Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (the whole bunch this time)

It should be pretty obvious from my last post that I’ve been away from blogging for a good while, and long overdue that I write. I’m particularly sorry to have neglected to write about Voces de Cambio while the fourth session was still going on, partly because it’s something that I’ve put a lot of time and good effort into during the past months, but mostly because it’s a great organization that deserves much, much more credit and attention. If you want to learn more about Voces, don’t hesitate to write me (or them), visit their website, and if you’d like to support the program, it’s quite easy to make a donation to Voces de Cambio from there. Recently we put them on Facebook and Twitter as well, just in case .. following them on Twitter won’t flood your inbox right away, but we might have participants twittering about their experiences in future sessions. Vamos a ver ..

Above are all of the girls from this year’s session, the fourth so far. Pictured from above, left side are: Sara, Evelyn, Ana, Angie, Laura, Janeth, Felisa, and Nancy. Below: Marta, Darinca, Mariela, and Gladys. A click on the image will open the individual portraits I took of the girls.

Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (Fourth Session)

Since early July I’ve been working with Voces de Cambio, a small non-profit in Xela run by some great people, and only my general lack of time to blog has kept it out of here; it deserves much more honorable mention than I’ve been able to give it. Voces de Cambio is an after-school program for teenage girls which provide free classes in photography and writing, as well as conversations centered around women’s rights, the role of women in Guatemala, machismo and other issues of gender inequity, and which promotes participation, self-confidence and creative growth. I originally took over from Lucas when he left Guatemala, and now that the fourth session is over, I’ve also left Guatemala. However, it’s an amazing program really, and as it’s close to our hearts we’re both continuing to work with Voces from afar. During the fourth session I’ve been running the photography bit of the program, with the indispensable help of Brenda, a graduate of the program’s first session who now works as an assistant in facilitating the new sessions. With only two days left of the exhibition at Alianza Francesa in Xela, a mention is all but overdue, but I’ll put up my images from the opening as soon as I get myself sorted here. In the meanwhile, all of the final images are now up at our Flickr gallery.

As you can see there’s some great work up there. I’ve really enjoyed working with and getting to know the participants, but also the quality of so many of the photographs has totally humbled me. I should add that most of the girls have never photographed at all before, and they’ve received a very minimum of tutoring – mostly a camera crash course and an idea to go with it. While there’s room for some personal favorites among them, more than a few of the girls have produced amazing work, and it’s been a pleasure as well as an honour to have worked with them. If you happen to be in Xela before Sep. 8th, the exhibition is still on, so I’d say get your butt down to Alianza Francesa.

¡Hasta la próxima!

Santo Domingo, Huehuetenango, Guatemala. 2009. Indians.

Santo Domingo, Guatemala, 2009.

Floor after community assembly. Santo Domingo, northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala. May 21, 2009.

The Economist article: An indictment from the grave explains and puts the situation into a bit of context.

In brief, key members of the government have come under suspicion of murder, as foretold by the now deceased lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg. In a video released onto the internet in the days following his death, he accused president Álvaro Colom of the murder of Rosenberg’s client, anticipating that he himself would be the next to die. A serious allegation to be sure, that’s now being investigated by the UN independent comittee CICIG and an FBI agent (one) the US embassy flew in last week. There has been a bunch of manifestations in support of Colom and a great deal more demanding his resignation these past weeks, marking the deepest political crisis of the Colom administration.

Also, demonstrations against the mining operations sprung up in the capital yesterday, among other places at the Canadian embassy. And also yesterday Goldcorp, the company responsible for the Marlin mine in San Marcos, held its annual shareholder meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Indigenous community members from Sipacapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán in the Guatemalan highlands, as well as Nak’azdli First Nation representatives of British Colombia came to Vancouver to confront Goldcorp with its environmental and human rights resposibilities. I’m excited to hear how it went.

To illustrate earlier posts, the Marlin mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán seen from a distance. San Marcos, Guatemala, 2009. Go ahead and click it.

I’ve just revisited my last photo post on the previous consulta. I posted it rather quickly and since found a lot of errors. Now I’ve spent the last hours fixing it, uploading the images in big versions, captioning it and fixing technical issues, had to do a lot of fiddling with the code and other stuff I shouldn’t be doing at 2am, nor at any other time for that matter…but: There should now be a nice set of 18 photos in a slide show, up and working. Enjoy, and let me know if you notice any issues.

I’ll post more about this week’s consulta after I’ve sorted through my photos, of which there is far too many. It’ll be at least a week of staring into the screen, but luckily there’s also a great deal of eatin’ throughout this weekend. I’m sorry to say it’s on the occation that our friend Simca is leaving to go back home to Boston, but such is life.

Now I’m getting myself hungry again at 3am. Goodnight computer. Hello bed.

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Click on an image to view the whole series in a large size.

San Rafael la Independencia, Guatemala, 2009. During a local community referendum against chemical mineral mining, in which the people of Canicham, a small rural community in northern Huehuetenango, voted unanimously against mining in Guatemala. Before being signed, the community statement was read to the community members.

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Click on an image to view the whole series in a large size.

San Rafael la Independencia, Guatemala, 2009. During a local community referendum against chemical mineral mining, kids play with found stuff.

La Consulta Comunitaria de Buena Fe (‘The Community Referendum of Good Faith’) took place on the background of the opposition of Guatemalan communities to international megaprojects such as hydroelectric dams and especially chemical mineral mining operations. On such is the Marlin mine, an open-pit gold mine in the San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipakapa municipalities of San Marcos to the south, and since its opening in 2005 the subject of massive local opposition. And with good reason, as the impact on the local environment has been nothing short of disastrous. With little or no local consultation or consent prior to beginning construction, the company behind the Marlin mine, Montana Exploradora, pressured communities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán into selling their fertile ancestral lands, and people found themselves uprooted and displaced to infertile lands they couldn’t farm. From then it got worse; the mine is an open-pit mining operation where gold is extracted from the ore by a chemical process using cyanide and enough water per hour to sustain an average Guatemalan family of the area for 22 years. What follows is like the Plagues of Egypt unleashed upon the lands: water depletion and contamination, structural damages to houses due to underground vibrations, health issues such as vicious skin infections in children and a rise of cancer cases. As the mining cmopany has increased its use of security personnel, the area has also seen an increase of disappearences and mysterious deaths. In San Miguel Ixtahuacán, the sense of vigilance is mixed also with a sense of fear and oppression. When I visited a community in San Miguel Ixtahuacán with a big group, we were unexpectantly met by armed San Marcos police who insisted to escort us on the entire journey on the pretext of protecting us; it felt more like surveillance, as I think it was, on request of someone else.

The mine in San Marcos is owned by Goldcorp, a Canadian mining giant of which Montana is a subsidiary. Goldcorp has continually denied any responsability and in biased Environmental and Human Rights Impacts Assessments claim there’s no relation between their mining operations and the environmental damages and health issues of the surrounding communities. But if you ask any independent organizations you’ll hear a different story, or better yet, if you ask the people. The local opposition movement against mining in Guatemala have in part risen out of the local resistance in neighbouring Sipakapa to Goldcorp’s operations that are expanding from San Miguel Ixtahuacán into Sipakapa. For almost five years Sipakapa has resisted Goldcorp’s influence, witnessing as they could the destruction being done to Ixtahuacán. Since mid 2005 the residents have organized community consultations where they put the mining to a popular vote which is then presented to Congress. The consultas should be seen as part of the larger resistance movement in Guatemala, but they form an important and inspirational capacity.  In selling off their land piece by piece to foreign investors it gets harder and harder for the government to ignore the signatures of hundreds of thousands of farmers’ votes against mining licensing to foreign companies, as more and more community consultas take place around in the country.

Back in Huehue, I spent the night in the casa of Don Miguel, a local patriarch of Caserio Canicham, a small settlement of ten or so houses. Most of the people speak Akateco and little or no Spanish, but during dinner with Miguel we did have some great conversations, in which the inevitable question soon popped up: Whether there were work to be found in Europe. Don Miguel worked in the fields for 30 years, but family in the States – everyone has some family in the States or Mexico – have made it possible for him to build a colourful annex to his house here in the hills. The toilet’s still a tiny shed down before the cornfields, but I guess you have to prioritize. Empathetically (at least I’d like to think) I guess I said something about the World economic crisis ‘n’ all, and that it’s probably tough to find work anywhere.

The next morning at the consulta most of Canicham showed up prepared. I was acting as an independent observer to the proceedings, which I did as best I could, and snapping pictures when I could get around to it. Although I did attract a fair bit of attention, being the only outsider present in a group of forty-eight people, I think I balanced well enough between being a photographer and some kind of authority of international standing and was accepted as such .. perhaps a bit over the top, as the assembly secretary Francisco Diego gave off the impression I’d flewn in directly from Europe to oversee the consulta (though he could have done that as a courtesy towards me, he’s that kind of guy). In any case, I won’t hide a certain pride in knowing that my name was meticulously written into the community act to be entered into the municipal records.
If my presence at the consulta caused any uneasiness or stifled curiosity from the elders -I don’t know which- I think it fell apart after goofing around with the kids for a few hours. Of course they all turned out to be incredibly resourceful, which I think is the case with most kids who grew up under pretty dire straits, like life in this countryside; after our shared efforts of building a tiny church out of twigs, they were suddenly all over the place finding ever more unlikely construction materials and the church had turned into several towers of babel.

So this was what the consulta was all about: everyone was there. Every head a vote, and it was made by the book and with pride. A hand raised in favor, a hand raised against. It was a popular vote, direct democracy in one of is purest forms and I’m glad I was there to witness the members of a small community not yet affected by mining, unanimously say no to the exploitation of their ancestral lands.

Pictures will be up soon.