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Guatemalan police units assist with a land eviction

If you want to see what ethnic cleansing looks like in the 21st century, take a trip to Guatemala. Don’t just stay at the charming eco-lodge by the lake under the volcanoes, however, because you might fly home with a false idea of Guatemalan progress. To understand the true cost of your vacation you have to see the original residents the police drove off the land so investors could acquire that scenic view; the nearby farms appropriated by agro-industries responding to foreign, not local, markets; and the courtroom where Indigenous political leaders are rendered invisible in disputes with multinational investors. Those helpful waiters you are tipping? They might have been driven out of their ancestral villages at night by hired thugs from the nearby mine pumping toxic runoff into their water, their family scattered to places as distant as Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in the effort to find the money to keep the next generation alive. This ethnic cleansing is not grotesquely bloody in the way that usually captures international attention, but the results are just the same: a landscape cleared of the culture, institutions, and bodies inconvenient for the more powerful. Continue reading →