Postcard from Huehuetenango

In the Northwestern part of the Guatemalan highlands is the province of Huehuetenango. It is one of the few places in Guatemala where men as well as women have preserved the unique Traje, or clothing. In several places the mens’ traje consists of a sort of black wool poncho cut so men can travel in the cool mountain air. In other cases it is a jacket with beautiful red purple and white stripes. It is a region of spectacular, soaring mountains, and narrow valleys, and the geography means that several mutually unintelligible languages are spoken by the indigenous residents of the rural areas. A Guatemalan who went to an indigenous residential school where children were required to learn other Maya languages said that Mam, the language most widely spoken in Huehuetenango, was always the most difficult to learn. Here you might travel ten miles to another valley and find people speaking a different language. It seems backwards and far from the Spanish-speaking centers of power in Guatemala City. But the linguistic fragmentation and relative paucity of archaelogical sites suggest that it may have seemed backwards and far from the centers of power even before the conquest in the days when the most powerful people in the region were other Maya speaking languages like Kakchiquel and K'iche.

I was in Huehue to observe a referendum on mining concessions. Guatemala is party to an international convention granting indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the use of natural resources in their territories. In 2005 a series of referenda in another western province rejected concessions granted to a Canadian company to mine for gold.  Despite these rejections on the local level, the national government and the companies are proceeding apace. The mining concessions in Huehue are nowhere near as far along—but the issues, including the destruction of landscape, poisoned streams and wells from runoff and the small share of the revenue generated by the mine which stays in the community—or even in Guatemala, are issues shared.

We awoke in the town at four in the morning to trek out to some of the 50 villages involved in the referenda. We took a bus partway, then my group of about thirty crossed a bridge in the dark, and began climbing a roadway which was blocked to put down paving stones. At one point we saw a man with a horse outlined against the dark navy sky. We mumbled greetings as the horse´s breath made slight steam. The sky continued to lighten as we ascended past cornfields, the sun slowly revealing the contours of the sheer mountainside opposite, the sparkling river below, and the rooftops of the town we had left on the opposite valley. Trekking with this group of thirty, made up of local people, Guatemalans from other provinces, and international observers as we climbed the mountain with the dawn was an experience I will always take with me.

The trekkers split up to go to five villages. In ours we received filling breakfast of soup and tortillas with a local family, then went to the local school, where a man with a megaphone started talking to a slowly gathering crowd of men in sombreros and women with colorful headbands and traje. He wasn´t speaking Spanish. Eventually some four hundred people were gathered and began registering their names for the vote. It was interesting to look out at this crowd of people with individual faces, but very similar clothing: men clustered on one side and women on the other. The man with the megaphone continued discoursing in Popti. A generation ago, even a small gathering of people speaking an indigenous language would have been greeted with suspicion and possibly bullets. Here hundreds were participating in a political rally almost no one in Guatemala city could understand (there are always a few words: “cents”, “poison”, “environment” where they use the Spanish terms).

Then there was the time for the vote, for or against the awarding of mining contracts without consulting the community. And suddenly hundreds of people were waving their arms in the air, shouting, as was the man with the microphone, triumphant. It was a scene I would see repeated multiple times, in various locations in the three municipios (county-level political unit) I observed. The unity of opinion was reinforced by the visual unity of clothing: two dozen women in long black skirts and red tops with a shared color scheme and pattern despite individual touches make quite an impression when working together. The visual unity of traje is something I noticed many times during the referendum, or when they faced the visual unity of police in uniform in the capital.

There are criticisms which could be made. The organizers of the referenda do not feign neutrality, and posters urging people to come to the “consultation against mining” make it clear which side they are on. While there may be some intimidated into keeping silent by the size of the majority view, the enthusiasm of people to defend their way of life is not fake. Both the turnout and the enthusiasm with which people respond to their local leaders is impressive compared with other meetings I have seen organized by people from the capital. If it is a little bit like a pep rally, it is about something which will affect their lives much longer than who will win a football game, or even who will win a congressional seat. The mayors and other elected officials who organized these referenda are representing an indigenous and community perspective absent in the meetings between Canadian businessmen and government officials from Guatemala City making decisions about land where neither has children, family, or roots.

It is interesting talking to the other observers. One night I bunk with a Swiss University student. He indulges my attempt to practice my German. He comes from another mountainous country with scattered dialects—though he says these Guatemalan mountainsides are much more thickly populated than the Swiss ones. He also talks about the effects email and text messaging are having on Swiss: for the first time people are having to write down, and figure out how to spell dialect words not found in any dictionary. Watching people with cellphones chattering in the various dialects here I wonder about the effects of technology. Will these technologies lead to a homogenization like BBC standard or midwest standard in broadcasting, or help people with shared language background keep in touch even as they scatter geographically?

Another night, in a bar in the provincial capital, I watch an argument between an observer from Guatemala city—an ardent socialist—and two neo-liberal economic students. Their conversation fairly quickly degenerates into insults. The neoliberals assume the North American is a potential ally: won´t mines bring jobs? and how can I believe the Maya peasants are the same race who built the stone temples and made such accurate calculations about the solar year? I try to get them to ask similar questions about Europe: are the Italians the same race as the Romans? How could soccer hooligans and blue-blood toffs be the same race as Tolkien and Lord Kelvin? And in any event it's not surprising that people denied education for centuries and only just recovering from the latest in a long history of massacres haven't been able to give rise to scientists and architects. But I´m disappointed in the lack of comity: I´m not sure either the Spanish-speakers on the left or right were interested in doing anything other than debate whether socialism is a good thing and confirm the stereotypes each already had of the other: that the other guys just don´t understand the larger repercussions of mining, or care about what Guatemala really needs.

The unwillingness to listen strikes me again on a larger stage. A few weeks later we travel to the capital where leaders of the consultation present their results to the congress, the human rights office, and finally the ministry of mines. The last is the least successful, or perhaps the most honest. At the end of the presentation one of the officials dismisses the delegation, saying “You just need to go to school to understand what mining is.” And its not too surprising that these college educated men in suits and ties with fancy computers on their desks would look askance at the peasants who would usually be working in cornfields with nary a computer or filing cabinet in sight. Though the peasants are here to talk about things being done in their own back yard and which could affect the land for generations.

We end up getting a ride with a minor ministry official, who tells us how mining has an improved ecological footprint, that the land is obtained through legal purchases, how everyone in these communities is impoverished, how the jobs will make it less necessary for people to go work in coffee plantations. His story isn´t implausible and is probably consistent with everything he has seen in word-processed reports, and when he steps out of his air conditioned pickup for an hour-long site visit. Even among educated Guatemalans concerned about human rights there is sometimes a tendency to see peasant life as a black box described by the word “poverty.”

But if the people at the ministry of mines think the peasants need to “go to school to learn about mining” and the things they deal with every day, I would suggest that the people at the ministry likewise need to learn how “economic development plans“ have historically worked in rural Guatemala. And perhaps the Yes, people seek cash working on coffee plantations, or even in the United States because of difficulty finding jobs close to home. But they value their homes, send money back, build houses in their home villages to try to keep some semblance of a way of life which strip mining and chemical runoff could destroy forever. And even if the technology exists to minimize the environmental dangers, development projects throughout the world have a history of making promises. They make promises to the powerful and well-connected and also to the poor. And they do keep some promises, but promises made to the poor and poorly connected are almost always the first ones broken. When its time for an accounting, I doubt any business will budget for state of the art environmental technology for the peasants of Huehuetenango if they believe they can save the money to pay better-connected creditors. And if they intended to treat the land an the people on it with respect, they didn't show much evidence of that respect today.

I studied urban planning in Boston, and even in the US the demolition of low-income housing to build highways or high rises destroyed communities and small businesses dependent on them, and threw people onto the street. Even forty years later the people have never been compensated. The highways and high-rises were built, and people who were already rich and well connected got richer. But the communities were destroyed, small business owners and tenants were displaced, and promises made were never kept. In Guatemala projects which don´t merely fail to deliver on promises made to people affected, but in some areas where I worked people were killed to ensure there was no one to complain about the broken promises. And the dismissive attitude at the ministry, is not a good sign that they really intend to treat people from these areas with respect, especially since they never consulted with them in the first place.

But organizing is a multi-step struggle, and even if the ministry ignores the meeting, it is officially registered, and the people are organized, and unified, and are building a network. And the logistical effort itself is impressive: computers to count and summarize results, hundreds of local and outside observers coordinated and fed. Whether mining eventually takes place or not, it is in the community´s interest to be treated as stakeholders, rather than relying on the “good will” of patronizing ministry officials. And watching the rousing meetings in Mam, and Popti I am struck by something else. A generation ago the technological divide between indigenous and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans was huge--and these villages still have many people living in wooden shacks, cooking on open fires, and sleeping on boards. But they also have a few people living in two story tile houses with cellphones, computers and pickup trucks: even videotaping the meetings with camcorders—still speaking the language, wearing the clothing and attending church services which tie them to their neighbors in the shacks. And a child in these meetings listening to the language of his or her grandparents used by hundreds to discuss life changing issues might grow up with a very different idea of the balance of power between the indigenous and Spanish-speaking world than some one living in a village with no roads, electricity, or running water and only a hoe and a machete who watched soldiers with machine guns jump from helicopters to torch houses, round up women, and shoot indiscriminately during the civil war twenty-five years ago.