1st
Volcanic Crossroads of Guatemala
Isuru Seneviratne, July 2011
Travel: November 2010
With elevated spirits, “Team Dragons” reached the peak of the ridge, a mere fifteen minutes before sundown. From this vantage point, we had a panoramic view of the scenic land around us. Towards the West resided the majestic triangular peaks of Volcan de Agua, Acetenango and Fuego (3,760, 3,880 and 3,763 meters above sea-level, respectively). The blood-red setting sun was accompanied by bands of faded yellow and blue sky as the backdrop to the highest peaks in Guatemala. In the valley below, glistened Lago de Amatitlán, the volcanic lake. To our east was our destination, the magnificent mountain of lava, Pacaya. At the very top, 2,552m above sea level, a circular crater was fuming with noxious sulphur vapor.
Snowy likes volcanoes: Agua, Acetenango and Fuego
“Dragones! Vamos!” exclaimed our guide to the national forest, Carlos. And downward we walked, along the ridge, leading towards the peak.
Guatemala sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” on the edge of the Central American and the Pacific tectonic plates. While Fuego is the only active volcano today, the last eruption of Pacaya was not long ago, in May 2010, projecting smoke and debris 1,500m in the air and and covering Guatemala city, the capitol 30km away, with ash.
Carlos and I
Ash the size of pebbles was the surface we walked on, as well as many meters below the surface. The slope had a 45 degree gradient from our viewpoint to the valley in-between, and we took the surface along with us on the way down. While this proved difficult for some, the skiers from Vancouver, Canada just slid down gracefully. Almost suddenly, it became quite cold as the ridge exposed us to air current just when the sweat from our climb was cooling down.
Team Dragons was a multi-national collective from Canada, Italy, USA, Germany, Netherlands, Sri Lanka plus two guides from Guatemala. Most of the travellers were students, and they had set a brisk pace up the trail to the vantage point. Many of the groups were travelling across a few countries in Central and North America - El Salvador, Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras & Mexico. I was in the country the shortest time - 4 days, with only 1.5 days for personal travel.
The our van ride to the base of Pacaya from La Antigua Guatemala, the ancient capital that was devastated in by volcanic activity in 1541, was a harrowing experience. The driver seemed to not know where to go, and the van, full of tourists, did a couple of about-turns before reaching the destination. In a country where street gangs known as maras kidnapping both locals and foreigners for ransom was a common business practice, we anticipated the worst: “OK gringos, when we pull up here, give us all your money and your left kidney.”
Guatemala also sits squarely in the middle of the most lucrative drug trade-route in the world. The U.S. cocaine market is estimated to be half of the $85 billion per annum global trade. Colombia produces three quarters of global production, the flow of this contraband material north has caused much bloodshed and devastation along the way. As the governments of both Colombia and Mexico have pushed against the cartels in the last couple of decades, Central America has become a haven for traffickers. The underfunded governments of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua are struggling to confront the well-financed and armed drug cartels.
Drug Trafficking in Central America
Source: NPR, STRATFOR
Credit: Stephanie d’Otreppe/NPR
A definitional “banana republic,” powerful militarist leaders of Guatemala colluded with foreign private interests to develop banana plantations in the 20th century. Today, the narcotics trade has penetrated most parts of the Guatemalan government, security apparatus and judiciary. Vast swaths of the country (particularly the Department of Petén bordering Mexico, and the Mayan Highlands close to the Pacific Ocean) are under drug-lord rule, where police and mayors either survive by following their orders or get decapitated. Drug cartels provide employment and safety nets in a country where seventy percent of the police force live in poverty. Each president since 2000 has had to change the Interior Minister and the National Police Chief many times due to corruption or intimidation. The murder rate in Guatemala is 48 deaths per hundred thousand people (for context, Colombia in the height of the late-eighties drug wars was almost twice as high at 80, and in the US, the number was 5.4 in 2008). In Guatemala, impunity rules the day, with ninety-seven per cent of homicides remaining unsolved. The deteriorating security situation has kept Guatemala from achieving its potential as a country with great natural beauty and generous people.
Volcanic ash is rich in natural nutrients, and most of our hike up Parque Nacional Volcan Pacaya was through a forest with no undergrowth. Earlier still, we had climbed through maize and corn plantations. However, other than the village of San Francisco de Salis at the beginning of the walking trail, we did not come across any Pacaya trees, a member of the palm family, that the the volcano is named after.
volcanic growth
After sliding down the ashen slope, we were faced with crossed a river of hardened lava. Unlike the pebble-like circular and soft ash, the barren riverbed surrounding the puffing peak was crusty and prickly to the touch. The narrow trail led us across the rugged and raw alien landscape.
The historic oppression of the Amerindian people (40-60% of the 13m population) started with Spanish colonization (500y ago), and was exacerbated by the military massacring many Mayan communities during the civil war (1960 to 1996). This trend continues to-date, with 1.5% of the population controlling 62.5% of the land, diminishing the usefulness of the annual GDP per capita metric of $2,900 (or $4,900 on a PPP basis). The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution, is close to 0.6 (a value of 0 stands for total equality and a value of 1 maximal inequality. Today, 8 big families (supercúpula) and the ex-military intelligence chiefs are the “power behind the throne” and operate a clandestine “shadow government.” The elite and their interests avoid paying most taxes, and will not budge an inch to help the beleaguered government fight the deterioration of rule-of-law, let alone reduce social exclusion.
“Taxi Naturale”: from the village of San Francisco to the vantage point ascent, local Indio entrepreneurs chased us trying to sell rides.
Indigenous populations have risen in a groundswell against mining and hydro electric development projects. Historically, development projects didn’t consult locals, and didn’t provide them any benefits. In the backdrop of mismanaged developments of the ‘70s (e.g. World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank funded Chixoy Hydro dam, where the government massacred the indigenous opposition), came multiculturalism of the ‘80s and the environmental awareness of the ‘90s. The strengthened local press, which sees itself as being the protector of the innocent; and the Catholic Church, which has historically distrusted capitalism; and international NGOs who have a bucolic vision of the countryside, are the key organizational hubs against development projects in the country.
From the riverbed, we ascended about ⅓ of the volcanic peak to where the surface of the conical peak was broken so as to provide a little window into the burning heart beneath. The two-story high cave got warmer with each step inside, until we had to shed the many layers of clothing we had put on in face of the chilly dusk. If we had bought marsh-mellows that were offered to us at the base of the mountain, we would have toasted them with the help of the burning earth. Lava glowed red beneath the crust of the earth. Carlos warned “do not get too close or breathe the fumes,” a little too late for my curiosity.
As night settled over the mountain, surefooted Carlos lead the group across the prickly valley and down the mountain using a longer but safer route. Moonlight helped at the top of the mountain, but when under the canopy of trees, it was pitch black. Some of us has flashlights, but most did not. Team Dragones left the volcanic land behind in its state of darkness.
sunset hiker
Continued…
- Enjoy photos archive from my trip to Guatemala.
- Read the chilling, real-world, murder mystery of Rodrigo Rosenberg, uncovered in the New Yorker in A Murder Foretold: Unraveling the Ultimate Political Conspiracy, April 2011. David Grann crafts a enveloping tale, where all levels of government are involved in intrigue, and depicts the challenges facing the UN-Guatemalan joint commission set up to address institutional decay in Guatemala. Guatemalans will elect a new president in September 2011. Their choices are between the former First Lady Sandra Torres de Colom, who has been heading Mi Familia Progressa, the government wealth transfer program for the poor; and the former General Otto Perez Molina, who headed branches of the military during the civil war.
- Listen to NPR’s 3-piece audio introduction - Mexican Cartels Spread Voilence to Central America, July 2011.
- Learn about United Fruit Company and United States’ involvement in transforming Guatemala into a banana republic in the 20th century.
- Support the International Crisis Group’s through and extensive research and policy recommendations for a better Guatemala.
