September 15 marks 200 years since the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica gained independence from Spain. In that time, Guatemala has become the largest economy in Central America. The diverse and beautiful country draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Yet, for the Indigenous populations of Guatemala, independence has not meant an end to racism, exploitation, and abandonment.
“There is no positive presence of the State to the extent that basic problems, such as chronic malnutrition, security, access to education, and employment, are not solved.”
“The celebration of the bicentennial is only something imaginary for the mind of a racist government and elite,” Sitpo’p Herrera, a member of the Maya Ixil Ancestral Authorities of Nebaj, tells The Progressive. “They do not see any further than what is around them. They continue to treat the Indigenous peoples as their ancestors. Indigenous peoples are not important to them. For the Indigenous peoples, there is nothing to celebrate.”
While the countries wouldn’t form their current borders until the 1840s, the 1821 “negotiated” independence only benefited the children of the Spanish invaders, known as Criollos, who sought independence for their own interests. Independence did not form a group of nations that valued Indigenous people, but rather it abandoned those communities.
Amidst pervasive racism, wealthy foreigners in Guatemala oversaw land thefts, decades of brutal dictatorships, coup d’états, and a thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict (1960-1996) which killed 200,000 people, displaced one million, and left 45,000 people missing or “disappeared.” The structural inequalities that have plagued Guatemala’s Indigenous communities have remained.
“The great majority receive these 200 years mired in poverty and uncertainty about the future in the face of the various crises that hurt Guatemala,” Jonathan Menkos, the director of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies, tells The Progressive. “The Indigenous population has suffered from the institutionalization of racial discrimination, exclusion, and violence from the State in various forms.”
The Guatemalan Spring, which began in 1944 and ended with the CIA-backed coup against President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, was only a brief point of hope for the country. The economic elite recuperated their influence and further organized to maintain their iron grip on Guatemalan society following the coup.
Today, the continuation of these inequalities due to racism and neoliberal economic policies is pushing millions to migrate abroad to provide for their families.
“What remains to be understood from the perspective of migration is that in many places in Guatemala, it is not that the State has abandoned them—it is that the State has never been. The State has always been absent,” Alejandra Colom, an anthropology professor at the Guatemalan Del Valle University, tells The Progressive. “The new generations understand it very well. There is no positive presence of the State to the extent that basic problems, such as chronic malnutrition, security, access to education, and employment, are not solved.”
Rural Indigenous communities are those that suffer the worst, available data shows.
According to the 2015 study by the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies, the Guatemalan state invested forty-five cents in Indigenous communities for every dollar the State invested in non-Indigenous communities.
Corruption is rampant, impunity reigns, quality economic opportunity remains elusive for youths, insecurity permeates all levels of society, and, for many, there is no way out.
Moreover, a 2018 investigation by the Guatemalan daily newspaper Prensa Libre showed that, in recent years, the largely Indigenous departments of San Marcos and Huehuetenango have registered more than 50 percent of all abandoned public works projects. Both of these departments have high rates of migration.
The disregard for Indigenous communities is also seen in poverty rates. While poverty levels initially fell following the end of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal armed conflict, since 2006 these levels have creeped higher, reaching 59.3 percent of the population in 2014. This data point has not been updated by the Guatemalan government’s National Statistic Institute since.
In August 2021, statisticians with the National Statistic Institute denounced what they considered to be attempts to manipulate the data of the price of market goods in establishing the basic cost of living, a key barometer for documenting poverty rates. But while the economy has grown during the pandemic, so have levels of poverty. Nearly 70 percent of the population of Guatemala is outside of the formal economy.
Amid the increase in poverty, malnutrition among children has exploded, registering more than 20,000 cases in 2021. At the same time, the country’s health ministry has cut funding for addressing malnutrition.
The problems plaguing Guatemala today are immense. Corruption is rampant, impunity reigns, quality economic opportunity remains elusive for youths, insecurity permeates all levels of society, and, for many, there is no way out.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the economic elite and the government supported counterinsurgency policies, called by the Catholic church-backed Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) “acts of genocide” against the Mayan populations, who made up 83 percent of all victims of the war.
The genocide continues today. The Guatemalan government has done little to support Indigenous communities, and racism and discrimination continue—a slow genocide that kills by neglect, often making migration the only option.
“More and more people do not even consider staying. They reach a certain age and know that they have to leave,” Colom says. “Because it is the only way for their families to survive.”
Source link : https://progressive.org/latest/guatemala-indigenous-fight-for-rights-abbott-210915/
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Publish date : 2021-09-15 03:00:00
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