CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Another Look at Central American Migration

Graphic by Paola Bilancieri.

In 1992, while on a United Nations mission to assess the health conditions of refugees and displaced communities in Central America, I travelled to Quetzaltenango, a highland city at the heart of Guatemala’s Mayan culture. It was there, on the steps of the town’s historic cathedral, that I learned an unexpected lesson.

An elderly Mayan woman, dressed in traditional clothing, was kneeling in prayer when I instinctively raised my camera. Before I could take the photograph, she turned to me and said, “One dollar!” I hesitated. But she was right. I was about to benefit from her image without her consent or compensation—an echo of the exploitation her people had endured for centuries, beginning with the Spanish conquest.

For Guatemala’s Indigenous majority, dignity and equity have surfaced only in fleeting moments. One such moment came in 1951, with the democratic election of President Jacobo Arbenz. At the time, 2% of the population owned 70% of the land. Arbenz sought to change that imbalance through sweeping agrarian reform, transferring uncultivated land from large estates to the rural poor. Roughly half a million mostly Indigenous peasants stood to benefit. His government expanded suffrage and established a minimum wage.

But Arbenz’s reforms threatened powerful interests—none more so than the United Fruit Company (UFC), which controlled 220,000 hectares of land, only a fraction of which was under cultivation. UFC responded with an aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington, where it had influential allies: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his........

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