Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Twenty First Century Armed Conflict in Guatemala

“You never had to go through that”. That was a phrase that got straight into my mind and made me thing what was it that I never had to live.

They were referring about the armed conflict that for 36 years affected the countryside and even the capital city of Guatemala. I could hear them refer about how was it that they had to go straight to their homes before 8 pm because of the “toque de queda” that the government implemented to avoid having “communist” meetings in the dark nights.

Also, they told me how was it that, many times, they heard the parlor stop the projection of the film and asked them to evacuate ASAP because there was a menace of a bomb in the theater.

I am sure I had never lived a status quo were I had to be afraid of guerrilla’s activity, or even from the activity of the armed forces of the government. But is it all true?

It is certainly not. Since December 29, 1996 Guatemala signed a “Peace Accord Agreement” with the belligerent forces of the guerrilla and the government in turn. It was a peace accord of holding down arms that was up to end with an “enduring peace” that was supposed to last for ever, and in the near future forgotten by the next generations that never had to live it.

Has it all finished? It does certainly not.

Guatemala has lived the beginning of a twenty first century type of war. It is called the war against the “maras”, gangs that have taken control of entire zones of the capital city, and entire zones of the inland towns; making security, under government’s obligation been totally disappear and a new force appear in our society. What a teacher once called a “parallel power” had appeared in the “never spoken about” society we, Guatemalans, live in.

What is the reason for all this chaos? The reasons are many, but the solutions are less obvious and less easy of implementing.

Guatemala decided that the armed conflict was up to an ending and the former President in government, Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, decided that it was time for him to receive the “Príncipe de Asturias prize” for ending the so called war. Once the peace was signed, the conflict was up to end in a few months and demobilization of the belligerent forces was supposed to turn on their arms and return to their civilian life and work the land they possessed, or were going to receive.
[1]

Once the peace was signed a backyard problem appeared in the landscape. It was the “armed gangs” in Guatemala that started to spread as a parallel power all over the capital, towns and little villages.

Supported by the drug dealers, that since the last decades had an almost divine immortality and lived as the “untouchables” of our society; these gangs reinforced their strategic “occupied areas” and started recruiting new forces to their regiments.

Where was the government in this moment? Why did not they act?

The reason and maybe a huge part of the guilt of the chaos that is soon to begin in Guatemala, I may even dare to predict a new and distinct “twenty first century way” of civil war, was that the weak government that by not reason appeared in Guatemala since the ending of the armed government in 1986.

But the reason is even deeper and obscure, it involved the incentives Guatemalans had to avoid to return to a strong type of government that was certainly never to be in the short time occupied by an army men. As well, it meant that people were tired of having a police government that would have told were to meet, eat and sleep, and at what time to do so.

And there is one more huge incentive. It included the Scandinavian countries and the rest of the European Community that had made an incredible pressure in our political image in front of the international community, which meant that, if we did not turn into a more “democratic” government the influx of cash was soon to stop and our morally depraved economy and society, was soon to be in a deficit that only was saved because of the aid we had received for decades from the international community.

The effect of this externalities turn the country into a very “calm society”, actually meaning an afraid of danger society, were a parallel force started to grow; without a strong government that would have procrastinated it to ever occur and without a government force strong enough to secure the citizens and protect them of danger.

Guatemala had just turn into a government were all the power rests in a weak President that has not the enough power to reinstate order, or at least to secure and protect the capital city nor the towns. Guatemala has gotten for itself a weak government that because of the lack of leaders, because of the massive killing of leaders since the 1960’s, which right now had made a whole in our society where no important example of leadership can be found.

Guatemala has been just turn with open arms into the wrath of this new parallel power that would institute a status quo of lack of a strong government directed by civilians that by the use of arms and power would exploit, abuse, rape and panic my fellow Guatemalans.

We have just begin a third millennium were we would have to fight against a weak government and a strong civilian-gang power that has been spreading like a plague around the community.

Shall we see a strong leader come in our help? Or shall we suffer a new century of fearful, unjust, corrupt, and wicked Guatemala?



[1] It also meant integrating the indigenous peoples that are part of our society, and these people were supposed to be “recognized” as an integrant and important sector of our society, as recognition of their suffering since the colony (something I have lot to say against, but that is not of an issue in this essay).

Sunday, January 22, 2006

The Greenhouse Effect, the CO2 and the IPCC - A Bermuda Triangule

“Will The European Union of the next century be more
clean, healthy, beautiful and prosperous?

Or would we continue to suffer the crescendo of
air, water and ground pollution?

Would we continue suffering
the loss of rainforests and plains?

Would we continue suffering the increasing
number of sicknesses that may
derive from our actual living styles that are
more urbanized and industrialized?”
[1]

Does this last paragraph hit directly into your heart and sentiments? Of course it does.

The last phrase has no intention but to get into the collective unconscious that is actually claiming for help into the constant fear of having its houses disappear from the landscape because of a tropical storm or maybe even the most destructive hurricane of history.

Why, then, we associate, since a few decades ago, destruction and the wrath of nature with the “wrath” of that heinous capitalists that seeks for nothing else but to satisfy their hunger of power and money without taking care of the thousands and thousands of poor people that live in constant fear of nature.

Through this essay you will be able to observe, read, refute, judge, or maybe support the information that, followed by a brief research, has proved me that the causes of that constant alarm and attack to the “heinous” capitalists is nothing but a political game used with the masses and against the masses to inform them with groundless fears and data for hidden political agendas of logrolling and turbid interests.

Planet Earth has suffered, all through its geological history, a cycle of constant climatic changes which are known for not having a steady temperature. These climatic changes have distinguished themselves by fluctuations in the “thermostats” that for thousands of years have demonstrated to be relevant and significantly just an approximation.

Even those changes of significant importance have been capable of turning into strong ice rocks, icebergs, and glaciers all of the Northern Hemisphere and have caused that the level of seas fluctuate in different periods of history, raising and diminishing in a voluble and lent way. Never prematurely nor torrential, and never affected notably by the human action, nor less caused by those rational mammals that live in the planet of which they are masters and lords.

According to the data accepted by the worldwide science society, the Planet Earth is around five thousand million years old. And, during this impossible to measure period of time, have occurred Glacial Periods that have corresponded to only a 1% of the Earth’s geological history.

In Contemporary geological and climatic history groups of scientists asseverate that the planet is actually in between of two glacial periods; and in a world that lives between two glacial periods, it’s certain that climatic changes will fluctuate violently (let’s keep in mind that Earth’s history is measured in thousands of years and in the same way this climatic changes won’t be perceptible in it’s totality to humans, but eventually with the passing of time).
[2]

Then, is in any way human activity in the planet able to have and important effect, with only a few thousand years of existence, in the climate and geology of the planet? Is it then possible that only because of the Industrial Revolution the man has been “guilty party” of the “destruction” of the planet and we are just in the way of causing an ecological cataclysm?

My answer is NO. Nature is wise and old, and it is a Capital Temptation to even try to give to the human ego that, maybe even divine, power of destroying what took millions and millions of years of evolution, and for man to destroy it in only a few decades or centuries.

Recently world organizations have initiated claims all over our countries speaking in behalf of nature and in behalf of the planet a fight of life or death between those who believe having for themselves the power of saving the world from contamination, greenhouse effect, droughts, floods, extreme cold and hot and even global warming itself.

Of course we must protect the planet, and of course there is no other possibility but to respect what to nature itself has taken millions of years to produce. But, it is impossible for us has humans to believe that we are capable of transforming or modifying nature into a desert because of mass production, capitalism, industrialization, productivity, market efficiency and creation of richness.

These ideas of panic began more than a century ago when one of the first scientists that studied the world climate tried to establish a theory about the issue. His name was Svante Arrhenius and he was a Swedish professor that published the first scientifically “verified” investigation that mentioned that the rise of the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a cause of the changes in temperature of the planet.

His ideas continued to evolve by different scholars and a series of studies and researches, by the hand of the first methods of climatic analysis, confirmed his investigations and even amplified its impact.

By the passing of time all of those statistics started to spread all over the world and people started to concern about the supposed dangers and threats that human beings were causing to the world in a macro level.

One of the most important organizations in the advance of this issue is the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that was created by the WMO and UNEP to analyze all the scientific information that is of importance to the understanding of climate change. This panel actually attempted to state that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a significant human influence in global climate”. How significant and of what type they believed that human activity would make an impact in global climate is one of the central points of this essay.

Next to statements as the one mentioned, political activists have declared that “torrential rains have risen in agricultural regions” or “that glaciers are melting”, both statements of the former Vice-President Al Gore. Also, statements such as “we hare not sure that global warming of Earth is responsible of what we consider a substantial rise in drastic climatic changes, but I think it does” of ex President Bill Clinton have made an impact on those rationally ignorant people that have been alarmed and cried to a turning back of economic growth in name of the wishes of the goddess Gaia.

Evidence shows that the actual paradigm pretends to say that it is dangerous for the survival of human beings that the climatic and temperature changes occur and they have maintained this postulate on the data provided by three different climatic scenarios of temperature change for the year 2100. These scenarios of changes in globally averaged surface temperature evolve from a rising low scenario of 1.92ºF/decade to 9.6ºF/decade until a 25.6ºF/decade.
[3]

Actually, six thousand years ago the Earth had a temperature of 4ºF above this century’s temperature and even do human beings lived in a Sahara Desert full of plants, trees and animals; dense rainforests that covered Europe from the Alps until the Scandinavian Peninsula; and Canada had a warmer and rainier climate.
[4] Carbon Dioxide concentrations also, were 16 times higher sixty million years ago without the existence of a greenhouse effect and other periods of the Earth’s history experienced three or four times more CO2 with a warmer climate.[5]

By the passing of time the Earth started to become warmer and by the end of the glacial period the levels of sea rise, agriculture developed, technological advanced developed in an accelerated manner and there was a “climatic optimum” in which temperature was significantly warmer than twenty century’s temperature by 4-5ºF.
[6]

It is in that way that the mixture of three indispensable factors were needed to domestication of plants and animals, and then of cultural advances, and then of mayor technological breakthroughs as the professors Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza asserted in 1984: a global warming, an increase in rain and a rise in carbon dioxide levels; all of them needed for development and invention.

Maybe then, the most important thing to do is not combating climate change, because I assert that it is an adulation to our human ego to believe that we are even capable of predicting the exact moment were they will occur and what would be their destructive effects. We must then, adapt and fortify our ports and costal cities turning them in strong installations capable of handling the hitting of this destructive rains and hurricanes by pumping as much money as possible to save in health the people that may get hurt by them if not secured. And certainly not by stagnating the world economy and taking it back to 1990’s levels of industrialization and commerce, hurting the economy of the wealthy and even more of the Third World economies such as my country.

I hope there shall be still rational people that would seek for the last never to happen. What would you decide?
[1] La Unión Europea y el medio ambiente. Comunidades Europeas. 1998. pp.5
[2] Michaels, Patrick; Balling, Robert. The Satanic Gases. Cato Institute. Washington, D.C. 2000. pp.75
[3] For further information on the graphic view: “The State of the Environment”. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 1991. pp.26
[4] Gale Moore, Thomas. Climate of Fear. Cato Institute. Washington, DC. 1998. pp.23
[5] Idem. pp.28
[6] Idem. pp.30-31

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