As the world marks the fifty-third Earth Day, many Indigenous communities have mobilized to clean up and raise awareness of the contamination of the waterways across the isthmus of Central America. While Guatemala faces the rampant contamination of rivers and lakes, residents of the Indigenous Tz’utujil municipality of San Pedro la Laguna in the western highlands are doing what they can to combat the pollution of their local lake.
Once a month, between thirteen and fourteen small groups of about ten people each gather in San Pedro la Laguna by Lake Atitlán, a popular tourist destination a little more than 100 miles from Guatemala City. The lake-cleaners are mostly local women, their families, and members of the local fishermen’s association, who have all participated in clean-up efforts for nearly fifteen years, following the emergence of cyanobacteria in the lake in 2009.
“We don’t get anything in return,” Magdalena González, a forty-year-old resident of San Pedro la Laguna and member of the women’s organization that gathers each month to clean the shores of the lake, tells The Progressive. “But nevertheless we come here with all our hearts to clean because it is what we want. Our goal is that we want to rescue the lake, so that it is clean.”
The local non-governmental organization Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ is one of the primary organizers in these efforts. But others have joined in the efforts to clean up the garbage that appears on the beaches during the rainy season, or as a result of heavy winds that come from across the lake.
Not all the waste that washes ashore originates in the Indigenous municipality. Rather, much of the garbage often comes from the numerous clandestine dumps that encircle the lake and that receive waste from the local tourism industry.
Much of the garbage often comes from the numerous clandestine dumps that encircle the lake and that receive waste from the local tourism industry.
It is estimated that as much as 3,000 tons of garbage enters the lake during the rainy season, which lasts from May to November of each year. The pollution by both liquid waste and trash affects the residents, especially those who do not have access to running water in their homes.
The garbage that is collected by local activists in San Pedro la Laguna is properly disposed of in the waste management plant, which sits just outside of the municipality. The facility was opened in 2016, shortly after San Pedro la Laguna issued one of the first bans in the country on the use of plastic bags and other single-use products, such as styrofoam plates.
But these facilities are rare in Guatemala.
Only 189 of Guatemala’s 340 municipalities have built them, in spite of legislation passed in 2018 that requires their construction. But as Melany Lucia Ramírez Galindo, an investigator with the Center for Environmental Studies and Biodiversity at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, tells The Progressive, only 60 percent of the existing facilities are functioning.
“They do not give them the corresponding maintenance,” she explains. “By mid-2022, roughly two out of three municipalities did not have treatment plants in operation.”
In recent years, communities have taken it upon themselves to work to protect their environment. San Pedro la Laguna issued a municipal ban on disposables in 2016.
Since San Pedro la Laguna banned plastic products, at least eighteen other municipalities have independently followed suit in outlawing products like styrofoam plates or single-use utensils, as well as plastic bags. In 2019, the government of President Jimmy Morales also announced a national ban, but it was never implemented.
Mexico City too has implemented bans on the use of single use products and plastics, though its plans have not been fully realized. Honduran officials have also suggested they will pursue a ban as well.
The banning of the use of plastic and styrofoam products was met by quick resistance and protest from the Guatemalan Industrial Chamber of Commerce. San Pedro’s municipal ban was challenged in the courts, but the country’s constitutional court ruled that the local ban was constitutional, opening the door for the subsequent bans in other local communities.
Along with this awareness has come an explosion in creativity by Indigenous communities to find alternatives to the use of plastic and styrofoam products. These alternatives have included street food vendors using banana leaves as plates and bowls for everything from french fries to cake.
Residents of San Pedro la Laguna say the bans faced challenges with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which emergency measures undermined efforts to limit use of plastic bags and other single-use items in the community.
But residents point out that there has been an overall decrease in use of these products as a result of the ban.
“[The ban] has reduced [the use of plastics],” González says. “But I still think it is a very difficult task for all of us.”
She adds, “Maybe we will be the example for others, other towns, other departments, so that we can reuse the bags or put the garbage in its proper place when it is necessary for us to use [single-use items].”