Jack Lesniewski is the co-representative for MCC Guatemala-El Salvador.
It’s been almost three weeks since Volcan del Fuego erupted in Guatemala. It was supposed to be a lazy Sunday afternoon and returning from church I was mindlessly scrolling through twitter, noting without really noticing, that ash was falling on Guatemala City. It wasn’t until our neighbor rang the bell to tell us we should put MCC’s car under a roof that I realized that there was gray rain of ash and rock and dust falling on the city, making similar sounds to and looking a lot like a dirty late March sleet storm in Chicago.
Early reports (including an infamous tweet from the Guatemalan Emergency Authority that told folks NOT to evacuate) missed the extent of what would become an internationally impactful disaster for the communities along the route of the “pyroclastic flow” that descended from Fuego. The disaster was catastrophic for the families in the now buried communities of San Miguel Los Lotes and El Rodeo.
Carlos Carrillo and Cesar Montenegro of Iglesia Casa Horeb gathering the supplies the churches gathered to send to Alotenango.
The disaster and the response was and has been everything that we’ve come to know as emblematic of this country. The outpouring of material aid from individuals Guatemalans and Guatemalan organizations has been inspiring, reminding us that there are few people as willing to be in solidarity with others than Guatemalans. The response of the Guatemalan government, has been somewhat less than ideal, beginning with President Morales announcing on the Sunday evening after the eruption that the government didn’t have any money to help because of laws that constrained him from merely spending tax money as he wished.
What was most impactful for us in all of this was how this disaster reminded us of how displacement is the norm for so many Guatemalans. Since the volcano erupted, we’ve been fielding questions and inquiries from folks from all over the world (literally) about what MCC was doing in response and how they could help. We were fortunate to be able to support one of our local Mennonite Church conferences (the Evangelical Mennonite Church of Guatemala) in their delivery of relief supplies to a shelter near the impact zone and we thought that our partners and the churches we accompany were mostly spared from any direct impact. While the eruption of Fuego was dramatic and horrific for the families and individuals in the way of the flow, it was occurred in a relatively limited geographic area of impact.
But then we found out that a friend, a compañera from the Ixil region of Guatemala, 200 miles to the northwest who we had spent time with just a week before, had lost 13 family members in San Miguel Los Lotes. How in the world was it possible that the deadly ash of a volcanic eruption reached that far into the misty interior of Guatemalan western highlands?
Anna Vogt.
It was possible because of a particular episode in history of state violence and violent displacement of indigenous people in Guatemala, an episode I wasn’t aware of until a brother from Casa Horeb, our church family here in Guatemala City, shared it on our WhatsApp group chat. In the midst of the usual inspirational memes and announcements, we learned that many of the families living in Los Lotes and El Rodeo were members of “Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPR),” folks that fled the genocidal violence of the civil war in the early 1980s to shelter in the mountains of Guatemala or in to camps in Mexico. After the peace accords in 1996, these displaced people posed a significant problem for local and national authorities, as many of the places they fled from were now occupied by others.
The global drop in coffee prices at the time presented an opportunity, as many wealthy land owners were looking to unload the coffee fincas (plantations) and the national government was looking for a way to transfer state funds to them without it being totally obvious that they were bailing out their friends. The state purchased the coffee fincas and offered them to CPR families to settle on across the “Boca Costa” region of Guatemala including on the slopes of Fuego, one of the most active volcanoes in Central America. The “only” problem was that where El Rodeo and Los Lotes, located downslope from the very active “Volcano of Fire”, the land was best suited for coffee, not towns and communities, leaving thousands vulnerable to disasters like what happened that Sunday afternoon.
We can not escape from history no matter how much we want to leave the past in the past. And we can not escape the fact that the history of Guatemala is a history of displacement, of the continued efforts of a Spanish speaking European elite working to culturally, economically, politically, and physically displace indigenous folks, aided and abetted by their economic and political allies in the US and Canada. Which is why the debates and discussions over the current Unites States administration’s immigration policies are so warped and divorced from reality.
Goldcorp’s Marlin Mine. Anna Vogt
Guatemalans moving north to the border are displaced people extending that displacement further afield. They were displaced by years of US backed state violence that sought to “drain the pond to kill the fish;” obliterating a left wing insurgency by annihilating Mayan communities. They continue to be displaced by an extractive economic model built on the backs of their physical labor and cultural production that leaves little room for investment in their education, health and political participation. The same plantation owners who ripped land away from indigenous communities for export agriculture now conspire with US, Canadian, and European countries to permanently scar their land with mines and hydroelectric dams. They are displaced by the public-private partnership violence of the drug trade, by the privatized violence of disconnected and displaced youth crowded into marginal neighborhoods on the outskirts of the glitzy modern metropolis of Guatemala City.
It’s probably a misnomer to call the folks making their way through Mexico to the US border migrants: they are refugees, economic refugees from a global, regional, and local economic system that offers the best chances for economic survival to those who risk life and limb to head north. They are political refugees from a political system that marginalizes their claims to land and self-determination as “anti-development” or “populism.” They are social and cultural refugees from a colonialidad that casts them as inferior and backward.
Banana plantations.
It’s pathologically ignorant to imagine that the vicissitudes of US border policy have anything but a marginal impact on the decision making of already displaced people to journey north. From the vantage point of the communities where MCC serves, US border policy becomes a question of how much cruelty and traumatic displacement we care to impose on an already cruelly traumatized group of people.
It’s at this point that the “well what should we do? We can’t just let everyone in, I mean, we need to have borders, it’s sad what happened to those folks but the US just can’t help everyone, right?” questions arise. Leaving aside the question of open borders, it does seem like a first order solution is to stop criminally prosecuting illegal border crossings. Actually, according to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, 91% of the folks in detention are being held on misdemeanor charges.
It’s long past due that we as individuals, communities, and nations reckon with historical and continual mass displacement of Guatemalans and Central Americans. Without that reckoning we will continue to stumble from cruelty to cruelty, from half-measure to half-measure, from a crisis at the border to a volcanic eruption. The time for a reckoning is at hand.