Indigenous Town Navigates Shortage of Food as Guatemalan Protests Continue
On a typical day, Adolfo Hernandez would be managing the operations of his hotel, Royal Country. It’s the only lodging available to visitors in the Indigenous town of San Juan Atitán. The municipality is an hour north of the city of Huehuetenango by car.
Today, Hernandez’s hotel is unable to continue providing economic development for his community. Protesters have set up blockades along the Pan American Highway, barring the transportation of fuel and staple goods, leaving the residents of San Juan Atitán without heat and in a shortage of food. Hernandez heads out of town to join protesters on the road.
Protests started nearly two weeks ago after Guatemala’s highest court upheld the decision to ban the political party of Bernardo Arévalo, the 2024 progressive presidential candidate who won the popular vote. Residents in San Juan Atitán say they are seeing essential items grow scarce as demonstrators disrupt transportation of consumer goods, and vendors are responding with 300% price increases.
“Families here are struggling because they don’t have any corn,” says Hernandez. It’s routine for staff in the Royal Country Hotel restaurant to prep corn tortillas in the mornings. In Maya agriculture, corn serves many uses and is consumed in various ways.
A man in his fifties, Hernandez marches with a group of men wearing a tunic over an amaranth top and white pants, traditional clothing to the Indigenous Maya Mam group. Hernandez says the shortage of food has put stress on his family and the town of San Juan Atitán, and that residents have come to his hotel asking for support as they find themselves with less and less resources.
A decrease in goods has sharply increased demand and prices. According to Hernandez, a batch of 30 eggs is typically $3.90, but they are now $10, a 160% increase in just two weeks. Similarly, he says a pound of tomatoes is generally 50 cents, but is now $2.60, and a gallon of gasoline is generally $4.20, but is now $12.80.
“We will benefit from these protests in the long-term, but we must support our people now,” says Hernandez.
Demonstrators have called for the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 for her involvement in “significant” corruption. Porras began persecuting Arévalo and his political party, ordering raids into both his office and the country’s electoral authorities. Porras alleges that Arévalo’s party was registered through fraudulent means eight years ago, but the charges were only filed after his surprise second-place finish in the first round of voting this summer. The president-elect’s party was then banned by the country’s highest court for alleged voter and registration fraud.
As night falls, protests continue. Lucrecia Carrillo, a Mam resident of San Juan Atitán, has settled back at home. She wears a winter hat and coat inside to shelter from the cooler temperatures of the highlands.
“There’s no fuel so we have no heat,” Carrillo says. Carrillo, 24, a women’s rights and Mam language activist, says she supports the protests and believes the circumstances will be worse than she sees them now if they don’t allow for a peaceful presidential transition.
Carrillo says the protests have resulted in school closures, and her sister who teaches has been left without work for an indefinite period, causing additional financial instability. For her, every day that they protest is another day without work or income.
“President Giammattei is determined to keep himself and his political party in power, and put blame on the people,” Carrillo says.
Demonstrators have set blockades in an effort to disrupt operations for the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF), ultimately, to pressure business elites into withdrawing support from the Guatemalan President Giammattei. CACIF is a powerful organization that plays an important role in Guatemalan politics.
San Juan Atitán, where both Carrillo and Hernandez live, is located in the Huehuetenango Department and sits near the Guatemala-Mexico border. Previously referred to as the gateway for migrants, Huehuetenango is one of the most impoverished regions in the country. The plight of residents is compounded as limited entry points remain closed off by the protest.
“There’s only two roads into Huehuetenango so we cannot go anywhere right now,” says Diego Domingo. A Mam resident of the city of Huehuetenango, he says he walks to and from work, which takes 30 minutes each way. His company, Cristobal Colon, offers passenger land transportation according to their website, however, Domingo says he has been stationary at the office downtown.
“I ran out of fuel eight days ago to my taxi, and vendors sell it for really high prices now,” Domingo says. He says there’s no bus service either, but the company still pays employees to show up to the office. A man in his twenties, Domingo sits at his office desk unable to do much else, but still commutes over two hours by foot daily. He says the shops in the city are closed as if it were the pandemic all over again. According to him, tourists that fly into Guatemala City can’t leave the city, affecting overall tourism.
Guatemalan President Giammattei called the blockades illegal on the Guatemalan Government’s Twitter account, affirming that they block access to hospitals and schools. In his message to the country, he also said he cannot remove Porras from her position.
Meanwhile, Hernandez says their circumstance is a moral crisis more than anything else.
“The money that comes from other countries to Guatemala never makes it here to our communities because government officials take away the aid that was meant for us,” says Hernandez. He will be helping to provide coffee and water at the ongoing demonstrations.
Guatemala plays a key role in US-bound migration. In 2019, there were 724,000 undocumented Guatemalans in the U.S., primarily driven during the 1980s by the Guatemala Civil War. During the conflict, 250,000 people were killed or went missing. Eighty-three percent of those murdered were Maya.
