According to a study by Tom Vesey, head of media analysts Carma International, western self-interest determines whether or not natural and humanitarian disasters earn column inches. “There is a clear link between the volume of reportage and global economic impact of these events. So, while the political subtext determines the timing, level of commitment and story angle, no connection exists between the scale of the disaster and media interest in the story,” he says.
In an excellent article in The Guardian, David Adam, reports on Vesey's findings:
Hurricanes Katrina and Stan struck within weeks of each other last year, and both killed more than a thousand people. But while Katrina devastated New Orleans, Stan wreaked his havoc in central America, mainly Guatemala. No prizes for guessing then, which storm has been referred to some 3,105 times in UK papers since then, and which a mere 34…
…Vesey's report reserves its strongest condemnation for reporting of the crisis following hurricane Stan: “The hurricane Stanley emergency stands out as the worst indictment of the selfish western approach to humanitarian disasters. There is no obvious significant economic or political interest. Consequently, there is virtually no coverage of any kind beyond the first few days.”
It has always been so, says Leonard Doyle, foreign editor at the Independent. “We have an enormous fascination with the US but we're allowed to have that. It's not a judgment on our degree of interest in central America. We can be interested in that too, but perhaps not as much so because it's not as much on our radar.”
He adds: “Whether it's true or not, we have an expectation that in Guatemala the houses are built on hills without proper foundations and there's mudslides and all the rest of it. You look away in despair and say this is a tragedy of the developing world. But you do not expect it in the world's superpower, which makes it fascinating.”
The report was also covered by Reuters' AlertNet in the UK. You can download the complete study here.
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The above photo of a ceremony for
victims of a massacre in Rabinal, was taken by Jorge Uzon, a
independent Chilean photographer based in Toronto, Canada. You can find
a very
interesting collection of his photos from Guatemala 1996-2000 on
Flickr posted in the last few days. You can find more of his work at
http://uzonphoto.com.
You find an updated list of photos of Guatemala here from many different photographers.
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The major story involving Guatemala internationally, covered widely in the UK press, has been the deaths of eight Guatemalan peacekeepers 23-01-06 in DR Congo. The BBC has followed up the Guatemalan government's questioning of the United Nations as to whether the Guatemalan troops were on a secret mission when they were fatally attacked. The French newspaper Le Monde says the Guatemalan special forces members were on the trail of Vincent Otti, a leader of Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army, who is wanted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
According to AlertNet, Guatemala has 80 peacekeepers in the Congo at present which it intends to keep there. The irony of the new role of the 'kaibiles' as peacekeepers will not be lost on students of recent Guatemalan history. After all, the infamous Kaibil creed of: “If I go forward, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I turn back, kill me”, seems to kind of jar with the traditional peacekeeper approach.
In February 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclaracimiento Histórico, or CEH), the truth and reconciliation body established under United Nations auspices by the 1996 Peace Accords ending the 35-year-long civil war, called attention to the brutalising nature of the training conducted by the Kaibil Centre in its final report, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio (“Guatemala: Memory of Silence”):
The substantiation of the degrading contents of the training of the Army's special counter insurgency force, known as Kaibiles, has drawn the particular attention of the CEH. This training included killing animals and then eating them raw and drinking their blood in order to demonstrate courage. The extreme cruelty of these training methods, according to testimony available to the CEH, was then put into practice in a range of operations carried out by these troops, confirming one point of their decalogue: “The Kaibil is a killing machine.” (CEH, §42)
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An exhibition of black and white photographs by Carlos Reyes-Manzo on the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and in Guatemala City, is going to take place at the
Oxo gallery in London from
16th February-5th March.
For a decade, thousands of women have been abducted, raped, tortured and killed. The authorities’ failure to carry out investigations and prosecute those responsible allows the perpetrators to continue. The exhibition is supported by Amnesty International UK.AI UK have organised an action to coincide with the exhibition where you can send an e-postcard to the Guatemalan authorities.
Carlos Reyes Manzo writes in a recent article:
“WHEN I WAS documenting the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico) in February 2004, I learned that many more women were being violently killed in Guatemala, but that it was not widely known internationally. I decided that it was very important to document the violence affecting women in Guatemala in order to inform the international community so that it can put pressure on the government of that country to take measures to stop the violence.”
In an incredible interview in the Guardian, Carlos, originally from Chile, explains the extraordinary sequence of events that led to him living and settling in London.
Admission is free from 11am-6pm daily
the.gallery@oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street,
South Bank London SE1 9PH (see gmap)
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Amnesty International have just (13-01-06) issued an urgent action for Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Fundación de AntropologÃa Forense de Guatemala (FAFG), Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation and for three of his relatives.
According
to Amnesty International, Fredy Peccerelli and other members of the
FAFG have been subjected to numerous death threats as a result of their
work to exhume mass graves of those killed by the Guatemalan military
and their civilian adjuncts in the early 1980s. In 2002 the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered that Fredy
Peccerelli and other members of the FAFG receive protection. However,
this protection has been shown to be inadequate on various occasions.
Fredy
Peccerelli was recently based with his family in the UK studying a
masters degree in the University of Bournemouth in 2004.
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Gareth Thomas (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for International Development) recently explained in written answers in the House of Commons (16-01-06) that the Department for International Development (DFID)
provided the above bilateral assistance to Guatemala and other Latin
American countries. The figures show that bilateral, multilateral and
regional assistance to Guatemala has dropped over the last eight years.
Gareth Thomas has also recently confirmed
(11-01-06) that “the Department for International Development is
contributing ‚¬1 million through its share of the European Commission's (EC)
2004-07 project to strengthen the ability of the Guatemalan Indigenous
Women's Ombudsman (Defensoria de la Mujer Indigena) to address the high
levels of exclusion and violence suffered by poor indigenous rural
women. The Ombudsman is part of the Guatemala Presidential Commission of Human Rights. The UK provides 18 per cent. of the funding of EC programmes to Guatemala.”
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Marlin Mine in Guatemala PHOTO: Communities, Ecology and Mining in Guatemala
Glamis Gold Ltd. announced (18-01-2006) that it produced 434,010 ounces of gold in 2005, an increase of 85 percent compared to 234,433 ounces in 2004. Unaudited total cash costs in 2005 were $195 per ounce of gold produced.
The 2005 results were driven by a strong first year of commercial production at El Sauzal Mine in Mexico (191,586 ounces in 2005) -which exceeded plan by 13 percent as well as strong performance at Marigold Mine in Nevada (137,116 ounces in 2005).
Marlin Mine in Guatemala commenced commercial production in late 2005 and concluded a successful year by contributing nearly 24,000 ounces of gold to the Company's total production.
You can find out more information about the fight against Glamis's exploitation of Guatemala's natural resources at this new website which is an independent repository of information on mining in Guatemala.
It is maintained through a partnership of organisations Misereor, Friends of the Earth International, Halifax Initiative Coalition, Bank Information Center, Social Justice Committee, Friends of the Earth Canada, Madre Selva, The Social Justice Committee, KAIROS – Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives , MiningWatch Canada
Friends of the Earth USA wrote a brief report on Glamis in May 2005.
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The Observer (15-01-06) has made “The Divine Husband” by US novelist Francisco Goldman, paperback of the week. The story is set in 19th century Central America mostly in Guatemala or thereabouts (although this is never explicitly stated in the book). Goldman, a jounalist who has written in Granta, the New Yorker, and the New York Times has written other novels on Guatemala including the “The Long Night of the White Chickens”. He has also written on the assessination of Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera.Goldman was also a prominent defender of Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu, against accusations made by US academic David Stoll in his book, “Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans”.
An excerpt from an article in the Daily Telegraph (06-02-06) about Francisco Goldman:
'The obsession with 'boom' writers is the most absurd, tedious, painful thing that's happened to three generations of Latin American writers,” says the author Francisco Goldman, born in Boston in 1954 to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish father. “Publishers manufactured the magical realist genre, and it's still mixed up with a bigoted notion that if you aren't doing it, you aren't authentic.”
Goldman, who grew up in New England and Guatemala, says, “Writing is always an act of deciphering yourself¦ at the heart of what I do is an obsession with blending.” That characterises his writing. First, he married the “Jewish-American coming-of-age novel with the multi-voiced narration of some of the great boom novels”; now, in a story about the settling of 60,000 K'iche Indians from Guatemala in Massachusetts, home to H P Lovecraft, he is working to merge “the Gothic, New England horror novel with the immigrant novel”.
“My imaginary homeland, the world where Guatemala and the US meet, is now a reality,” he says.
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