There's an interesting 15 minute interview with Dawn Paley on the Rabble Podcast Network reporting on the violent evictions that took place on land controversially owned by Canadian mining company Skye Resources. The interview gives a good overview of the current situation in Izabal, Guatemala at present.

In a recent open letter (posted on Upside Down World) to Ian Austin, Skye Resources CEO, Dawn Paley made the following two points:


As yet no response has been posted on the Skye Resources website to these latest open letters from Dawn Paley and Victoria Henderson.

Background

Dawn Paley, an independent journalist was in Izabal, with the photographer James Rodriguez and film maker Steven Schnoor during the forced evictions in early January. You can read more on Dawn's blog 'Reporter Zero', James' blog 'Mi Mundo' and watch Steven Schnoor's video of the evictions.

Cerigua have just (22-02-07) posted a report: "Campesinos/tierras: Narran historia de desalojo"


You can find other related links on the mining issue in Guatemala here. Mining is an issue that we've covered on a regular basis on this blog.

We've just received this news about the decision by Concepción Tutuapa, San Marcos, to deny the granting of a license for exploration with a view to developing a mine for metals in the area:


The Comité Medio Ambiente of the municipality of Concepción Tutuapa, San Marcos, put together the following press release:

Living and writing now in London, I guess I'm more keenly aware than ever that when you mention Guatemala here to my fellow Londinenses, the image they hold is either one of dazzling touristic colour or of chilling darkness*. In short, the image of Guatemala here in the UK is too simplistic. Guatemala's portrayal by the media is generally to shock or to enchant. And that, all too often leaves too little room for the real Guatemala to shine through and reach us outsiders so far removed from the Guatemalan reality.

When I stumbled upon this article in Albedrio, 'Un documental sobre Guatemala nominado al Oscar', I was struck by how rarely this issue of how Guatemala is portrayed abroad is discussed by us outsiders. This article was part of a call to action by the Frente Nacional de Lucha por la Defensa de los Servicios Públicos y los Recursos Naturales. It remarks on the fact that many films (La Hija del Puma, El Silencio de Neto, Las Estrellas de la Línea, Las Cruces, Poblado Próximo and Vida Reciclada) that have had a certain amount of critical success outside of Guatemala, share one thing in common: their exposure of the sad, tragic and bitter side of Guatemala.

There was one line in particular though that took me back to an experience I had several years ago during a presentation about Guatemala I was part of in Paris.

Those words, 'brillamos afuera por nuestras desgracias adentro' ('we shine abroad as a result of our misfortune at home'), took me straight back in time to a moment of insight into this issue. The team I was part of that worked in Guatemala had been asked to do a presentation of our work (in the field of education) in Guatemala at an international conference in Paris. In particular, we'd been asked to explain and introduce the Guatemalan context of that work.

My colleagues were a mixture of Guatemalans and Europeans and as soon as we'd embarked on writing this presentation we realised what different approaches we had. What I found hard to understand was the reluctance on the part of my Guatemalan colleagues to enter into any detail about the civil conflict. The plight of many of the families we worked with to gain access to education had in some way been affected by the civil conflict, and rooted in my outsiders' logic it seemed imperative to explain this link in our presentation. My Guatemalan colleagues disagreed and thought that the civil war did not need to be explained in any depth.

It wasn't until the day of the presentation in Paris that I finally understood. When the talk turned to the reasons why some families found themselves excluded from the world of education, my Guatemalan colleague slowed. As she spoke the carefully thought out words that explained the legacy of those days of violence and insecurity, her whole manner changed, her voice slowed and became charged the emotion. The room hang on every word my colleague said. But the most important thing I learnt that day was that when it comes to the rawest of human experiences, the power and the importance is not in what you say, it is in what you don't say.

Sometimes so raw is the experience, so dramatic the misfortune, so grave the injustice that it can blind the outsider to the actual people who've had the experience, misfortune and injustice happen to them. We see only the misfortune, not the people living with the misfortune.

This brings me back to the simplistic image many of us outsiders have of Guatemala. If we want to break this bi-focal vision of Guatemala (of shock or enchantment) on the outside, it's time that we understood that silence is not always a space to be filled- it's a space that, given a chance to grow, can develop our mutual respect and understanding.

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Examples

To demonstrate this bi-focal vision of Guatemala- it's sufficient to do a Google Image search to find the 'enchanting'. While for the images offering 'shock', the photo on feminicide by Argentinian, Walter Astrada, that's just won first prize in 'Contemporary Issues' in this year's World Press Photo competition is a good example.

This is a massive topic and will surely be an expanding post of the coming days. It's that topic of globalisation- that phenomenon that means someone in London can write about Guatemala and be read by people in Singapore, etc. When reports surfaced in January of a sharp rise in the price of maize in Guatemala, some were connecting this to the increase in ethanol production in the US.

El Siglo XXI wrote on (11-01-2007):


Inforpress also picked up on the story about, "the rising grain prices resulting from America's growing appetite for ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuel. Of course, this was a massive story across the border in Mexico where, exacerbated by a lack of a competitive domestic market in maize products, prices in corn rose steeply. The price of tortillas rose by nearly a third in three weeks".
But how has this price rise happened in Guatemala? And how do things bode for the future? Well, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Food Outlook:
















The recent trend is for the price of maize to rise. And what does the FAO put this down to?

The FAO continues:


This story of the rising price of Guatemala's most important foodstuff, kept coming back to oil. Oil before food, surely not?

The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) summarised the situation as follows: "The price of white maize is increasing due to the international price increase of yellow maize caused by the increased demand for the grain for ethanol production in the U.S.A.  It is expected that this increase will be for a limited time, and that prices for February and March national harvests will be lower." They conclude that generally the food security situation in the short term remains stable.

But what's the context here? According to a recent report on the maize problem in Guatemala, Propuesta para la Reactivación de la Cadena Agroalimentaria del Maíz Blanco y Amarillo by Mario Roberto Fuentes López, Jacob van Etten, José Luis Vivero Pol and Álvaro Ortega Aparicio, the situation is critical. Maize production in Guatemala is increasing but demand has steadily outstripped demand in the last decade and a half- a gap which has been bridged increasingly by importing maize from abroad (particularly from the US). 

For some this policy of importation threatens Guatemala's ability to produce the food it requires so that none go hungry and go back to being self-sufficient as it was in the 1970s. Less reliance on imports would take the pressure off to devalue and cushion Guatemalans (remember we're talking about a vital foodstuff) from the vagaries of the global markets subject to speculation.

It's also impossible to ignore the fact that a huge amount of Guatemalans produce maize for their own consumption. So while maize production only comes in as 1% of Guatemala's GDP, economists tempted to belittle maize's economic importance should also consider the social significance of the statistic that two thirds of the agricultural land in Guatemala is used for maize production. As Susana Gauster of CONGECOOP, puts it we should be:


Gauster makes the point that this trend to use more and more maize in the production of ethanol is putting pressure on food prices in countries like Guatemala. But what has this got to do with chickens? Well, this brings us to the supporters of maize importation in Guatemala. Who are they? Amongst others they are pork and particularly chicken producers who depend on a ready supply of yellow maize (they can't use white maize as it lacks the necessary carotenoides). For these producers it's more convenient to import yellow maize- it's a stable supply so why bother in investing in boosting a comparitively riskier domestic supply?

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it would donate 18,000 metric tons of yellow corn to the Guatemalan Government in September 2006, this dumping undoubtedly favoured the chicken producers of Guatemala. According to Susana Gauster:


Politically it's easy to see why a unified enormously powerful chicken producer has more influence over the Guatemalan Government than the unorganised small and numerous maize sector. This lack of sectoral organisation for maize producers is in no small way down to the bitter civil war fought in many of the high maize producing areas of Guatemala.

This is of course an incredibly complex situation- way beyond this short post. But the challenge for Guatemala is to start investing in its many domestic producers of maize. With CAFTA-DR gradually lowering the barrier to imports over the next nine years- this investment imperative will only become more and more vital.

We've just received the following sad news from the Latin America Bureau: