But you can’t predict the weather. Especially if your picnic is in Guatemala, and the potential storms include protests, social unrest, landslides and the like.
I have a long-time friend visiting from home who happens to be studying botany. Plants, agriculture, soil, ecosystems, various fungi - he is veritably obsessed with the living world around him. What better place to indulge that obsession than on the outskirts of a tropical national forest and lagoon?
Guatemala had other ideas.
After winding our way along dusty mountain roads, passing the myriad of landslides both big and small that make me weary to make the trek anywhere in or around rainy season, and having the requisite close calls that bring forth an audible gasp from any passenger naïve enough to actually watch the road, we were about to pull into Estacion del Norte when César, our friendly shuttle driver, broke the news.
“La carretera esta cerrado, no hay paso.” The highway is closed, you can’t get through. After enough probing to ascertain that César, a cheerful little man who knows me and my route well by now, was not in fact joking, I implored him for details.
“Hay manifestaciones... Los campesinos han bloqueado la carretera despues de Chisec, en Canaan. Mi compañero esta en Raxruha y no puede pasar. Me va llamar cuando esta aclarada. Quieres ir a un hostel?” There are protests... The farmers have blocked the highway after Chisec, en Canaan. My friend is stuck in Raxruha, he’ll call me when it’s cleared. Want to go to a hostel?
Alta Verapaz is home to many protests, many land disputes, many clashes between an increasingly displaced Maya desperate to hold onto the land that has sustained them for centuries and remains sacred to them, and the government-backed transnational companies determined to remove them to extract every last quetzal in the form of oil, gas, nickel, copper, hydroelectric energy, or palm oil.
While most of these protests begin peacefully, a demonstration of the right granted to the indigenous communities by the peace treaty signed at the end of the civil war to have a meaningful dialogue regarding the use of their land prior to the initiation of projects that will degrade their land or displace their people, the military, police, and companies often respond forcefully and violently. (Learn more about these conflicts here, here, here, and here.)
Yesterday’s protest was against the expansion of the palmera, the African palm oil company that is rapidly buying up land from poor campesinos for a less-than-fair price. This is causing tension within communities as the African palm is known as an environmental scourge that brings a host of problems affecting the viability of crops for local farmers who choose not to sell their land.
Needless to say we chose the hostel. In true “Only in Guatemala” form, our avoidance of one public demonstration led us directly into the face of another. After settling in, we walked to Coban’s Parque Central in search of snacks and diversion. We found a crowd assembled outside the gates of a municipal building. There were no signs, no chants, no shouting... only a large crowd waiting patiently.
We stood and watched for a few minutes trying to ascertain what the occasion was. Was this related to the protests a few hours away? A smaller show of solidarity with their campesino brothers and sisters in Canaan?
As two men and a woman emerged from the doors of the building, the crowd erupted in ecstatic cheers. They approached the gate with arms raised in victory and sincere, wide grins across each of their faces as bystanders set off 50-meter strings of cuetes (sticks of dynamite tied together). After a few minutes of cheers and reaching through the gates to touch the hands of those anxiously awaiting them, they went back inside.
I asked a man in a cowboy hat and a tattered nylon jacket with a US football team logo on it what was happening. Was this related to the protests happening today?
“Nooo, no. Esto no es un manifestación. Es una audiencia. La policia han capturado 8 de nuestros compañeros, pero fue ilegal. Ahora, por fin, ellos nos dan nuestra audiencia y ellos pueden salir.” Nooo, no. This is not a protest. It’s an audience. The police captured 8 of our brothers, but it was illegal. Now, finally, they are giving us our audience and they can leave. He pointed to another man a few feet in front of us and suggested I ask him for more details, as he had organized this demonstration.
He was deeply tanned from a life in the fields beneath his impeccably pressed green oxford shirt and worn blue jeans. His worn face and graying hair told more of his position in the community than his age; a community where years of exposure and hard labor age men quickly, but age commands respect rather than dismissal.
A phone call to my dear friend Jeff, a freelance journalist who is deeply invested in the many disputes and protests through Alta Verapaz, provided more insight and clarity into the complex nature of what we were witnessing.
In the 1800's, the government sold the ancestral lands of a Q'eqchi' Maya community to a German family. The families that had been living on this land for centuries were allowed to remain on their land in exchange for free labor, reducing them to slaves working their own land. At the end of the 20th century, the land was finally ceded to the families. In 2011, a name mysteriously appeared on the registry as the owner of the land - the government had once again, quietly and with no consultation to the impoverished farmers who derive both their past and future from the land, sold it out from under them. There were protests, and an eviction of the families was ordered. Community leaders were rounded up, arrested, and detained illegally for two months.
After two months, local authorities finally granted the distraught communities their audience, and were releasing the community leaders. These were the eight joyful, relieved faces that emerged from the building to receive their hero’s welcome through the bars of the iron gates.
Unfortunately, conflicts like this, which sound medieval to most, are happening all over Guatemala. Throughout big cities and tiny pueblos the indigenous community, determined to preserve its way of life and defend the right to live and work on the lands that have sustained their ancestors for centuries, face a violent wave of neoconservative-driven modernization that threatens to wash away centuries of culture that has been preserved against all odds. What the Spanish conquistadors, subsequent missionaries, and several hundred years of land-owning elite could not eradicate, transnational corporations backed by a greedy, corrupt government just might.
This is a country deeply divided. The indigenous community face not just government discrimination, but discrimination from fellow Guatemalans as well. As a petite ladina (mixed Guatemalan and Spanish heritage) woman checked us into our hostel, she asked if we would be staying long. I explained that we were only here for the night, and were simply unable to get to work due to the protests. Her response reminded me once again that the indigenous struggle for respect, rights, and autonomy will persist long after lawmakers begin to recognize and protect their fundamental rights:
"More protests? Oh, those indios. What imaginary problems are they causing trouble over now?"
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