Who Archive

Huehuecoyotl: 30 years of utopia, and going strong

Tracy Barnett

Published: April 27, 2012Posted in: Alberto Ruz, Ecovillages, Featured, Mexico, Mexico City, WhyTags: Alberto Ruz Buenfil, Consejo de Visiones, ecovillage, Festival de Jade, Huehuecoyotl, Jan Svante Vanbart, Laura Esquivel, Mexico, Rainbow Peace Caravan, Vision Council

Huehuecoyotl: 30 years of utopia, and going strong

Beloved Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, of “Like Water for Chocolate” fame, described it as “a type of Macondo, a magical place that belongs to all of us, that enriches all of us, that represents all of us.”

Mexico’s first ecovillage has just turned 30, and celebrated with the release of a beautiful book of memories, “Huehuecoyotl: Raices al Viento” (Roots to the Wind)” and a festival that took the magical spirit of the place into the heart of the city.

Esquivel, as a collaborator and friend of Huehuecoyotl, was a contributor to the book and one of the presenters at the recent book launch celebration in Coyoacán. Her words capture my own feelings about the place, whose work and inhabitants have had an impact far beyond the green valley where they live.

“…Huehuecoyotl is more than an ecovillage,” she said. “It’s the certainty that not everything is bad, that not everyone is asleep, that not all the civilizing efforts have failed, nor that the ideal of community, common-unity, is a utopia. In Huehuecoyotl, utopia is real; it breathes, it sings, it eats, it kisses, it dances, it dreams.”

I share her wistfulness at not having been there as the vision unfolded. “But do you know what?” she countered. “Thinking about it more, I’m convinced that I was. I was in the temezcal, in the theatrical performances, in the rainy nights and the sunrises, at the births, at the funerals, at the sacred ceremonies, in the silences… in this time out of time where we dream that a world like this is possible… the tribe of Huehue is my tribe.”

Huehuecoyotl is more than a Macondo, it is a real community built with love and cradled in the mountains of Tepotzlán, about an hour and a half outside of Mexico City. And the stories of its inhabitants and visitors, chronicled by more than 40 collaborators, are the stories of the potent currents of change that have moved through this planet, alternately unperceived, misunderstood and repressed by the powers that be.

Huehuecoyotl is like the giant amate tree that stands at the heart of the community, whose seeds have been spread throughout the planet thanks to its inhabitants’ various cultural and educational adventures, beginning in the 1960s with the Hathi Babas in India and the Middle East, and tracing its way through the Americas in the epic Rainbow Peace Caravan, 1996-2009. Look for its current manifestation in the periodic international Consejo de Visiones, or Vision Council.

The writers are dreamers and doers, cultural, spiritual, artistic and ecological activists from Mexico and the United States, from Sweden and Italy and Spain, to name just a few of the nationalities of this global tribe. To page through this collection of essays and the colorful photography of Jan Svante Vanbart and others is to be swept along those currents through four decades of change. These are voices that will not be silenced, but will be raised time and again in song, lifting into the skies like the smoke of the sacred copal.

As Huehue cofounder, author, visionary and teacher “Coyote” Alberto Ruz Buenfil said, “Those who do not dare to live their dreams, or who for fear betray them, the only thing they achieve is to end their existence in the middle of a great nightmare.”

For those willing to take that dare, “Huehuecoyotl: Raices al Viento” is more than an inspiration; it’s a call to action.

Available (in Spanish only, at this time) through Alberto Ruz Buenfil, subcoyotealberto@yahoo.com.

Here are some images from the book launch celebration, April 20 at Casa de Cultura Reyes Heroles, and the Festival de Jade, April 21 in the nearby Plaza Coyocan, bringing the spirit of Huehue to the heart of Mexico City’s most authentic colonia.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Guadalajara by foot: Trek reveals many faces of historic avenue

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 21, 2012Posted in: Biking, Ciudad Para Todos, Com:Plot, Environmental education, Featured, GDL en Bici, Guadalajara, Transportation, Urban green space, WhyTags: Alfredo Hidalgo, Barranca de Huentitan, Calzada de la Independencia, City planning, Ciudad Para Todos, Com:Plot, environment, GDL en Bici, green cities, Guadalajara, Guillermo Gomez, Hospicio de Cabañas, Jesus Arreola, Karla Preciado, Mercado San Juan de Dios, Mexico, Parque Agua Azul, Plaza de Mariachis, Plaza Tapatia, public spaces, sustainable cities, wikimultas, Yeriel

Guadalajara by foot: Trek reveals many faces of historic avenue

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.

Real de Catorce awaits historic pilgrimage

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 5, 2012Posted in: Featured, Indigenous peoples, Mining, WhyTags: Huicholes, Mexico, Mining, Real de Catorce, Wirikuta, Wixarika

Real de Catorce awaits historic pilgrimage

Story and photos by Tracy L. Barnett
For The Esperanza Project

REAL DE CATORCE, San Luis Potosi, Mexico – A quiet but excited buzz hums through the streets of this normally sleepy ghost town turned tourist attraction. Hotels that languished for months are filled to bursting and people are camping on every spare piece of real estate. Everyone is awaiting the arrival of hundreds of Wixarika pilgrims from their homelands in the Western Sierra Madre – a historic mass pilgrimage to connect with the spirits of their ancestors and to pray for the renovation of the fading candles of life that reside in this place, the depleting water supply and the continued equilibrium of all life on Earth.

The Wixarika, more commonly known by their Spanish name, the Huicholes, hope to gain some insights in a historic “spiritual consultation” regarding the threats to their most sacred site, Wirikuta. The Huicholes have made their millenial pilgrimages to Wirikuta since the beginning of their history, and see it as their holiest altar of prayer, the place where they come to hunt their sacramental cactus, the peyote, and the place where the sun was born; but this protected reserve is the target of Canadian mining companies and agroindustrial businesses that see it as a resource to exploit.

This UNESCO-recognized natural and cultural reserve is also home to some of the world’s richest silver veins, exploited for centuries by the Spaniards and then left to languish – until now, when new mining methods and rising silver and gold prices have made the area attractive once again to the mining industry. But besides the cultural significance of the site, the region is also one of the most biodiverse desert regions on the planet and home to a number of endemic and endangered species.

I arrived last night in this picturesque colonial mountain town in the company of Carlos Chavez, coordinator of the Wirikuta Defense Front, and got a quick debriefing from Mercedes Aquino, who is heading up the local support effort. Tensions have risen here for the past year since First Majestic Silver Corp. announced plans to open a silver mine, with those who depend on the tourism industry at odds with those who hope to make a living from the mines.

Organizers were worried yesterday about reports that pro-mining forces were gathering and possibly mounting an unfortunate response to the event, but Mercedes was breathless and glowing when we arrived; she and several others went on the air on the community radio station to head off a possible confrontation, explaining the purpose of the pilgrimage and putting people’s fears to rest. And this morning, priests all over the diocesis are urging their parishioners to exercise tolerance and support the pilgrimage in their own way tomorrow night, praying along with the Huicholes from their own homes for water and for life.

“We explained that the Huicholes are coming here to pray for life, to pray for the water, as they have for centuries. And just as they began to arrive, it began to rain. It’s like a miracle, really.”

Like all of northern Mexico, Wirikuta is suffering the worst drought in more than 70 years; the rains never came to Wirikuta this year, and the crops all failed. Many locals are hoping the proposed mines will provide much-needed employment, despite concerns that it will contaminate and deplete the scarce water reserves. So the timing of last night’s cloudburst, and the predicted rain of the next few days, is really quite remarkable.

Organizing the support for this pilgrimage has been a tall order the Wirikuta Defense has had to fill; from the moment the Huicholes made the decision to make this pilgrimage, just a few weeks ago, it has fallen to the small, unfunded and overworked defense group to try and pull together the logistics and smooth things over in the local communities. Somehow they managed to raise most of the nearly half-million pesos necessary to rent buses, buy food and firewood and pull together a thousand other details, and now about a dozen buses filled with Huicholes, in addition to countless individual bands, are making their way here from hundreds of ceremonial centers spread out over the Wixarika territories some 400 miles to the west. Their plan is to converge on the Cerro Quemado, the sacred mountain where they believe the sun was born, on the night of Feb. 6, where they will hold an all-night ceremony of prayer.

Anthropologist Paul Liffman, author of Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation, called the pilgrimage “unprecedented in recent history – maybe unprecedented, period.” Normally the pilgrims organize their annual journeys to Wirikuta individually, and each of the more than 500 ceremonial centers sends their own group of maraka’ames (shamans) and jicareros (guardians of the sacred sites) over the course of the year. This mass pilgrimage and ceremony is a response to what they see as a mortal threat to their culture, Liffman said. It’s also a result of the logistical and financial support of the civil society and a growing awareness of the media.

Meanwhile, Chavez takes the long view. “What we’re seeing here is a concentration of the challenges that humanity is facing everywhere,” he said. “It’s going to be extremely important that a sustainable alternative livelihood is provided to the local communities,” he said. “What we’re hoping for and working towards is a big project of restoration – this is such an important area and we can make of it an example of sustainable development for the world.”

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

The fight for Wirikuta crosses the border

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 19, 2011Posted in: AJAGI, Borderlands, Featured, Indigenous peoples, Mexico, WhyTags: Coahuiltecan, Ho-Chunk, Huicholes, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights, Lakota, Latin America, Mining, Native American Church, peyote, sacred sites, Wirikuta, Wixarika

The fight for Wirikuta crosses the border

By Tracy L. Barnett
Translation by Yvonne Negrin

MIRANDO CITY, TEXAS – It was an unforgettable meeting of cultures: Lakota and Navajo, Chippewa and Cree, Coahuiltecan and Chichimecan and more, joining hearts and minds wth their Wixaritari brothers in a hogan in South Texas.

“Never in my life did I imagine that this moment would come,” said Efren Bautista Parra, a diminutive yet powerful marakame, or shaman, and the traditional governor of San Andrés Cohamiata, with tears in his eyes. “Just like the joy of this moment, our suffering brings us together in a bond of brotherhood.” Around the fire, cradled in the curve of a crescent moon, the language of spirit transcended words to merge all souls into one.

Efren was one of eight Wixarika leaders chosen by their communities in the highlands of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit to travel from their communities to this town in Mirando City, Texas. They were there to attend the International Convention of the Native American Church, a union of Native American peoples of North America dedicated to preserving the right to traditional use of the sacred peyote plant, or medicine as it is known.

“Never did we imagine that there were others who, like us, use the sacred hikuri as we do in their ceremonies and prayers,” he said.

The Native American Church is comprised of various tribal peoples from the United States and Canada, who consider peyote a sacrament and use it in their prayers and ceremonies. Upon learning that a Canadian mining company, First Majestic Silver Corp., has acquired 22 concessions, granted by the Mexican government, to exploit minerals in the sacred land of Wirikuta, the birthplace of the Wixarika’s Father Sun and the ecosystem where the sacred plant grows, the Native American Church invited representatives of the Wixarika communities (also known as Huichol) to attend its convention on 11, 12 and 13 of February in Mirando City, Texas.

Some of them had been traveling for days to arrive in Guadalajara, where a race to acquire visas and passports culminated in a 15-hour overnight bus ride from Guadalajara. An hour of lines and paperwork at the border was followed by an hour of travel from Laredo to Mirando City in a rented van through the desert considered a sacred place for members of the Native American Church.

Unfazed by the lack of rest, the delegation arrived energized and eager to meet their northern counterparts. In the Mirando Community Center, festooned with hearts and balloons for the upcoming Valentine’s Day celebration, the delegation was welcomed with open arms by the Indian nations of the north, a greeting which was followed by an extensive and sincere dialogue.

“We are the keepers of the sacred land of Wirikuta,” said Felipe Serio Chino, secretary of the Wixárika Ceremonial Centers of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit. “We conduct our pilgrimages there every year, as our ancestors entrusted us to do, so that life can continue to be reborn. It is inconceivable to us that from one moment to the next, a site this sacred can be destroyed. This Canadian company is very powerful, but we hope that perhaps with partnerships like this one we can win in the defense of Wirikuta.”

Santos De La Cruz Carrillo, an attorney and an appointed official from Bancos de San Hipólito, Durango, explained the process of the formation of the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Wahaa.

“We know they are in violation of our rights. What they have planned is an attack on our culture. We want this to be known not only nationally but internationally,” he said.

“We are here to build bridges and join forces with the indigenous peoples of the North. We invite you to work with us and to integrate into the Front in any way you can to help defend what is sacred in life. Our prayers and ceremonies are to renew the candles of life, not just for the Wixárika people, but for the whole world.”

Sandor Iron Rope, a Lakota leader from South Dakota and Vice-President of the Native American Church of North America, was the first to answer.

“We understand the process of colonization on both sides of the border,”he said. “We can unite in the defense of our medicine. We are the legitimate guardians of this continent and we must create a struggle to continue spreading awareness among those who do not understand.”

Sandor shared a song he had written for Wirikuta in his native Lakota:

Several members of the Native American Church told of how the peyote had changed and even saved their lives, such as Lance Long, a member of the Ho-Chunk people of Wisconsin. Long told of how as a baby he was on the verge of death, and medical doctors could do nothing to help. Finally, his parents gave him his first peyote tea. “I am alive today thanks to medicine,” he said.

Members of the Coahuiltecan delegation of Texas reiterated their support as an indigenous sister nation bound by the long history of medicinal use of peyote by both indigenous groups. They expressed that the desecration of sacred sites must stop and that the defense of Wirikuta is the same as defending Our Mother Earth.

The two-day dialogue included a ceremony in which several saw visions of the Condor and the Eagle, symbols of North and South. Sandor Iron Rope expressed it as a vision from the beginning of time, in which the Eagle and the Condor flew together as in the beginning of the world.

Agreements were manifested in the Native American Church of North America signing of a letter by the Wixárika delegation, proposing a collaboration with the Church and a pledge of brotherhood and solidarity. The assembly of the Native American Church of North America unanimously voted to join the Wirikuta Defense Front.

José García, spiritual leader of the Coahuiltecan nation, sang during the ceremony in his native language and in a voice that resonated from another dimension. Later he explained that he had actually visited Wirikuta during the ceremony, and he shared the story behind the song.

“Several years ago I was commissioned to talk to the Wixaritari (Huichol) to tell them that our elders dreamed that something bad was happening in Wirikuta,” he recalled. “At that time I didn’t understand. Tonight I realized what it meant, as I visited this sacred place and spoke with Wirikuta during my song. ”

Armando Loizaga and Cristian Chávez contributed to this story.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Mayan communities under siege in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala

Tracy Barnett

Published: January 26, 2011Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Indigenous peoples, WhyTags: Alta Verapaz, drug war, Guatemala, Los Zetas, Q'eqchi Maya, Zetas

Mayan communities under siege in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala

Above: Members of the community Miralvalle in Alta Verapaz. The community was recently attacked by the private security force of a biodiesel company financed by the US government. (Guatemala Solidarity Project)

By John Schertow
Intercontinental Cry
Traducción por Project ISD

On December 19, 2010, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared a State of Siege in the department of Alta Verapaz under the pretence of fighting drug traffickers.

Officials claim that, since Mexico increased its own “war on drugs”, the hardline organization known as “Los Zetas” has moved its operation from Mexico to Alta Verapaz which is located in north central Guatemala. Los Zetas are now allegedly in control of much of the region.

Since the siege began, notes Al Jazeera, “Police have arrested at least 22 ‘traffickers’ and confiscated five small planes, 239 assault weapons, 28 vehicles and explosives in a series of raids.” However, with the suspension of basic human rights in Alta Verapaz–and the extensive powers given to the police and military–drug traffickers aren’t the only ones being targeted.

According to Coordinadora Nacional Indigena Y Campesina (CONIC), the Q’eqchi Maya community of Se’ Job’ Che’–which has absolutely no connection to drug trafficking–was raided on January 10, 2011. The community fled the area when the soldiers arrived; and when they returned, their food crops and property had been destroyed.

Soldiers, police, and park rangers [INAB guardarecursos] approaching the farm lands of the Maya Q’eqchi community of Se’ Job’ Che’, municipality of Cobán, Alta Verapaz (Coordinadora Nacional Indigena Y Campesina)

CONIC states:

On Monday, January 10, 2011 at 10:00 am, 40 soldiers, 2 members of the National Civilian Police, and 20 park rangers [INAB guardarecursos] entered the area where the community tends their cardamom, corn, and bean crops. Without engaging in any dialogue, the military troops began shooting their weapons, and the campesinos had to run and hide away from the crop area. The military then began to destroy the community’s crops, cutting 300 cuerdas of cardamom [around 15 hectares], 300 cuerdas of beans, and 50 cuerdas of corn.

Crop destruction in the Q’eqchi Maya community of Se’ Job’ Che’ (Coordinadora Nacional Indigena Y Campesina)

Héctor Arnulfo Ruiz, who was present as a representative of the FONTIERRAS government land institution, assaulted and attempted to rape Mrs. Adelina Yaxcal as she was hiding among the cardamom crops, ripping her traditional güipil blouse in the process. Fermín Ayala, head of the National Forestry Institute (INAB) park rangers, attempted to bribe various community members, offering to spare their crops in exchange for Q50,000 [over $6,000].

The families were able to reunite in the afternoon, and then realized that during the raid they had lost 20 turkeys and 20 chickens, as well as other personal property such as work tools. By 5:00 pm that day rumors were circulating that the same actions were to be carried out in other Indigenous communities.

According to the Guatemala Solidarity Project (GSP), wealthy landowners and international corporations have also been taking advantage of the ongoing military offensive to do a little “land clearing” of their own.

On January 20, 2011, the community of Saquimo Setano was violently attacked by the family of wealthy landowners Benjamin Soto and his wife Maria Elena Garcia Ical. This family has violently attacked numerous unarmed peasants, burned houses with children inside, and attacked and threatened US citizens. Numerous complaints have been filed, but the only response by the authorities has been to threaten community leaders and US volunteers who are working with them.

Since the attack on January 20, GSP has been unable to reestablish communication with the community. GSP is now urging immediate action in solidarity with the Mayan community (see below).

Providing some background, GSP observes,

“The community has faced numerous attacks from wealthy landowners Benjamin Soto and his wife Maria Elena Garcia Ical, who are attempting to steal the community’s land. Between August 31 and September 2, 2010, the landowners led attacks against the community during which houses were burned down, death threats were made and dogs, horses and guns were used to terrorize families. The government has refused to arrest Soto and Elena Garcia for the attacks, and has instead moved forward with fraudulent charges against community leaders and GSP activists.”

Though details are scarce, GSP says that the indigenous community of Miralvalle was also attacked “by the private security force of a biodiesel company financed by the US government.”

The teenage daughter of a community leader was hit in the face with a machete during a recent attack on the Q’eqchi community Rio Cristalino. (Guatemala Solidarity Project)

Guatemalan Human Rights Leaders have been speaking out against the siege since it was declared On Dec. 19.

Indigenous Community Leaders have also been speaking out; however, so far their voices have been ignored.

While attacks against indigenous communities in Alta Verapaz have been going on for quite some time, the latest attacks by the police and military appear to be part of an effort to ‘change the region’s social fabric’.

Just prior to the Jan. 10 attack, Carlos Menocal, Guatemala’s Minister of the Interior, stated that U.S. officials would be travelling to the region along with Colombian Vice Minister of Defense, “to kick off the new phase” in Alta Verapaz. “According to Menocal, US officials will support a new ‘model police precinct’ in its efforts to ‘reconstruct the social fabric’”, notes a Jan. 9 statement by GSP.

Following this, on Jan. 20–the same day that the community of Saquimo Setano was attacked–President Colom announced that the siege would be extended for another month.

At this point, there’s no telling how long Alta Verapaz will be under martial law. And with media almost exclusively reporting on Los Zetas, there’s no telling how many more indigenous communities will be repressed – under the pretence of fighting drug traffickers.

What You Can Do
1. Email and/or fax the office of President Alvaro Colom and demand an end to the repression
Email: cartapresidente@scspr.gob.gt Fax: 502-2251-4144

It is very important to please also cc: goberaltaverapaz@gmail.com, esay@oj.gob.gt, solidaridadguatemala@yahoo.com, stuand_wckr@yahoo.com, fdaltaverapaz@mp.gob.gt, mpcoban@hotmail.com

2 Call or write members of Congress asking them to oppose the state of siege and denounce the continued government repression of the peasant movement in Alta Verapaz. If you send an email, please cc: us at solidaridadguatemala@yahoo.com so that we can follow up on their actions. Below is a sample letter

3. Send a financial contribution to communities facing eviction. Checks should be made out to “UPAVIM Community Development Foundation” and mailed to UPAVIM, c/o Laurie Levinger, 28 McKenna Rd, Norwich, VT 05055. Write the word “evictions” in the notes/memo of your check, and all funds will go to communities facing eviction. Or donate via paypal at http://upavim.pursuantgroup.net/english/donate.htm, you will see the paypal link, and you must include the words “GSP evictions” in a note to ensure the funding is delivered correctly. The GSP will take no percentage of such donations.

Sample letter:

Dear Congresswoman/man ,

I am writing to ask you to call for an end to the state of siege declared on December 19, 2010, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and the continued repression of indigenous leaders in the region. According to Guatemala’s Minister of the Interior, Carlos Menocal, US officials will be accompanying police and soldiers in the region to begin what he calls the “second phase” of the siege. In addition, many of the police and military officials leading the siege have been trained and equipped by the US government.

I am very concerned about the immediate physical safety of peasant leaders who continue to be targeted by the police and military, including Pablo Sacrab Pop who was arrested on December 28, 2010, despite committing no crime. I am also very worried about human rights violations by the company Chabil Utzaj, which has received US government funds and has organized violent attacks against Q’eqchi families in Alta Verapaz. Please contact the US Embassy in Guatemala at your earliest convenience and ask them to intervene with the company to prevent them from continuing such attacks.

Sincerely,

Saving a sacred tradition in Wirikuta: How you can help

Tracy Barnett

Published: December 31, 2010Posted in: AJAGI, Featured, Huichol lands, Indigenous rights, Mexico, WhyTags: AJAGI, Huichol, Indigenous rights, Mexico, Real de Catorce, Wirikuta, Wixarika

Saving a sacred tradition in Wirikuta: How you can help

REAL DE CATORCE, San Luis Potosí, México – Rodolfo Cosio prays he’s not the last generation of a dying tradition.

As a jicarero, he is one of the keepers of the ancient pilgrimage of the Wixaritari or Huichol people of western Mexico. Each year he travels to the sacred sites of his ancestors in the five directions, offering up prayers and ceremonies that his people believe are essential to balancing the energies of an increasingly endangered planet.

Each year he explains to his children the importance of living a simple life, of maintaining the traditions, of fasting and pushing oneself far beyond the limits of comfort to keep the ceremonial fires burning as his ancestors have done for more than 1,000 years. He prays this won’t be the last year his people will receive the teachings of their sacred plant, hikuri, or peyote.

Just a few months ago, Cosio and other members of his community received the news that Wirikuta, the most important of their five pilgrimage sites in the state of San Luis Potosí, near the UNESCO-recognized site of Real de Catorce, has been concessioned to a Canadian mining company for a silver mine – despite the fact that the mining concessions lie within a federally protected cultural and natural preserve. The news was met at first with shock and disbelief.

“What they are talking about means the annihilation of our culture,” Cosio said. “It’s like a spiritual death for us.”

At the heart of Wirikuta is Leunar, or Cerro Quemado, the site where the sun rose for the first time, according to Huichol tradition. The region is home to several sacred springs, where their ancestors are buried and important ceremonies must be conducted each year. Here is the desert where they collect the sacred hikuri that they use for their prayers and ceremonies. And here will be the site of Mexico’s next resource battle, as the Wixaritari are not likely to let their ancient ceremonial site be mined without a struggle.

Santos Carillo de la Cruz, a Wixaritari leader, at Real de Catorce, Wirikuta.

The Wixarika communities published a call for support from the international community in September. Since that time, they appointed AJAGI, the Jalisco Association in Support of Indigenous People, to lead their legal defense, and AJAGI has joined with several organizations throughout Mexico to create a coalition called the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta, or the Wirikuta Defense Front. AJAGI has supported the Wixarika communities for two decades in reclaiming their lands from illegal invasions and in a wide range of development projects.

Those organizations are now working together on the legal challenge and are organizing to raise awareness about this threat and to build an international campaign to support the Huicholes in their efforts to protect their sacred sites.

“In the face of these enormous challenges that humanity is confronting right now with environmental destruction, climate change and industrial contamination, we cannot let economic ambition carry us to the extreme of destroying sacred places of such great spiritual, cultural and environmental value, even disregarding laws and the most elemental of human rights,” said Carlos Chávez, founder of AJAGI. “We must support this cause, which is the cause of all humanity, because to do otherwise would bring us one step closer to the cancelation of our future.”

In this excellent video interview, recorded at the recent Call of the Eagle – Vision Council gathering by Leticia Rigatti and Ryan Luckey of the Común Tierra project, Huichol marakame (medicine man) Julio Parra shares his thoughts about the proposed mine in Wirikuta. For a version with English subtitles and blog entry, and to learn more about Común Tierra, check out their website here.

How you can help

There are several ways you can support the Huichol people in their struggle to protect their culture and their traditional pilgrimage site.

First, you can join the Wirikuta Defense Front by dropping a line to AJAGI1@prodigy.net.mx and asking to be added to the mailing list. If you want to receive information in English only, please specify. Also, please indicate if you have particular skills that you can share: translation, background in environmental sciences or other relevant skills, connections with organizations that might be able to write a letter in support or help in other ways. The group is in the process of translating Spanish-language materials into English; please let us know if you’d like to help. Meanwhile, the Spanish-language blog is SALVEMOS WIRIKUTA (Let’s Save Wirikuta) and there’s also a SALVEMOS WIRIKUTAFacebook page. Also, the Wixarika Resource Center has a Wirikuta page with frequent updates here.

Second, you can organize a letter-writing campaign among your friends and contacts to Mexican officials; personal letters sent through the mail are the most effective, but if you prefer, there is a website where you can just fill out a form and press “send.” Cultural Survival, an international organization dedicated to raising awareness about indigenous rights, has launched an international letter-writing campaign with a sample letter and addresses here, as well as an alert that lays out the issues in detail. Rainforest Rescue has another that goes to even more public officials. Please do both.

* Sign the petition.

Meanwhile, the Wirikuta Defense Front is working to bring international pressure on the Mexican government to shut down the mine before it starts. The group is working to raise the money to send a delegation of Huicholes to Canada to lobby against the proposed mine at the company’s Canadian headquarters, through its stockholders and through the Canadian government.

If you are interested in contributing to the Wirikuta Defense Front to help with this and other expenses related to stopping the mining operations in Wirikuta, please make a tax-deductible contribution to The Esperanza Project via the Paypal link on its website, with WIRIKUTA in the special instructions space, or through the AJAGI bank account in Mexico, c/o CARLOS CHÀVEZ REYES, at HSBC, Branch # 00701, Account #02132 00403 92525 721.

Most importantly, help spread the word – and join Rodolfo and his people in their prayers for a healthier, happier and more balanced planet for us all.

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.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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.