Guatemala In Context: The New Yorker: Rodrigo Rosenberg

To get a sense of the Big Picture in Guatemala, read last week's (4/4/11) excellent New Yorker article by David Grann: "A MURDER FORETOLD: Unravelling the Ultimate Political Conspiracy." It provides a window onto the 2009 assassination of Rodrigo Rosenberg, "a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala...with master's degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University." As Grann describes Rosenberg,"Rosenberg had been born into Guatemala’s oligarchy—a term that still applies to the semi-feudal Central American nation, where more than half of its fourteen million people, many of them Mayan, live in severe poverty.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_grann#ixzz1IfnUpOEC

Since the image illustrating the article is intense, I have tried to balance it metaphorically with my photos. First I show a picture of the good life in Guatemala (flowers in a nice hotel) then we have a shot of a poster for "Plataforma Agraria" taken up in one of the indigenous homes high in the mountains. Plataforma Agraria is their national group dedicated to land reform and environmental protection. This issue is central to the extreme imbalance of wealth distribution in Guatemala. We, in the States, are not that askew yet, but we are quickly moving in that direction. Paul Krugman, among other economists, often addresses this reality more expertly than I, in his New York Times blog: "The Conscience of a Liberal."