Gary Mason's long article 'Anatomy of a shootout' in the Globe and Mail is worth reading but demonstrates outsiders' difficulty with covering the issue of violence and injustice in Guatemala. The difficulty is the outsiders need for a spoonful of sugar with the bitter reality. You could sum this view as: "Don't tell us how awful and bleak the situation is if we can't make it better". But Mason like many other foreign news journalists before him in Guatemala says it's ok because foreigners (Canadians in this case) are making things ok. Is it just me or when it says at the beginning of the article:

"Welcome to Guatemala, where death stalks the land — and Canadians are trying valiantly to stop it."

There's a part of you that wants to alter this to say: " - and Guatemalans and others (including Canadians) are trying valiantly to stop it".

The article is founded on an indeed shocking statistic that endures in Guatemala:

"According to statistics kept by the United Nations, there were 1.85 homicides in Canada last year for every 100,000 people. The U.S. figure was 5.7, while Russia, considered one of the more dangerous countries in the world, recorded 20. Guatemala's was almost 21/2 times that: an estimated 47 per 100,000 people."

But when you read down the article, you come across lines like:

"The situation is so desperate that the Guatemalan government has turned to Canada for help."

I know this isn't supposed to, but why does this kind of writing read as faintly farsical? You get the journalist's point here and recent Guatemalan-Canadian cooperation, some of which the article explains, has certainly been an interesting case in point of cooperation between countries on the issue of criminal justice. But this is reinforcing the trite point of a desperate country that reaches out to us for some kind of salvation from its overwhelming problems. Somehow this conception takes outsiders out of picture when the problem's discussed, but very much puts outsiders at the centre when looking for the solution. In reality, isn't it more the other way round?

So why is it you read an article like this one and you feel outsiders can't read about issues in Guatemala without someone from Guatemala saying: "It's nothing to do with you guys, hey, you're doing all you can and we're so grateful to you!". In this case the journalist has got Juan Florido who heads up the Ministerio Publico saying what we 'want' to hear:

"But I can't tell you how important the support from the Canadian government, the Law Courts Education Society, the B.C. government, the Mounted Police has been in terms of resources and training and getting all this going," he says. "Because of it, there has been a new beginning of the criminal-justice system."

One day our media will be able to cover issues in countries like Guatemala on their own merits and focus entirely on how those directly affected are part of the solution and not just impotent victims. To this end, the video interview with Fredy Peccerelli from Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) is great- not sure why it's not in the written article. Anyway check it out- this article is the first of a series on Guatemala.