Fighting Poverty in Guatemala’s Highlands: A Profile of The Ripple Effect
During the second half of the twentieth century, the Indigenous Maya Ixil people of Guatemala’s highlands experienced a genocide. Perpetrated by Guatemalan state forces, and backed by the US government – it’s estimated that over 150,000 Maya were killed between 1960 and 1996.
In the period since, while the degree of violence may have decreased, the country’s poorest individuals have continued to live in abject poverty, as national and global economic systems have maintained the class structures that defined the 20th century in Guatemala.
For the last fourteen years, The Ripple Effect has been working in the small Ixil community of Chel and its surrounding villages, in order to improve the lives of their inhabitants, and help to rectify some of the injustices of the previous century.
In March of 2023, I travelled to Chel, in order to learn more about the region’s dark history, and the meaningful change that The Ripple Effect is bringing about.
A Brief History of Guatemala
To appreciate the necessity of the work that The Ripple Effect does, it’s important to understand Guatemala’s recent history. And for that, it helps to go back to the first half of the twentieth century, with the arrival of large, American-owned agricultural corporations such as the United Fruit Company. Renowned for its corruption, tax evasion and horrific labour conditions, the United Fruit Company alone came to control 42% of Guatemala’s farmland in a period of just 20 years – land which had primarily been owned by the Indigenous population.
Fast forward to 1951, and Guatemala’s new president Jacobo Árbenz is democratically elected with an overwhelming majority, on the promise that he would buy back the unused land of the major fruit companies and redistribute it to the nation’s poor, rural communities. But this plan threatened the United Fruit Company’s monopoly on agricultural exports, and so, in 1954, the US government orchestrated a coup – removing Árbenz from power and installing a military dictatorship in his place.
The destruction of Guatemala’s fledgling democracy, and the reversal of the intended land reforms, left many among the rural population disillusioned, and with no other avenues left to explore, there was sympathy towards the calls of guerrilla leaders for revolution. This led to a thirty-six year long civil war, during which the Guatemalan military, backed by the US, committed genocide against the country’s Indigenous Maya population. Even though only a tiny fraction of the Indigenous population was willing to take up arms, all were swept up in the violence. Death squads travelled from village to village, employing a scorched earth policy as they went, and it’s estimated that of the 200,000 people killed during the Guatemalan Civil War, more than 80% were Indigenous Mayas.
Guatemala Today
While the violence in the region formally came to an end with the signing of the Guatemalan Peace Accords in 1996, the nation’s enormous inequalities have remained entrenched. Towards the end of the 20th century, the implementation of a neoliberal structural adjustment programme in Guatemala by the IMF forced the nation to prioritise economic growth over investment in public services – the logic being that the benefits of this growth would trickle down to the nation’s poor.
In reality, however, the opposite occurred. While the nation’s economy has more than tripled in size since the turn of the century, the number of people living in extreme poverty in Guatemala has actually increased by 32% over the same period, and more than three quarters of the rural population currently live below the national poverty line.
Much of this economic growth has come from agriculture, with foodstuffs accounting for almost half the nation’s exports. And yet, Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of malnutrition in the world – with 47% of children under five stunted by lack of food. For Indigenous children, that figure is 58%.
These numbers are hardly surprising, because what’s required to alleviate poverty in Guatemala isn’t economic growth for large agricultural corporations – it’s land reform. In the days of the United Fruit Company, 3% of landowners owned more than 70% of the nation’s arable land. Today, they own around 65%, highlighting that corporate profits still vastly outweigh the interests of Guatemala’s rural, Indigenous population.
But Guatemala’s majority have been calling for land reform for decades. First, those calls were quashed by the overthrow of a democratically elected government, and when that wasn’t enough, those in power turned to genocide. Even today, land reform campaigners face an extraordinarily difficult uphill battle. In the last ten years alone, over 100 human rights activists have been murdered in Guatemala.
Life is also dangerous for those within the union movement who are fighting for the more modest goal of improving working conditions for agricultural labourers. A report by the Solidarity Center identified 101 unionists who were killed between 2004 and 2018.
The bleak irony is that as conditions worsen in Guatemala, many people are seeking safety from the country that has been most responsible for their inequality. The number of Guatemalans being apprehended at the US border has increased by more than 400% in recent years, and a new class divide is beginning to emerge in villages like Chel – between those who have family in America, and those who don’t.
Larger houses are starting to appear – mansions by comparison to the rest of the community – belonging either to those who went to the States and returned, or those who have a family member there right now. Simultaneously, others are selling what little land they have in order to try and come up with the thousands of dollars required to gamble on a smuggler taking them over the US border.
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the situation is being further exacerbated by climate change. Firstly, there’s the primary impacts, exemplified by an increasing number of extreme weather events. Chel has been hit by three hurricanes in the last four years, which have decimated crops, cut off supply routes to the outside world, and resulted in landslides that have devastated communities. But there are also more complicated secondary impacts which are driving food insecurity in the region, and which are poised to worsen in the years to come.
In recent decades, governments in Europe and North America have provided subsidies to their agricultural industries, allowing farmers in wealthy nations to out-price those in poorer ones. The result is that countries like Guatemala have become reliant on superpowers for staple crops such as corn, leaving those on the margins of society increasingly vulnerable to the volatility of international markets. Indeed, the UN estimates that of the US$540 billion per year being spent on agricultural subsidies, 87% are environmentally and socially harmful.
The negative impacts of this are starting to be seen as environmental regulatory bodies in wealthy nations begin mandating an increasing reliance on biofuels, requiring the transformation of land that was once used to grow food for the global poor. As the US decreases its corn production in favour of biofuel plantations, for example, there is a direct impact on the price of corn for families living below the poverty line in Guatemala.
This problem is only set to get worse, with many nations utilising modelling by the IPCC that is heavily reliant on Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) in order to meet their emissions targets. The scale of BECCS deployment that is required would see huge swathes of land transformed into biofuel plantations – land which is currently the breadbasket of the world’s poor.
And it’s for all these reasons and more that the work of The Ripple Effect is so important in Guatemala’s highlands.
Michael Ewens
Soft-spoken, compassionate, and tenaciously hardworking, The Ripple Effect’s founder and director, Michael Ewens, has dedicated the last fourteen years of his life to working with the Ixil people. Deeply aware of the challenges facing the region, his goal is to provide people with access to the resources required to break out of the cycle of poverty.
“In situations where a family does not have any personal property, and the wages are sporadic and low, it is impossible to ‘pull yourself up by your bootstrings’,” he explains. “It’s impossible to climb your way out of this level of poverty – without outside help, it will never change.”
After growing up in the counterculture movement, Michael eventually settled down with his wife and children, working as a carpenter in an affluent part of the United States. However, his altruistic roots never went away, and when the last of his children moved out of home, he felt an overwhelming urge to leave the comfort of America, to live simply as a member of the global majority, and to make a difference wherever he ended up.
But Michael’s story wasn’t going to be that straightforward. His son Forest had been deployed to Afghanistan, and in 2006, he received the news that every father fears most.
“He was returning back from a manoeuvre – they reported radio chatter that they were being watched. The enemy he was seeking had come back across the border with a newly equipped group of militia. They set up an ambush, and when Forest was crossing a puddle in the road, he hit an IED, and him and his sergeant were killed.”
Ultimately, however, this tragedy fortified Michael’s resolve.
“When troubles come,” he explains, “we have the decision, really, to go 360 degrees. But we should use them to push through to the best that we can.”
From his son’s life insurance, Michael received $10,000, which turned out to be the seed from which his organisation would eventually grow.
“What can you do with ten thousand dollars that is the blood of your son?” Michael asks solemnly. “But then when I arrived back here, and I saw the level of poverty and the level of need, I didn’t have any problem putting that into the soil, into the land of the Ixil.”
From those initial foundations, Michael has grown The Ripple Effect into a dynamic organisation that has changed the lives of tens of thousands of people – and the 64-year-old is nowhere near finished.
The Ripple Effect
The organisation’s initial focus was on clean water, and over the years, Michael and his team have installed projects in more than twenty villages. They begin by trekking up into the mountains around the village in order to locate a freshwater spring.
“At times, we’ve been over two hours hiking,” Michael explains. “We’ll pack cement and rebar into the spring to make a spring box, collect the water into the size of tube that it can fill, and then start trenching through the mountains.”
While I was in the region, The Ripple Effect was providing clean water to the village of Cajchixla’. The organisation’s connection with the local people was emphasised by the dozens of volunteers who turned out to help with the project. Even 75-year-old Silvece was helping to dig the trench that would provide Cajchixla’ with clean water.
Reflecting on the impact of the water projects, Michael notes that “there are probably ten to twelve thousand people that have clean water today that didn’t.”
Another key focus area for The Ripple Effect is their clean stove project. Most people in the region cook on simple, open fire stoves, which pose a hazard to small children, while the smoke leads to respiratory illnesses. The Ripple Effect have designed stoves that overcome these problems, and they travel village to village, installing around 25 new stoves every month.
“Our stoves are pretty neat in that they have two wings on either side of a metal cook plate, and that allows the family to sit and have dinner at a table,” Michael says. “They’re expensive, almost $200 a stove, but I think we’ve passed over a thousand so far.”
In the last year, The Ripple Effect has also begun a house-building project. The organisation identifies the members of their community who are most in need, and provides them with bigger, sturdier houses to live in.
For Mario, Maria, and their three children, this action was life-changing. The five of them lived in a tiny home, consisting of an open-fire stove in one corner, and some wooden boards and blankets in the other – where the family slept.
“I am a worker, nothing more,” Mario explains. “I want to bring my family forward, but here, it’s not possible.”
From the front of Mario’s house, one can see the huge Xacbal Hydroelectric Plant, which was constructed more than a decade ago at a cost of US$250 million. And yet, Mario and the other members of his community don’t have access to electricity – unless they can pull together the money to invest in a small solar panel. The electricity generated by the plant is exported primarily across the border to Mexico, where it can deliver greater profits. Nor does the plant provide employment opportunities for people like Mario, who spends his time seeking out whatever manual labour he can find to support his family.
“It is hard to find work even at Q50 (US$6.40) per day,” says Mario. “If there is work Monday through Friday, we make Q250 (US$32).”
Even if Mario succeeds in obtaining work every day, which is rare, his family are still left with less than US$1 per person, per day to survive.
“It covers the corn, but no money is left for the family,” he explains. “We want to eat, but how can we?”
In the space of less than 48 hours, The Ripple Effect took apart Mario’s old house, and constructed a new one that was almost double the size, providing a safer environment for Mario and Maria to raise their children.
Since beginning this new project last year, Michael and his team have built 17 new homes, with more going up every month. They harvest the wood for the houses from trees in the mountains that have already fallen down, and the organisation’s new reforestation project ensures that their activities are a net positive for the surrounding environment.
Chel is located right next to Visis Cabá Biosphere Reserve, and while the reserve itself remains largely intact, the edges are becoming increasingly vulnerable to deforestation as access to the region improves. But The Ripple Effect are working hard to reverse this trend. Since beginning their reforestation project last year, they’ve already planted over 20,000 trees.
“And we’re not just planting a plantation of pine trees,” Michael explains. “We’ve collected species so far of 16 different native trees from the forest, and we’re expanding that biosphere back into its natural habitat.”
Before being planted, the saplings are grown on The Ripple Effect’s farm, which also acts as a seed bank and training centre for their agricultural program. The organisation has provided gardens and seeds to over 200 families, and they run classes designed to help recipients get the most out of their plots.
The farm even has a sample plot designed to mimic the average amount of land available to people in the region, demonstrating what can be achieved within such a space. Most people purchase staple crops such as corn, but rely on subsistence farming for their nutrients, so the sample plot contains a range of vegetables and herbs, as well as a small section dedicated to medicinal plants – and all of this is in a space of just a few square metres.
Conclusion
From clean water and safe stoves, to new houses and reforestation, Michael has built a dynamic and enduring organisation over the last fourteen years. At present, the 64-year-old maintains an impressively hands-on role within The Ripple Effect – carrying lumber, building houses, and personally distributing supplies to communities.
“I came down with some lofty goals – some ideals – and I wanted to put them into practice,” Michael explains. “And it’s a very rewarding road, but it’s not easy… The last seven years have been almost non-stop, seven days on every week, and as noble as those ideals and the work is, it’s good just to enjoy life – to appreciate the journey that we’ve been given in this world.”
As his body slows down, Michael sees himself transitioning primarily into the grant-writing and donor relations space. Indeed, he acknowledges that a new phase is just beginning for The Ripple Effect.
“It’s time to take the main mantle of work, and let the Ixil people carry it to the next level,” he explains. “This has been a training period – training for me and training for them – and I really sense that we’re at the day where it’s go. Everybody’s working full tilt, everyone has developed skills, and we need to develop more, but it’s an honest team with a good heart.”
Reflecting on my time spent with The Ripple Effect, the thing I was most impressed by was actually Michael’s outlook – his philosophy on life. He was generous not just with his money, but also with the far more valuable resources of time and energy.
“I’m well aware I’m on the last stage of life, but I’m doing things that still have a fruitation – ten, twenty, thirty years down the road,” he says. “I plant trees that I hope will have a life of two or three hundred years, and the very act of giving in this way fills me up in a way that a second bowl of ice cream never could – a new car wouldn’t come close.”
For those living comfortable, perhaps even excessive lives in more fortunate parts of the world, Michael has a powerful message.
“I wish people could open up and wake up their hearts, not just to poverty and need, but to life itself,” he explains. “We see possibilities – I can create my business, I can build a bigger house – all these dreams, but we still aren’t awake. We’re on this planet, and we’re in this world of opportunity that many people will never see, and we should open our hearts. We should find that limit that says I have enough, and enter the joy of sharing.”
Postscript
Thanks to the incredible people who support this project, I was able to donate 1,000 quetzales – around US$130 – to The Ripple Effect. This money will help to alleviate extreme poverty in the Ixil communities of Guatemala’s highlands through clean water, house-building, and sustainable agriculture projects in the region.
If you’d like to help me contribute to more organisations in the future, you can sign up to our Patreon here.
You can also donate directly to The Ripple Effect here.
A list of sources for the statistics in this article can be found here.
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Don’t forget to check out the video about The Ripple Effect as well:
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Lastly, you can also watch my full interview with Michael here: