The banks of the Las Vacas River outside Guatemala City are covered in twisted plastic bags and packaging, Styrofoam plates, and other detritus.
Along a ridge overlooking the river, a dump truck unloads piles of garbage, while another drops dirt over them. The ensuing cascade of refuse and earth kicks up dust as it slides down the hill and into the river, while a nearby elderly man picks through the rubbish.
Jeff Abbott
Local people collect garbage along the banks of Lake Atitlán in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala, in 2016.
The Las Vacas River, which also carries raw sewage from Guatemala City, runs through the municipality of Chinautla, just seven miles from the capital. The area has become a clandestine dump, the result of runoff from the capital and a lack of waste management by municipal officials.
Gladis Chacón, a twenty-nine-year-old resident of Chinautla, has never seen the river when it was clear, but her mother remembers fish living in it decades ago. Now, it’s filled with waste that increases during the rainy season, when the waters rise.
“The municipality does nothing about the garbage,” Chacón tells The Progressive. “My mother says the water was crystal clear before.”
Guatemala has thirty-eight major rivers that flow to the Pacific Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico.
“The municipality does nothing about the garbage.”—Gladis Chacón
“Our country is a producer of water—it is impressive,” says Melany Lucía Ramírez Galindo, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Studies and Biodiversity at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. But, she adds, there is a problem: Almost all of it is polluted.
The pollution affects rivers, lakes, communities, and even diplomatic relations with neighboring countries, and it stems from a broken system. Experts estimate that up to 95 percent of the country’s waterways are polluted.
There is little control over the collection and disposal of garbage, and even less political will to change that. Of the country’s 340 municipalities, Ramírez Galindo says, only 189 have trash processing facilities—and only 60 percent of those are actually functioning.
“There’s no maintenance at these facilities,” she says. “By mid-2022, roughly two out of three municipalities did not have waste treatment plants in operation.”
The majority of the garbage ends up in clandestine dumps, like the one in Chinautla. The Guatemalan Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources estimates that there are nearly 10,000 clandestine dumps across the country.
The majority of the garbage ends up in clandestine dumps, like the one in Chinautla.
Some regulations exist on paper, but the country lacks any legislation to protect its waterways. Many communities have long protested the lack of a national water law, which they say results in the theft and contamination of their water.
“Proposed legislation to regulate water began in the 1950s because we do not have an established water law,” Ramírez Galindo says. “We have only one discharge and wastewater regulation.”
In 2016, thousands of small farmers, community activists, and other residents from all over the country marched to Guatemala City to protest the theft and pollution of their bodies of water. They demanded that the government respond to the crisis. Government officials ignored them.
Five years later, the administration of President Alejandro Giammattei created the Vice Ministry of Water within the Environment Ministry to manage the country’s waterways. But the office has done little to resolve the ongoing crisis, and a changing government every four years means there is little incentive for authorities to carry on political projects from previous administrations.
The problem has sparked a conflict with neighboring Honduras. The Motagua River, which is fed by the Las Vacas, flows to the Caribbean Sea along the border between the two countries. The garbage that enters the rivers flows along with them, and is often deposited on the beaches of Omoa, Honduras.
The problem has sparked a conflict with neighboring Honduras.
In 2020 alone, more than 1,400 tons of garbage were removed from the beaches of Omoa and Puerto Cortés, Honduras. The Giammattei Administration has taken steps to address the problem, working to prevent the waste from getting into the Montagua River basin. In 2022, Guatemalan authorities celebrated that in the previous year, they had blocked the flow of garbage toward the Caribbean, but Honduran officials disputed that claim. Honduran lawmakers sought to file a lawsuit against Guatemala over the matter.
Guatemala has deployed simple barriers to capture the material floating toward the largest lake near Guatemala City and the sea. These are maintained by residents paid by the government, and they help limit the amount of garbage entering the Caribbean. But they are insufficient to stem the crisis.
Current efforts largely have relied on international nongovernmental organizations like Ocean Cleanup and 4ocean, which have erected systems to strain rivers like the Motagua to intercept the garbage. But those efforts aren’t enough, either.
“It really is the responsibility of Guatemala, and it is true that we are the ones affecting Honduras,” Ramírez Galindo says. “These efforts are focusing on the Motagua River when they should focus on its tributaries.”
Faced with the widespread contamination of lakes and rivers, some communities have taken the step of banning plastic packaging and single-use items. In 2019, the administration of then President Jimmy Morales announced a ban on single-use plastic items that was set to begin in 2021. But it was repealed by Giammattei’s administration before it came into force.
Elsewhere in the country, residents have taken it upon themselves to clean up. Once a month, members of the Indigenous Tz’utujil community of San Pedro la Laguna gather along the banks of Lake Atitlán to painstakingly collect garbage that has washed up along the shore. The lake sits in the majestic western highlands of Guatemala. For decades, tourists have traveled to gaze upon Lake Atitlan, which was formed in a volcanic caldera centuries ago.
Jeff Abbott
A sign in San Pedro la Laguna promotes the plastic ban in 2019.
San Pedro la Laguna has long been at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment. It was the first municipality to ban the use of single-use plastic products and Styrofoam in 2016.
But the lack of controls over the disposal of garbage elsewhere around the lake has led to the establishment of illegal dumping sites. When it rains or if there are heavy winds, the garbage is swept into the lake, where it litters the same shores that are a primary draw for tourists. An estimated 3,000 tons of garbage enter the lake each rainy season.
Added to this, many do not properly dispose of their waste. “A lot of people don’t have a conscience, and they throw the garbage into the water,” Isabel Cumatz, a resident of San Pedro la Laguna who has joined the efforts to clean the shores of the lake each month, tells The Progressive. “And they don’t do their part; they don’t collaborate or participate [in cleaning the lake]. We don’t want to see our lake dirty.” She adds, “We are the caretakers of our beautiful lake, the most beautiful lake in the world.”
For the last decade, a group of women from San Pedro la Laguna associated with the organization Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ have worked to clean up the lake’s shores in collaboration with groups of fishermen and other residents. Each month, they clean up thirteen or fourteen areas of the town.
Jeff Abbott
Salvador Quiacain, a community elder in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala, poses with a rake in an alleyway near Lake Atitlán in February 2023.
“For several years, this group of women has been interested in the appearance and quality of the water. As a collective, we are accompanying them,” Salvador Quiacain, a respected elder in the Tz’utujil community, tells The Progressive. “We depend on this lake.”
In October 2022, members of the Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ collective and other residents of San Pedro la Laguna traveled to Guatemala City, bringing the garbage they had collected with them. They protested at the offices of the Guatemalan Chamber of Industry by depositing the garbage there. The chamber’s members have long resisted efforts to reduce waste and ban single-use plastic, and the activists wanted to show them what they live with.
As communities across Guatemala seek to clean their waterways, Chinautla remains abandoned. There are no efforts to clean the river there. Political candidates continue to campaign on cleaning up the pollution, but progress is elusive. The 2023 elections have been no different, with at least one mayoral candidate promising to clean things up.
“All the candidates for mayor have promised to do something,” another young woman from Chinautla told The Progressive. “But they never do.”