Guatemala

Suddenly, voices of the dead, silenced for hundreds of years, are speaking out, revealing their names, their ages, their great accomplishments, even to a degree, their personalities.

For a decade, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K'iche' Maya woman, has lived in Mexico, one of thousands of Guatemalan refugees from the counterinsurgency terror engulfing her homeland. In 1992, her efforts to advance human rights in Guatemala gained international recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Price.

After taking part in the February 11th press conference on community radio organized by Cultural Survival, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech, Frank La Rue filed a case in Guatemala’s Constitutional Court against the government claiming that the existing telecommunications law is in violation of freedom of expression and speech guaranteed in the Guatemalan Constitution.

From Co-Ops to Kitchens: In Nicaraguan cities, women face an uphill battle in and out of the labor force

Julia Morales, a seamstress for 30 of her 70 years, and her daughter have seven sewing machines in their Managua home, where they used to employ several other women. A founding member of the Women's United Textile Cooperative a decade ago, Morales and others like her joined up with much enthusiasm, but today her sewing has stopped and the machines sit idle.

Central America, the 200,000-square-mile land bridge connecting North and South America and separating the Pacific from the Caribbean, is an extremely heterogeneous mosaic of climate, soils, vegetation, and animal life. Species from both North and South American intermingle along this isthmus, making it one of the richest zones of biological diversity in the world. Its tropical forests, in particular, are repositories of a multitude of species of flora and fauna.

Voices of Courage: Indigenous people tell their stories of persecution,. humiliation, and hope

Since its founding in 1982, Cultural Survival Quarterly has become the largest subscription international journal to document the realities of indigenous people. The fact that so many indigenous peoples have survived the discrimination, persecution, and genocidal campaigns launched against them is a tribute to their tenaciousness. The fact that they still have the courage to speak is even more remarkable.

Culture Shock: The misleading term "culture contact" doesn't begin to. express the dramatic effects of changes brought by outsiders

The shock of "contact" has taken many forms, initially, at least, to indigenous people just the physical presence of outsiders was shocking.

Massacre in Santiago Atitlán: A turning point in the Maya struggle?

That the Maya of Ixil country have suffered dreadfully as a result of counterinsurgency is but one of Guatemala's many depressing realities (Manz 1988; Stoll 1988; Guatemalan Church in Exile 1989). There is no adequate way that one person can tell of another's pain, but try we must, especially if our lives as privileged North American scholars are to reflect any semblance of academic responsibility.

As most Cultural Survival Quarterly readers know, Mayans in the western highlands of Guatemala have suffered a protracted (10-year) period of attempted ethnocide.

In 1988-1989 my wife, our toddler, and I spent a year in Nebaj, a counterinsurgency zone of Guatemala. Living in Nebaj was not as risky as it might seem, at least for researchers enjoying the usual North American immunities and careful not to test the sensibilities of the Guatemalan Army. Backpacking tourists, many of tours of Central America, arrived daily, coming to Guatemala to find oppression and to Nicaragua to find liberation. Of oppression there was plenty in Nebaj, but we did find something else as well.

The Lacandone rain forest is the northernmost in the Americas, located in Chiapas on the Mexico-Guatemala border. It has been inhabited for more than 1,500 years by Mayan Indians who remain in the region, living in the tradition of their ancestors.

In the past 100 years, half of the original 526,110 acres of the Lacandone rain forest has been destroyed in the face of logging, cattle ranching, destructive agricultural practices, and energy development.

The line that ethnographers draw across Central America to mark the division between Mesoamerican Indians and those of South American and Caribbean origin passes right through the middle of the Republic of Honduras. In comparison with its neighboring Guatemala, only remnants of indigenous Indian culture survive in present-day Honduras; 90 percent or more of its population is Mestizo or Ladino.

A reasonable first step in the study of Central American Indians is to identify and locate people of Amerindian heritage. Most attempts at mapping the distribution of Indians in Central America have been produced by anthropologists and based primarily on language, including those by Brinton (1891), Thomas and Swanton (1911), Lehmann (1920), Jiménez Moreno (1937), Mason (1940), Johnson (1940 and 1948), and McQuown (1955). Normally, the maps show approximate group boundaries for the period of Spanish contact.

All of Central America today is in sorry shape, each country in its own fashion. Guatemala, currently making a tentative and not altogether convincing transition from military to civilian rule, remains as tense as a coiled snake.

In a futile attempt to staunch the flow of massive new waves of Central American refugees, the Rio Grande corridor of southern Texas and the Mexican-Guatemalan border zone of Chiapas have been placed under de facto martial law. As part of a generalized crackdown on Central American refugees, Mexican and US security forces have been augmented, while immigration authorities intermittently have tightened restrictions on asylum applications, work permits and travel.

The home of Guatemala's Ixil Indians is a relatively isolated, ruggedly mountainous territory ranging from 700 to 3,000 meters above sea level and encompassing approximately 2,300 km². It lies in the central sector of the Department of El Quiché, 85 km along a gravel road north of its capital city, Santa Cruz del Quiché.

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.