Guatemalan Student Support Group: Poverty

Poverty

Conditions in Guatemala are best illustrated with the following quotations:

- In the departments of Quiche, Huehuetenango, Totonicapan, Solola, and Alta Verapaz, where all of GSSG’s youngsters live, “Extreme poverty is increasing. 9 out of every 10 persons do not have the resources to cover basic necessities. . . . 49% of children endure chronic malnutrition.” Frank La Rue, Director of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, Prensa Libre, December 10, 2006, p.16. [Mr. La Rue earned his law degree in England, where he spent twelve years in exile because of his fight for human rights.]

- “Poverty is not just a reflection of low income. More fundamentally, it refers to the deprivation of basic human needs. To measure poverty more directly, the UNDP has developed an Index of Exclusion from Social Development (IEDS, Indice de Exclusion del Desarrollo Social). The index, which has no direct economic component, combines the following: the percentage of the population that does not live to 40 years of age; the percentage of adults who are illiterate; the percentage of homes without access to water; the percentage of the population without access to basic health care; and the percentage of children under five who are moderately to severely underweight. . . .

“The Department of Alta Verapaz [where the Guatemalan Student Support Group recruits many of its participants] has the highest index of exclusion (48.4).” Andrew Reding, U.S. Department of Justice, Guatemala: Hardship Considerations (2000), s.v. II. General Considerations: A. Poverty.

- “Problems hindering economic growth include high crime rates, illiteracy and low levels of education, and an inadequate and underdeveloped capital market. The distribution of income and wealth remains highly skewed. The wealthiest 10% of the population receives almost one-half of all income; the top 20% receives two-thirds of all income.” U.S. Department of State, Background Note: Guatemala (May 2002), (http://www.state.gov/-r/pa/ei/bgn/2045.htm), s.v. Economy (c.9).

- “Guatemalan society is characterized by extreme social and economic inequality. According to a 1998 study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Latin America has the greatest disparities in income distribution in the world. In gauging the relative levels of Disparity in Latin America, the IADB study found that Guatemala was among the countries with the very highest levels of inequality,” U.S. Department of Justice, ibid., s.v. I. Introduction.

- “According to the United Nations Development Program, real per capita income (adjusted for differences in purchasing power) was $4,100 in 1997. The World Bank figure for 1997 is virtually identical at $4,060. Because of the country's extremely unequal distribution of income, however, these averages are very misleading. A small part of the population has a considerably higher income, while the majority receives far less. According to UNICEF, about 53 percent of the population earns less than a dollar a day, or $365 a year," ibid., s.v. II. General Consideration: B. Income.

- “Approximately 55 percent of Guatemalans survive on less than $1 a day. . . . Sixty-five percent . . . living in rural areas, most of them indigenous Maya, suffer from a lack of access to education, health care, potable water, credit, and employment opportunities.” Catholic Relief Services (2002). catholicrlief.org/where_we_work/latin_america_and_the_caribbean/guatemala, s.v. History.

- “The housing shortage increases by approximately 43,000 units a year.” “Report of the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) for Consultative Group Meeting for Guatemala,” January 18, 2002, 10.

- “According to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), 46 percent of the population in rural Guatemala did not have access to safe drinking water, and 48 percent did not have access to sanitation in 1994. . . . The primary health risks to Guatemalans come from diseases that could be prevented by greater investment in sanitation. Intestinal parasitism is by far the leading cause of disease.” U.S. Department of Justice, s.v. F. Health.

- “Guatemala continues to be haunted by its past in more ways than one. Because of its large unassimilated indigenous population, the country has never developed a culture of respect for the rule of law. The imperatives of maintaining control over the impoverished indigenous majority have tended to take precedence over democracy and modern notions of justice. It is no coincidence that the counterinsurgency during the 1970s and 1980s was the bloodiest in all of Latin America. Nor is it a coincidence that almost no one has been made to answer for the killings of almost 200,000 civilians during that period.” Ibid., s.v. H. Personal Security.

- “On 25 February 1999, the Clarification Commission (CEH) published its report entitled 'Guatemala: Memory of Silence'. In its conclusions, the Commission stated that more than 200,000 persons died or disappeared as a result of the armed conflict, of whom more than 80 per cent were Mayan, and it attributed institutional responsibility for 93 per cent of the violations to agents of the State, principally members of the army.” Ibid., 2.

-”the national social security system, IGSS, covers 7 percent of the working population.” Jean-Marie Simon, Eternal Spring – Eternal Tyranny (1987), 20

- “Mayan culture may now function as a magical treasure for the state, . . . but under Guatemala’s various colonialisms, the ‘Indian’ has also been identified . . . through the hostile markings of stereotypes: as lazy, stupid, brutal, backward, superstitious, uncivilized, illiterate, rebellious, and, in the clearest case of projection, hostile.” Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound (1999), 128.

- "Colonial and modern plantation economies were built on social ideologies and national development strategies that harnessed the labor of impoverished Mayas and kept them poor." Kay Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics, (1998) 87.

- “The indigenous . . . suffer from low self-esteem and . . . have become increasingly dependent on hand-outs that come from NGOs and foreign aid groups. . . .To be successful . . . requires more than economic support. [It requires] a change in mind-set. . . . Limited choices make students less interested in attending school. One primary course [in high school] is bookkeeping which has led to a glut of bookkeepers that are unemployed. Many students follow the teacher-training path [also in high school] and this is a low-paying job and requires secondary income to survive.” Jeramy Bagozzi and Roger Garcia, “Education in Guatemala.” Kenan-Flagler Business School, Univ. of North Carolina (April 2003).

- “The problem in education is twofold: inadequate investment of resources by the government; and extremely unequal distribution of educational opportunities among the population.

“In 1996 Guatemala spent 1.7 percent of GNP on education, ranking it at the bottom of the hemisphere, below the Dominican Republic (2.0%), El Salvador (2.2%), and Peru (2.9%). That contrasts with countries that invested more heavily in education, which included not only wealthier countries like the United States (5.4%) and Canada (7.0%), but also poorer countries like Cuba (6.3% in 1985) and Costa Rica (5.3%). . . .

“. . . gaps in education explain most income inequality in Latin America. Guatemala's extraordinarily high level of income inequality is due above all to extraordinarily unequal access to education. Guatemala is the only Spanish or Portuguese-speaking country in the hemisphere in which the average person [in the whole population, Mayan, mixed-race, and European] receives less than three years of schooling. Only Creole-speaking Haiti comes in slightly lower.

“According to the United Nations Development Program (LTNDP), less than three-quarters (73.8 percent) of the relevant age group [again, of the whole population] attended primary school in 1997; and only slightly over a third (34.9 percent) attended secondary school. According to UNICEF, only half of those who enter primary school reach the 5th grade.” U.S. Department of Justice, Ibid., s.v. D. Education. [Emphasis added.]

- “The average illiteracy rate for indigenous women is 51.5 per cent. According to the Ministry of Education, the school dropout rate for girls is 81.5 per cent in rural areas and 50 per cent in urban areas. Only 17 of every 100 girls complete primary school, and 66 per cent drop out before completing third grade in rural areas.” Report of the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) for Consultative Group Meeting for Guatemala,” (January 18, 2002), 11.

- “Children for the most part come to school ill-prepared to learn to read and write. . . . Other children drop out of primary school because there are few incentives to staying.” USAID, “Development Challenges in Guatemala,” RFA No.520-A-04-027, May 2004.

- “In 2003 government spending on education amounted to only 2.49% of GDP, while government health expenditures were only 1.30% of GDP.” USAID, “Development Challenges in Guatemala,” RFA No.520-A-04-027, May 2004.

- "Characteristically, under-funded universities have not been able to offer more than token salaries to their professors or minimal support for undergraduate studies. At public institutions, where students attempt to arrange studies around their work schedules and growing family responsibilities, graduation rates may be as low as 5 percent.

"Even at high-status institutions, urban intellectuals cannot support themselves as university professors. Rather they typically combine part-time teaching at several institutions with research projects, writing for the press, and consulting for politically engaged think tanks and international NGOs. Relatively few have Ph.D.s. They support their families with continually shifting jobs and publish books as they complete the licenciatura, the undergraduate degree equivalent to M.A.-level studies in the United States. In countries such as Guatemala, it is common to see well-published intellectuals in their forties or fifties who have gained national prominence as political and cultural leaders and who still yearn to find the time to finish their undergraduate theses." Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics (1998), 25.

- “University education is of generally low quality. Only 10% of the teaching staff is full-time, another 15% half-time, and the remainder hourly. Only 15% of students obtain a degree. Most do not arrive with the minimum level of preparation needed to be able to do university studies. Only 17% of those who obtain degrees do so in engineering and the sciences, the areas most vital to a developing economy. Because of the low quality of education in Guatemala, the wealthy tend to send their children abroad for a university education, reinforcing the pattern of inequality.” U.S. Department of Justice, ibid., s.v. D. Education.

- “That people in Guatemala do not read is nothing new. In this country it appears to be State policy to deny the majority population access to education as a medieval strategy to maintain them in ignorance, which is the equivalent of preserving power and privilege in the hands of the few.” Carolina Vasquez Araya, Prensa Libre, May 14, 2005, 15 (translated).