started out with no gear and no facilities, but eventually people donated gear, and word got around. More people started signing up for volunteer shifts.

Making matters more difficult was that the country was still at war and the people in the highlands were extremely suspicious of outsiders. Guadalupe remembers once when he arrived in a village with a group of trekkers and was surrounded by peasants with sticks and machetes.

“They thought we were guerilleros, and they didn’t want us there. Since I spoke Quiche I explained to them we were an organization that was supporting a school and invited them to come, but it was very difficult.”

Those days are long gone. Now with the help of funding from international organizations, they’ve built the new school in Las Rosas, but the bulk of their funding still comes from Quetaltrekkers.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Guadalupe, the last of the founders to remain and now at the helm of a vibrant school that promotes the preservation of the natural environment and Mayan cultural values, which are one and the same.

He hopes that the word about EDELAC and Quetzaltrekkers will spread and it can become a model for others who want to start alternative schools. I share with him that hope.

Here’s the Interview with Guadelupe Pos, and some photos from my afternoon with the kids.

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