Our journalists are hard at work all over Guatemala. Please check out their latest videos on Vozz.com.gt. We've got a new design for our landing page, and with presidential and local elections less than a week away, the reports will keep coming.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 09/07/11
Here's a quick visual tour of our three day journalism "boot camp" which included visits to the National Palace and a tour of Guatemala's historic center. Some highlights were a visit to the monument commerating the 1996 peace accords that ended decades of civil war. Many of our journalists are from communities that suffered massacres during the armed conflict.
As part of the historical tour, we had planned to go into congress, but instead found ourselves at a tent city in front of it, where marginally-housed people were protesting for new laws to help them. They gave us an impromptu press conference on the spot.
By the end of three days, the diverse students from all over the country coalesced into a more cohesive group, ready to tackle important local stories. More photos to come as we head into El Quiché next week for follow-up with our Nebaj/Chajul delegation.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 09/03/11
August 29, 2011
GUATEMALA CITY – We took a leap of faith. The Friday when our Vozz training was set to start was also the same day the entire country's teachers mounted a strike blocking major points of entry into Guatemala City – Peten, Puerto Barrios, Quetzaltenango, Escuintla, Panajachel, to be closed as early as 7 AM. Tailbacks would be hours long, people would get off the bus and walk back or jump buses circling around the blockage or just give up and sit in a gesture of complete surrender. It was something that all of us experience in Guatemala, a country of eternal inequalities with no First Amendment, but where protests abound as a form of expressing discontent.
When the calls came in Thursday night right after the nightly news, I expected cancellations. I counted the minutes like teasponfuls of some bitter coffee. I checked my text messages. Students called, one right after the other to inform me they would be traveling overnight or leave at 4 AM to beat the closures.
"You've heard about the protests?" I asked.
"Yes, that's why we're leaving early." A silence of shock from my end of the line.
"Seño Kara, will someone be at Bakabs in Zone 1 to let us in?" They asked. I immediately called Luis Aguilar, also an Ashoka fellow, told him they were coming earlier because of the protests. Silence from Luis, then: "Really?". I confirmed that, yes, they wanted the doors opened earlier.
"Then the doors will be open to them," he told reassured me.
All the moving parts were moving and there were new parts every second. We had to negotiate with the hotel to make sure we paid at the end of the day instead of pre-paying for 40 youth. I knew that while some would turn back, others would hop buses to make it on time. Some would understand that this was our work - to make obstacles into opportunities – and they would report along the way or make use of that time. They would learn to connect disparate things and catalyze them into something, a narrative, a photo, an emotion that pushed them further.
Friday morning we printed agendas, contact sheets, got the contracts and press releases ready, made last minute hotel reservations for the participants, and then got into our pick-up ready for whatever the road had to offer for our journey into Guatemala City.
Fifteen miles from Guatemala City, Roosevelt Avenue, the main road into the heart of the city, was completey sealed off and traffic was being redirected through an outside suburb called San Cristobal. The line of cars snaked around each curve through the city for miles up and down the hills like small black ants. It was a detour through the back of the city and it would take us three hours to get through it and reach our training location in Zone 1 –Guatemala City's historical district of decaying Spanish colonial buidlings and and imminent gentrification.
The four young people from Zacapa arrived before any of us. Not only did they arrive before all of us, they were also robbed within the first hour of reaching the National Palace where I had sent them on their first reporting assignment. One of them had taken his Blackberry out of his pocket and talked with a family member for three blocks before someone snatched the Blackberry from his hand and ran off down the street. It was a wake up call for all of us how quickly things can happen and how nobody is immune.
At 2 PM they came, in pairs, then in fours, arriving with their bags, their tired faces their sneakers and jeans wet from walking the streets and dirt roads they had to walk to get here. Some arrived with parents in tow, others by themselves with their small daypacks and a curiosity and commitment I had not seen in a while.
Their simple arrival was an indication of their level of commitment to the work we call journalism – a job which isn't always comfortable, safe or practical. We had spent weeks preparing for this weekend and so we met them with that same level of compromiso, commitment, of learning and growing together through that learning. This was the product of a seed of an idea we had to create a local network of young reporters in Guatemala. It would grow and serve like the roots of a tree that only grew in strength and power.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 09/02/11
We're in the middle of our second day, and we've just toured the national palace. Most of the tour was architectural, but we also got a chance to visit the courtyard where the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, ending 36 years of bloody armed conflict. There is a bronze monument where the accords were signed, holding a white rose.
Several new participants have joined us today and the youth reporters are full of questions and story ideas.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 08/27/11
After weeks of complex logistics, the first day of Vozz magically came together. Young people arrived from the far corners of the country. Speakers coached them on the value and the craft of journalism, and helped them brainstorm their first stories. Groups from the same community talked about their local beats and the issues at stake in the upcoming elections. It was a thrill to observe. Today is the most intensive - a 14-hour marathon bootcamp. More to come.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 08/27/11
We're making a lot happen in a short period of time, but we have to, there's an urgency to this election in Guatemala where most people, including myself, are up against the wall of choosing between the menos peor, the least worse.
Guatemala may be both repeating and making history during this year’s September 11 election, the fourth election since the Peace Accords in 1996 and the most expensive. In a race that pits former First Lady Sandra Torres, who divorced her husband and current president Álvaro Colom in order to be eligible to run, against Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general denounced by human rights experts for his alleged ties to genocide in the 1980s. The plot thickens and the answers are more difficult to find.
Last week more than twenty thousand supporters ralled in Guatemala City to back Sandra Torres’ right to run for office and for the constitutional ban on immediate family members running for public office to be lifted. This week she's suing the Guatemalan government while Pérez Molina leads in the polls. Seasoned voters shake their heads that in the same week Pérez Molina gains the advantage four soldiers are sentenced to 6,060 years of prison each for their role in the more than 200 people who were killed in the northern village of Dos Erres in 1982 at the height of Guatemala’s civil war.
It's a country of contradictions and of young people -- 70 percent of the population is thirty years old and younger, flexing new online muscle. They've created their own groups online to educate and support one another during this at times disillusioning electoral process. Some of the groups we've found and are conducting outreach to are:
“Pilas con tu voto”
“Ni tiranos que escupan tu faz”
Cambio X Guate
Elecciones 502
Política para Jóvenes
VotoXGuate
ProLideres
Esto Es Guate
Politica Stereo
Others work directly with The Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, Asociación Renacimiento, ARGOS Association, organizations that are trusted within the indigenous rural communiites in Guatemala. The trek for many of them will be long, it will involve various buses and a trip that many of them have never made to Guatemala City. But the fact that they want to come is hope itself.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 08/07/11
