The stony road climbs steeply between the rugged hills of southeastern Guatemala in the department of Chiquimula. Victor Hugo Sosa, the coordinator for the local humanitarian project led by the NGO Oxfam, was focused on driving his 4 x 4 pick-up truck, stopping to let some women climb into the back, carrying water containers on ropes over their shoulders. In this dry corridor region, where poverty is worsening because of climate change poverty, humanitarian organizations are the only ones with cars. For the Maya Chorti inhabitants, their only choice is to fetch water from the nearest stream, an hour's walk away.
In the village of Guareruche, the palm houses have tin roofs to collect rainwater in basins. This is the only luxury at Victoriano Suchite's house. In the center of the room sits a stone stove and a single saucepan in which corn was soaking. His five children and his wife sat on bricks. Another room houses hammocks and a few items of clothing. The family is among the beneficiaries of a program run by Oxfam and financed by the European Union that gives free money (632 quetzals, or €74, every two months) to 14,000 people in Guatemala.
"This aid covers the food deficit between March and September. During these four months of what we call seasonal hunger, these families have nothing left to eat but tortillas with salt," explained Victor Hugo Sosa. In the region, acute malnutrition cases in children under 5 rose by 38.9% last year.
According to UNICEF's latest 2019 undernutrition report, Guatemala has the worst rate of child malnutrition in the Americas and the sixth worst in the world. The Ministry of Health estimates that 62% of Indigenous children suffer from it. The main cause is the lack of land: Their ancestors were thoroughly dispossessed of it and relegated to the mountains. "Historically, the Spanish colonists and then the elite during the independence seized the best land," explained Ricardo Saenz, an anthropologist and the director of Oxfam Guatemala. "Then came the military: The struggle for land was one of the causes of the civil war [1960-1996]. Today, 2% of the population owns 62% of arable land, which they often lease for palm, banana or sugarcane plantations. In the dry corridor, Indigenous people have tiny plots of land on poor and often waterless soil."
This situation was caused, in large part, by the corruption of the elite. And the only institution that had set out to combat it, the UN-sponsored International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), was dismantled in 2019. Since then, Alejandro Giammattei's government has attacked public freedoms and the rule of law, abandoning all social policy in the process. The first round of the presidential election, held on June 25, has raised huge hopes by placing a left-leaning political party, which proposes to fight corruption and poverty, in the run-off that will be held on August 20.
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