Lords Of Atitlan

Twice now in five years tropical storms have devastated the Lake Atitlán region. Hurricane Stan in October 2005 ended the rainy season with massive destruction of property, loss of lives, homes, and crops, and the tragic interment by mud of 800 or so residents of Cantón Panabaj, Santiago Atitlán. Last month tropical storm Agatha opened the rainy season with fury, catching us all by surprise, two days of heavy rainfall capped by 36 hours of torrential downpour. Then suddenly on the afternoon of May 29, almost simultaneously throughout the region, the earth reached its saturation point and things fell apart.

Cerro Lec, a huge land mass above Panajachel, has been falling steadily toward the Rio la Vega for over a year. Late afternoon the 29 much of the Cerro gave way in a gush, clogging La Vega with mud. When the mud broke free again, La Vega raged to the Rio San Francisco, which swelled over its banks and roared into town down main-street. Mud, tumbling boulders, and angry waters swept away homes, inundated others, and removed a section of the bridge to Santa Catarina Palopó. Jaibalito’s tiny river went mad, wiping out 15 homes and damaging others. The school of Jaibalito, still threatened by the river and rock-slides, is now closed, probably forever. In a village where most study only three years and few beyond the sixth grade, no one now studies at all. San Antonio Palopó, the hardest hit, lost 60 or more homes and 20 lives; Santa Catarina, 64 homes and two lives; Cantón Xepacoral (San Pedro la Laguna), 50 homes and a ten year old girl; and in San Juan de Argueta and Chipiacul, Patzún, a life each. Tzununá, San Marcos la Laguna, Tzamchaj (Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán), and Xajaxác, Xibalbay, Chaquijyá, and especially Pixabaj within the municipality of Sololá suffered mud-slides and heavy property losses.

Pixabaj in normal times possesses a natural beauty unsurpassed around Lake Atitlán. The setting is idyllic, almost fairyland. But, in Pixabaj, May 29, 150 or more homes fell or were snatched up by the Rio Candelaria. Pixabaj´s center was trashed. Upriver in sector Chuichicaste the damage was worse. Still further upriver in sector Maria Tecún the whole world appears to have caved away. Evidence of mud- and rock-slides now scars every mountainside. Miraculously no one died. Had the calamity happened at night when everyone would have been asleep, a disaster the scale of Panabaj, October 5, 2005, might have occurred. But the Torment peaked just before nightfall. Maria Tecún residents had opportunity to scramble to houses atop the mountain, where cypress, fruit trees, and the contours of the terrain protected them from what was about to transpire. There they watched in surreal, agonized horror as one mud-slide after the other crashed their hillside homes and those of their neighbors to the valley floor. There the Candelaria gobbled up the remains, while undercutting the remaining riverside homes.

The lead image for this blog shows Finca Pampojilá as it appeared in January of this year, actually as it looked right up until the Torment. I include this photo because it demonstrates the beauty of the finca as it was, and because my images of Pampojilá´s coffee harvest can never be recaptured. Agatha scarred the face of Pampojilá forever. Hurricane Stan wreaked destruction there too. Stan destroyed many finca homes, proved the others unsafe for human habitation, and prompted the relocation of finca residents to a new suburb, Colonia San Andrés, so named because the ancestors of finca residents came to Pampojilá in their youth from San Andrés Semetabaj to pick coffee, and stayed. Colonia San Andrés sits at the foot of Volcán Tolimán within the pathway of the flow of water, sand, and mud that inundated San Lucas in 1956. In a year in which mud- and rock-slides streak down all of Volcán Tolimán´s surface, San Andrés (historically, Zanikya) remains vulnerable.

My acquaintance with Finca Pampojilá began with visits to Colonias Pampojilá and San Andrés. I first attended Pampojilá´s harvest in January 2007 and have since spent most December and January days within the cafetal. Other than my family farm, Pampojilá is the only agricultural property of which I know virtually every inch. I love the finca, its people, and the feeling of fellowship in the harvest. I know the homes of the workers. So, when a friend called me from San Lucas the afternoon of the 29th to tell me of Pampojilá´s devastation, I resolved to see for myself.

Sunday morning I walked from Panajachel to Santa Catarina in waist-deep mud, washed off in the lake, and caught a launch to San Antonio. From there I took a private launch to San Lucas, bought pants and changed in the market, took a moto-taxi to the edge of town, and began walking to the finca. On the afternoon of the 29 just below Santa Alicia, an enormous gorge had opened up beneath the highway, swallowing it up along with a vehicle carrying Agatha´s first two casualties. Boulders, mud, and a flood of water raced toward the finca destroying everything in their path. As I walked along the roadway the following day along with dozens of others, many of them in tears, I could not believe my eyes. Rocks, logs, and mud dominated the landscape. A deep ravine had ripped through that part of the finca called El Campo and then deposited its fill in a wide band in the center of the finca, destroying almost every home. Mud-flows buried two finca residents. I had known them. I watched in horror as men searched for and extricated the bodies. I continued on to Colonia Pampojilá to find my friends there safe.

Back in San Lucas I visited the colonias affected by the storm. Even with ordinary rains the soccer field and its adjacent colonias flood. This past January water and mud entered homes in La Unión, Nuevo Amanecer I and II, La Esperanza, Espencer, sector El Campo, San Gregorio, and Pachavac during a freak storm in the middle of the dry season. May 29 the cerro above the Amanecers, Pachavac, and La Esperanza and below Cerro Iquitiu let loose in a series of mud- and rock-slides, burying or crushing many houses, and covering a family of six. Again I knew the victims. Rocks hurled into homes, destroying an entire section of Colonia San Gregorio. Many houses within the affected colonias can probably be cleaned out and repaired, but should never again be inhabited.

San Lucas hurriedly established shelters in its churches, school houses, and salons to house temporarily those 1,500 or so displaced by the storm. I visited the shelters for two days delivering first bread, then apples. I knew everyone. Most pick coffee in Pampojilá. The women wash clothing in San Lucas´ bays El Relleno and Las Conchitas. I write this the 28 of June, almost a full month after the Torment. I’ve just spent another three days in San Lucas, visiting the finca and shelters once again. This trip I began at the lower limits of the Department of Sololá in the last town of San Lucas before entering Suchitepéquez, Comunidad San Juan Mirador, part of Quixayá. I took a lady a piglet I’d bought along the way in the Friday market of Godinez, something she’d been wanting for a long time. San Juan Mirador illustrates the dislocations of Mayan communities by natural disasters. San Juan´s people originally came from San Jorge la Laguna on the north side of Lake Atitlán, between Sololá and Panajachel. They moved a few generations ago to near Pochuta to cut sugar cane. There they founded the first San Juan Mirador. In 1991, an earthquake destroyed their town, and they moved to their present location.

Across the road from San Juan near San Geronimo Miramar (Suchitepéquez) is a historical location, Paquip, whose name no longer exists. The story of the people who came from Paquip is interesting in that it connects to the history of two north shore communities of Lake Atitlán. Paquip's tale is one of natural disasters and dislocations. In 1547 the people of Paquip, for reasons unclear, left their homeland to settle near Cerro de Oro, Santiago Atitlán. The owner of the property on which they settled evicted them in 1580. They then came to the north side of Lake Atitlán, contracted to plant corn for the alcalde (mayor) of Patzununá, and settled in the Payan Chicol Valley (another name lost to time), modern day Jaibalito. There they joined with peoples from Sololá, and on April 26th,1584, a day after the feast day of San Marcos, they founded the town of San Marcos Paquip. Sometime later the town came to be known as San Marcos la Laguna. Mud-slides and inundations destroyed this original San Marcos on three occasions, in 1688, 1702, and 1721. Finally, in 1724, the alcalde of Sololá gave the disaster victims land formerly belonging to San Pablo la Laguna in the location of present-day San Marcos la Laguna. Having not learned their lesson, they once more settled in the flood plain, where they were flooded out again. They finally moved up the hillsides to the present-day Barrios I and II.

I arrived at San Juan by bus. Travelling back to San Lucas in the back of a pick up truck I was better able to assess the damage below Pampojilá. Near La Nueva Providencia and Colonia Xejuyú, deep ravines had nearly taken out the highway, where before ambled tiny streams. As I passed Totolyá, I mused again thoughts of human dislocations caused by natural disasters. Totolyá presently sits along the highway on land formerly belonging to the Finca Santo Tomas Perdido. It used to be part of the Finca Providencia and sat at the foot of Volcán Atitlán. On September 12, 2003 a mud slide buried 47 people, 12 from one family I know well.

My recent trip to San Lucas began with hope and a sense of renewal. The road to the Coast was open. Heavy machinery was hard at work restoring Pampojilá. Men and women planted pine and cypress in the massive land-slides of Pachavac and Nuevo Amanece I, which had only weeks before buried dozens of homes, and that of La Esperanza which had entombed a family of six. The mood in the shelters was positive. Try to magine living in a school gymnasium on tiny mats scattered along the walls and sharing three or four bathrooms with fifty or sixty other families for a month. Then try to imagine smiling and laughing the way the people of San Lucas do. 700 or more Luqueños remain in shelters, but they have reason for cheer. Already, the Parrochia of San Lucas Tolimán under the direction of Father Gregorio has purchased land and begun construction of 200 houses near the schoolhouse of Canton Pacoc.

My trip began with hope but ended with a sense of fatalistic gloom and despair. During the night of Saturday the 27 rains pounded San Lucas Tolimán without mercy. With daybreak they did not cease. They continued their relentless assault throughout the day. The Sunday market, normally so lively and gay, was somber. Everyone looked to the sky for reprieve, but none was in sight. I returned to Jaibalito by a very circuitous route with an acute sadness I could not shake. The rains stopped last night, but I don´t know what happened in San Lucas, San Antonio, Pixabaj, or the many other villages for which I fear the worst. I do know high winds tore aluminum sheeting off the roofs of houses in Colonia San Andrés during the night. I write this the evening of June 28. It is pouring rain. I´m seated at the Posada of Jaibalito, where several families living near the river have sought refuge and sit huddled together, cold, wet, and scared. I have no idea what´s happening to my friends around the lake, and I feel powerless.

Guatemala is a magnificently beautiful country. Guatemala is also a precarious place in which to live, a land of earthquake, eruption, inundations, and mud-slides. Deforestation and the extension of slash-and-burn agriculture up the mountainsides were indeed problems contributing to natural catastrophes even before the Conquest. But the true lords of the region, the ancient Maya, were far superior guardians of the environment than modern man. They revered animals, plants, and trees. They called their land Guatemala, ¨land of many trees¨, and named their villages in honor of trees or other aspects of nature. The Maya saw trees as a resource, one to be preserved for future generations.

Agatha was in part a natural disaster, largely outside of man´s control. But, in part, the disaster was man-made. Deforestation is one culprit. The fires that raged for weeks on Volcán Tolimán in January and February 2009 created conditions for the mud-slides that ravaged Finca Pampojilá on May 29. Intensive horticulture along and above the Rio Candelaria can be blamed for the devastation in Pixabaj. The onion fields above Santa Catarina and San Antonio contributed to the disasters in those towns. The construction of new roads to Sololá from Tzununá and Santa Cruz make future landslides for those villages a certainty.

Shamefully, for San Antonio Palopó the culprit is also greed. Hurricane Stan in 2005 destroyed only one house in San Antonio. In May of 2009 during a fairly normal rainstorm, four houses fell. Above San Antonio between Chipop and Patzaj is perhaps the best long view of the lake. For that view, life has been sacrificed. A new hotel and ¨development¨ on that spot, San Antonio del Lago has reconfigured the topography and drainage of the landscape, and has created rivers and cataracts where they previously did not exist. Unless construction stops and the developers reverse the damage, San Antonio appears a doomed city.

The situation around Lake Atitlán and throughout much of Guatemala is at crisis levels. Help is desperately needed, but where to send the help is a problem. Municipal and departmental officials in Guatemala tend to divide emergency aid among themselves like spoils. Foundations and institutions help those in need, but also help themselves mightily. I´m sure there are legitimate foundations around. I just don´t know of any. Nor do I know enough to criticize specific foundations, other than one I´m sure is dishonest. I will say that Father Gregorio Shafer of the San Lucas Mission is a man of character, nobility, and scrupulous honesty. Even opposing religious within San Lucas say so. They also say, however, that there are local employees within his organization who are not so honest, ones who are out for personal gain. Nevertheless, the many accomplishments of the Mission on behalf of the poor and displaced over the years can not be denied. Nor can it be ignored that the San Lucas Mission has gone right to work in the current crisis to work to relocate Agatha victims.

A warning: a German foundation named Ready-to-Help, which is ostensibly working in Jaibalito, is not. The foundation has conducted fund raisers in Germany to help the people of Jaibalito. Its web-page announces proudly that ¨the good news is your donations have arrived in Jaibalito;¨ they have not. The organization´s web-page claims to be working to restore a particular household which was damaged during the torment. That work is actually being done by Hans Schaefer, the owner of the Posada of Jaibalito, the most trusted and respected man in the village, with generous contributions from friends. Hans is a meticulous book-keeper and will account for every Quetzal given him on behalf of the people. In the end, he will reach deeply into his own pockets to make up the difference to pay for work needed to restore the town. The problem is he´s also an extremely humble man and will step aside for others to take the credit for his many sacrifices and accomplishments on behalf of the people. In short, help is needed, and the two men I trust most to give that help both share variations of the same surname, Father Gregorio Shafer of The San Lucas Mission and Hans Schaefer of the Posada of Jaibalito. If you really want your dollars to help the Maya devastated by Tropical Storm Agatha, contact the San Lucas Mission or Hans.