Robelson Isidro was only fifteen years old when he left his village in the municipality of Comitancillo in Guatemala’s western highlands for the United States in January 2021. His stepfather, Moris Velásquez, says he had grown tired of earning too little working on coffee plantations, or fincas, and that he had felt ashamed by his family’s poverty.
“He decided to go [to the United States] to get his siblings ahead, to get them out of poverty,” Velásquez said in an interview in January 2021. “Life working on the finca is difficult, if you want to get ahead. It is a killing.”
Child labor is a benefit for the economic elite, who are able to pay children lower rates and do not need to pay any taxes for social services for them.
But Robelson never made it to the United States. He was killed along with nineteen other migrants in Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, just miles from the U.S. border.
While the Guatemalan legal code permits youth as young as fifteen years old to work, it is common to find children younger than that working in the informal economy to support their families. Prior to turning fifteen, Robelson began working on the fincas, picking coffee for 30 quetzales (less than 4 USD) per day.
The use of child labor in Guatemala is a serious national problem. All too often, child labor is a benefit for the economic elite, who are able to pay children lower rates and do not need to pay any taxes for social services for them.
“It is something that has been normalized,” Myrella Saadeh, the director of the Programa de Atención, Movilización e Incidencia por la Niñez y Adolescencia tells The Progressive. “For people, seeing a boy in the street washing cars, seeing a boy selling newspapers or working in the fields in agriculture, or seeing a girl doing domestic work in the houses, is normal.”
She adds, “Guatemalan society maintains a total indifference and invisibility of the phenomenon that has to do with childhood [exploitation].”
Work opportunities remain limited across Guatemala, forcing many families to rely in part on putting their children to work picking coffee beans, working in the sugar cane harvest, or on African palm oil plantations.
The pandemic has caused poverty to explode. Wages have not kept up with the increase in the cost of living, and hundreds of thousands each year have sought to reach the United States for job opportunities. But the Guatemalan government does not seem to have the political will to address the root causes of migration. Rather, it seeks to attack those who facilitate migration.
“The country’s economic situation has been in a clear deterioration, especially right now in the pandemic, with many [parents] left without formal work and without informal work,” Saadeh says. “[Children] have had to be incorporated into the workforce to support families. It is an issue that we believe is increasing.”
Child labor in Guatemala is the result of rampant poverty and inequalities across the Central American country. Prior to the pandemic, Guatemala’s poverty rate hovered around 59.3 percent, according to 2015 data. But poverty is most prevalent in rural Indigenous communities, with people earning 25 quetzales (equivalent to 3.23 USD) per day in agricultural work, or even less.
Jeff Abbott
A young boy picks coffee on a finca near Antigua Guatemala in December 2012.
“It is an extremely grave situation,” Patricia Cabrera, who works with the Defender of the Rights of Children and Adolescents within Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s office, tells The Progressive. Discrimination and structural inequalities force thousands of children to find work across Guatemala.
Children—particularly Indigenous children—who are forced to work often find extremely exploitative conditions in picking coffee, bananas, or corn, or in construction. Few children are paid the official minimum wage.
This situation is especially bad for Indigenous girls, who are often forced to make tortillas across the country, according to a December 2021 report by the Associated Press. Many Indigenous girls are forced into sexual industries or trafficked within and out of the country.
Indeed, the Guatemalan economy in part relies on the work of children. According to the United Nation’s International Labor Organization, in 2002 at least 20 percent of the Guatemalan economy, especially the agricultural export sector, relied on child labor. And as poverty has increased, both Saadeh and Cabrera state the the situation has worsened.
“Children contributed 20 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product,” Saadeh says. “In certain economic sectors they prefer to hire a child because they do not pay all the labor benefits. They do not care that the child does not go to school. It is cheap labor.”
The Guatemalan state has continually maintained that it is dedicated to fighting child labor. In February 2021, the administration of President Alejandro Giammattei reiterated that it was dedicated to eradicating child labor, but no concrete actions have been undertaken.
“The government does not take care of our children,” Cabrera says. “Guatemalan society is being constituted with indifference towards our population.”
The Guatemalan General Labor Inspectorate has taken steps to combat child labor. According to a report from the United States Department of Labor, the Guatemalan labor monitoring group carried out more than 400 inspections in 2020, finding fourteen children working. But inspections are not enough when sectors rely on the labor of children.
Jeff Abbott
A young girl picks coffee on a finca near Antigua Guatemala in December 2012.
Subsequent Guatemalan governments, and Guatemalan society as a whole, have maintained a libertarian analysis that places the blame for poverty squarely on those who suffer. Inequalities and the status quo remain unchanged.
“Governments have a route for the eradication of child labor, but child labor cannot be eradicated if poverty is not addressed,” Saadeh says. “All these authorities take a photo during the campaign period with the [children], but when they have to demonstrate with actions, with resources, their intention to address problems and to close gaps in their recognition of [children’s] rights [all disappear].”
Like Robelson, young people might first migrate from their home villages to elsewhere in the country to find work. But all too often, this internal migration leads directly to migration abroad to find work to support their families due to the poor pay and exploitative working conditions within Guatemala.
“Here in Guatemala, there is internal migration,” Saadeh says. “An internal mobilization of children from the highlands to work on the coast with their families.”
On January 28, Guatemalan National Civilian Police and the Guatemalan Public Prosecutor’s office, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, began arresting members of the “coyote” network in Comitancillo who Robelson’s family and others had paid to bring them to the United States.
But those who benefit from child labor are not affected by this type of enforcement.
“Whoever is responsible for children working in labor exploitation are made invisible,” Saadeh says. “They also hide or do a job of concealing the real one, the person who is truly acting incorrectly with the children and working the children and adolescents. It is a concept where the emphasis is placed on the subject. The subject is the child.”