Santo Domingo, Guatemala, 2009.

A photo from March 2009, during a demonstration against public energy privatization in Flores, Petén region, Guatemala.

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

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

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

Everado Lopez lives in Efraín Bámaca, a small community of ex-combatants in Cantón Chichigüitan, just on the other side of the hills from my house. After the civil war officially ended in 1996, a group of 22 families who participated in the war as guerillas got together and bought this small patch of land behind the eastern hills of Quetzaltenango. They named it after Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, the revolutionary leader of the URNG who was captured and permanently disappeared by the military government in the familiar fashion aided by the CIA. Efraín Bámaca the community lies beautifully among cultivated hillsides and fields of corn and cabbage, which almost all of the inhabitants work as day-laborers since their own land contains little fertile land. After five years of building the community, three family houses still remain to be built, but the community no longer has the external support or funding needed to buy the materials. They’ve recently installed electricity, but the community lacks an efficient water solution, a water drainage, and a paved road to avoid swamping during the rainy season – and dust during the dry season. The residents of Efraín Bámaca also dream of one day building a school and perhaps even a small playground for their children, but due to a large communal debt and low income, they need external support in order to take the community towards a sustainable future.

I visited on February 14th, and the image above is my first out of Aperture, a photo editing software I’ll be using from now on. Click on the image to view the large version of the photo along with its caption, this is an option for every own photo that I upload. More to follow on Efraín Bámaca.

(click on an image to view them all as a slideshow)

Photos from the mines in Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), Potosí, Bolivia.

The mountain was once the richest source of silver in the World, and Potosí grew to becoming the largest and richest city in Latin America. By now the silver is mostly depleted, and other minerals, tin especially, are being mined. Plunging mineral prices have sent workers’ wages down to a point where they can barely sustain themselves, yet still some 80 percent of the city’s population work in the mines – some as young as 13 years old.

A week ago I went on a tour into the mines, and the photos below are from that tour. The next day I went with a french guy named Stephane who is making a documentary, as a translator to conduct an interview with the secretary of the mining cooperative and a miner named Ruben. Despite a few initial doubts, it worked out really well, and I think both interviews came out good, on the image side too. The photos above are from this day, taken away from the main active mine entrance. I mostly shot on my film camera the first day, and managed to break it on the first day … damn … so the pictures here are shot on my pocket digital camera. Worked out pretty well.

The working methods are much the same as centuries ago, and working conditions horrifying; the work is dangerous, hard manual labour using pickaxes, hammers, and dynamite, and the many risks include tunnel collapses, rock falls, fires, toxic gasses, heat exhaustion and suffocation due to dust – there’s plenty of asbesto in the mines (as I found out as my finger was picking away at some pretty little crystals). Few miners live beyond the age of 40, many dying from silicosis ten years after entering the mines.

The Rich Mountain is believed to have produced as much as 60,000 tons of silver over the years – also, it is said to have claimed the lives of 8 million indigenous workers. The vast majority of these poor souls still lies somewhere in the bowels of the mountain.

more below.

(click on an image to view them all as a slideshow)

( Some rough math on those numbers: If 8,000,000 workers perished producing 60,000 metric tons of silver (132,230,000 pounds), then an average of 7.5 kilos of silver (16.5 pounds) was produced by each of those miners. I know it’s terrifically inaccurate, but still I thought it was worth the quick math. Now it may be cynical, but would be interesting to convert 7.5 kilos of silver into the commercial value of silver in the 16th-17th centuries, then bring it up to today’s value. How much is it worth, the life of a Bolivian miner? )

The only light source within the mines are battery-powered headlamps. My 18-year old guide on the second day, Alvaro, described the mountain as a Swiss cheese. Indeed – after 400 years of mining activity, the pitch black maze of tunnels, grottos, shafts penetrate the Cerro Rico in all imaginable directions, some say there are as much as 75 levels. These are the only photos I managed to pull out of the mines. On a personal note, the mines are pretty fucking scary.

Also, check out Lucas Mulder’s great photo essay Miners of Potosí at Photoshelter.

From the bus leaving Potosí, a few more photos in b/w:

(click on an image to view them all as a slideshow)

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Coolest kid on the blog.

I went to this street corner to snap a pic of a mural on Avenida Corrientes, only to find that it had been pasted over with election posters. The mural depicted what has become an icon of the fight for justice from the disappearences in Argentina, the outlined drawing of faceless Jorge Julio López. López was ‘disappeared’ by the dictatorship during the National Reorganization Process in 1976 but returned in 1979. In 2006 hours before he was going to witness against his torturers, López was disappeared for the second time. Here there was a big mural. Now it’s gone.