LAND, WATER, JUSTICE

ADO bus stations provide wifi connections in their lobbies, so on my recent trip to Guatemala I browsed the Internet while waiting for the bus south. I paid attention when a recent article in the UK's The Guardian newspaper turned up entitled "How Guatemala is sliding into chaos in the fight for land and water."

So far this year 18 Guatemalan activists have been killed, targeted for opposing evictions, logging and mining. The Guardian reports that a high-level, UN-backed mission to Guatemala suggests that the killings probably have been orchestrated by powerful political and financial interests with links to the drug trade and military. Last year saw 197 killings of environmental activists worldwide, the most dangerous countries being Brazil and the Philippines, with Guatemala now also one of the most dangerous.

The Guatemalan people have had it hard for a long time. In 1954 the US's CIA deposed democratically elected leftwing president Jacobo Árbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Rebellion followed and in 1960 a 36-year-long civil war began, eventually resulting in about 200,000 largely indigenous people killed by the military, supported by the US, and hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. Today 2.5% of Guatemala's landholdings occupy more than 65% of the land. Economic measures forced on Guatemala by the US and global bodies have further opened the country to foreign-backed mining, hydro dams that flood large areas, and various extractive industries, making the violence and inequality worse. Huge palm oil and sugarcane developments occupy much of the land.

So, when passing through Guatemala's northern department of the Petén and seeing how the landscape had been been completely deforested since my last visit there in 1975 or thereabouts, and that the land now was populated by a lot of very poor indigenous people, I saw things through the filter of the above information. I thought a lot about the situation, and am still stunned by what I saw.

In recent years my reading has focused more and more on human history. It's a lot like ecology, in that once it's understood that certain patterns appear again and again, in different times and contexts, when those patterns begin forming again, a good guess can be made as to how things probably will turn out.

The pattern of masses of people being abused by a few rich, powerful people is one of the most commonly occurring throughout human history. An interesting features of this pattern is that often members of the oppressed and abused rally behind the very ones taking advantage of them. Look how even still certain Europeans admire, even revere, their royal families. Look at Putin's high ratings in Russia. Look who most supports Trump and his rich cohorts in the US.

My reading of history is that sometimes the very rich and powerful get away with their plundering, sometimes they don't. In general, the less informed the abused masses are, the more likely their overlords will keep growing even richer, more powerful, and more abusive.

I'd like to say that my understanding of history and ecology is that eventually things evolve into a "more humane" state and that justice is done, but I just don't see that. My best reading of both history and ecology is that the powerful usually win. However, information -- and the art of distorting information -- are important forms of power.

Something else that history and ecology teach is that no one really has any "right" to anything -- including the right to live with dignity, to live in peace, to be treated with justice, and to have access to drinkable water, breathable air, and such.

My reading of both history and ecology is that, generally, individuals and communities gain dignity, peace and justice, and retain access to needed natural resources, only when -- at some point in their history -- they fight for those things, and win.