The people own all the land

Not to sound communistic, but, in many countries, all the land is owned by the people who live in that country. This is true in the U.S.

To use the U.S. as an example, land is obtained in several ways, and then it is "put in trust" for the people by the government. The government then decides who can use the land. The main thing to remember is that the government can take the land back at any time if it wants to use it for some public purpose. In recent years, the courts in the U.S. have been illegally legislating on this issue (illegal because they don't have the right to legislate, but they do anyway) by taking land from private citizens and giving it to private land developers.

Some of the ways the U.S. came to own the land (theoretically in the name of all the people) include

1. Taking it from previous owners by war (war-ending treaties or driving them off the land)
2. Getting it deeded to them by English, French and Spanish kings who owned by control
3. Buying it from previous owners
4. Having the previous owners deed over the land due to various other treaties

The government then begins to parcel out the land as it sees fit: for development, homesteading, putting it in trust for certain purposes (reserves, parks, etc.) or simply affirming private ownership which had already existed. None of this giving or reserving has to be permanent. This ultimate control of the land by the government is known as "eminent domain." The ultimate top government is called the "sovereign lord" from English times.

The U.S. Constitution allows the use of eminent domain ONLY for the purpose of a public good or benefit. It is obvious to all who can read, that the constitution was talking about using land for roads and bridges and dams and the like. In other words, they are not supposed to be able to take your land just to give to a builder to build condos there because more housing may be needed in your town. But they can do that now. You can thank former Justice John Paul Stevens for that ruling. I remember there was a petition drive to confiscate his personal country farm when he retired just to let him share in the blessings of his ruling, but nothing ever came of it.

Large public works projects almost always require the exercise of eminent domain. Many landowners or people living on the land which is needed for the project are displaced (and compensated, in the U.S. version, though such compensation doesn't have to be for any amount the landowner wants.)

What does a person do when he doesn't want to move and let the government take over his land? He finds out in a hurry that the government ultimately owns all the land; he will be forcefully removed from "his" land. If he persists in blocking or hindering the project, he will be imprisoned.

Benefits and sacrifice: The needs of the many

Since the turn of the last century, since the advances in electricity and what it can do, the U.S. and other  countries have concentrated on getting the benefits of electricity to more and more people. Soon came the great electrification projects of the Great Depression and later. Huge numbers of people benefited. Quality of life improved for much of rural America. Farmers' way of life changed drastically. Factories were vitalized. A whole new age changed our lives forever.

Soon came efforts to "harness" the great rivers in the U.S. to produce electricity. There were a few great falls. Niagara comes to mind as one of the first that was harnessed to provide electric power. There are not many great falls of that magnitude, though, so the imagination turned to building dams to use the power of water. It was very costly. Hugely costly. But many were put to work at a time when work was hard to find. The great public works projects of the Great Depression helped pull America out of a terrible time in our history.

In the case of every dam we built, the river backed up and created the lake needed for falling water. People lived in these areas that had to be flooded. They had to be relocated. Sometimes smaller groups of people must sacrifice for the good that will affect so many more people for the better. So they say, and I suppose it is true. In some cases, many of the people that had to be relocated were Native Americans. That is a whole other post.
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The Tennessee Valley Authority comes to mind as one of the earliest and largest of these huge projects. Remember how the heros of the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?" were saved at the end of that movie? One of the first dams built in this system was Norris Dam, begun in late 1933. This project relocated 2900 families and necessitated the removal of over 5,000 gravesites. That sounds pretty gruesome.

Another huge public works project begun in the Great Depression, also in 1933, was on the Columbia River in Washington State, a dam across the Grand Coulee gorge. It was another monstrous undertaking of engineering. Huge benefits in electricity and crop irrigations were realized. But again, the created lake flooded much land and people had to be relocated. Some of the Native American descendants of those people are still in court even today, trying to get more money because they were relocated and don't think they were compensated fairly.

Hoover Dam was begun in 1931. It is a marvel of engineering. It is the largest dam in the U.S. It provides power for people in Nevada, Arizona, and California. Lake Mead was created by Hoover Dam, and, of course, people had to be relocated that used to live along the Colorado River. As usual, many were indigenous people living on ancestral lands.
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Great dams exist in Canada as well, and great benefits are being derived from these structures. Again, vast numbers of people benefit and a (relatively) few people must be displaced.

There was also a need for electrification of Central and South America. These projects are extremely expensive and beyond the means of most of these small and unstable countries. That is one of the reasons the world bankers, the U.N., and the International Monetary Fund exist. Some of the dams built with "loans" from the word banks, and via the U.N., were not spectacularly huge, but each time, as is always the case, people who lived in the new flood plain had to be displaced.

In the next post, I want to talk about one of these dams, financed by world banks, located in Guatemala.

Guatemala

The history of humans in the Americas goes back perhaps 18,000 years. It's hard to pinpoint such things, so scientists give estimates. White people tend to think history in the Americas began with the first voyage of Columbus, but many civilizations rose and fell long before his excursion. Even mass murder didn't start with Columbus. That is to say, the "Indians" learned to fight and kill each other thousands of years earlier. Then there was religion. Christopher brought his religion to the Americas, of course, but the ancient American civilizations were practicing mass human sacrifices long before Columbus began killing in the name of Catholicism. The history of religion is the history of bloodshed and control of one's fellow man. This is not to deny the good of religion. The history of man killing other men needs no excuse, though. It has gone on since the beginning of time.

The people who lived in the Americas before Columbus did their share of killing and treating their fellows unfairly. The Spanish came and killed and brought disease and took new diseases back home to Europe and treated the residents of the Americas terribly. This went on for a few hundred years before the British and the French came and killed and brought disease and treated the Americans terribly and unfairly. And, along the way, the people in America tried to kill as many of the invaders as possible.

I don't know if anyone would say things are much different today. Some people on both sides try, but mostly things don't get better for many of the descendants of those early Americans. As I see it, we have no real way to turn back the clock and make amends or do things differently. We do have the opportunity to change ourselves starting now, and some people of goodwill already have started doing their small part. Maybe someday we will all live in peace. I am not optimistic.
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I like to read history books and look at the collections in museums. As I said before, I can't go back in time and make any changes, but I feel it helps me make better choices for the future if I study history and try to understand how we got to where we are today and why we are liked by some people and disliked by other people. As I read and study, I am horrified sometimes, but I never have the urge to try and apologize for what my racial ancestors did wrong. I think the very thought of apologizing for a whole race of people long ago is ridiculous. If I personally do something bad, I will apologize and try to make it right.

So I study history to learn how we got to where we are today, and try to use history to guide future choices, choosing as much as possible from knowledge instead of prejudice.
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This post was intended to give an overview of Guatemala, because the history of Guatemala is typical of the history of much of Central and South America. In many ways it is typical of of the European takeover of North America as well.

With very few exceptions, the people who live south of the U.S. speak Spanish as their main language. Of course, individual "Indian" languages are preserved as well. In both North and South America, the system of conquest by the Europeans was pretty much the same: they came and took what they wanted, killed as many people as it took to subdue them so they could enslave them and take their land and goods and try to turn them into good Christians along the way. After that it was a simple matter of exploiting them as if they had no rights as humans at all. That is still the situation today, in the main. We are still in the exploitation stage and treating them as rather subhuman. From time to time, we ponder why they don't seem to like us.

In what is now known as Guatemala, the Spanish came and killed and took everything and enslaved the people and turned them into serfs. That is to say they took over from the former rulers who had enslaved the common people and treated them like serfs. After the Spanish were driven out, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, more or less, the white people from the north began to come down and be their new friends. Banana and rubber plantations. Mines. Puppet governments who served the interest of the U.S. and others. And new novel religions.

In short, the history of Guatemala, and so many other countries, has, from the standpoint of the real owners of the land, been a history of oppression by outsiders, hatred of outsiders, exploitation by outsiders, a hope of someday throwing off that oppression. As we have mentioned before, this is the fertile ground for Communism - another form of oppression of the common people, but with the cruel false promise of liberation. Of course, the native leaders who promoted communism were not meaning to be cruel. They truly believed communism was the pathway for getting their land back from the oppressors. The leaders of numerous revolutions were taught the communist way by outsiders and then took it upon themselves to put theory into reality. They got some land back from the foreigners, but the new leaders didn't make their lives any better.

Is that where we are today in Latin America? Are things getting better? Certainly the governments seem to last longer than they used to. There seem to be more and more democratic elections, or at least manipulated democratic elections. Outsiders still covet their natural resources, but seem to have begun more and more to paying for them. Some countries are still communist or communist-leaning, but a lot of the people have stopped trusting that that is any better than anything else. There still seem to be a lot of large multinational companies making insider deals with the various elected governments.

The "recent" history of Guatemala is a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996, and events leading up through the present day. The civil war involved the national governments/army juntas and their various supporting factions; and the left wing "insurgents." The left wingers unfortunately tried to sabotage the economy as well as fight. And the government soldiers were brutal against the population as well. The people were squeezed in the middle as usual. The military massacred citizens.

In 1982, Rios Montt was elected under the Christian Democracy Party. He was a lay pastor in the Protestant evangelical "Church of the Word." In his inaugural address, he stated that his election resulted from the will of God. He had the support of U.S. President Reagan. He formed a three member  military junta, annulled the constitution, disolved congress, suspended political parties, cancelled electoral laws. Then he dismissed the junta and declared himself "President of the Republic." [Wikipedia]

And indeed he was.

Rios Montt, July 1982, to an audience of indigenous Guatemalans: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you." The Plan de Sanchez massacre occurred the same day.

The government began to form PACS (local defense patrols.) Young men who wouldn't join PACS were labeled guerillas. It was boys and old men too. At their peak, the PACS had a million "patroller" conscripts.

Rios Montt's brief presidency was the most violent period of the civil war. Thousands of indigenous peoples, noncombatants, and others, were captured, tortured, killed. Montt was deposed a year later, but survived to become President of Congress in 1995 and 2000.

In 1999, President Clinton apologized for U.S. support of the wrong people.

Much of the business of Guatemala today is concerned (some would say "bogged down") with investigations and litigations concerning events that happened in the civil war. Perhaps when everyone is hurt badly enough and enough money and retribution is exacted, the country can concentrate on making life better in Guatemala. I hope so.

President, 2000-2004