Most suffer from chronic malnutrition, which means that while they are getting enough calories, the food they eat is severely lacking in vitamins and protein.

As Samuel Loewenberg reports, this poor nutrition affects not only their bodies, but their future.

This production was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

For more:

Click here for the full transcript of the video.

Listen to our radio show on “Guatemala: Behind the famine”
View the Pulitzer Center’s Food Insecurity multimedia project.
Read Samuel Loewenberg’s blog from the field: Chronic malnutrition fatigues Guatemala’s children

Last month, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared a “state of calamity” as Guatemala experiences the worst drought in 70 years. Approximately half of the population lives below the poverty line and 50 percent of children are suffering from chronic malnutrition. But these are only the surface casualties of a vulnerable nation ravaged by 36 years of civil war, genocide and now, the encroaching drug war spilling over from the northern border with Mexico.

Worldfocus special correspondent Martin Savidge hosts Anita Isaacs, Carlisle Johnson and Sam Lowenberg. Some highlights of the conversation include:

• Guatemala in 2009 looks a lot like Guatemala of the 1960s and 1970s
• Malnutrition is connected to poverty, which is connected to the ownership of land
• There is almost no basic infrastructure in rural areas, including access to clean water and sanitation
• The U.S. CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954 gave rise to 36 years of genocidal armed conflict
• Lawlessness on the streets, drug trafficking and rural violence have contributed to the deaths of 6,000 people in 2008
• Indigenous systems of justice punish by means of lynching and public humiliation
• The sitting vice president has called Guatemala a “failed state”
• There has been no justice for war crimes and the civil war hangs over everyday life in Guatemala
• Is Guatemala a feudal society that never stopped being a banana republic?
• Guatemala has the highest per-capita income in all of Central America at $4,000/person, but income distribution is woefully underreported
• As the capital of Central America with it’s entangled history with the U.S., Guatemala does matter

GUESTS:

Dr. Anita Isaacs is a political science professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. For the last decade, she has researched democracy, justice and the peace process in Guatemala. She conducts field research in the country four to five times a year. Anita is writing a book with the working title At War with the Past? The Politics of Transitional Justice in Postwar Guatemala. She has also served as consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Dialogue, Freedom House and the Open Society Institute.

Stephen C. “Carlisle” Johnson is the producer and host of the television show “Inside Guatemala.” He has worked as a venture capitalist in about 50 countries and traveled to more than 120 countries. Carlisle has lived in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, France, England, and currently, Guatemala. He is the former publisher of the “Guatemala Post” and the former host of the English radio program “Good Morning Guatemala” on ABC Radio International affiliate. He is a chartered interpreter in English and Spanish.

Samuel Loewenberg is a journalist who covers public health and politics. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic Online, The Washington Post and many others.  He has reported from Latin America, Europe, China, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. His work in Guatemala was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Lisa Biagiotti, Ben Piven

Photo: Samuel Loewenberg

Samuel Loewenberg of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is currently in Guatemala producing a couple Worldfocus signature stories. He writes about his visit to the Bethania clinic, where he encountered the young victims of Guatemala’s rampant malnutrition.

The little girl does not smile. She doesn’t have the energy. Hopefully she will soon.

She is in a rehabilitation clinic in Jocotan, Chiquimula, a province in the far east of Guatemala, near Honduras. Her name is Domitila and she is nine years old. Her body is emaciated and she is fragile. Patches of her hair are missing; the veins in her legs show through her skin. Her face has a perpetual look of sorrow — the muscles are too weak to change expression. Other children in her family were in similar shape, the nurse tells me.

A boy, Israel, can not even support himself. He has been placed in a walker, where he lays sprawled. When he sees me, he tries several times to raise himself, but he cannot muster it. A pair of babies, twins, are so thin and frail I can hardly stand to look at them.

These were the lucky ones that were being taken care of in the well-staffed and clean Bethania clinic.

The cases of Israel, Domitila, and the other children here are the extreme edge of what is in fact an all-too common problem in Guatemala: Childhood malnutrition. While these children in the clinic faced the possibility of starvation, the more common problem is not a lack of food itself, but a lack of the right kind of food, with enough vitamins and micronutrients to keep children healthy. Children who suffer from chronic malnutrition are not in immediate danger of starvation, but they will face stunted growth and a diminished mental capacity. The children don’t look underweight — they just look tiny. Some have light hair, a sign of vitamin deficiency, and others are missing patches of hair, like Domitila.

Half the children in Guatemala suffer from this type of food poverty, known as chronic malnutrition. In some areas it is as high as 75 percent, which is among the highest such rates in the world.

The populations affected are largely the indigenous Mayan communities that make up most of the country’s rural poor. The hunger hot spots also track with the places the civil war was most fierce, like the province of Quiche in the highlands. This was not by mistake. “Budgets were shifted to keep some populations less developed,” said Andres Botran, who pioneered some of his country’s anti-hunger programs in the last government. “For us it is a national shame.”

It is often said that Guatemala is really two countries in one, divided between the few rich and the many poor. This is only partly true. One would not exist without the other. It is among the most unequal countries in the entire world, with 20 percent of the population receiving 60 percent of the income.

Botran himself is one of Guatemala’s ruling elite, the scion of the powerful rum dynasty that bears his name. It was Botran who took up the issue in the early part of his the decade as an adviser to the Berger government, which was more conservative than the current one although far from the hard-line military forces in some parties. Botran admits that he came across the issue almost by mistake, as a political maneuver while staying with friends in Georgetown. He says that when his assistant first presented him with data that half his country’s children were malnourished, he did not believe it and accused him of making a mistake. But the numbers were right.

Photo: Samuel Loewenberg

The reasons for chronic malnutrition in Guatemala are attributable to a number of factors: a lack of education; the increased price of beans, one of the only sources of protein for villagers; poor or in some cases non-existent infrastructure, meaning no electricity or running water, and certainly no clean water — so diarrhea is a major factor. And Guatemala remains a highly dysfunctional society, still badly damaged by the 36-year-old civil war and income inequality that is some of the worst in the world.

Underlying all of it is poverty.

The malnutrition, which is hidden from Guatemala’s wealthy urban populace, happens in places like the mountain village I visited in the Northern Highlands near to the town of Santa Cruz del Quiche. There, there are huts with dirt floors and tin roofs with little patches of land out back growing corn or lettuce or chili peppers. It is lunchtime, and inside one two-room hut a mother was feeding her five children. She worked over a wood-fired stove, rhythmically patting her hands making dozens of tortillas, to accompany a small bowl of pasta and just a spoonful of frijoles. Her youngest daughter is being treated for malnourishment, and the other children appeared to be stunted as well. They wolf down their tortillas and drink a Kool-aid like mixture to fill their stomachs.

Even the experts remain somewhat mystified about why the problem persists at such high levels. Guatemala is only four hours by air from Washington D.C., and it has some of the worst levels of chronic malnutrition in the world. Among Latin American countries, it is the only one to have failed to decrease its malnutrition over the last decade — even countries with worse income inequality, like Brazil, or ones that are poorer, like Honduras and Nicaragua, have had much bigger successes in addressing the problem. So far, in Guatemala, efforts are just going towards treating the symptoms. It is not enough.

- Samuel Loewenberg

Watch for Worldfocus’ stories from Guatemala in the coming weeks.

Some Guatemalan migrants to the U.S. send money back to their families. Photo: Samuel Loewenberg

Samuel Loewenberg of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is currently in Guatemala producing a couple Worldfocus signature stories. He writes about the experience of Guatemalan migrants to the U.S.

People seem to cry a lot in Guatemala.

This applies to men as well as women, the country’s reputation for machismo notwithstanding. The crying seems to come especially when they are recounting their experiences as migrants to the U.S. It has been something of a surprise to be honest.

Over the years I’ve interviewed family members of murder victims, survivors of terrorist bombings, victims of medical malpractice, and I’ve not quite encountered something like this before. It is not that the trauma is greater (how can you quantify trauma?), but it does seem somehow closer to the surface. More than anything, I think what brings them to tears is a sense of grand injustice.

After all, they came to the U.S. to work, to provide for their families by doing jobs that Americans did not want to do, and they ended up being treated as criminals. The minimum wage in Guatemala is about $200 a month, well under the $250 a month considered necessary to feed a family, according to economist Jorge Santos, who says that U.S. economic policies, from the neo-liberal economic regimes known as the “Washington consensus” to the more recent Central American Free Trade Agreement have only increased the pressure on Guatemala’s poor, who make up the vast majority of the country.

Indeed, the level of Guatemala’s income inequality is stunning, with only a handful of families controlling the vast majority of the country’s wealth in what is almost a feudal system. The level of education for the general populace is among the lowest in Latin America, and malnutrition strikes about half of the country’s children — making it one of the worst such situations in the world.

In a small community center of the village of San Miguel Duenas outside of the Guatemalan tourist town of Antigua, dozens of men and women who had been deported after a raid on the kosher meat factory in Iowa, gathered to recount their treatment at the hands of U.S. immigration officials.

They described being held for as long as five months. They said they were given negligible access to lawyers and were unable to communicate with their families. Some said they were stripped naked. According to the Washington-based Guatemalan Human Rights Commission/USA, one woman was separated from her one-year-old child during her imprisonment. When she was released, she found her baby had been adopted by an American couple.

Workers told me they were hit by ICE officials, and when describing the abuse, which was not only physical but psychological, a rather tough looking guy with a mustache and gold chain broke down in front of me. “I came back with more scars than benefits,” he said.

- Samuel Loewenberg

Watch for Worldfocus’ stories from Guatemala in the coming weeks.

Approximately 33 bus drivers have been murdered in Guatemala so far this year. Photo: Samuel Loewenberg

Samuel Loewenberg of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is currently in Guatemala producing a couple Worldfocus signature stories. He writes about the ongoing violence instigated by street gangs in Guatemala. Approximately 33 bus drivers have been killed so far this year.

In a country as bloody as Guatemala, the last two weeks have stood out. In the last several years, bus drivers have became targets for street gangs seeking extortion money. But the thugs are not breaking the drivers’ kneecaps — they are blowing their heads off. The number of bus drivers killed was around 80 last year.

Last week, as I was heading back from the countryside where I’d been visiting malnutrition clinics, the health worker who was acting as my guide told me that four bus drivers in Guatemala City had been killed all in the same day. During one attack, an infant was shot and killed.

A common theory, taken seriously by both government officials and everyday Guatemalans, was that this was something beyond mere street crime, but was in fact an effort by the right-wing opposition party to spread chaos and fear to undermine the current center-left government. Public officials received anonymous phone calls warning of an imminent coup.

When I asked a U.S. government official if a coup was likely, the answer was “probably not.”

There were fears the government might invoke martial law in response to the bus attacks. It didn’t, but many people hoped it would. The police here are perceived to be worse than useless — they are often considered to be corrupt and part of the problem.

During the elections in 2007 dozens of politicians were killed. It is a culture of impunity that permeates everyday life. This was underscored by a more openly political attack last week. Several days after the country’s human rights ombudsman released a report on atrocities from the country’s 36-year-old civil war, his wife was kidnapped and tortured with cigarette butts.

Thirteen years after the peace accords were signed here, violence and fear continue to be a way of life. Between the gangs, the narco-traffickers, and the looming military and police forces, Guatemala’s violent past continues to intrude in the present like an infected wound. After a long discussion about events both recent and past with a Guatemalan colleague (her father was tortured during the civil war, also with cigarettes), she cuts off the discussion: “I don’t like to talk about the past. It is not good to know too much history — it takes away your hope for the future.”

- Samuel Loewenberg

Watch for Worldfocus’ stories from Guatemala in the coming weeks.

Worldfocus special correspondent Lynn Sherr and producer Megan Thompson visited the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

Venture to the first stop on the train line in Chiapas, and meet several Central American immigrants Waiting for northbound trains out of Mexico’s south (web original video).

The majority of deaths are preventable, with access to sufficient medical care — a challenge for many Guatemalans, particularly those in remote areas.

Worldfocus special correspondent Lynn Sherr reports from the mountain community of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, where the “Casa Materna” center has helped 50,000 women and their children since opening — but tragedy lingers.

For more information on global maternal health, see below.

One of the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals — a set of global goals to achieve by 2015 — is to improve maternal health and reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters.

Read about the state of maternal health in Latin American countries.

A chart, courtesy of PBS Wide Angle, details those countries with high and low rates of maternal mortality. Also, listen to public health experts discuss worldwide efforts to improve maternal care.

The Mexico-Guatemala border.

Though the U.S.-Mexico border receives much attention and immigration is a hot-button issue for many Americans, Mexico’s other border is equally alive with activity — and the debate equally contentious.

Recently, Guatemala tightened security along its border with Mexico to deter illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Mexico’s “Plan Sur,” implemented to tighten the country’s southern border, was supported by the U.S.

Vanessa Burgos is an independent journalist and human rights worker in Latin America. She writes for the online magazine Upside Down World and discusses the reasons for mass migration to Mexico.

Mexico-Guatemala: The other border

The immigration experience of Central Americans offers cautions about current approaches to immigration reform, just as a U.S. debate on immigration fails to produce meaningful changes in immigration policies.

When the topic of immigration comes up in the U.S., the debate usually centers on the Mexico-U.S. border and the Mexican immigrants that make up a large portion of those who cross the border running along the states of California, Arizona, and Texas. Far fewer think about the significant number of immigrants who must cross multiple borders before they arrive in the U.S.

Pushed by the hope of finding new economic opportunities, thousands of Central Americans and others cross the border between Mexico and Guatemala. It is the natural gateway for the rest of Latin Americans. According to Mexico’s National Institute of Migration, 2 million documented and undocumented cross Mexico’s southern border a year. The majority of these undocumented immigrants are Guatemaltecos, followed by Hondurans, Salvadorians, and a fewer number of Nicaraguans. They are either in route to the U.S or seeking temporary work in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas.

Over the last years, difficult economic circumstances, lack of opportunities, along with natural disasters have increased undocumented migration. Since 2001, the number of undocumented Central Americans coming into Mexico has more than doubled. This number is a low estimate considering it is hard to accurately document the actual number of undocumented immigrants who cross the border.

Central American immigration to Mexico, however, is no new phenomenon. During the civil wars of the 1980s, Mexico saw an increase of immigration from Central America as refugees fled genocide in their home countries. Natural disasters such as hurricanes Mitch and Stan have also put more pressure on already poor communities to migrate north. In the last two decades, however, a growing factor in Central American migration to Mexico has been the adoption of free-trade policies in the region.

To read more, visit the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user TMSean under a Creative Commons license.

A crowd mills around at the largest independence day festival in Guatemala, in the city of Quetzaltenango.

On this day in 1821, five countries — Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua — joined to declare independence from Spain. Led by Guatemala, the countries then briefly united with Mexico before again breaking off and forming the Central American Federation. The federation gradually dissolved after border disputes, and its member nations gained sovereignty.

Today, the five countries join together once more to celebrate the anniversary with festivals, parades, song and dance. A torch relay began on Sept. 14 in Guatemala, crossed the Pan American Highway and arrived in Costa Rica today.

“The Hansons in Guatemala” blog talks about the arrival of the torch yesterday and describes the celebrations in San Lucas.

“Inner Diablog” discusses the origins of the holiday and posts a video of Guatemalan fireworks.

“Gerry” links to a video of a parade and other festivities in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala.

“Hobson’s Happening’s” posts about misconceptions of Nicaraguan independence and features a video of young Nicaraguans parading.

“Eruptions at the Foot of the Volcano” posts about the evolution of Nicaraguan independence day and the liberty torch, complete with pictures.

A Canadian teacher in Nicaragua writes about her school’s festivities, and “Laurie” writes about celebrations in Honduras.

In the United States, Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated annually beginning every September 15 to mark the anniversary of these countries’ independence.

A Hispanic Heritage Month event calendar also lists celebrations in the U.S.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user erik2481 under a Creative Commons license.

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