Mayans Archive

Cultural Survival: Using radio to preserve endangered cultures

Tracy Barnett

Published: July 14, 2010Posted in: Belize, Community Radio, Environmental education, Featured, Guatemala, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Mexico, Mining, Spiritual, WhyTags: Community Radio, Cultural Survival, environment, Guatemala, Indigenous People, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Mark Camp, Mayans

Cultural Survival: Using radio to preserve endangered cultures

(Above: Concepción Aganel of Radio Niña in Totonicapan, one of the community radio stations fighting for legitimate status.)

Mark Camp, Operations and Interim Director, Cultural Survival

By Tracy L. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldcorp’s Marlin Mine: “Development for death”

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 24, 2010Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Indigenous rights, Mining, WhyTags: Central America, environment, Goldcorp, Guatemala, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Marlin Mine, Mayans, Mining

Goldcorp’s Marlin Mine: “Development for death”

Author’s note (June 24, 2010): Today’s Prensa Libre carried the news that the Guatemalan government has agreed to abide by the requests of the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, the Catholic Church, the International Labor Organization and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights and has ordered the temporary suspension of operations at the Marlin Mine. Goldcorp, the Canadian owner, has announced it will continue operations. “We welcome this opportunity to demonstrate once again Goldcorp’s record of respectful, environmental sound operations at Marlin,” Goldcorp CEO Chuck Jeannes was quoted in Mineweb, a publication covering the mining industry.
This is the second in a series about Anaya’s recent visit to Guatemala and the issues surrounding that visit.

SAN MIGUEL IXTAHUACAN – The road up into this mountain town seems to wind forever upward, and I’m frustrated because we’re late. The meeting with the U.N Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People, James Anaya, is scheduled to begin his meeting with the people at 8. I don’t understand why Joshue is stopping for breakfast.

I needn’t have worried. I’m with Josue Navarro and Bart Van Besien, two members of the dedicated staff of COPAE, the Pastoral Commission for Peace and Ecology, and their peaceful trajectory is in keeping with local traditions.

We arrive at the parish hall to find it filled with animated people in their colorful native dress, milling excitedly around a spectacular mandala created from colored sawdust and flowers in the center of the floor – but no James Anaya. Feeling lucky to find a seat, I settle in and wait; listen to a few speeches and a few marimba tunes, shoot a few photos and wait some more.

This is a big day in San Miguel Ixtahuacan. This small town has drawn big headlines in the past few months, and has been the subject of several documentaries. That’s because the transnational Goldcorp has a tremendously profitable mine here, the Marlin Mine, which many in this Mam Maya community say they never agreed to.
Residents complain of strange rashes on their children’s skins and other symptoms, of cracks in the walls of houses near the mine, and of repression from local authorities when they dare to speak out against the mine. A recent study by University of Michigan physicians showed elevated levels of heavy metals in the blood of residents living near the mine, but said they were uncertain whether those levels constituted a risk.

Goldcorp officials – here in Guatemala the subsidiary is called Montana Exploradora – say there is no evidence of contamination, and the government so far has agreed.

The wait stretches into an hour, and suddenly everyone gets up to leave. Everyone seems to know what’s going on except Bart and me. “We’re going to the field,” someone explains to me. The field? “Yes, that’s where the helicopter is coming.”

Sure enough, everyone was gathering around a big field, holding up signs that expressed their rejection of the mine.

The helicopter landed to great fanfare and paparazzi, and James Anaya emerged from the helicopter: a tall, photogenic man with Native American features and a gentle smile. He and his entourage were greeted by local leaders and led back to the parish for the proceedings.

The first order of business was a ceremony. A group of beautiful young Mam Maya women and men gather around the mandala and perform a graceful dance in honor of the sacred elements, the water, represented by the earthen pots they carry, and the earth, represented by the green tree seedlings they “plant” at the center of the mandala.

Now it was Anaya’s turn. Hundreds of traditionally dressed Mam Maya highlanders looked on with bated breath as Anaya, perhaps the world’s highest-ranking authority on indigenous issues, knelt before the altar to light the red candle.

“Red signifies abundance, energy and life, and whoever lights the red candle has the responsibility of looking out for the well-being of our community,” Sister Maudilia had said, handing the matches to Anaya.
The task was not as easy as it seemed. The wick was short, and the flame wavered and threatened to fail. Anaya, however, was up to the task. He persisted, working with the candle and nurturing the flame until it grew steady.
The onlookers erupted into applause.

Carmen Mejia, a leader of the San Miguel Association for Integral Development, took the mike and began with a short history of the mining company’s entrance into the community.

“They entered under deceit and lies; they were offering productive jobs for people here. They didn’t say they were a mining company; they never said they were here to extract gold and silver. They said it was a project for development, and they began acquiring lands. Once they had some land they began to coerce the neighbors to sell their land. ‘If you don’t sell to us, you’ll be surrounded and buried,’ they were told if they resisted.”

The company continued, she said, manipulating and gathering signatures under false pretenses.

“The company is operating illegally, because it lacks the social license to be here,” she said. “The people of San Miguel were never consulted.”

Exploration of the mine began, and that’s when the damage began occurring, she said. Neighbors began speaking out.

“The answer was criminalization, persecution, the threatening of campesinos and campesinas. In 2007, we had seven comrades processed; five were liberated, but two were condemned to three years of prison and liberated, under the condition that they stop speaking out against the mine. In 2008, eight women campesina leaders, indigenous Mam Maya women, were under an order of capture, just for speaking out for their rights. In 2009, five campesinos were arrested and charged, and in 2010 five more. And why? Because the people of San Miguel have demanded their rights.

“They’ve spoken out for their right to life, for their right to water; for their right to safe homes. In San Miguel, more than 120 houses have been cracked and broken, their lives are in danger…. They’ve spoken out for the environment, for the rivers and the flora and the fauna that are being contaminated.

“This is what we’re living here in San Miguel; we’re seeing more illnesses, in the people and in the animals, including animals that have died after drinking contaminated water.

“Seeing all of this, seeing all of the manipulation and the criminalization and the conflict that has occurred at the community level, we have come to the conclusion that an extractive industry like a mine is not compatible with a Mam community.”

Anaya heard from a labor leader who said there were miners who had been injured and who knew about the contamination but weren’t free to talk; a women’s rights leader who said the company claims to be giving women opportunities but that they are being manipulated and exploited; and from a number of others.
“Next you’ll go and speak to the government officials and the mining officials, and they’ll tell you we’re just a little grupito of troublemakers,” said a man introduced as Don Ricardo. “But we are not a grupito. We are thousands. We represent our communities, and we represent many more who are afraid to speak up because of the reprisals.”

Sister Maudilia López, of FREDEMI (Front in Resistance of San Miguel), a Catholic sister and a Mam Maya leader of the resistance against the mining, presented the officials with handmade earthen pots used for carrying water.

“These are humble works, but they are made by our own hands, and we make them not to do damage but to give life – to share the sacred good that is water,” Maudilia said earnestly. “I ask myself, why are we doing damage to our Mother Earth, and to all of the mothers who make these pots from our Mother Earth? This is not a development for life, it’s a development for death.”

The next stop was with Alcalde Joel Domingo Obidio Bamaca, mayor of San Miguel Ixtahuacan. “There’s a group that says yes, and a group that says no – and I can’t take sides, because I’m the mayor of all the people,” Obidio told the dignitaries. “I’m not a scientist and I’m not an environmentalist; I can’t say one way or another. It’s complicated.”

After a few minutes, the public was asked to leave and the officials held a private meeting.

The next stop on the tour was a trip to the tiny settlement of Ajel, home of Crisanta Hernandez, where the light of day shines through huge cracks in the walls and ceilings. Like about 120 other families whose homes have opened large cracks since the beginning of mining operations, she believes it’s the constant grinding of heavy equipments, trucks and blasting in the area – once a quiet neighborhood on a mountainside – that has destroyed the houses.

“We’re afraid to be living inside this house now, but it’s all we have,” Hernandez said. “It’s a great damage they’ve done to us. We worked for years in the fincas, suffering in the rain and in the sun, for years we ate cold tortillas with salt, to save the money to buy this house. We wanted to have a dignified home to leave for our children…it’s not fair.”

The company denies any responsibility.

Crisanta Perez, however, is the first to speak, and she tells of her arrest in 2008 and again in 2009 for speaking out against the mine. She tells the officials that she was in hiding but returned home to give birth and a few days later was apprehended by officers and very nearly taken to jail but that local citizens intervened and demanded her release. Ever since, she has been afraid to leave her home.

Grahame Russel of the Canandian group Rights Action tells Crisanta’s story here, with video and background information. http://www.rightsaction.org/articles/Goldcorp_&_Mam_woman_020410.html

Dozens of journalists and supporters crowded into the tiny home to listen. When a villager began to speak about the skin rashes and prepared to undress her baby to expose the condition, Anaya asked us to leave so they could talk alone.

As we waited, neighbors prepared us a delicious ginger atol – a drink made from corn – and chicken soup.

The next stop was the Marlin Mine, where the reception was decidedly colder; the public and media waited out in the rain while Anaya’s team went inside and met with company officials.

After that, we bid our farewells and headed up to Huehuetenango, the site of Thursday’s gathering. I was left with an image of the Marlin Mine, a vast extension of brown amid the rolling green mountains and a bluish green tailings lake that stretched for what seemed like a mile.

I was reminded of the statistic that perhaps holds the greatest impact for the people of these regions: In an hour, this mine uses the same amount a Mayan family uses in 22 years.

Videos:
An excellent short documentary, “La Mina,” by Paul Plett and Esther Epp-Tiessen for the Mennonite Central Committee: http://mcc.org/stories/videos/la-mina

And a four-part investigative series by the Canadian broadcasting network CTV, “Paradise Lost”:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100415/w5_paradise_lost_100415/20100417

Images from San Miguel Ixtahuacan and Ajel on the day of Anaya’s visit:

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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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