Dr. Brent Metz

KU Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies Waggoner Colloquium I want to thank the center Latin American studies for giving me the opportunity to speak at the Waggoner. It's quite an honor to to be doing this again at the Waggoner. So I'm just going to give you some very brief health challenges faced by the Ch’orti’ Mayas of Guatemala and Honduras. The Ch’orti’ Mayas exemplify what a lot of other indigenous groups in Latin America are facing. Ch'orti' Mayas of Guatemala & Honduras I've been conducting research in this area since for almost 30 years now, including during the cholera epidemic in which several of my neighbors died in 1992; famines… …but famine is actually chronic in this area, but it's acute in certain years, and so I have been able to see the health problems that arise. So I'm just going to list six key challenges, but this list is far from comprehensive, just the ones are the most striking. First of all, the Ch’orti’ are poor, like most indigenous Americans; they have been dispossessed of their land, of their resources, and last but not least, their knowledge, cultural knowledge about how to react to crises, how to organize, etc. They not only live off the land, but they also supplement what they grow by by low wage labor. For the Ch’orti’ Mayas it's usually seasonal coffee picking, very low wage, we are talking $5 or $6 a day, depending on how much they managed to pick. Poverty also means little infrastructure: few poor roads, poor communications, poor decrepit schools, and lack of health posts almost entirely in their rural mountainous communities. They have to come to town, which can be several hours’ walk or an hour to pickup truck ride to get to. So very weak state services on top of the infrastructure. And weaker after The Peace Accords when neo-liberal agreements were signed with international lenders. This essentially meant devolving or decentralizing state services and has usually simply meant cutting them and leaving people to their own devices. There's coffee picking. There's a school meant for 30 where 70 students are crammed in. They are very susceptible to epidemics, because of their malnutrition. Some missionary groups consider all of the Ch’orti’ to be malnourished and treat them accordingly. The main cause of death for Ch’orti’s is respiratory illnesses, which doesn't bode well for corona virus, and the second major cause of death is digestive tract infections. But really it’s a combination of all of those three that usually kills people. Violence actually comes in fourth. And as Dr. Dean will be talking about, diabetes is a growing problem, not only in Peru, but in many indigenous groups because of changing diet and other things. Another disadvantage is they have a lot of children, averaging about seven to eight births per woman; that might be declining slightly. But that creates lots of challenges when you're poor, and trying to take care of a lot of little kids. Lack of physical and cultural access to health clinics and hospitals. So, you know, hospitals and clinics are far away, as I mentioned, Lack of physical and cultural access to health clinics & hospitals Largely localistic knowledge to interpret global problems Susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories But there's a cultural access to Western medicine that they also don't have, they don't understand, they don't trust, for a lot of historical reasons. They are not respected by healthcare workers who talk down to them and treat them like children and often blame them for their own health problems, even though it's their poverty, historically informed poverty, that has put them in this situation. So, their lack of access to knowledge to the outside world leads them to rumors, conspiracy theories, not too dissimilar to what we see in this country when people aren’t accessing good information, good solid information. They tend to treat global problems locallistically--so if there's an epidemic disease, they wonder what they have done or what they have done that may have made God or the gods angry. So they take responsibility for any problems that happen, even when it's not theirs. And so those are all things have to be addressed. Rivers & streams drying from forest clearing Rivers and streams are drying because of poor clear-cutting of forests both by peasants—by themselves--and by mafias who are cutting the peaks. The Ch’orti’ always leave the peaks forested, but they're being cut for the timber, which is very expensive, by former Narco trafficking groups who have now diversified, you might say, in their operations. What does this mean for health? People don't wash as much; they don’t have as much access to water. Water streams are drying, and water systems are drying. Water systems are all gravitational here and so that comes out of the top tubes, leaving out of the mountains where there is still water down to their hamlets and that's drying up; they’re getting water, maybe an hour a day or two hours a day, maybe an hour every five days, which means you just have to limit the amount you wash your hands you wash your face wash everything, all the stuff you're supposed to do during the pandemic. What water comes in is actually contaminated, contaminated by pesticides contaminated by cows pasturing up in these mountains because rich people, once it's deforested, Range their cattle up above, and that gets into the water system. No autonomous, unifying socio-political organization And finally, no autonomous unifying socio-political organization. There were forms of political organization that revolved around religion in the past, and during the colonial period and before, But that has dissolved, mostly because of the poverty and mostly because of attacks by missionization, both orthodox Catholic missionization in the 20th century, and evangelical Protestant missionization, and now people are actually divided by religion, which inhibits organization. And so if they have any organization they depend on outsiders to do it like myself or nonprofits or Or corporations that are coming in and wanting to do produce, say, broccoli for the US market. But it's always others that they have to trust and get them organized. Okay, thank you. I'll leave the next speaker.