Impunity

A woman was murdered here last night.

In Guatemala, that’s not so unusual. Last year, 620 women were murdered, and not one person was brought to justice over it.

While filming in Guatemala, we are staying at a seminary, the largest in Latin America. It’s a beautiful oasis in a violent city. High walls surround lovely green areas, well-manicured lawns, well-kept buildings and engaging students.

We left the compound at 8 a.m. for our day of shooting. At 7:30 a.m., the woman who cleans the rooms, makes sure the towels are fresh and who keeps the guest comfortable, was dropped off right in front of the main gate of the seminary.

A student who lives across the street was an eye witness to what happened next.

The cleaning woman (who’s name I do not know) alighted from the vehicle and moved toward the gate.

A car sped around the corner and a well-trained assassin leaned out the window with his pistol and shot the woman in the head.

The car sped off and the woman collapsed in the arms of her sister. She died soon after.

The eye witness said it was a well-executed operation by a well-trained person. Apparently it’s quite easy to hire such a person in Guatemala.

One of the seminary professors knew the woman quite well and she’s the one who told us about the 620 murders of the previous year. Trembling with anger and frustration, the professor told us that most likely, some routine paper work would be done on this murder and then it would be put in a file somewhere and would most likely never see the light of day again.

The professor talked of those who operate with “impunity.”

Seeing her anger and helpless frustration gave me an inkling of what the residents of La Limonada slum must feel at times. The Ministry of Justice building is an imposing structure (see photo) that stands literally on top of the ridge overlooking La Limonada. The task of the Ministry of Justice would be similar to the FBI in the USA. They are charged with investigating murders, suspicious deaths, etc. Being so close to La Limonada, a violent slum in a violent city, should be job security for them.

However, as we found out, what happens in La Limonada stays in La Limonada. According to those who live and work down in that deep ravine, murders that happen there are just not worth investigating by the Ministry of Justice.

At certain times of the day, the shadow of the Ministry building literally falls into the slum. But that’s about all the residents of the slum will get. Murders down there are not investigated.

Imagine being one of those residents and knowing that murderers can operate with impunity. Simply being a resident of La Limonada makes you unworthy of official protection. You’re on your own.

The United Nations says some characteristics of slums include lack of security of tenure, lack of security and lack of sanitation. For those in La Limonada, we could also add lack of rights.

Selma's War

I have never, ever, in my life, heard a story quite like Selma’s.

Imagine Job. You know, the guy in the Old Testament book of Job. Now add rape, sexual abuse, physical abuse and a severe beating with a machete, add a life-time of rejection by an alcoholic mother, being sold by her to the sex trade, a string of men who added to the rejection and abuse she felt, and you start to get an idea of what Selma’s story is all about.

Being a journalist, or in my case, a documentary film maker, opens up portals into stories and lives one could never enter otherwise. I remember interviewing a lovely woman in Sierra Leone who was finally, a few years after the war there, recovering her sanity. She was buried in a deep hole for days, was raped, assaulted, tortured, and made to hold the severed head of her aunt for hours on end. That happened during a war so in some bizarre, strange way, maybe the fact of war somehow lessens the horror of her experience for those that hear her story later.

But Selma’s story takes place in Guatemala. Today. The war officially ended in 1996 but even so, her story really had nothing to do with the “official” Guatemalan war.

When Selma finished telling her story to Tita and, in effect, to you the reader of this blog and eventual watcher of the film, Tita and Selma hugged each other tightly and they both wept for several minutes. It was a most holy moment there in Selma’s house. Iron sheets on a narrow spit of land on the side of the steep ravine that is La Limonada.

After catching my breath, Tita told me that Selma’s story is actually not that unusual. Women in Guatemala are abused and beaten all the time. “At least 50% of them,” she said.

I suppose poverty is a war of sorts. It assaults its victims and puts them in situations and predicaments that would seem unimaginable in peacetime. Selma, the men that beat her, the impoverished alcoholic mother, the men that used Selma when she was sold as a nine-year-old girl; all part of the violence of poverty.

Does it really have to be this way? In a world that generates so much wealth, does Tanya have to beg on that corner every day, and does Selma have to suffer so much?

Today, as I write this blog entry, Selma is experiencing yet another chapter in her life. She’s having surgery somewhere in Guatemala City to try and remove her cancer.

For her, the war goes on.

Begging from a Wheelchair

Today we filmed Tanya at work.

Tanya, you may remember, is paralyzed from the waist down. She was shot 10 years ago and is in a wheelchair. We joined her at 6 a.m. down in La Limonada slum in Guatemala City. Her papa already had her in the wheelchair. She was just putting the finishing touches on washing her face and getting her hair out of her eyes. She has a beautiful face and bright eyes that manage to laugh despite the physical and emotional pain.

Jesse and I followed with our Panasonic HVX hi-def cameras and we had Aaron with us, a friend we met last night. We gave Aaron the Nikon and let him go to work getting photographs for the website and future print pieces. Papa wheeled Tanya through the very narrow corridor on which they live. That empties out onto a wider alleyway. He took that down to the river and then followed the main road out of La Limonada. The main road goes up. It’s the only way to go. Papa doesn’t work as a painter anymore because he has such a sore hip. Picture him pushing Tanya in her wheelchair up a very, very steep hill. (Papa was so exhausted at one point that the film crew jumped in and pushed Tanya the rest of the way up the hill.)

Once at the top, traffic is the main enemy. Cars and trucks and buses fly by. Diesel fumes and smoke hang thick in the air. Papa and Tanya quickly and deftly maneuver through it. They do this every day and are quite good at it. The streets are level for several blocks, then go up again. The traffic increases. It’s 7:30 a.m. Finally, after a two-mile hike that takes them from the bottom of La Limonada slum to a busy intersection in Guatemala City; from a world of gritty survival where there’s no margin for error, to a world of expensive cars, flowers for sale, and coffee shops, Tanya is ready to work.

Papa collapsed on a step and caught his breath while Tanya adjusted her clothing, got the cup out for collecting money and put her game face on. (The cup, she explained, is necessary because so many people who might be tempted to give money don’t want to touch her. She cried when she told us that yesterday in the interview. She said, “they don’t want to touch me,” and she cried.)

So the work day began. She joked around and laughed with the flower vendor on the corner. They must see each other each day there on the corner. And she wheeled herself up and down that incredibly busy intersection in her low, blue chair, reaching up to the windows of SUVs and cars and pickups, hoping for a good day of generosity.

We shot this scene from a variety of angles. Sometimes when you see life unfold through a lens, rather than just watching it with the naked eye as you pass by, you see things differently. What I saw was how incredibly vulnerable Tanya is. That tiny chair, with Tanya in it, next to rumbling buses, diesel trucks, expensive cars and beat-up junkers. Some reach their hands out and place some coins—or paper bills—in the cup. Others ignore her. Others literally don’t see her. This is her life. She does this each and every day because she has to to survive.

By seeing the behind-the-scenes story of this one beggar on a street corner, I and my team have had our perspective changed of beggars in general. It the future, It will be mighty hard to see someone working a street corner in the Developing World and not immediately think of Tanya. We’ll wonder what the story is, who the Papa is, how much do they need to survive, what kind of room do they sleep in.

Getting to know one person has made me aware of a whole class of people.

That’s what this documentary is about. Maybe if viewers get to know a few slum dwellers, like Tanya, Selma (more on her later) and the Alquino family under the bridge in Manila, they will become aware of, and concerned for, a whole class of people called slum dwellers.

All one billion of them.

(photos for this posting: thanks to Aaron Kreuger.)

Behind the Black Door.

Today we entered La Limonda, the largest slum in Central America. 60,000 people crowded into a deep ravine one mile in length. At the bottom of the ravine a rushing stream carries the sewage of these 60,000 people to the Rio Las Vacas which empties into the Rio Motagua, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

If you wind your way up from the sewage through narrow alleys, you’ll come to another alley, more narrow yet, and one of thousands just like it. Turn right, wend your way through it and pound on a black door. A man will open the door and let you in. We stepped through a tiny courtyard—literally about six feet across—and into Tanya’s bedroom.

She was laying on her bed, covered with a blanket. The first thing we noticed is that the “normal” shape of a person under a blanket was missing. And that’s part of Tanya’s story.

I won’t trouble you with all the details, we’ll cover more of that in the documentary, but here’s the short version. Membership in a gang, brothers murdered, Tanya shot, bullet hits her spinal cord, she loses the use of her legs, later a severe break means she has one of the legs amputated, she now lives in this tiny room with her father in his own room right behind her. She wheels herself to a busy intersection each day and works—rain or shine—begging next to the cars when they stop at the traffic light. She must earn about 50 Quetzales each day ($1=8Qs) to survive so even during rainy season—now—she must be out there begging.

At the end of a long day, she wheels herself back down into La Limonada, through narrow alleys to her own, comes to the black door and papa lets her in, helps her into bed so tomorrow she can do it again.

Tanya welcomed our crew into our home. She was painfully honest about her life, her frequent thoughts of suicide and her oft-repeated questions of “why me?” What troubles her greatly is the comments people make to her, or about her, as she begs at the corner. Rich people, particularly, are harsh, she says. She cried while telling that story.

She was also honest about how she gets through it all. Her faith in Jesus is what sustains her. By her own words, she went from a hard gang member, to a women with a deep faith in God, despite a personal story even the best Hollywood writers would have a hard time matching.

Tita is the woman who linked us up with Tanya … and is largely responsible for helping Tanya, and many, many more like her, find that deep and abiding faith. Tita’s story is a documentary in itself. Maybe another day.

Meanwhile, Tanya is resting behind the Black Door while I write my blog. Tomorrow morning we will be at the red door at 6:00 a.m. so our cameras can follow her as she makes her way out of La Limonada, over the crest, down to the busy stoplight and begin another day of survival.

Flowers in the Slum

There’s a storm brewing in Guatemala. Last week, a lawyer was assassinated. Soon after his death, a video surfaced with him telling his fellow citizens that if they were indeed seeing him on this video, it meant he had been assassinated and he knew exactly who did it.

The news finally reached the Drudge Report today, which means it’s pretty big.

Being here in Guatemala puts it all front and center.

There were demonstrations again in the central plaza today. We were there later and it looked like a hurricane swept through the plaza and left tons of garbage behind. We didn’t get there in time to film the event though because we didn’t come here to capture up-to-the-minute breaking news. We came to get the much older story of poverty.

Today was our first day of shooting in Guatemala. Joel A, our guide, drives us to the right places, tells us when to shut the windows of our car because the neighborhood is bad, translates for us, and gives us good advice and answers to our many questions.

We didn’t actually go into the slums today, that’s our job for the rest of the week. Today was a day to get the lie of the land, get some establishing shots, get some of the stuff we’ll forget about later like government buildings, landmarks, candid people shots, culture, sort of essence-of-Guatemalan-life shots.

We did get to the outskirts of La Limonada though. We went up on a precipice that overlooks the slum. Actually, the slum creeps right up to the edge of that precipice and almost crawls over. We shot long, wide establishing shots to show this piece of the slum when we were quietly and wonderfully interrupted by the type of hospitality poor people are so good at.

We were shooting when Joel started talking with a tiny, elderly Guatemalan woman who’s home almost reached the top of the precipice. She was curious. What were we doing? He explained. She invited us—four strangers from another country, plus Joel—into her house.

We might enjoy getting some shots through her window, she explained. Then she led us through her little house to the back onto a tiny verandah that emptied out onto more little homes straight down, down the slope of the embankment we were on, a perfect picture of how the very poor build their homes on the absolute worst and most dangerous pieces of land.

She had flowers on her verandah and proudly showed them to us. I asked her (through sign language. My Spanish is horrible) if I could take a picture of her with the flowers. She agreed. You can see her picture here.

We got some great footage from that vantage point; shots we would not have gotten without that serendipitous moment provided by that gracious Guatemalan woman.

In her home, I forgot all about the storm brewing in Guatemalan politics. I forgot completely that I was on the cusp of a slum and surrounded by poverty. In her home we were treated as friends. And our political persuasions, incomes and countries of origin didn’t seem to matter.

From Tulip Lanes to Slums

It’s Tulip Time in my home town. It’s an annual celebration of all things Dutch. There’s Dutch Dancing in the streets, gorgeous tulips planted by the thousands all over town; there’s windmills and a canal, wooden shoes klomping all over the place and tourists by the thousands who bus in to see the street scrubbing, eat Dutch treats (including almond bars), watch the parades, take trolley tours and more.

In two days, four of us will be in La Limonda, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Though I haven’t ever been to this particular slum, I rather doubt we will see scrubbed streets, tulips, or even authentic ethnic costumes.

I suspect we will find many kind people who are generous to four strangers, and who are fabulously rich in community.

As I explained to my daughter Lauren once when we were filming in San Salvador; there are different kinds of riches. What she experienced there in that poor community was the richness of community. People knew each other, knew each other’s business, names, took the time to talk to one another. There wasn’t a lot of material wealth, but my young daughter definitely picked up on this other form of richness.

We were living in another state at that time, and we certainly did not have that richness of community. When we got back, she was hungry for it. She missed it.

Of the four of us, two of us, Jess and myself, have spent considerable time in this region of the world. Jess is a recent college graduate with a degree in digital media production. He grew up in the Dominican Republic and speaks Spanish fluently.

The other two will have their first taste of both Latin American culture and of slums. One is John, a friend of mine from town. He’s eager to see for himself what life in the slums is all about. John has a big heart for the poor and for justice. I’m eager to see his response.

The other traveler is my dad. He’s 70 years old and though he’s followed his kids around to East Africa and Israel, this week in La Limonda will be an eye opener for him. He’ll carry equipment, hold shotgun mics, recharge batteries and generally do whatever needs doing. And like the rest of us, he’ll meet people who are part of the one billion.

And he'll wonder how some of us can live in tulip-lined lanes, while others live in slums.

La Limonada, Guatemala: The Precarious Life

Next week we go to Guatemala to shoot.


Why there and not a favela in Rio, or on the outskirts of Mexico City? Why do the Latin America shoot in Guatemala?


As we looked at the various slums in Latin America (unfortunately, there were plenty to choose from) we decided to focus on a slum that hasn't received much attention from the world. Not that most slums have, but some are more famous than others. Rio, for example, has been featured in several movies and the favelas are almost romanticised in some quarters. Funny how media can make a location famous (i.e., just think about the baseball fields here in my home state of Iowa.)


Guatemala is a small country right next to Yucatan, Mexico. We don't hear much about it in the news, it gets very little attention, and yet, 70% of the population lives on less than US$2 per day. In the countryside, 30% live on less than $1 per day. In the city, 8% does.

Guatemala City has about 2.5 million people and estimates show that at least 60% of them are poor. Those with the lowest incomes live in very precarious situations.

Our goal is to spend a week with two women who live these precarious lives; Tanya and Selma.

Tanya and Selma have stories that border on the unbelievable. We hope to make their stories real and believeable with our lenses and microphones. They live in a slum community called La Limonada, which had its beginnings in 1959.

When the government put an end to the agrarian reform program in the '50s, that, plus socio-economic problems accelerated the migratory process from rural to urban. About 600 families invaded the sides of the gullies in front of the Olympic Stadium and thus was born La Limondada, one of the largest slums in Central America today.

We don't know Tanya and Selma's history or complete story yet, but we hope to find out. As the author Chaim Potok said, "in the particular is contained the universal." Through the particular stories of Tanya and Sara, we may gain clear insight into the more universal story of the plights of tens of thousands more who live the precarious life in Guatamala City and in cities around the world.

I'll post more here about Tanya and Selma, the good people who are making this possible in Guatemala City, our experiences as we shoot, and what we learn. Thanks for checking in.