Complete Thesis_double spaced abstract.pdf

that significant portions of the unemployed and landless peasants from other regions throughout
Guatemala could be (forcibly) coerced into resettling in the northern Petén region. Peasants who
did choose to relocate to the Petén were faced with harsh conditions; the land not suitable for
farming, small plots of land made subsistence farming extremely difficult, and there were
widespread labor abuses by the livestock owners who employed peasants in the area. By 1978
the military had begun forcibly relocating thousands of peasants to the Ixcán, the northern most
area in the Petén.
Rising inequality and poverty made improving the social conditions in Guatemala during
the 1970s and 1980s extremely difficult. Poverty in Guatemala had reached massive proportions
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Approximately 87% of the population lived below the poverty
line during this period and the Gini Index for Guatemala was 85.05 in 1979 the highest inequality
in Central America. The group most likely to be living in poverty was female, indigenous and
rural. Although the high incidence of poverty in Guatemala meant that both genders, all ages,
and nearly every ethnic group was affected. Poverty was especially evident in Guatemala City
where the population had nearly tripled between 1975 and 1985. Shanty towns were constructed
around the outskirts of town with people living on top of and around the garbage dumps
surrounding the city. Thousands of unemployed peasants roam the dumps in search of bottles,
cans, cardboard or metal that can be turned in for money. Poverty affects children in particular,
“eight of every ten Guatemalan children are undernourished, and infant mortality…is the highest
in the Western Hemisphere” (Perera, 1995, 25). In the urban areas the shanty towns are filled
with youth gangs and “basurero rats,” children with little education, whose parents have been
killed or who have been abandoned, or who are addicted to drugs (Perera, 1995, 25). The same
situation was replicated in the highlands, in 1984 there were approximately 120,000 children
missing one or both parents (Perera, 1995, 78).
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