Who Archive

Archaeologist shifts focus to modern-day Mayans

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 16, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, ProPeten, WhyTags: environment, Guatemala, Latin America, Maya, Mayans, Peten, ProPeten, Rosa Maria Chan, Sustainable development

Archaeologist shifts focus to modern-day Mayans

POPTUN, Guatemala – It’s been a long day, and Rosa Maria Chan is still not finished. She’s traveled for hours on twisty, rocky country roads, held community meetings in three villages, toured a cacao farm, met with the liaison for funding from the World Bank and a tilapia farmer, answered questions all day long from a visiting journalist, checked in with the Guatemalan Vice-Minister of the Environment and a score of others via cell phone, and ate a hasty dinner while checking her e-mail.

It’s 9 p.m., and by most people’s standards, it would be a good time to turn in. She has a two-day workshop on watershed protection beginning tomorrow, and she needs to prepare.

But now the mayor of Poptun is here, visiting with a Guatemalan legislator who is head of the committee on environment, and she has some networking to do.

There’s no such thing as down time for Rosa Maria Chan, director of ProPeten, archaeologist turned administrator of one of the country’s most respected environmental organizations. The tireless drive she once applied in six-day jungle expeditions, like the one where she discovered an ancient Mayan village she named Zapote Corozal, she now channels into marathon searches for funding.

This time, however, she’s motivated not by the call of an ancient people but the spirit of their descendents, migrants who have been pushed off their land by poverty and war. These are the people she sees as key to a stable, sustainable future for a seriously troubled region.

The Peten, home of Tikal and a host of other magnificent Mayan cities, takes up a third of Guatemala; it is the largest of the country’s states, or departments. Until relatively recently, it was an untamed jungle wilderness. In the 1960s, that began to change, with the construction of a new highway, followed by wealthy landowners coming in and clearing the jungle to make way for enormous cattle ranches. These landowners, called latifundistas, were seeking a calmer place to live, away from the conflicts in the highlands resulting from an attempt at agrarian reform, and Kek’chi and Mopan Mayas moved there to work the plantations.

The ‘70s and ‘80s brought a different sort of migrant, those fleeing violence in their homelands in the highlands. In three decades, the population of the area increased 10 percent each year; in 1990, the former wilderness was home to 300,000. But the bulk of the newcomers didn’t find the good farmland they were hoping for, as most of that had already been snatched up by the latifundistas. Instead they settled on parcels on the hillsides and planted their milpas as they had for centuries. The forest was decimated.

In 1990 the government responded to international pressure to preserve what was left of the forest – mainly a huge swath of jungle and wetlands in the north, where the Maya Biosphere Reserve was created, forming the largest natural preserve in Central America. In 1995 it followed suit with four smaller preserves in the south of Peten.

In theory, it sounded good. The problem was that the people living there had nowhere to go. A long-range plan to resettle them was not carried out, and continued population growth led more and more people to invade the preserves, causing escalating conflicts, especially in the region of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, where ProPeten – at that time a project of Conservation International – had a field station to do research and work with local communities to protect the preserve.

Unfortunately, people in the local communities saw the environmental community as a threat to their survival. The tensions culminated in the burning of the field station and a highly publicized incident in which members of the ProPeten staff were held hostage.

This was all before Rosa Maria’s time, but she relates the history as if it were her own – as it was soon to be, as Carlos Sosa, her longtime friend and mentor and the founder and director of ProPeten, asked her to become the head of its board of directors. “I know you, and I know you will never sell out ProPeten,” he told her.

The hostage crisis, Rosa Maria says, just brought to a head the differences in philosophy between the staff of Conservation International and the local staff of ProPeten. As she sees it, Conservation International, like most of the mainline conservation organizations at the time, took a strictly conservation-oriented approach, whereas the local staff recognized the need to integrate social policies into the organization, a need that CI failed to respond to.

“That’s why I refer to myself – and to ProPeten – as an environmentalist, not a conservationist,” Rosa Maria told me on the day we met. “I see people as part of the environment, and if you don’t include them in your plan, it will fail.”

Sosa gave up trying to convince the Conservation International leadership to change their strategy and decided it was time to separate. What ensued was a painful power struggle that Rosa Maria euphemistically calls “a divorce.” As chair of the board of directors, she was drawn into the struggle. It was a nightmarish time that she doesn’t like to recall, especially the most painful part. During that year, Sosa was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and soon after, he died.

The board of directors called an emergency meeting and immediately asked Rosa Maria to take over as director. It was a difficult decision, as she was currently involved in a high-profile archaeological project at Piedras Negras, listed as one of the world’s most endangered historical sites by UNESCO. The organization was left nearly bankrupt and without even an office or supplies after the rift with CI. Most people would have run in the opposite direction.

But Rosa Maria felt called to the task. She finished her two-month commitment at Piedras Negras and set to work rebuilding the organization. Seven years later, by all accounts, her work has paid off; ProPeten is seen locally, nationally and internationally as one of Guatemala’s most successful environmental organizations.

One key to Rosa Maria’s success has been her longtime experience working with government and nonprofit agencies. She started by working her way through college in a job with the Guatemalan Secretary of Planning. Here she learned how to do budgets and negotiate the system, and she began to build allies at the national level. She later held jobs with several other nonprofits, including the German nonprofit GTZ, and learned how to write fundraising proposals.

On a normal day, she juggles telephones and e-mail accounts and meetings with the agility of an acrobat. But today, she’s left all that behind to enjoy the fresh air of the countryside and meet with some of the communities she’ll be raising funds for. I’ve been invited to ride along, because this is really the only time she has to meet with me. So she and two ProPeten staffers, Elder Hernandez and Hector Choc, explain to me some of the many programs ProPeten is sponsoring in the countryside as we bump along a country road past scorched hillsides and grazing cattle.

On this particular day, she’s meeting with some of the five communities that have expressed an interest in starting cacao farms. Rosa Maria is approaching international foundations to find the funding for this project, and she wants to be sure the communities are prepared to invest the time necessary for a successful project.
“Cacao is a good thing to promote here because it’s native to the area, and it’s part of their indigenous tradition,” she explained. “It requires shade, so it’s a form of agroforestry, which protects the soils and the watersheds.”

Ultimately, however, perhaps the most important result is to give these families a way to earn a living on their own land without slashing, burning and using it up, as so many families have done. It will also give them the incentive to resist the land speculators coming through to buy up tracts for the oil palm companies, which ProPeten and other environmental groups see as an increasing threat to the region.

Other programs that ProPeten is sponsoring now throughout the countryside include tilapia ponds, ecotourism projects, a educational program with a soap opera and xate cultivation – xate is a native plant used by the floral industry which has been severely depleted in Guatemalan forests by foraging campesinos who sell it to make a living.

In fact, the illegal harvesting of xate has grown to the point that, as Guatemalan forests have been depleted, people have been crossing over the border to Belize to harvest their xate. The plant is now in danger of extinction and the government has passed a law requiring xate dealers to verify that their harvests come from legitimate sources. Guatemalan incursions into Belize for xate harvesting is on the decline in the past year, Rosa Maria’s Belizian contacts have told her, in part due to the new law and in part because of the xate cultivation promoted by ProPeten.

After two days in the communities come two days of meetings of an entirely different sort: local and regional leaders gather to map out a strategy for watershed protection. Then, on Saturday, a meeting with a local women’s cooperative.

While Rosa Maria’s work may be tiring, it is not without its rewards. Southern Peten has embraced her with open arms, and everyone from the mayor to the local agriculture administrator and the head of the regional planning department shows up to spend two days mapping out a watershed management plan under her direction.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Rosa Maria since the beginning of my administration and I’ve seen the success she’s had administering this organization and working with the local groups and the municipality,” said Poptun Mayor Angel Kilkán Ochoa. “She’s a woman of enormous vision, and I wish we had 10 or more people like her, and that all the municipalities would work with her and her team to lift up our communities together.”

Donald Perez, coordinator of the regional organization of community leaders, agreed. “I would say that today, ProPeten is the NGO with the weight and experience to represent the initiatives of conservation and human development in Peten – and given that Peten represents a third of Guatemala, we could say that we’re really good ambassadors for conservation at an international level for our country, thanks to the live experiences of ProPeten that are excellent examples.”

Here are some images from the four days I spent with Rosa Maria, Hector and Elder. The videotaped interview with Rosa Maria (above) is available only in Spanish at this time – sorry!). For more information about ProPeten, visit their website, www.ProPeten.org.

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Dear friends of Guatemala (A letter from IMAP)

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 14, 2010Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Organic agriculture, Permaculture, Reforestation, Watershed protection, WhyTags: disaster relief, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, Mesoamerican Permacuture Institute, permaculture, Rebecca Cutter, Rony Lec, Tropical Storm Agatha

Dear friends of Guatemala (A letter from IMAP)

Following is a letter from Rony Lec, cofounder of the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP), which I wrote about recently in (Permaculture takes root in Lake Atitlan). The letter is to IMAP’s supporters, and if you’re not already on their list, this would be a good time to join them.

Rony is now among the leaders of his town’s efforts to rebuild the local community of San Lucas Toliman and the surrounding villages. Any support that can be given either to his organization, or through his organization to the reconstruction effort, will help strengthen the Permaculture community and philosophy in this region, an approach that is firmly rooted in native tradition and ecological practice. For more information on how to help, contact Rony at nativasemilla@hotmail.com or Rebecca Cutter at rebecutter@gmail.com.

Dear friends of Guatemala,

We are sorry we have not informed you about the tragedy that probably by now you have probably heard about. First there was the volcano, Pacaya, and then Tropical Storm Agatha. We have been very busy trying to respond in a coordinated way.

The magnitude of the catastrophe has had more impact than Hurricane Stan in 2005, since it was early in the rainy season and we had 4,000 millimeters of water in 24 hours, which the rugged topography of our land could not handle. Making matters worse is that this is just the beginning of the hurricane season.

At the national level, the storm has left us with more than 400,000 people affected; at least 152 are dead from flooding or landslides, 98 are still missing and147 wounded; 87,000 are in public shelters and uncounted thousands more sheltered with family and friends; and 48,000 homes are damaged or in high-risk areas. The roads have been ruined and that has caused food prices to increase. That, along with the loss of all the crops that had just begun coming up, will soon be manifested in a severe food shortage.

In the Lake Atitlan area, most of the communities were affected. Throughout Guatemala, 19 areas of high risk have been identified, and 9 of them are located here in our department of Sololá. Forty-one emergency shelters in Sololá reported 7,500 homeless this week. In our village of San Lucas Toliman, where IMAP is located, fortunately only 10 people died, but thousands have been left homeless. Eight neighborhoods are still habitable but they are in such high-risk areas it’s not recommended that they return.

Our center at IMAP has been designated as a shelter for the community of Pachitulul, which is one of the 13 communities of the San Lucas Toliman municipality. Pachitulul is also a high-risk area, but this time they were not affected directly. We are now compelled to step forward and participate in the emergency relief effort of the entire San Lucas municipality and coordinating throughout the Lake area by working together with other community groups to fill in for the leadership void that is now presenting itself.

IMAP has been working since 2000 on risk management in this disaster-prone area by generating information and educational materials, and holding workshops that have educated hundreds of people throughout the region. We have promoted reforestation, land and water management and food security by promoting seeds and foods that are more resistant, not only to disease but to these dramatic weather changes we are experiencing.
Fortunately that strong sense of community of the Guatemalan people has come again to the rescue, and thanks to that, the situation is under control. However, their resources are limited and the danger is still very present.

Our effort right now is to encourage that solidarity and at the same time channel all the information and efforts of all the organizations with the idea to coordinate so that we can be more efficient and more resourceful.
Food is present at the shelters but it is scarce. Aid has been delivered but not always the appropriate aid. For example, many of the indigenous women won’t wear Western clothes no matter what, and most of the women’s clothing being donated won’t be used. Milk is being delivered, which is not healthy for most indigenous people, who have a high incidence of lactose intolerance.

Governmental presence is intermittent and not very substantial, limited mostly to moral support. One local NGO was quoted in the Prensa Libre estimating that about 80 percent of all assistance has come from private citizens, not the government.

If you’re interested in more information or in supporting the relief effort in any way, please contact us and we will direct you in the best way. Also, if you want to support IMAP directly so that it can continue doing its work, we would be more than grateful.

We thank you for your solidarity, which has always provided for us.

Sincerely,

Rony Lec
for the Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP)

Permaculture takes root in Lake Atitlan

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 8, 2010Posted in: Environmental education, Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Organic agriculture, Permaculture, WhyTags: Guatemala, I'jatz, IMAP, Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, Permacultura America Latina, permaculture, Rebecca Cutter, Ronaldo Lec, Rony Lec, seed banks

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – Rony Lec is roasting coffee beans on a clay comal when I arrive, stirring patiently as the smoke rises. He grew the coffee out back, and every step of the process, like many of his processes, is his own.

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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Neighbors fend for themselves in wake of storm

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 5, 2010Posted in: Featured, Forest protection, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Permaculture, Reforestation, Watershed protection, WhyTags: Agatha, deforestation, flooding, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan

Neighbors fend for themselves in wake of storm

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – School principal Aroldo Jerez Celada understands the importance of trees in the prevention of disasters like the one brought by Tropical Storm Agatha. He’s also seen, first-hand, the human disaster that keeps the obviously needed reforestation from happening.

“Of course we at the school worry about this, located as we are at the base of these volcanoes. We’ve done more than worry; we’ve actually tried to do something about it.”

A couple of years ago he organized a group of community volunteers and students from the school he directs to do a tree planting on the steep slopes surrounding this town, consulting with the experts to find out which type of tree was the best for these situations and raising the money to buy the seedlings.

The group was proud and exhilarated with their first planting of 500 trees. They had a plan for follow-up maintenance, taking turns to go up and check on the trees and water them through the dry season. But one day the team went up and discovered the area they had planted had been fenced off. The steep incline had been slated for development.

In many cases, local governments tend to be more a part of the problem than the solution. Here, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods was a government housing complex built on one of these hillsides. The day of the storm, however, and even the day after, government officials were notably absent, Jerez and others told me.

“Our government, unfortunately, needs to be more organized,” said Jerez. “They didn’t have a plan, nobody knew what to do or where to go.”

I began my day with Rony Lec, from the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP), and other members of a coalition of community groups meeting in the municipal hall, mapping out an emergency plan, assigning tasks, without any apparent input from the municipal government, which was largely absent. Rony was running the meeting. Like most of the others on this committee, he is working full-time without pay to help organize the response. I left the group at their gargantuan task and headed over to the shelter called Anexo to interview Jerez.

Saturday morning, after some 12 hours of intense and driving rain that was continuing unabated, Jerez ventured out into the downpour to rent a mototaxi and take a look around.

“I realized at 9 a.m. that we had a disaster,” he said. “Already there were many families in the area of the football field whose homes were underwater.”

A few hours later, the first landslides came, and then the people started pouring in. As of today, six days later, he is caring for 40 families, a total of 72 people.

Nobody showed up from the government until the next day. Aroldo had sick children in the shelter, including a small girl with pneumonia, and he took it upon himself to contact an organization and ask for donated medicine, and it arrived 24 hours later. He showed me with pride his ample stock. He had no idea if any of the other shelters had sick people.

Emergency supplies had finally been delivered by the federal government on Tuesday. But there was no one to coordinate the distribution, and the food and other supplies were grabbed by whomever was there.

Suddenly, a knock came at the door. The mayor was finally here.

Here was my chance to get an interview, I thought, and I went out with Jerez to find the mayor surrounded with the shelter’s inhabitants, each trying to tell their story, pleading for help. As the camera rolled, the mayor listened intently, tears in his eyes. He promised to do what he could and headed for the door.

I stopped him to ask for a few minutes of his time, and he told me to meet him in his office in half an hour. “He won’t be there,” one of the men in the shelter laughed.

He was right; the mayor wasn’t there. I waited for an hour. Finally I saw him approaching the central park, flanked by a crowd, talking to many, and then he prepared to leave. I approached, got his attention, his apology and his phone number, and agreed to call him in the afternoon. There was no answer, and his voicemail was not accepting messages, so unfortunately I can’t give his side of the story.

Felix Gomez, a representative of the Fundacion Guillermo Toriello, a community development organization, chairs the committee. He had been instructed in risk assessment and was working in the community to prepare people for disasters like this one when Agatha fell with all her fury, and he was trapped here.

“We heard from news reports on Thursday that the storm was on its way,” said Gomez. “Unfortunately we don’t have a culture of disaster preparedness.”

Gomez had already warned government officials that people should not be living in the high-risk areas at the foot of the mountains but his warning went unheeded.

Volunteers put together a form and went from shelter to shelter conducting a census on the first day and the second day, and I accompanied them. On the third day, we began to go out to the neighborhoods on the periphery and contact the leaders to get a sense of how many had been left homeless but had not come in to the shelters.

Yesterday in Pavarotti shelter, the Sicay family, Juan and Petrona, invited me to their home to see the damage. They lived near the family who had been buried in their home, and they agreed to show me the place.

The Sicays were one of the families who lived near the football field, and their home filled with water on Friday from a flash flood, long before the landslides began. They grabbed their two little ones and the two bigger boys and fled, running down the street in chest-high water. They had nowhere to go, and walked through the downpour until they arrived at the home of a family who took them in until the shelter opened.

They showed me the kitchen, which had only a single piece of furniture – a hutch, that had once held her dishes. Most had been washed away in the storm. I asked where the stove had been.

“I never had a stove – I made my tortillas right here,” said Petrona, kneeling in the mud next to a pair of cinderblocks, where she used to build her fire. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is how we live.”

A huge hole in the back of the kitchen floor showed where the river had found its way through their house.
Next they all filed into the small bedroom area, where mattresses were tightly packed into the cramped space, and a dresser overflowed with wet clothes. A clothesline stretched the length of the room, where ears of corn had been hanging to dry, and were now beginning to cover with mildew.

“We would take our clothes out and try to save them, but we have nowhere to take them,” Petrona explained.
The older son, Juan Antonio, was out back, trying to rescue what was left of the tiny corn patch, but there was little left to salvage. Most was covered in mud.

Finally I asked them to take me up to the place where the family had refused to leave their home and had been buried, the father and mother and three children, together with a neighbor who had been trying to rescue them.

The day ended with a ray of hope from a source higher than the government. The night before, I noticed a crowd gathering in the streets to marvel at a bright light that was shining from the hills above. It was so far up that there was no way someone could have climbed up there to place a light.

On the other side of the landslide gleamed something else – a white image of the Virgin Mary, gleaming from a patch of barren stone.

I went to the foot of the hill with Emilio and Eliazar, who had been canvassing the shelters and neighborhoods with me, to get a closer look. A campesino was in his backyard when we passed, and I asked him what he thought of it. “Well, the good book says there’ll be lots of signs in the last days,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I think we’re seeing them.”

Emilio and Eliazar had another take on the situation. “I was seeing it as more of a sign of encouragement, like it was saying things are going to be all right,” said Emilio, hopefully.

Today, as I made my way back from the destroyed homes, people were gathering in the streets to witness another marvel – a group of young people making their way up the mountain to pay their respects. My friends Emilio and Eliazar were among them.

Here are a few images from my second day in San Lucas.

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The river will find a way: Visiting with the victims

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 3, 2010Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Permaculture, Reforestation, Watershed protection, WhyTags: Agatha, disaster relief, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, permaculture

The river will find a way: Visiting with the victims

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN – I arrived at the home of Rony Lec of the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP) at 9 a.m. and found him meeting with a group of young men from Ajpu, a local youth group. The post-storm response of the government was slow and disorganized, I had heard from various people around town, and the group echoed this concern.

Emergency food and supplies had arrived from the federal government and had been carried off by whomever happened to be around instead of being distributed in an organized and equitable way; nobody had any idea how many people were now homeless; people who were not in the shelters were not being taken into account; the list of immediate problems went on.

Rony was organizing a group to help with the immediate disaster response, gathering data that would allow IMAP to respond with a long-term plan to help with recovery and prevention. I had offered my services as a documentarian for a few days, to try and get the story out about what’s going on here.

After a quick meeting, we decided to divide into two groups: Rony and Felix would attend the meeting being called by local NGOs, and Emilio and Eliazar would accompany me to the affected areas and to the shelters to do interviews.

We headed downhill to the edge of town, where a series of landslides had occurred. It didn’t take long. Within five minutes we encountered a woman picking through the remains of her brother’s house.

Ismael Santiso Yoxon had lived with his family in this house for 16 years; it was built on land he had inherited from his grandfather. He had survived many storms, including Hurricane Stan, with no problems.

A huge chunk of hillside had fallen off and slid down, smashing into his home, flattening the back wall and filling it with dirt. The chicken house with its 50 chickens was buried, along with his other animals.

“He doesn’t have any idea what he’s going to do,” said his sister, Elvira. He and his wife and daughter are currently staying with his mother-in-law, but there’s not room to continue living there.

The case is a typical one; the land above his house, like much of the land on the hillside, was divided up and rented out with the blessing of the municipal government, despite the instability of the soil. The neighbors began cutting trees and put in a milpa on the slope just above Yuxon’s house, and this cornfield was what had collapsed.

We wished Elvira well and made our way up the hill, where we encountered an abandoned house with the front torn off. Inside, the bed was covered with dirt, and a cluster of green bananas had landed on top. The walls were askew, and dirt and rocks practically filled the structure.

Children’s schoolbooks and backpacks and clothing were scattered about in the mud, with what was left of a manual typewriter tossed in the middle of the pile.

No one was near, so we made our way back down the hill, past two other abandoned houses, where we encountered Ana Cu and Romelia Guarcha Sep, two women in traditional dress who said they knew the affected families and would take us to them. We accompanied them to the stricken neighborhood called Nuevo Amanecer, or New Dawn.

Regina Castro was standing on what was left of her back porch, looking out at the expanse of mud and the fallen trees that covered what was once her brother-in-law’s house.

“We were here on Saturday in the rain and we started hearing the sounds and we got scared, so we grabbed the children and ran,” she said. “We didn’t have time to get anything together – we just ran. Fifteen minutes later, the hillside fell down.”

Ana and Romelia’s homes had not been damaged, but they didn’t feel safe living there anymore, seeing what had happened to their neighbors.

Marcelino, Leandro and Luis Acibinac were the three brothers who lost their homes nearby. We found Liandro just up the hill, looking over the mud that buried his home. The only sign was a small pile of clothing on top. How they had gotten there, I didn’t know – perhaps they had been drying on the line.

“Here was the kitchen… here was my bed,” he said, pointing out where his house once was. “We didn’t have time to recover anything; we only have the clothes on our backs. Only God knows where we will go now.”

Esdras Mardoqueo Baran was picking over the remains of his sister’s house, nearby. His house had not been hit, but he didn’t feel it was safe to continue living there.

“We’re all at risk,” he said. “The river finds its path, and the rainy season has just begun. What will we do? Only God can say.”

Up the hill, Salamon Alvarez de Leon was checking out the remains of his friend’s home. The land above their homes had been converted to a coffee plantation, which doesn’t have the same ability to hold the soil as a native forest.

His friend, Rafael Ajcot, had had six children, ranging from 6 to 16. “This is part of the problem – all of the people,” said Alvarez. “The deforestation, the population growth – in 1970, we had 5,000 people living in San Lucas. Now we have 40,000. Where are they all supposed to go?”

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First the ashes, then Agatha – then the gifts from heaven

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 3, 2010Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), WhyTags: Agatha, deforestation, disaster relief, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, landslides

First the ashes, then Agatha – then the gifts from heaven

PANAJACHEL, Guatemala – For three days I’ve been traveling the villages of Lake Atitlan, watching the slow shift from disaster to windfall.

On Saturday, we stood together in Marvilla’s kitchen at Posada Dos Volcanes in San Lucas Toliman, one of the mostly Mayan villages that ring this lake, watching in disbelief as the mountain began shedding its skin right before our eyes. What had once been a smooth green slope was now a great brown gouge.

I now know the sound of a landslide. It’s like a low-flying plane, or thunder, only louder and longer. I hope never to hear it again.

“Ay, la gente,” Marvilla lamented – oh, the poor people.

Most of them were spared their lives, thanks to an evacuation order the night before. But some 400 families were without homes, and seven were confirmed dead, seven others missing – in our village alone.

It had only been a couple of days since Volcano Pacaya blew her top, raining ashes on Guatemala City, killing three and leaving hundreds homeless. Now Tropical Storm Agatha had come to carry on with a vengeance where Hurricane Stan had left off just five years ago. Bridges collapsed, roads filled with debris and homes were buried, some of them with the families still inside.

On Sunday I took the ferry to visit several towns along the lake and survey the damage. Santiago Atitlan, the charming village known for the traditional outfits embroidered with birds, was a mess. People were picking their way through ankle-deep mud in the streets – but they were alive. And it didn’t take them long to notice that while Agatha took, she also gave. All along the streets and in the harbors, people were collecting firewood for their stoves.

I didn’t notice it at first – but the woman sitting next to me on the ferry did. She gasped. “Leña!” she said, as we approached a mass of floating wood.

Firewood – in many ways the coveted fuel that caused the disaster in the first place, or at least the need of it. Most people in these parts still cook on wood stoves, and the gathering of firewood has become more and more difficult with the growing population and the passage of time. Now the people range far up into the hills looking for dry wood, and if they can’t find enough dead trees and branches, they begin hacking them off. Deforestation strips the soils of the cover that protects them from these very rains.

What is ensuing is a repeat of the pattern that some blame for the fall of the Mayan empire, one of the most sophisticated in history: deforestation, leading to landslides and clogged rivers, leading to drought, leading to an increasingly marginal life.

Later I passed what looked like a mud beach full of people – hundreds of them, combing the wasted land for something – firewood, I assumed, but then later I learned that a little girl had been washed away by the floodwaters and they were the search party. Bizarrely, a pair of kayakers drifted past, tourists on vacation, perhaps, accentuating the gulf between our worlds.

Now I’m in Panajachel, watching the sun set over the lake and chatting with Catarina, who, together with her husband Pedro, own the small and beautifully kept Hotel Sueño Real. Some of her own friends and family have been collecting firewood, too. She tells me of her mixed emotions as she watches the people scavenge for wood. All day they’ve been going past, with filled wheelbarrows, loaded up on their backs, even pickup trucks, for those who can get ahold of one.

“I look at them and their faces are so happy,” she says. “But I can’t help but think, These are pieces of people’s houses that they are taking. How can you feel happy about that?”

“I don’t know – I guess I’m just sentimental.”

What they forage today represents hours and hours of work saved in the months ahead. Who can blame them?

It’s easy for those of us who cook with gas or electric to feel sentimental. Meanwhile, the majority who don’t hae that luxury must eat.

Today I’m going out with some folks affiliated with the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP) to interview affected communities and people who can offer some suggestions as to how to prevent this situation in the future. Please stay tuned.

Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 1, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, Organic agriculture, Semilla Nueva, WhyTags: Curt Bowen, Food Security, Guatemala, Joseph Bornstein, Organic agriculture, Semilla Nueva, sustainable agriculture

Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

(Above: Curt Bowen, right, and Joseph Bornstein)

ALMOLONGA, Guatemala – Ramón Siquina has depended on insecticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like everyone else in this green produce basket of the Quetzaltenango province. But nowadays, he’s using fewer of them.

“Fertilizers have helped us a lot, and it was a great advance for us,” he said. “But we’ve been conscious that the state of our soil is deteriorating. We began using lots of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, which we wouldn’t have to use if the land was still rich like in the times of our forefathers.”

We’re standing on the roof of his cement-block home, a soft mist descending over the green valleys and hills surrounding us. Almalonga, a community of 20,000 on the outskirts of Xela, is unusual in that the forefathers saved the richest soils in the valley for agriculture, and built the homes around the fields and up into the hills. For years the community has produced the huge truckloads of cabbage, squash, corn, lettuce and radishes that feed the city, but it’s getting harder.

“I’ve struggled and struggled with this piece of land; I put all the chemicals possible on it, and it still didn’t produce,” Ramón was saying. “I realized I had to change the way I was growing.”

That’s when he met the folks from Semilla Nueva (meaning “new seed” in Spanish), a new organization formed by a group of high school and college buddies from the Pacific Northwest. They began to talk about farming practices and Rafael shared his problem. Curt Bowen and Trinidad Recinos, two of the group’s founders, suggested compost as an alternative to chemical fertilizer and offered to help him set up a composting vermiculture project, and that’s how we all ended up tonight on Ramón’s roof, with Ramón and Joseph combing through the garbage to examine the progress of the squirming colonies of worms.

“God gives us a way of showing us what we need,” said Ramón. “It’s a small project now, but one day it will be big.”

****

Oregonian Joseph Bornstein was just 18 when he made his first trip to Nicaragua with a couple of buddies from the Ashland High School Class of 2003 in Oregon. They had decided to take a gap year to travel in Central America before beginning college.

“We’d learned a lot about the world from books and from our desks, but we wanted to learn about it for ourselves.”

The friends made their way down to San Juan del Sur, a fishing village near the border with Costa Rica, where they made a friendship that would change their lives. Their friend was Alix Fermin, a fisherman and a father of a delightful 3-year-old.

“He was such a loving, joy-filled person,” recalls Bornstein wistfully. The friends spent some carefree days with the family, learning about the family’s culture and way of life. Three months later, they learned that Alix had died in a fishing accident – a not uncommon occurrence, given the rudimentary nature of the equipment the poor villagers used in those parts.

“We put our heads together to see if there was a way we could provide a long-term form of support for the family, since their breadwinner was no more,” Bornstein said. The friends decided to pool their resources and build a house that the family could rent out so they would always have income. They raised $8,000 and headed south in 2005 to build the home.

In the interim, much had changed. A spike in the petroleum prices had caused the prices of basic necessities to double. “That woke us up to the need for more structural change,” said Bornstein.

That was when Curt Bowen, a college buddy, got into the picture. By that time, Bowen and Bornstein were studying at Whitman College in Washington State and hit on the idea of building a biofuel network in Central America, teaching local farmers. They laid the groundwork for a series of workshops throughout the Americas and made plans to establish resource centers in each community. The idea was to teach organized communities, community leaders, and non-profits processor fabrication and biofuel production. Two professors from Whitman helped them design an independent study course, and a friend in Antigua offered to loan them a Guatemalan chicken bus for the experiment, and they were set.

They converted the bus for biodiesel, and with 400 gallons of the stuff, made their way from Washington State all the way down to Nicaragua, teaching farmers and community members how to convert waste crop materials to fuel and setting up an infrastructure to keep the project going after they left.

The project was a good one, but as their studies progressed, they realized that it didn’t really address a more fundamental issue.

“For biofuels to be done well, you have to start with organic agriculture,” said Curt. Much of the world’s biofuel production is coming from palm oil forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, he pointed out; 89 percent of rainforest deforestations come from biofuel production. Making matters worse is that after the forests are slashed, the peat bogs underlying them are drained and burned to make more biofuels, and the resultant emissions have made Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gases.

A sad and ironic turn of events for a supposedly green technology.

So the friends began to think of ways they could work with local farmers to promote a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and they recruited more friends from Whitman and from Ashland for their next project: Semilla Nueva. They also contacted Trinidad, a Guatemalan palm oil grower they had met on the biodiesel trip who had embraced their project with such an innovative spirit they recruited him to join their project.

One of the first things they did was visit the Ministry of Agriculture, where they were brought into an office with an impressive desk made of tropical wood. Embedded in the design was a small plaque: “Donated by Dow Chemical Co.” Soon they noticed the plush sofa had been donated by Monsanto.

“It turned out that every piece of furniture in that place had been donated by a chemical company,” laughed Curt.

Guatemalan agriculture has been heavily dominated by the chemical industry and utilizes products that were banned in the states a long time ago, resulting in damaging runoff, pesticide poisoning of unprotected workers, depleted soils and other ills, they explained.

Alternative farming practices had been introduced in the country, but there’s little support and follow-through with these projects, Curt said. In a country of more than a corn million farmers, there are 17 government corn specialists available to offer assistance.

There are a number of NGOs currently working in the country on sustainable agriculture projects, but most are isolated from each other and working on specific projects, Semilla Nueva’s goal, with the help of a Dutch organization called Gota Verde (Green Drop), was to fill in the gaps.

“One of the biggest problems in development is not a lack of technology; it’s getting that technology out to the people who need it,” said Curt. “For example, conservation tillage – a practice that’s very easy to use, but nobody’s using it here because nobody’s promoting it.”

Now they’re working on a variety of projects in the surrounding countryside, and one that they’re most excited about is a joint project with a Spanish NGO called Intervida. They will be training promotores, or community-based educators, who are already working for Intervida to spread the word about (health??). Now they’ll also be able to teach sustainable farming techniques, from composting and contour ditches to living barriers and shuffle hoes.

The pair’s faces light up when they talk about “action research,” a strategy for working together with local farmers to experiment their way toward the best practices for each farm. Just as Ramón is measuring the progress of his two differently managed vermiculture bins, local farmers will be experimenting with techniques that allow them to wean their dependence from chemical inputs.

Now with a new associate, Darren Yondorf, and with two more staff members on the way, the group will be fully staffed within two weeks – just in time to receive the first round of volunteers from Yale, Kentucky University, the University of Puget Sound and of course their alma mater Whitman College. The volunteers will be living out on the farms, working with farmers to help them incorporate the new practices and monitor the results.

But the most ambitious part of their project is perhaps the most important, and also the hardest to measure. By working within local farmer associations and helping to build others, they are hoping to build community leadership through sustainable agriculture practices.

“As the promotores become involved in the research, the impact will grow,” said Curt. “We’re trying to promote sustainable agriculture, but we’re trying to build unity in the community as well.”

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Eco-evangelical Mayans work for a greener village

Tracy Barnett

Published: May 21, 2010Posted in: Climate Change, Featured, Guatemala, Projuve, Recycling, Reforestation, Spiritual, WhyTags: CDRO, Centro de Desarrollo Rural del Occidente, environment, Guatemala, Martin Toc, Paxtoca, Projuve, Recycling, Reforestation, Sustainable development, Totonicapan

Eco-evangelical Mayans work for a greener village

PAXTOCA, Totonicapán, Guatemala – Martin Pedro Toc Sic is an eco-entrepreneur on a mission. Standing amid the green, forested hills of his native village, this young Maya marketing major explained why he left a good-paying job in the city to try and make his mark in his hometown with projects designed to keep those hills green.

“My father told me a long time ago, ‘Martin, God wants a vocation for you.’ And I always looked for it,” he said. “Then one day, God touched me with fear. I was listening to a radio program about the way the climate is changing and it scared me so bad I ran to my room and hid under the covers and trembled. But then I realized I had to do something about it. Instead of hiding in the house, frightened, it’s time to find solutions.”

Martin is a curious mixture of many things that on the surface don’t seem to blend. He’s a business-minded environmentalist and an evangelical Christian working to revive the Mayan cosmovision. He’s the founder of Projuve, short for Youth Program for Sustainable Development (Programa Juvenil para Desarrollo Sostenible), and his enthusiasm for his subject matter is contagious. A youth leader in his evangelical church, he’s managed to attract nine others to the cause, including Carmina, now his wife-to-be, and they’ve all put their work aside today to meet with me at their new Forestry Center, a small protected plot of tree seedlings they are nurturing for a reforestation project.

The youths begin with a brief and very professional introduction, each telling me which of the Projuve departments they belong to: environment, programs, fundraising and business development. The young women are dressed in corte tipica, the traditional Quiché Mayan woven skirts and lacy blouses. The young men are all business casual.

“Here it’s normal for the young people to wear their hair long and their T-shirts loose, but we don’t want to do that,” Martin explained to me later. “We want to have the respect of the community, so that’s why we dress this way – formally. We are trying to earn their trust.”

In the year since their founding, they’ve garnered the support of a local cooperative, which has given them the land and supplies for their forestry center. They’ve held a Christian eco-concert, Una Sola Voz por el Planeta (One voice for the Planet) to raise money for their cause.

They’ve established a recycling project in their town; in a place where the idea of recycling was once as far from most minds as the moon, villagers are now separating their plastic, glass, metal and paper from their organic waste and saving it for the Projuve volunteers, who collect them every two weeks and truck them to the recycling center in Xela.

On an ordinary day, many of this dynamic group can be found hauling bags of rich volcanic soil and mulch from the surrounding forest to mix into the tiny nursery bags for the seedlings in their Forestry Center. Already they’ve got some 8,000 sprouts here, including white pine, oak, cypress and the endangered pinabete, or Guatemalan fir. Their goal is to plant 100,000 in the surrounding deforested areas by the end of the year.

But this is only the beginning. Their long-range goals include an ecotourism program in the surrounding mountain valley, built around a spectacular waterfall in the forest near here. They’re collecting plastic and glass bottles in a warehouse near here that they plan to use as the base for an adobe Earthship-style ecological house, and they’ve enlisted the aid of a green architect to help them design it.

The only thing standing between them and the conversion of Paxtoca into an ecovillage, it seems, is money – but they have faith it will come.

We took turns telling our stories, and each of the youths, from 16-year-old Nicolas to 24-year-old Carmina, shared their fears of a devastated planet and their dream for a green future for their children.

Martin and Carmina took me for a breathtaking hike through the village, up through the cornfields surrounding the forest and down a trail through the woods to the waterfall, which they’ve used as the backdrop for their stunning brochure and their power point presentation.

Then, since the cooperative had loaned them the car for the day, they took me up into the mountains to see another ecological project in the region, the Aprisco Sendero Ecologico, an educational ecocenter in a virgin pine forest near the town of Totonicapan. The hike among the old-growth pines refreshed the spirit while learning stations along the way taught about the endangered birds and trees this forest harbors.

Aprisco is an initiative of CDRO, the Cooperative for Rural Development of the West, an organization that has been promoting sustainable development in the Western Highlands for a generation. They took me by the organization’s learning center, where I had a chat with Ana Victoria Socop, one of the organization’s directors.

Here are a few comments from each of these young movers and shakers that will stay with me.

Martin:

“Jesus loved nature! Remember the story of how he released the doves from the people who were selling them in the temple? Remember how he said, the birds of the air don’t worry about where they will get their food, but God takes care of them. God gave us dominion over nature so that we would take care of it.”

“Our Maya culture is closely related to nature, but we’ve lost a great deal of that. So why don’t we go back and reclaim what’s ours? The Maya saying is, leave no one behind. This applies to nature, as well.”

“We created the concept, ‘empre-ambiental’ (empresarial plus environmental) because we have to have development, but it doesn’t need to hurt the environment. I said to myself, if they can do this in Xela, why can’t we do it here? Here we have the resources, the natural beauty. We should be able to make it work here.”

“I give talks to the young people and I say, ‘Kids, now is our time, it’s the time for us to show what we are made of.”

“If they support us from outside, that’s great but we also have to learn how to generate our own financing. A lot of times groups will arrive in the villages and the people will say, ‘What are you bringing us?’ We say, ‘what do we have to offer?’ We’re trying to change the paradigm.”

Ana, 20 – “We were seeing that the trash was collecting all around and it was really affecting us. Sometimes the grandfathers cut the trees in the mountains and don’t replant them. So we got together and we said, we have to make the change; if we don’t, nobody will. We want to have a beautiful place to hand down to the little ones when it’s their time.”

Jairo, 21 – “I’d been studying science and thinking already about the way the future is looking and feeling really scared about it. Then one day at church I heard a talk that Martin gave and I said, and I loved the idea, I was delighted to join this team.”

Pablo, 20 – “Now that we’ve been going around picking up the recyclables the people are beginning to trust us. Guatemala is changing and I realized, I wanted to be a part of it – we have to really put out the effort to make it better.”

Nicolas, 16: “Now is the time we can raise up a generation of change. Maybe the last generations believed that you could cut the trees down and they’d come back by themselves, but now we realize they don’t come back by themselves, and without trees there is no life, we can’t breathe.”

Josias, 20: “Sometimes we young people don’t really think about what we’re doing, just throwing trash and such. Now we’re beginning to realize what our environment really needs, and that’s why we’ve started all these projects, which are going to require a lot of work. And since I’m in charge of fundraising, I know we’re going to need some money to make it happen, and I’m not sure how we’re going to do it, but I know we have to.”

Jose, 18: “Up here in the highlands, the sun used to just warm us, but now it burns us. We have to do something for our planet. We can’t fix what’s already been done but what we can do is raise the awareness of our friends and neighbors, saying what are we going to leave our children? We can’t give them a destroyed planet. We want them to be able to have what we enjoyed.”

Carmina, 24: “I had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in an NGO, and I was sharing with many foreigners. I realized that the reality we were living – we went to many places where there were not more trees, the mountains were completely treeless. We saw places where there was extreme poverty. This motivated me to do something, but I didn’t know what to do by myself. I saw how the foreigners came to help, but when they extended a hand to help, the people would reach out and say, give us more.”

“Why do other people come to help our people when we can do it ourselves? But then a friend told me about Projuve, and at first it didn’t really convince me. The third time I said, let me see what they’re doing. Then it was Martin who told me the whole vision of Projuve. Then I said, I think I can contribute something here. So I decided to stay and see what I could do to realize the vision of a green Paxtoca.”

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A Mother’s Day greeting from the Racoons

Tracy Barnett

Published: May 11, 2010Posted in: Biking, Featured, Forest protection, Guatemala, Mapaches, Reforestation, Urban green space, WhyTags: environment, Guatemala, Mother's Day

A Mother’s Day greeting from the Racoons

Mother’s Day is celebrated here in Guatemala on the 10th of May, regardless of what day of the week it falls on. So today was the big day – and I do mean big.

It began at 6:30 am with a mobile loudspeaker blasting an upbeat blessing from the streets, mañanitas-style. That was followed by fireworks, and all day I continued to receive kisses and hugs and very sincere blessings just for the fact that I have a beautiful daughter – which is already blessing enough.

But then, when I arrived home and checked my e-mail, I found the best Mother’s Day greeting of all. I just had to share it with you all.

This greeting came from the Mapaches, or Racoons, a lively group based in Guatemala City that has been using creativity and community-building to raise awareness about the need for a more liveable city.

Their greeting card is a gentle reminder:

“Thank you, Mom, for teaching me to love the Mother Earth.”

Chevron’s new tactic called a threat to First Amendment

Tracy Barnett

Published: April 28, 2010Posted in: Ecuador, Featured, Forest protection, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights, WhyTags: Amazon, Chevron, Crude the Movie, Ecuador, environment, Joe Berlinger, Texaco

Chevron’s new tactic called a threat to First Amendment

An Amazonian community’s fifteen-year battle with Chevron is entering dangerous waters with the Chevron request for all of the 600 hours of unused footage from the filming of “Crude: The Real Price of Oil”.

The movie documented the environmental disaster left behind by Chevron-Texaco in an indigenous community of Ecuador, and the battle by Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo and others to force the company to clean up its mess and make reparations to the community. Readers may remember my post when the film came out, “Crude: The Movie Chevron Doesn’t Want You to See.”

Now Chevron is appealing a court order to pay the community millions of dollars in reparations, and it wants to see whether director Joe Berlinger’s raw footage contains any material that could bolster its defense. Now the company has asked a federal judge in New York to force Berlinger to hand over his footage.

“Documentary filmmakers play an essential role in exposing social injustice,” said Berlinger in a press release I received yesterday alerting me to the case. “As with traditional journalists, their sources must be protected or we risk the demise of this kind of comprehensive investigative reporting.”

As a journalist, this request sent a chill up my spine. One of the things we count on as reporters is the ability to protect our sources from danger or harassment that may come to them as a result of sharing information with us. Without the ability to promise confidentiality, there’s a “chilling effect” that occurs, and sources are less willing to share information.

“Unused film footage and other editorial materials from Crude are protected by the journalist’s
privilege under federal law and the First Amendment,” said Maura Wogan of Frankfurt Kurnit, the
lawyers for Mr. Berlinger and his production company. “We will vigorously oppose Chevron’s
attempt to get to these materials.”

Let’s hope they are successful. Meanwhile, I’m going to take full advantage of the opportunity to plug “Crude, The Movie,” which is now available on DVD from First Run Features and Netflix. If you haven’t seen it yet, put it on your must-see list. You won’t regret it.