By David Toro Escobar |
Guatemala City (EFE)
“The river brings waste and even corpses from the Guatemala City garbage dump,” Migdalia Hernández, a Mayan teacher who lives in San Antonio Las Flores, a community that has become a drain for the country’s capital, told EFE.
Hernández and 1,200 families in this village live surrounded by three polluted rivers and only have water once a week, which is barely enough to cover their needs.
Magdalena González lives in a similar crisis, in San Pedro la Laguna, on the shores of Lake Atitlán, in western Guatemala, where water only arrives three times a week.
History repeats itself, even in the heart of Guatemala City in residential areas, where the service is not regular.
Guatemala is a country full of water resources but where 6 out of 10 homes do not have drinking water and 5 out of 10 are not connected to the drainage network, according to United Nations data from 2021.
They look for alternatives to water problems
“There is no authority that responds to the crisis,” says Hernández with annoyance.
The residents of San Antonio Las Flores, a village in the municipality of Chinautla on the outskirts of the Guatemalan capital, have had to devise their own distribution system to obtain water.
In 2022, the residents, most of them bricklayers, taxi drivers, security guards and seamstresses, raised funds to connect their houses to a spring in the mountains that surround them, far from the contamination of the Las Vacas River.
The thick, brown flow of Las Vacas carries some 9,000 tons of solid waste per year from Guatemala City and invades the homes of those who live on the banks of this blackwater river with a fetid odor.
“The municipality does not fix anything, we have to come up with solutions to have water,” says Enrique Monroy, a 52-year-old resident of San Antonio Las Flores.
Monroy, faced with the scarcity of water, built his own 25-meter-deep well in the patio of his house and has supplied his family with supplies for 4 years.
lakes in danger
“The lake is sick and it is going to die,” says Magdalena González as she fills two sacks with bottles, syringes and all kinds of plastic found on the shores of Atitlán.
Atitlán is a lake surrounded by three volcanoes and the second largest in Guatemala with 130.1 kilometers of extension in the department (province) of Sololá, in the west of the country.
González is part of a group of 300 Tz’utujil Mayan women who, since 2009, have been volunteering to remove solid waste from the beach of San Pedro La Laguna, located in the lake basin.
El Atitlán, deified by thousands of foreign tourists, suffers a serious ecological deterioration as a result of sewage, solid waste, agricultural runoff, among other problems that worry the communities that inhabit it.
“For us, Lake Atitlán is like our mother, we have a very strong connection,” Nancy González, who coordinates the women who have organized in defense of water, told EFE.
In the town’s bars, hotels and restaurants, packed with visitors, water is not a problem, as the service is constant for now.
In contrast, in the houses of the original inhabitants, the liquid barely arrives three times a week and in minimal quantities, according to complaints from indigenous women who claim to be the most affected by the growing crisis.
The crisis hits the capital
Guatemala City is not escaping from the growing crisis and for years, residents of popular neighborhoods in the center and north of the city have begun to denounce the shortage.
“We cannot cook, bathe or wash our hands,” Aarón Aguilar, a resident of the Ciudad Nueva neighborhood, tells EFE, where at least 400 houses have suffered from irregular drinking water service since 2019.
Aguilar assures that the Municipality of Guatemala has justified rationing water twice a week, saying that “it is running out nationwide.”
However, according to the World Health Organization (PAHO), Guatemala produces 97 billion cubic meters of water, an amount that is above the world average.
“In recent years they have built three gigantic buildings in the neighborhood and one even has a swimming pool,” explains Aguilar, pointing to the 14-story apartment complex that was built one block from his residence.
Despite the water situation, the Guatemalan municipality authorized 3,307 constructions of residential buildings in the capital in the last 10 years, according to data requested by EFE.
The indigenous communities and inhabitants of the largest city in Guatemala warn of a growing crisis in a country where there is no national water law and in the last 30 years seven legislative attempts to regulate the use of water have failed.
In 2021, the United Nations published that if Guatemala managed water correctly, it could offer 31 liters a day to each of its inhabitants.