Social Co-operatives are booming in Guatemala

Social cooperatives are booming in Guatemala, so much so that they make up 22 percent of the gross domestic product. In co-operatives, the workers each have a share in ownership. This gives each person the opportunity build an income not only for themselves but also for others they invite to work with them.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Danilo Valladares tells us about one co-operative that makes artisan jewelry available in markets worldwide.

“Our economic situation improved a great deal because we obtained more income for our families” as a result of setting up a social enterprise, Matilde García, who makes fashion jewellery in the municipality of Pastores, 60 km west of the capital of Guatemala, told IPS.

“Now we send our children to school in the urban area and we can pay for their transport and food,” said this proud mother of three, who gave up working as a domestic employee with a monthly wage of about 40 dollars to set up a small-scale factory of necklaces, bracelets and fashion accessories employing 25 women.

Social entrepreneurship and cooperatives are offering rural families the opportunity to generate income in Guatemala, where 54 percent of the country’s 15 million people live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, especially in areas where most of the population is indigenous, according to the state National Survey of Living Conditions of 2011.

García’s group is one of 15 firms made up of 350 people, mostly women, who operate in eight of Guatemala’s 22 departments or provinces, making fashion jewellery for the social enterprise Kiej De Los Bosques, which in the Maya Cakchiquel language means “deer of the woods.”

“This is changing entire communities,” said Ligia Chinchilla, head of the Saquil group to which the Kiej De Los Bosques enterprise and the non-governmental Comunidades de la Tierra (Communities of the Earth) belong.

Kiej De Los Bosques is a private company that markets the products manufactured by the women under the Wakami label, while Comunidades de la Tierra develops their capacities and “incubates” them into formal businesses within two years.

“This country’s problems, such as poverty, are very complex, and it is everyone’s job to solve them. That’s why we created this with the goal of increasing incomes in rural areas,” said Chinchilla, one of the three founders of the social enterprise.

Guatemala - President-Elect Otto Perez Molina Inherits Poverty and Crime

This week saw the election of a new president to Guatemala - General Otto Perez Molina.  The election campaign was fraught with violence and electoral law violations.  Despite all that, and the road ahead, General Otto Perez Molina may by the most well equipped man to handle Guatemala's poverty and crime issues.

President-elect Otto Pérez Molina inherits poverty, crime issues in Guatemala

"The president-elect does in fact confront a difficult situation (El Nuevo Herald, Telesur, NYT). Over 50 percent of the population lives in poverty...On the other hand, President-elect Pérez Molina probably has more going for him than President Alvaro Colom did upon taking office..."

CSEM; helping women entrepreneurs in Guatemala

There are a greater percentage of women in poverty in Latin America then men. The percentages for women are almost double than those for men. So the women who do want to strike out on their own with a business need a little extra support. An organization called Centros de Servicios para los Emprendimientos de las Mujeres helpes women in Guatemala to receive funding and draw up business plans.

From IPS, writer Danilo Valladares gives us one CSEM sucess story.

Rosenda Gómez, a 53-year-old mother of five, knows all about challenges. To overcome them, she started a modest sausage business in Guatemala, and thanks to her leadership skills and training and other support she received, she is now an example of the economic empowerment of women.

Sixteen years ago she began to make homemade sausages in her village, Laguna Ocubilá, to sell in the nearby city of Huehuetenango, the capital of the northwestern province of the same name.

But her business was a micro-enterprise that allowed her family to just barely scrape by -- until things changed radically three years ago, when the Centros de Servicios para los Emprendimientos de las Mujeres (CSEM) came to her village.

CSEM, a network of centres providing technical and financial services for women entrepreneurs, is sponsored by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in association with Guatemalan institutions.

"We began to receive support, in the form of credit, training to improve our products, and promotion of our chicken and pork sausages in markets and fairs -- none of which we had before," Gómez told TerraViva.

With that boost, Gómez, who only went to school up to third grade, managed to increase production from five to 50 kgs of sausages a week, and demand continues to grow.
....
Social organisations point to the vicious circle of poverty, lack of education and lack of health care suffered by so many in this country of 14.3 million people, where the poverty rate is slightly higher for women (51.5 percent) than for men (48.4 percent), according to the 2006 national survey on living conditions.

Rita Cassisi, UNIFEM coordinator in Guatemala, told TerraViva that the CSEM helps women set up businesses by offering loans, organisational training, assistance in improving products, marketing techniques and other support.

"One of the vacuums that we have seen is women's access to financing, which is why the programme is focused on a strategy of economic empowerment at the local, national and regional levels," she explained.

Canadian health professionals head to Guatemala

Many health conditions are easily treated in the developed world. However in poor nations, most health problems never receive treatment and the people live with it the best they can. A pair of health professionals are about to head to Guatemala to treat people with cleft palates, hernias and the like.

From the Nanaimo News Bulletin, writer Rachel Stern tells us about the doctors who will make the trip, Heather Smith and Terri Storey.

In Canada, hospitals are viewed as a place to get better. In Guatemala, many people view them as a place to die.

There are few hospitals in the country. Those that do exist were built with foreign aid in the 1980s and are understaffed, funded and equipped.

The health care that exists is for emergencies and is only accessibile by a lucky few.

The majority of the country’s population lives in poverty and most Guatemalans could go their entire life and never visit a doctor. They often live with disfiguring, painful or life-threatening health conditions that could be easily fixed in Canada’s medical system.

Those conditions pulled on the hearts of two Nanaimo women who felt compelled to act.

Heather Smith and Terri Storey, sterile supply technicians at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, volunteered for Project H.A.N.D.S., an organization that creates medical trips to perform free medical procedures in the country.

Doctors, nurses, sterilizing technicians and translators volunteer their time to help, but each must pay their own way.

The Canadian medical staff work with Guatemalan doctors to provide free surgeries to poor residents. This year the team is going to repair cleft palates and offer genealogical surgeries to correct things like a hernia.
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For more information about Project H.A.N.D.S., please go to www.projecthands.org.

The Guatemalan angle on immigration

We find another angle on illegal immigration today with an article from Reuters India. The story concentrates on immigrants from Guatemala. Once immigrants are deported back, they find themselves with less money than before, and become easy recruits for street gangs.

Guatemala is ranked as the most violent country in Central America. Caused in part by Mexican gangs fleeing to Guatemala after being flushed out by the military.

For our snippet, reporter Sarah Grainger talks about immigration enforcement and gives the example of one deportee.

As successive U.S. governments have responded to pressure to crack down on undocumented immigrants, the size and frequency of deportations has risen steadily.

In 2008 the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency sent home nearly 30,000 Guatemalans, a rise of 21 percent on 2007, and the figure is on course to rise again in 2009.

Still scarred by a 36-year civil war which ended in 1996, Guatemala is ill-equipped to deal with the thousands of people returning, jobless, to a shaky economy.

Crime rates are sky-high, with more than 6,000 murders last year in the country of just 13 million people. Mexican drug gangs, under pressure at home from an army crackdown, have moved into Guatemala and are seeking recruits there.

Easy money from being a cartel lookout, driver or hitman is tempting in countries where wages are pitiful.

Carlos Aguilar, 26, recently swapped the neatly clipped lawns of the Royal Wood Golf and Country Club in Naples, Fla. where he made $600 a week as a groundsman, for back-breaking work on his uncle's coffee farm near the mountain village of El Bosque, where he is lucky to pocket $40 in a week.

Arrested after a decade in the United States and placed on a deportation flight with 90 other Guatemalans, he is finding it hard to adjust, especially having left his wife and children in Florida, where they are legal residents.

"Here there's no way out and you're worried about having enough money for food just to survive. But there it's very different because each week you get your paycheck from work and the banks even offer you credit," he said.

Cleaning up the trash in a Guatemalan town

A great story details one family's work in aGuatemalan village. The entire Rose family from Georgetown, Massachusetts travels to the village of San Juan Comalapa to help the people. They previously built a park/community center for soccer and a nursery, they also help to teach English and have helped refurbish the community hospital.

The latest project is to build a school out of recycled materials. To help raise funds for the construction, an art show is being held in Massachusetts.

We found more details of the project and it's fundraiser in the Newbury Port Daily News.

Rose and her family have decided to help with a solution. They have joined an initiative through the community development organization Long Way Home, which is finding beneficial ways to put trash to work.

The group's latest project involves building a school out of recycled trash in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, for students in kindergarten through grade 12.

"We're trying to clean up the environment and recycle trash into another form that's usable," said Rose, the new president of Long Way Home's board of directors.

The new school comes at the request of Tecnico Maya, the smallest and poorest school in Comalapa, a community of close to 40,000 residents. It is being constructed with recycled materials, such as tires and used soda bottles filled with paper and plastic trash.

"This is part of Long Way Home's huge recycling effort," Rose said.

Although the new school, which will include a vocational program, is being built primarily with volunteer help and recycled materials that come at no cost, Rose said it will need windows, doors, desks and school supplies.

To raise funds for the school, Long Way Home is touring North America to increase awareness about the organization and its efforts. A representative will be in Georgetown this weekend to make a presentation during an art show fundraiser being organized by Rose.

What: Art show and sale to benefit Long Way Home

When: Tomorrow and Sunday, 3 to 7 p.m.

Where: 90 Pond St., Georgetown

How: Call 978-352-6804 or e-mail elizrose213@yahoo.com.

Rising food prices increases poverty in Guatemala

from the International Herald Tribune

A United Nations report says rising food prices have pushed half a million Guatemalans into poverty.

A report from the U.N's World Food Program says another half of million of Guatemala's poor are now living in extreme poverty due to increased prices for the country's basic food staples.

Guatemalan have seen corn, rice and bean prices rise by more than 40 percent in the last two years.

The report's author Nicholas Virzi of Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala City said another 200,000 Guatemalans who are not living under the poverty line are also struggling to purchase food.

More than half of Guatemala's 12 million people live on less than US$2 a day.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Humanitarian workers among dead in Guatemala crash

from the Tri City Herald

Utah mission workers were among those found dead in this plane crash. - Kale

By PAUL FOY

SALT LAKE CITY A small plane that broke apart in Guatemala as the pilot attempted an emergency landing, killing 11 of the 14 people aboard, was carrying members of a Utah-based humanitarian group who were on their way to help build a school in a remote, impoverished area of the country.

Seven of the dead were Americans, including the wife of Chris Johnson, acting chief executive of CHOICE Humanitarian, a West Jordan, Utah-based group that arranges relief missions around the world, according to Lew Swain, a board member for the group.

The three survivors also are Americans, including a Utah businessman who was pulled from the wreckage by farmers shortly before it exploded Sunday in a field lined with palm trees.

"We only know the engine had problems and they did not make a successful landing," Swain said Monday.

The single-engine Cessna Caravan, also known as a Cargomaster, broke apart and scattered burned wreckage across a barren field where the pilot made an emergency landing about 60 miles east of Guatemala City, Guatemalan civil aviation director Jose Carlos said.

Johnson was prepared to fly to Guatemala when he got a message from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City that his wife, Liz, a leader on the expedition, had died, Swain said. Liz Johnson died at 3:15 a.m. Monday, said William Diaz, general manager of Hospital El Pilar in Guatemala City.

Johnson decided to stay in Utah, where he remained in mourning Monday.

"There's not a thing he can do at this point. We're working with the U.S. Embassy to have all of the arrangements made for the repatriation of those who are deceased, and medical flights for those living," Swain said.

The embassy did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

CHOICE Humanitarian is aimed at helping people in poverty around the world improve their own lives. CHOICE stands for the Center for Humanitarian Outreach and Inter-Cultural Exchange.

The group relies on help from volunteers who pay their own way on trips to countries including Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, Nepal and Kenya. The volunteers on the flight that crashed were on their way to a Guatemalan town called Sepamac.

Among the dead were Roger Jensen and his son, Zachary, of Amery, Wis. A daughter, Sarah Jensen, 19, suffered minor cuts and bruises and survived along with her mother, April, who had burns and contusions, Sarah Jensen told the AP in a brief hospital interview.

April and Sarah Jensen were expected to return Monday to the U.S. by air ambulance, said Diaz, the hospital official.

The Guatemalans who died in crash include pilot Fernando Estrada; co-pilot Monica Bonilla; and two CHOICE Humanitarian representatives in Guatemala, Javier Rabanales and Walfred de Rabanales, according to civil aviation authorities and Swain.

Utah businessman Dan Liljenquist survived the crash with a broken right leg and broken left ankle.

"There were farmers in the field where they crashed. They pulled my husband out of the plane 30 seconds before the plane exploded," Brooke Liljenquist told the AP in a telephone interview from her home in Bountiful, Utah.

"He has constant pain he says he can deal with. He's just grateful to be alive," she said.

Dan Liljenquist is president and chief operating officer of Focus Services of Roy, Utah, which handles customer service calls for other companies. Brooke Liljenquist said the crash killed four employees of his company, two from Utah and two from another call center in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

The other U.S. passengers who died were Cody Odekirk; John Carter; Jeff Reppe and Lydia Silvia, according to Guatemala's civil aviation authority, which didn't list their hometowns. Swain declined to provide that information.

Roger Jensen, 48, was the maintenance manager at Smyth Companies in St. Paul, Minn., for 12 years, Chief Executive Officer John Hickey said Monday.

"He did everything. He was a carpenter. A multipurpose utility player. He was a very popular employee, forever upbeat," Hickey said. "He was very giving. I think he was in Africa last year."

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Pair will devote year to help poor people in Guatemala

from The Northern Echo

A profile on a couple who are taking a year off for a mission trip to Guatemala. The country has a high crime rate, but the pair are willing to take the risk. - Kale

A NURSE and her husband are taking a year-long career break and giving up creature comforts to travel to Central America and help some of the world’s poorest people.

Community psychiatric nurse Sarah Hogg and her husband, Simon, have made the life-changing decision to spend a year in Guatemala, volunteering for a charity which helps street children and destitute single mothers.

However, in order to share their skills and expertise in the extremely deprived town of Santiago Sacatepequez, the couple need to raise £600 in sponsorship for every month they are there.

Mr and Mrs Hogg, both 32, set off for Central America next month.

They will be working for Mission Guatemala, a charity established three years ago by a British family, which has set up a church and school and helped to transform the lives of the 42 children they are educating.

Mrs Hogg, who has worked at West Park Hospital, in Darlington, since 2002, will be teaching and continuing the charity’s outreach work with homeless children, who are often left with no alternative but to live on rubbish dumps.

She also hopes to work with women in the area who are forced to raise children alone and in poverty.

“We had some quite difficult personal circumstances over the past two years, and it gave us a sense of what is important,”

said Mrs Hogg, a qualified nurse of 11 years.

“As a Christian, I felt quite moved that if I could do something to help people, I should.

“When they think of poverty, people tend to think of places in Africa. Central America has been called the forgotten continent. The people are desperately, desperately poor – you are talking about people who are living on less than 50p a day.”

The couple recently visited the mission ahead of their planned trip.

“We were very humbled by some of the people we met who had nothing, yet were so pleased we were there. We went to see a family who were living in just a tin shed, but had decorated the roof with crepe paper for us.”

To sponsor the couple, call New Life Baptist Church on 01609-775396 or email sarahm.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Adopted girl helps family in Guatemala

from WTOP

A touching story of Lily Mackley, who helped another little girl in Guatemala.

By TIFFANY ARNOLD

Her name is Veronica Par. She is 10 and has five siblings. The youngest, 1, sleeps in the bed with the parents while the rest of the children sleep on cardboard pallets on the concrete floor. Her father earns $16 a week as a gardener. Her mother earns $2 a week by making beaded jewelry.

"It's easy for (us), but it might not be easy for them to earn up that money," said Mackley, who begins her first year at Smithsburg Middle School this fall.

Thanks to Mackley, who lives in Smithsburg, Veronica's family has one less thing to worry about. In April, Mackley used her birthday money to help offset Veronica's school expenses.

Mackley said she did it because she felt obligated to help her people. She was born in Guatemala but was adopted and has lived in the United States since she was an infant. She lives with her sister, Anna, 8, who was also born in Guatemala, and her sister, Vanessa, 15, who was adopted from Canada.

In Guatemala, school can be an elusive dream for families who can't afford the supplies, said Dwight Poage, director of Mayan Families, a nonprofit charity group that helps raise money for low-income Guatemalans, especially young girls.

"Usually boys are sent to school, girls are sent to work," Poage said in a recent phone interview.

Mackley donated $120 through Mayan Families. The organization has sponsored more than 700 children, Poage said.

More than half of the country's 13.3 million inhabitants are descendants of the Mayans, the native people who flourished in Guatemala long before Spanish colonizers arrived.

Today, Guatemala is characterized by wide income disparities. Violent crime because of widespread poverty remains a serious concern, according to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, part of the U.S. Department of State.

Mackley's mother, Kathie Mackley, said she looks for opportunities to keep her Guatemalan daughters in touch with their culture. All three girls attend a cultural camp in the summer. They eat Latin cuisine and attend ethnic festivals, though they are usually held in and around Washington, D.C. The girls are also being tutored in Spanish.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Eating right - in Guatemala

from the Daily Pennsylvanian

Natasha Bandukwalla

Craig Sinkinson, President and founder of the Mayan Medical Aid, a non-profit organization that funds medically related projects involving Mayan Indians, spoke at Civic House last night. He addressed the impact of maternal and childhood nutritional diseases during pregnancy and early childhood development.

His speech was part of Healthy Philadelphia Week, which is sponsored by Civic House and works to build awareness of public health issues in the Philadelphia area.

Sinkinson left the United States in 2004 to start a health clinic in a small village, Santa Cruz La Laguna, in Guatemala. This health initiative aims to improve the nutrition, primary health care and sanitation of the inhabitants of Santa Cruz, Guatemala, while maintaining the cultural traditions of the Mayan people.

Sinkinson realized that malnutrition among children was more than a nutritional problem but was "a major ethical and economical issue." He discussed the vicious cycle in which families in Santa Cruz and other places around the world remain trapped in poverty. According to him, poverty causes malnutrition which leads to poor congnitive function.

He has faced many obstacles in Santa Cruz such as inavailibilty of resources, high illiteracy rates and a resistance of the people to give up their traditions and customs. However, Sinkinson has made a lot of progress. He encourages the villagers to consume nutrients that their diets are currently lacking - foods rich in protein, fats and iron.

Additionally, he believes that education is an important step to ensure good health practices.

Student Ambassadors of the World, a community service group at Penn, has been closely involved with Sinkinson's work in Guatemala. Last summer, students volunteered and observed the delivery of medical care in Santa Cruz.

Vice President of the Latin American region of SAW and College junior Jackie Rivera was one of the students who spent her summer volunteering in Santa Cruz.

Sinkinson is doing amazing work, she said, adding that "He is not only giving medical help but his work is a social experiment."

Sinkinson hopes that his malnutrition-fighting model will be implemented in other poverty striken areas around the world.

Indigenous Women Weave Incomes, Self-Confidence

from IPS

Inés Benítez

SOLOLÁ, Guatemala, "Before forming part of the association, we were shut up in our houses. Now we have overcome our fear and shame of going out and seeing new places, and we are bringing money in for our families," says Nicolasa Raxtun, a 30-year-old Maya Cakchiquel Indian woman.

In a house in Chuacruz, a village of 800 people in the Guatemalan region of Sololá, six indigenous women have gathered to tell IPS how their lives have been changed by joining the Aj Quen (which means "the weaver" in the Cakchiquel language) association of artisans.

The association, which now has around 800 members, mainly women, was born in February 1989 on the initiative of representatives of organised groups of indigenous craftswomen from the southwestern regions of Sololá, Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango, Alta Verapaz in the north, and the central Chimaltenango.

The association’s goals are to preserve traditional indigenous weaving skills, develop independent production while marketing products at a fair price in order to improve local living conditions, eliminate middlemen, and spread understanding and awareness of the culture and conditions of craftspeople in Guatemala, one of Latin America’s poorest countries.

The project involves poor indigenous women who receive training, assistance and a source of income, which boost their self-esteem and confidence.

"The founders were mainly women in the country’s highlands region who were widowed during the armed conflict," says Aj Quen executive coordinator José Víctor Pop.

A 1996 peace agreement put an end to 36 years of war between the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) and the state security forces. The latter were responsible for the deaths of the great majority of the 200,000 mainly rural indigenous people killed in the conflict, in which entire villages were destroyed, along with their inhabitants.

Pop describes to IPS the progress made by the women since 1989: "They didn't even dare to leave their houses before, and now they take part in local social activities."

One indigenous woman tells IPS that in her more than 30 years of life, she had never left her village, and that she took a bus for the first time to carry woven goods to Chimaltenango, where the central offices of Aj Quen are located.

Pop, who has been involved in the project since 1994, says the civil war left these woman severely traumatised and living in constant fear, in an atmosphere heavily marked by "machismo" and sexism -- factors that led them to isolate themselves from society.

But their work in the artisans’ groups has helped them build up their self-esteem and has restored their ties to the community, he says.

Most of the colourful woven and embroidered scarves, pillow covers, hand-bags, tablecloths and other items produced by the association’s 25 member groups are exported. Only five percent are distributed locally, while 85 percent go to Europe and 10 percent to the United States, Jorge Mario Tzaj, in charge of design, tells IPS.

"But the most important thing is the training" received by the women, says Pop, who underscores that the objective is to improve the quality of life of the association’s members by providing technical, financial and socioeconomic support while preserving indigenous cultures through the production of traditional crafts.

In Raxtun’s house, which is almost invisible as we approach through a dense fog, two women sit at sewing machines making zippers. In the nearby village of El Adelanto, another group of women embroider stars by hand on cell-phone and pencil cases.

The two groups are part of a "production line" that starts with the design of the cases at Aj Quen headquarters in Chimaltenango, which distributes the patterns and materials to the artisans, provides training courses, and collects the finished products.

The weaving of the material itself is done in the village of Chaquijya, where 10 women work on foot looms and run a child care centre.

Groups of women in other villages use their dressmaking, crochet and embroidering skills.

As a non-profit organisation, Aj Quen is based on the principles of fair trade, which means the profits from sales go directly to the association’s members, among whom they are distributed equitably. "We get a good price," Raxtun confirms.

"This project has really helped my family, because we needed money for food and clothing," says Antonia Churunel, a 33-year-old mother of six, whose husband works in the capital.

"By working together in an organised way, not individually, we have achieved results," she tells IPS in halting Spanish, with her one-year-old daughter Evelyn in her arms.

While the women describe their experiences with the group, mainly speaking in Cakchiquel, several children run around the yard outside, mingling with a few chickens, and avoiding the garden where corn and peas are growing.

"We are an economic support for our husbands," says 52-year-old María Chiroy, a mother of three.

And thanks to the training they receive, the craftswomen periodically have a chance to work for other projects, further boosting their income.

Juana Raxtun, 29, says she can earn 600 to 700 quetzals (80 to 90 dollars) a month from her work with Aj Quen.

While according to official statistics, 56 percent of Guatemala’s population of 13 million lives in poverty, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) estimate that up to 80 percent of people are poor.

And although indigenous people officially make up 40 percent of the population, NGOs put the proportion closer to 65 percent. The rest of the population is mainly of mixed-race (indigenous and European) heritage, with a small minority of European descent.

Lorenzo Muxtai, who runs Aj Quen’s education programme, explains to IPS that the training has a technical component, including teaching how to operate looms and sewing machines and produce crafts, as well as a social focus, with classes on gender issues, reproductive health and family planning, and human rights.

The courses also include basic accounting techniques, small business skills, and aspects like legal rights, how to access government assistance, and the basics of democracy.

"The change has been seen since 1989," says Mustia. "We started to work with women who had no formal schooling, and the training has given them the courage and confidence to speak in public and ride buses, while their living conditions have improved."

The women also forge ties on their own with other NGOs and fair trade organisations, which brings them a larger number of orders. In addition, they weave traditional "huipiles" -- colourful dresses or blouses worn by indigenous Maya women in southern Mexico and several countries of Central America -- to sell in local markets, he says.

The association’s sales grew 11 percent from 2006 to 2007. However, there have been hurdles to overcome, like a shortage of new designs, an inability to keep up with growing demand, or natural disasters like Hurricane Stan in 2005, which cut off many villages and made training courses and the delivery of goods impossible, he explains.

Forty percent of the project -- the production aspect itself -- is self-financed, and the rest, which includes the skills training and courses, is financed by Oxfam Belgium. With the assistance of that international development, advocacy and relief agency, Aj Quen plans to open several "solidarity stores" in Guatemala.

Sololá, some 140 km from Guatemala City, is the region with the largest number of Aj Quen member organisations: 18, comprised of a total of 600 people.

Some of the daughters of the founding members, who were illiterate, have become involved in the association, Carlos Mendoza, in charge of production, tells IPS.

Aj Quen also has a microcredit programme and is pressing for reforms of a 1997 law on protection and development of craftsmaking.

"We need an intellectual rights organisation, greater participation by artisans in the government, and a national school for crafts that caters to children," says Pop, who laments "the loss of culture due to emigration."

He says the law on crafts is not in line with the needs of craftspeople and should be amended. There are around one million craftspeople in Guatemala.

The hopes of craftspeople and NGOs are focused on the centre-left government of President Álvaro Colom. In his election campaign, the new president, who took office on Jan. 14, promised to reform the law in keeping with demands from the concerned parties.

But when asked by IPS, legislators and government officials said they were not familiar with the matter.

As the women talk about their lives in the modest tin-roofed house, María Julajuj works outside on her small loom. She doesn’t remember her age, but her fingers move agilely as she sits on the floor next to a basket holding a pile of yarn of many colours wound around empty juice cans.

Promoting peace amid poverty

from The Metro West Daily News

WAYLAND -

Shunned by society, children and their parents earn their living scavenging the dump in Guatemala City.

Exposed to methane gas, pests and rodents, they pick among the garbage littered with broken glass and twisted metal for recycled material. Roughly 560 children, from babies to age 20, live with their families in shanty houses made of tin and corrugated cardboard that line the dump.

Combining her passions for theater and resolving conflict, Wayland's Anna Hadingham helps preteens and teens in that area deal with another big problem plaguing the city - gangs.

Through the nonprofit organization Safe Passage, the 22-year-old started a program last September to teach conflict resolution to children who live and work in Guatemala City's dump.

To a group of about 50 at First Parish in Wayland yesterday, Hadingham talked about her experience as a volunteer. During her first visit home since she began the project in September, she showed pictures of the at-risk children children living in squalor and poverty.

In her classes, the 2003 Wayland High School graduate teaches children metaphorically about controlling the "sparks" in their lives.

"I try to get the kids to change sparks from setting off fires," said Hadingham. "The kids are getting it. One boy previously involved in gangs is now a peer leader."

The children now speak of aspirations beyond life at the limiting dump.

"They want to be doctors, vets and a lot of them want to be teachers," she said.

At her presentation, Hadingham, petite in stature, easily captured the attention of her audience with her message.

After graduating from Syracuse University with a bachelor's degree in acting and nonviolent conflict resolution, Hadingham thought about going to New York to become an actor. But after meeting with an agent, a different destiny called to her.

"That was not my best choice when there are so many other things I care about," she said. "Social justice has been my lifelong commitment."

In the classes Hadingham calls her "Non-Violence Theater Project," she presents hypothetical, dangerous situations to the children. Through discussion, they explore serious issues and create nonviolent solutions.

"It helps build self-esteem, confidence, and identity," said Hadingham, who wants to produce a video project for the children to create their own story, learn something about video cameras and produce the film.

"Her presentation was very moving," said Ann Knight, a Wayland resident who attended the talk. "We are grateful for young people like Anna who take the time to make a difference and bring the message to the rest of us and keep the situation at the forefront of our consciousness."

Hadingham has done a good job at mining her interests of theater and conflict resolution for social justice, said Lea Anderson of Wayland. In turn, the drama program at Wayland High, taught by Richard Weingartner, helped Hadingham mine her interests.

"He captured her attention by dramatizing many of the issues she now deals with in Guatemala," said Anna's father, Evan.

After Hadingham completes her year in Guatemala, she plans to continue teaching nonviolence through theater in urban settings in the United States.

With donations, Hadingham hopes to buy used video cameras for the children in Guatemala. To make a financial gift, visit safepassage.org and write "non-violent theater project" on a check.

Hadingham also sells note cards of pictures the children drew. The cards may be purchased for $1 by sending an e-mail to Anna.Hadingham@gmail.com.

Those interested may also send letters to the children by sending an e-mail to Anna. In English class, they can translate them to Spanish.

For more information on the city dump, view the documentary "Recycled Life," which is available online at www.recycledlifedoc.com.

(Kathy Uek can be reached at 508-626-4419 or kuek@cnc.com.)

His houses rebuild lives in Guatemala

from the Star Ledger

Joe Collins celebrated with a soft drink. His 67th birthday. The construction of his 103rd house for the poorest of the poor in the Guatemalan highlands.

And the continuing re-construction of his own life.

"I don't know what led me to this," says Collins. "I guess God did. I don't know, it's just ..."

His voice trails off because this twice-divorced 6-foot-2 former Marine and saloon owner and recovering alcoholic and cancer survivor is not the sort comfortable with invoking divine intervention in his own life. Collins would think it presumptuous.

But, after a round of Christmas fundraising, Collins is headed back down to the hot rain forests of the Central American country where, he estimates, some 1.6 million Mayan indigenous people live in shacks made of cornstalks or worse.

"We've built only 103 houses in three years. We've got a long way to go."

He runs an organization called From Houses to Homes in Guatemala, an offshoot of another group he joined six years ago just as a volunteer to help build small homes for people who, he says, make a dollar or two a day working in fields.

"They have nothing," he says. "The poverty down there is not like the poverty around here."

The building of houses for poor people in Guatemala might not appear to fit into this guy's life. Before he began the work, Collins was -- as he still is -- a private detective. A specialized one. He is an adoption detective who finds children given up for adoption and parents who gave them up.

He's good at it and has become a champion of the right of adoptees to learn more about their past, testifying before the Legislature, and representing a variety of groups pressing for open adoption laws. He's lost count of the number of adoptions he's investigated, but it's in the thousands.

"It's how I pay the bills," says Collins. "I can do that kind of work anywhere I can bring a laptop."

His interest in Guatemala began when he visited his son Darron there in 1999. Darron Collins, Joe's only child, was doing anthropological research for a Ph.D. from Tulane.

"Just a visit. He was down there for two years, and I wanted to see him."

What he saw appalled him. People sleeping in the streets. Or in shacks with no water. When he returned to the states, to his apartment in Morristown, the town where he grew up, the images wouldn't let go.

"Then one night I was just sitting in front of the computer and typed 'volunteering in Guatemala.'" He found an organization that built houses there and joined it, spending parts of three summers helping to build houses. When the group shifted its emphasis to Africa, Collins figured he could continue.

At $1,500 a house, he built 24 in 2005 and another 24 in 2006 and, now, this year, 55. He raises money, recruits volunteers, even opened an office in Antigua. His construction of 12-by-19-foot concrete and stucco houses -- along with his donation of school and health care fees to the poor -- attracted the attention of the nation's first lady, Wendy Widmann de Berger, a social reformer who visited Collins' operation.

He returns home to tend to his adoption work and raise money -- speaking at churches and other places, urging people to do the math. A few bucks from everybody here wouldn't be missed but could provide a house to everyone who needs a roof.

Collins is not a political guy -- and he's proud of the four years he spent as a Marine -- but he'll mention in passing that we probably owe something to the people in Guatemala, a country where the CIA engineered a coup that led to decades of civil strife.

"Why shouldn't we be helping these people? They are Americans, after all. Central Americans."

After his stint in the Marines, he opened a bar in Morristown with his brother. He says the business was successful but turned him into a drunk and that ruined his marriage. He's been sober since 1988. He still looks big and strong, although in the last year he's suffered a heart attack and just got through colon cancer.

"I'm doing all right," Collins says.

While home, he's writing out nearly a thousand Christmas cards, all with a pitch for money for his organization. Then he'll go back to Guatemala Dec. 30. New Year's Eve doesn't hold much of an attraction for him up here any more.

"I'm usually asleep by 10 p.m."

Bob Braun's columns appear Monday and Thursday. He may be reached at rbraun@starledger.com or (973) 392-4281. For more information about Collins' organization, click on www.fromhousestohomes.org.

Inside Guatemala's adoption pipeline

from the Chicago Tribune

Latin nation tries to fight image as baby factory for the U.S.

By Oscar Avila

Tribune foreign correspondent

GUATEMALA CITY — Maria Lorena will soon celebrate her first, and possibly last, birthday in her home country. In January, the 11-month-old infant will likely become yet another precious export to the U.S. when a Minnesota family adopts her.

But U.S. and Guatemalan officials and child advocates worry that adoptions aren't just of value to the children and their prospective parents. Critics say a shadowy Guatemalan system has helped lawyers, middlemen—and even birth mothers—collect sizable payoffs.

Under worldwide pressure, Guatemala is preparing to enact a law, currently being debated in the country's Congress, to add oversight and transparency to its adoptions, as required by an international treaty. Nearly all agree that the result would be fewer adoptions from Guatemala, which sent more than 4,100 children to the U.S. last year, making it the second-largest foreign source behind China.

Guatemalan officials say the country is becoming painfully aware that its youngest citizens have turned into "merchandise," in which birth mothers often receive hefty sums to place their children for adoption, while lawyers get up to $20,000 to make the deal.

On the other side, a well-organized lobby of pro-adoption groups in the U.S. has distributed letters and petitions via the Internet, charging that the new hurdles would send thousands of Guatemalan children into the streets instead of U.S. homes.

The debate has been passionate. Both sides say they are fighting to protect thousands of children in a violent, poverty-stricken country. Their arguments, more than in the typical policy disagreement, tug at the heartstrings.

In the New Hope Home, a shelter for children, Maria Lorena frolics in a nursery adorned with a cheerful "Finding Nemo" mural. The center has arranged adoptions for nearly all its 30 children, and center director Feliciano Carrillo worries that a new law would doom the next Maria Lorena.

"These children you see here, it's not fair that they do not have families," he said.

The question is how those families should take shape.

U.S. parents have adopted children overseas since the 1940s, when some U.S. military families brought German children home. The top sending nations have ebbed and flowed over the years, including a wave of South Korean children in the 1970s and Russian children in the 1990s.

In the past two decades, Romania and El Salvador cracked down on adoptions, reducing the flow of children to practically nothing. China said it would tighten restrictions on foreign adoptive parents, including banning those who are single, obese or older than 50.

Pressure from U.S.
The landscape for Guatemala changed last year when the U.S. said it would not process adoptions from countries not in compliance with an adoption treaty. About 70 nations have ratified the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which was enacted in 1993.

The convention has certain requirements that Guatemala does not meet, according to the U.S. State Department. For example, Guatemala does not have a centralized system to exhaust options for domestic placement and to counsel the birth mother before adoption.

Also, the convention requires that any adoption fees cover expenses only and not be used for profit. In addition to the lawyers, Guatemalan adoptions are fueled by jaladores, or pullers, who collect fees for identifying mothers willing to place children for adoption.

The powerful lobby of Guatemalan lawyers had thwarted any tightening of regulations for years. But First Lady Wendy de Berger has made it a crusade to overhaul the system, backed by UNICEF and the U.S.

The crux of the debate is whether the unsavory practices are ingrained in the system, as some government officials charge, or merely isolated examples that can be rooted out by a more modest proposal.

Carmen de Wennier, Guatemala's secretary for social welfare, said she thinks a "significant" share of international adoptions have been tainted by financial interests.

"A noble institution that is adoption has lost its value and turned into a business," de Wennier said in an interview. "Our children are not factory products."

Guatemalan attorneys say the alternative, greater government control, is no better. They say the government is riddled with corruption and does not have the resources to publicly fund the services that private agencies provide.

Hannah Wallace, president of Pennsylvania-based Focus on Adoption, which advocates for international adoptions, said the tougher law would discourage birth mothers because they would first be required to seek placement within their extended family. Many rural mothers hide their pregnancies from relatives and might turn to clandestine abortions or abandonment, Wallace said.

Wallace said the system can be cleaned up without such requirements by forcing private agencies to register with the government and provide a clear accounting of how money has changed hands.

"It's unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of children would be living on the streets or in institutions or dying prematurely because there is no way to protect their ability to find a family," said Wallace, who adopted a child from Honduras, where international adoptions have dwindled since similar laws were passed.

Wallace says only a tiny minority of Guatemalan mothers place children for adoption simply because they received money. Mothers typically get payments that can reach $1,000, a sizable sum for indigenous women in the countryside.

UNICEF and other proponents of a stricter approach say that because the financial incentive is strong, Guatemala will not see a surge of abandoned children. They point to estimates that 30 percent of the nation's birth mothers place more than one child for adoption, which they see as evidence of a calculated decision to have babies for that purpose.

"If I sell elotes [corn on the cob], and they take away my market, what am I going to do? I'm going to look for alternatives. I'm not going to keep producing elotes," said Hector Julio Perez, a Guatemalan lawmaker leading the legislative fight for a new law.

UNICEF assailed
In an unusual twist, the Guatemala flap has dragged in UNICEF, the United Nations agency that promotes children's rights with the help of celebrity ambassadors such as Jackie Chan and Shakira.

Wallace, who recently traveled to Guatemala, said she thinks UNICEF wrongly considers international adoption a "neocolonial" practice, somehow seeing it as immoral for a child to leave a developing nation for the U.S. Many adoption advocates say UNICEF has been heavy-handed in trying to push through reforms in Guatemala.

Manuel Manrique, UNICEF's representative in Guatemala, denied that his agency wants to end adoptions. But the outcry has been so great that U.S. adoptive mothers even started a movement to boycott the traditional Halloween collection for the organization.

The uncertainty over Guatemala's changes has rippled throughout the United States. Parents with adoption cases under way, estimated to be at least 3,000, have bombarded Guatemalan and U.S. officials with requests to let their cases continue under the current legal framework.

Several American couples with adoptions pending in Guatemala declined to discuss their concerns on the record for fear of jeopardizing their cases. A writer on a Guatemalan adoption blog who knows six parents in limbo recently wrote: "The [American] parents of these children aren't sleeping too well these days as politicians play chess with the future of their children. They hold their children in their hearts until they can hold them in their arms, and live with daily anxiety and worry."

For now, new families come together every day, especially at the Marriott in Guatemala City, known around the world as the "Baby Hotel" because it is one of the most popular lodging choices for U.S. families coming to meet their adoptive children.

The gift shop sells diapers and talcum power in addition to postcards and gum. The third floor, site of a "baby lounge," smells like formula. In the lobby, Guatemalan caregivers in traditional Mayan dresses place babies into the arms of smiling parents.

As lawmaker Perez drank coffee in the Marriott's cafeteria, nearly every table had a highchair with a Guatemalan child.

"Maybe these children are going to good homes," Perez said. "But as I think about how they could have come to this point, how they might have been taken from their mothers' arms, it fills me with sadness to see them."

But just like everything in the debate, even simple scenes are viewed in strikingly different fashion. When Carrillo brings babies from his New Hope Home to these high-rise hotels, he sees a wonderful process about to come to fruition.

"I feel good when I see these children going off to America," he said. "I think this child has a good future, a secure future, a future that even I wish I would have had."

oavila@tribune.com

Guatemala Elects Anti-Poverty Candidate

from The Associated Press

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ – 9 hours ago

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Alvaro Colom, a businessman promising to end Guatemala's desperate poverty, won the country's presidential election Sunday.

Colom beat retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, who conceded defeat after results from 97 percent of the vote showed him trailing Colom by 6 percentage points in the two-man runoff.

"I am the nation's president elect," Colom, of the center-left National Unity of Hope Party, told cheering supporters.

Colom had nearly 53 percent of the vote, while Perez, of the conservative Patriotic Party, had 47, according to results published on Guatemala's Electoral Tribunal Web site.

Electoral officials had not declared an official winner late Sunday but Perez acknowledged that Colom's lead was insurmountable.

"We are going to be a constructive opposition," said Perez, who ran on a tough anti-crime platform. "We're willing to keep fighting the war against impunity, the war against corruption and against violence."

Calm prevailed during the vote, which was guarded by more than 30,000 police and soldiers, on alert after weeks of campaigning marred by violence. There were no reports of serious incidents Sunday, when about 47 percent of the 6 million registered voters went to the polls.

Security was a top issue among voters in Central America's most violent country, with more than 5,000 homicides per year.

Colom, a 56-year-old former vice economy secretary and ordained Mayan minister, promised jobs, a judicial overhaul and increased social spending in Guatemala, where more than half of the country's 13 million people live on less than $2 a day.

Colom said he would use his experience brokering a civil war peace pact to reduce crime.

Perez, also 56, held a slight lead in polls heading into the vote. He promised to institute the death penalty, hire more police and send soldiers into the streets to fight crime.

A former military intelligence director, he has been accused of overseeing massacres during Guatemala's 1960-96 civil war, which he denies.

In one gang infested Guatemala City neighborhood, soldiers carrying automatic weapons and police with shotguns guarded polls.

Ruben Cruz, 60, a studio photographer, said Guatemala must deal with gangs that extort money from businesses and residents. He said thugs come to his home every four months to collect what they call taxes.

"I voted for Colom because he offers jobs for a lot of people, but also to fight criminals," Cruz said.

But housewife Marta Bustamante, 40, praised Perez.

"I like the fact that he's an army officer and that he's strict," she said. "Here we need that. There are too many gangs."

Political violence made for a harrowing campaign, with more than 50 candidates, party activists and their family members killed. Last month, Perez's secretary and a presidential security guard were gunned down.

Guatemalans eye law-and-order, anti-poverty candidates for presidential runoff

from the International Herald Tribune

GUATEMALA CITY: Guatemalans were likely to send Sunday's presidential election to a November runoff between a conservative former general vowing to crack down on crime and a center-left businessman who promises social spending to alleviate desperate poverty.

About 50 candidates, party activists and their family members were killed in the months leading to the election, underscoring public safety issues plaguing the Central American nation.

"I want things to change because there's too much violence and crime in my neighborhood," said Judith Orellana, a 32-year-old nurse, as she lined up before dawn Sunday for a polling station to open in her gang-invested neighborhood outside Guatemala City.

Pre-election polls showed Otto Perez, the hard-line former general, and Alvaro Colom, a three-time presidential contender, running about even, far ahead of other candidates — but short of the majority necessary for a first-round victory. A runoff between the top two finishers would take place Nov. 4.

Nobel Laureate and Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchu, one of 12 other presidential candidates on Sunday's ballot, all but conceded defeat Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press and accused the political establishment of sowing fear of a president from Guatemala's poor Mayan Indian population.

"The indigenous are the largest group and therefore they're afraid that if I arrive (in the presidency) it would be dangerous," said Menchu, who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights work following Guatemala's brutal civil war that killed 200,000 people, most of them Mayans.

Menchu is the first Mayan woman ever to run for president in this country where 42 percent of the population is descendant from the ancient Mayans. She is polling around 3 percent.

Analysts say security is the most pressing issue at stake in the election.

Guatemala is Central America's most violent country, with more than 5,000 homicides per year. The country of 12 million is also a main corridor for Colombian cocaine heading to the United States, and home to rampant corruption and a culture of violence left over from the 1960-1996 civil war.

"Guatemalans must choose between returning to a past of fear and poverty or a future of hope," Colom said in his last speech before campaigning ended on Friday, alluding to Perez's involvement in the civil war. "My hands are not stained with blood."

Colom worked with civil war refugees in isolated highlands and is an ordained Mayan minister. He proposes increasing social spending to fight poverty and boost employment, and overhauling the judicial system.

Perez has responded to allegations that his human rights record from the war era is stained by demanding his accusers present proof of any wrongdoing. He promises a "firm hand" on crime: hiring more police officers, using the military to fight drug gangs and instituting the death penalty.

Increased security will attract investment, he says — creating badly needed jobs in a country where 51 percent of the population lives on less than US$2 (€1.50) a day.

Some 18,500 policemen and 15,800 soldiers will patrol the streets to prevent violence Sunday, when Guatemalans also will choose 158 national legislators and 332 mayors

Bush to Press Free Trade in a Place Where Young Children Still Cut the Cane

from Truth about Trade via the New York Times

Chimaltenango, Guatemala — Work starts early for the people of the Guatemalan countryside, sometimes as early as 5 or 6. Not the time, the age.

Guatemalan children shine shoes and make bricks. They cut cane and mop floors. At some factories exporting to the United States, they sew and sort and chop, often in conditions so onerous they violate even Guatemala’s very loose labor laws.

“They like us young people because we don’t say anything when they yell at us,” said Alma de los Ángeles Zambrano, 15, who recently quit after 18 months at a food processing plant to work part time for an organization trying to improve conditions for young workers.

President Bush is likely to miss this side of Guatemala’s labor market when he comes to this rural area on Monday to visit a thriving agricultural cooperative that sells products to Wal-Mart’s stores in Central America. The president will meet with Mariano Canú, the leader of a United States-backed co-op that hopes to take advantage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Canú is doing well enough that his children are in school preparing for Guatemala’s new economy.

Opening up trade, Mr. Bush argues, will ultimately raise wages and improve working conditions in Central America. “My message to those trabajadores y campesinos,” Mr. Bush said last week, using the Spanish words for workers and peasants, “is you have a friend in the United States of America. We care about your plight.”

But this country’s young workers, most of them poor indigenous people, say they often feel that nobody cares about them: not their parents, who send them off to the work force; not their stern bosses, who treat them like adults; not the dysfunctional government off in Guatemala City.

“It’s a major concern,” said Manuel Manrique, Unicef’s representative in Guatemala. “Child labor keeps children out of school. The numbers are very high and there’s a social acceptance in this country that child labor is O.K.”

None of the child workers interviewed around here said they had yet felt any benefits of Cafta, as the trade pact is known, which Guatemala signed nearly two years ago and which slipped through the United States Congress by a hair. One provision in Cafta, which is intended to increase trade by eliminating tariff and nontariff barriers, requires companies to adhere to local labor laws and commits the United States to helping improve inspections.

But that is easier said than done. Guatemala’s labor code sets the minimum age for employment at 14. In some cases, though, the government can provide work permits to even younger children. Children under 14, who require parental permission to work, are supposed to work in apprenticeships appropriate for their age. Economic necessity in the family must be shown, which is not a problem in this country where 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and two-thirds of that number, or 7.6 million people, live in extreme poverty.

But with little enforcement of labor laws, those conditions are routinely violated. Guatemalan workplaces can resemble grade schools, with adult supervisors standing over little laborers like the strictest of teachers.

The State Department acknowledged in its latest human rights report for Guatemala released this month that “child labor was a widespread and serious problem” and that “laws governing the employment of minors were not enforced effectively.”

A few hours before leaving for Guatemala on Saturday, Gordon D. Johndroe, the National Security Council spokesman traveling with Mr. Bush, said: “Cafta, in its nine-month existence, is beginning to bring economic benefits to the people of Central America, but it will clearly take some time before all those benefits are fully realized. We’ll continue to work with the Guatemalan government to make sure all obligations to their people are met.”

An independent study of the issue estimated that about a million Guatemalan children under age 18 are working. Another review by the United Nations found 16 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the labor force in 2000, more of them boys than girls.

The child workers are people like María, 16, who lamented her four years in the labor force but at the same time insisted that she not be fully identified so as not to endanger a job that is helping to support her parents and four brothers and sisters.

“My father hits me and tells me I can’t study,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “He stays home and drinks and I have to go to the factory.”

She studies on the sly. On Sundays, her only day off, she goes to special classes for young laborers offered by the Center for Study and Support for Local Development, a small group known by its Spanish initials, Ceadel. Despite having worked at a factory since she was 12 and at home for years before that, María has now completed the equivalent of third grade.

“I can be so tired, so exhausted, but I feel so good when I come home and read,” she said, her tears stopping and her face lighting up. “It can be any book. I just like to see the words.”

Critics of Cafta see Guatemala’s child labor problem as evidence of the flaws in so-called free trade.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, was one of the principle opponents of Cafta while he was in the House of Representatives. “These trade agreements were written for investors in large American corporations,” he said in a telephone interview. “They weren’t written for American workers and they weren’t written to protect Central American children.”

Cafta’s backers, however, say it will take time to lift countries like Guatemala out of poverty and to improve longstanding social problems like child labor. The United States government is paying for efforts to improve the Ministry of Labor, which is now so dysfunctional that some inspectors say that since they work during the day they cannot possibly investigate reports that children are working night shifts.

Mr. Bush, in his speech in Washington before leaving on his Latin American trip, said American government aid had helped lift Guatemala’s percentage of children who complete first grade to 71 percent from 51 percent, a significant increase but one that illustrates the dire state of education in the country.

“Children have more energy and they don’t complain or know anything about unions,” said Carlos Toledo, whose Asociacíon Nuestros Derechos aids child laborers. “For a company, they are perfect.”

To draw attention to the issue of child labor in advance of Mr. Bush’s visit to Chimaltenango, the National Labor Committee, a New York-based group that has investigated gross labor violations worldwide, interviewed child workers in the area.

The group focused on Legumex, a factory that exports broccoli, melons and other fruits and vegetables to the United States, and in a report to be issued on Monday accuses it of violating a host of labor laws, including employing children, some as young as 13, for shifts longer than permitted.

Charles Kernaghan, director of the labor group, traced the food exports to American food service marketers that distributes to schools, hospitals, restaurants and the military. “It is very possible that children in the U.S. may be eating broccoli harvested and processed by other children in Guatemala,” Mr. Kernaghan said in a statement.

But at Legumex, executives interviewed about child labor in general insisted that they were complying with labor laws. They said they did not employ children under 18 without parental permission. They said they paid low wages — which they said were the legal minimum of about a dollar a day but that Mr. Kernaghan said were well below it — because of the low prices paid for their products in the United States.

“We’re a developing country,” said Hermann Peterson, the company’s auditor. “We can’t have the same conditions as factories in the United States.”

Bush hails free trade at stop in Guatemala

from The Baltimore Sun

President points to commerce as way to ease poverty

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala // President Bush heaved crates of lettuce onto a loading dock yesterday, a vivid demonstration of the benefits of a free trade deal he had trouble pushing through Congress.

"Free trade is important to a lot of people," Bush said after helping move cartons of lettuce at Labradores Mayas, a thriving vegetable packing station in Chirijuyu not far from here. "It's a gateway. It creates jobs in America as it created jobs here."

Undeterred by protesters who have dogged Bush at every stop on his five-nation Latin American trip, Bush is working to convince the region's residents that the United States is a compassionate nation. It's the same message he delivered earlier at stops in Brazil, Uruguay and Colombia.

His travels also serve as a counterweight to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who has been on his own parallel tour of Latin America. Chavez has been pumping his nation's oil profits into social programs across the region to further the leftward political shift he's leading in the United States' backyard.

On Sunday in Bolivia, while Bush was in Colombia, Chavez called for a socialist counterattack against the American "empire."

Bush received a brightly colored jacket at the vegetable packing station, started in the early 1990s by an indigenous farmer named Mariano Canu. The association of 66 small farming families produces 95,000 heads of lettuce a week that are sold in Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras. It employs 200 indigenous farmers and is one of the major vegetable suppliers for Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Central American supermarkets.

"I worked as a day laborer. I kept improving over time. The people here work hard. They want to sell you our products," Canu told Bush, who got a close look at tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, radishes and other locally grown products, which are washed, processed and packed for distribution.

The packing station has received $350,000 in U.S. assistance since 2003 and is taking advantage of eased trade restrictions under the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement.

Congress narrowly passed the trade pact last year, and Bush wants lawmakers to approve of three similar ones with Colombia, Panama and Peru. With the Congress now in Democratic hands, the president acknowledges that these are "tough votes," but he argues that free trade and democratic reforms can help lift Latin Americans from poverty.

"You represent people who dream," Bush told dozens of workers. "You represent people who work hard and people who make wonderful products."

Earlier, Guatemala's President Oscar Berger and his wife took the Bushes to Santa Cruz Balanya, a town of about 10,000 mostly indigenous Guatemalans, to stress the need for social justice and equality. In the town, he was warmly greeted with cries of "Hola!" from children who gave first lady Laura Bush lilies.

There, he saw the site of a U.S. military medical readiness and training exercise team, which brings military doctors from both nations to provide medical, dental, surgical and optometrical services for underserved rural areas. In the town square, the Bushes listened to a marimba band and were cheered by about 500 people especially excited to see Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Nearly three-quarters of Guatemala's indigenous people, descendants of native Mayans, live in poverty. Many who have protested Bush's visit don't agree with U.S. immigration policy and believe current trade agreements between the countries have kept Guatemalans from rising out of poverty.

The distribution of income throughout all of Guatemala is lopsided. The richest 20 percent of the population receives two-thirds of all income.

On Sunday, in Tecpan, more than 100 Mayan Indians protested Bush's visit, holding signs that read: "No more blood for oil." The group is angry that Bush was visiting the sacred Iximche archaeological site, founded as the capital of the Kaqchiqueles kingdom before the Spanish conquest in 1524.

Mayan priests say they will purify the site to rid it of any "bad spirits" after Bush is there.

"That a person like [Bush] with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked is going to walk in our sacred lands is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," said Juan Tiney, director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders.

Bush traveled to Iximche along narrow roads that wound through several villages. Hundreds of mostly friendly people thronged his route, waving and holding American flags. One banner, though, read "Bush Genocide" in Spanish.

At the ruins, Bush was given a demonstration of a ball game played by brightly clad young boys, was serenaded by a marimba band and saw Mayan Indian children perform a morality tale. Costumed as animals, the children danced out a fable in which a leopard attacks a deer, who is rescued when the other animals band together.