The tenacious young boys of El Remolino, a shantytown bordering the dump, bully their way to the top to get first pick of the best garbage, stuffing what they find in their shirts.

Photo by
Jason Henry

STORY by ERIK MAZA

Teculután is a town of 10,000 in the Northeastern region of Guatemala, an area more widely known around the world as the birthplace of Zacapa rum.

Small, even for the area’s standards, the town is overlooked by the sheltering penumbra of the Sierra de las Minas mountains: the colorful adobe houses of the town center, the mud huts on the countryside, tomato pickers working for a nickel a pound, drug traffickers in their SUVs, and even, the town’s landfill.

The name, derived from the Nahuatl word for owl, tecolote, literally means land of owls.

Although it is this warm, burnt-sienna land that has made Teculután an agricultural hotbed of tomato and watermelon plantation, it’s the landfill that has given it notoriety.

The landfill of Teculután is a hilly cesspool of organic waste, cow shit, and ashes. Clouds of smoke from the burning trash are so thick that it’s difficult to make the Sierra, the highest mountains in the region. The heat is such that flies will get stuck to sweat. If there was soil here once, it is no longer visible – only layers of solid waste, flattened by countless garbage trucks and little feet. The village of Los Bordos is adjacent to the landfill, on the eastern side. The village of El Remolino is on the western side.

In the north, there’s a swampy animal cemetery, if a place scattered with piles of cow bones can still be called a cemetery. If it’s true that hell is an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, the landfill of Teculután is Satan’s playground.

Four garbage trucks make twice-daily pilgrimages to the landfill, once in the morning, and then in the afternoon. They pass Luis Hernandez’s elementary school, where his classmates will sometimes run after them and climb on top. They drive through Los Bordos, alarming the chickens off the pockmarked mud road until they reach the vertiginous 50-foot precipice that marks the drop-off point into the landfill.

When they hear the trucks approaching, mobs of ravenous children race to the precipice, ready to dig through tons of tree cuttings, food, and medical supplies in search of recyclable material to sell as scraps for less than half a dollar a pound.

For every sack of scraps they sell, they could get one dollar, or 10 Quetzales. Three sacks, and they could buy a $3-bucket of chicken at Pollo Campero.

Cut-throat dumpster-diving

October 1 began inauspiciously.

Luis took his morning breakfast – black coffee, no sugar – with his mother, sitting on the bed he shares with two younger siblings, beneath posters of Jean Claude Van Damme and the Virgin Mary.

The day before, the third-grader picked 90 pounds of tomatoes with his mother for a nickel a pound. Today his goal was to collect one burlap sack of recyclable scraps from the landfill.

The faces of children that work take on a special hardness, like that of someone who has become prematurely resigned to the cruel and quiet passing of time. Luis learned to trust routine: school, maybe lunch, landfill.

He couldn’t have expected that the day would end with little more than blood and chicken guts.

It was “International Day of the Child,” but Silvia Escobar, his second grade teacher, had told her classroom that there would be no celebration as there surely would be in other parts of the world. The Guatemalan Department of Education had forgotten to pay the lunch bill.

“Nuestro Diario” celebrated the day of the child with equal brio. The front page that day deadpanned: Six Massacred. Man kills 6 teens playing cards. Buried in page 20 was a spread as incongruous as it was macabre: pictures of smiling Guatemalan children alongside statistics about youth in the country: There are 5.5M Guatemalans under the age of 15. Forty-nine percent of them suffer from chronic malnutrition. 12 percent of them work. Forty-four out of one thousand Guatemalan children die before turning five.

In the middle of the one-room elementary school in Los Bordos, Luis was a man apart: Alone, like a room with no chairs. He looked more like a pallbearer than a 12-year-old boy.

Escobar said Luis has told her that he won't come to school next year. He has too many responsibilities at home already, and thinks it would be more helpful to his mother if he worked. He might be better off, she said. “The sixth grade in Guatemala is worthless. You can't get a job with it anymore. Now they're even asking for university degrees.”

The truth is that when the children are at school, they're not thinking about multiplication tables. Even when they're making a kite, they're thinking – ‘what will I have to do after school today?’

There’s a saying in Guatemala – there’s no culture on an empty stomach. These children wake up, have coffee and bread, and they’re faced with a cruel but lately ordinary question: school, or work? The children of El Remolino chose the latter long ago.

With business booming, fights erupt

Guatemalans have been scavenging landfills since at least 1976, when a combination of earthquakes, civil war and massive unemployment sent many to landfills in search of food and income.

In the past 10 years, with a booming commodities market, the business of selling scraps has become lucrative, said Martha Herrmannsdorfer De Zaid, a professor at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala who studies the phenomenon of the scavengers, or, as they’re called here, guajeros.

Selling recyclables was so lucrative, in fact, that the theft of telephone copper wire skyrocketed in the last year, affecting more than 117,000 landline users, according to newspaper Prensa Libre.

The same newspaper reported that the Guatemalan government bought $19.4 million in metal scraps in 2008.

Meanwhile, global food prices increased an average of 43 percent this past year, according to the USAid. The World Bank estimated that the doubling of food prices during the past three years could potentially push 100 million people throughout the world into extreme poverty.

The combined effect of these two factors, along with an increase in unemployment (232,614 Guatemalans in April, according to Prensa Libre, droughts affecting the agricultural sector, the area’s bread and butter, have led more people to the landfill of Teculután as a source of income.

In fact, by October the landfill had become the main source of employment for the villages adjoining the landfill, Los Bordos and El Remolino, leading to territorial fights between the two towns, pitting family members against each other, and children to fight off adult scavengers. El Remolino is more dependent on the landfill because, unlike Los Bordos, it is isolated from the main town of Teculután.

Being closer to the landfill gives them an advantage over the people of Los Bordos. Fernando Oracio, the state-employed misanthrope charged with burning the trash spread out in this two-acre panopticon, said they arrive to claim spots even before he gets there at 7 a.m. He said the scavengers are as responsible as he is, if not more so, for disposing of the trash that comes from Teculután.

“It’s a tough job,” he said. “I’m poor, but there are some people poorer than me.”

As expected of boys who have Jean Claude Van Damme posters in their rooms, Luis has been bullied to the sidelines. Maria Sushite, Luis’ mother, said the landfill has become too competitive and too dangerous over the last year.

“There are too many tawdry people, gentilla” she said. “There’s one old woman who’s always spoiling for a fight. And she says she’s an evangelist!”

Even though he had been coming here for almost four years, Luis still didn’t know if it was worse under the truck, or on top of it, or hanging off one of the truck’s loose ropes like the punks from El Remolino. Unlike his classmate Ingrid, at least he wasn’t at the bottom of the precipice, the hottest and most physically dangerous spot in the entire landfill.

The competition was ferocious anywhere he looked. He was stuck behind a vicious mob of toddlers, all uniformly wearing Crocs of many colors, the gifts of Americans missionaries from years before.

The children surrounded the garbage truck on both sides and took to the falling garbage bags like hyenas to an antelope. Pedro Alvarez, the oldest of the El Remolino gang and certainly the toughest, climbed on top of the truck when it first entered the landfill. He threw the bags to his pals, who punctured them with sturdy wire hooks until the insides spilled out.

The El Remolino punks did this with a speed that surprised even the garbage truck drivers, stopping only when they see cans, bottles or toys. Sometimes, they found a rare delicacy beneath the rubble: a piñata with actual candy inside, sometimes still wrapped candy. Pedro and his gang had gotten so quick that the garbage men made a habit of relaxing under the scalding sun.

They uncorked a beer, let the kids do their jobs, and listened to station 90.3 FM, the Sultan of Zacapa, where Vicente Fernandez’ La Despedida played. El Remolino is predominantly inhabited by single women who, after having their fifth or seventh child, are abandoned by their husbands. They send their children to the landfill at the crack of dawn. Pedro, the 12-year-old from El Remolino, was known to unload a one-ton truck in less than a half hour.

Countryside ignored by non-profits, government

There have been few studies on the scope and health impact of the scavenging phenomenon, De Zaid said. A 1999 study conducted in the notorious landfills of Guatemala City, where there are more than 2,000 landfill guajeros, concluded that 60 percent of them suffered from chronic anemia and parasites. Forty percent suffer from respiratory, digestive, and skin and eye conditions.

This much is known: the desperation in this area is such that parents overlook the obvious health hazards for the money.

Pedro’s mother, Narilda Alvarez, told him to choose between school, picking tomatoes or going to the landfill.

“I need the help,” she said.

Pedro had seen his father leave when his mother had her fifth child. “They see us with too many patojos, and they disappear,” his mother said then. After that, he resolved to quit the second grade and work full time, at the tobacco fields during its season and at the landfill off season. “That’s his lot in life,” she said. When he works at the landfill he brings 50Q a week from what he sells in scraps.

“Enough to get by,” his mother said.

While De Zaid collaborates with Safe Passage, a Guatemala city non-profit that provides healthcare for about 500 child scavengers that work in the city’s dumps, she said such non-profits are rare in rural Guatemala, assuring a path to underdevelopment and malnutrition for children here.

There is one non-profit in Teculután. Since 2007, Christian-based Hope of Life has been serving warm meals three times a week in an abandoned hangar adjacent to the landfill to an ever-growing number of children and adults from El Remolino and Los Bordos.

Some 600 meals are handed out in a typical day. Irma Rivera, who organizes the food drive, said the two hundred pounds of chicken and one hundred pounds of rice normally disappear in under an hour. But the rising cost of food means that they’re serving less food to more people, she said.

That October 1, Luis walked straight from school to the abandoned hangar, where an interminable line of people formed even before the food had arrived.

Some of them, especially those from El Remolino hadn’t gone to school at all. This was probably the only break they would get from digging through trash.

The children waited in a separate row from the adults, lined back-to-back in colorful crocs, their dirty faces indistinguishable from one another.

As the smoke from the burning trash in the landfill mixed uneasily with the aroma emanating from the tubs of chicken soup, Luis impatiently held his glass and bowl among a crowd of no less than 250 toddlers and adolescents all chanting, “pollo! Pollo! Pollo!”

“The government doesn’t help here. It only makes things worse. The lands haven’t produced much,” said Sushite, Luis’ mother. “Although it hurts to see him working in trash, it helps to hold on, aguantar.” She said she works at the watermelon and tomato plants but those jobs are only seasonal.

The sub-prime credit crisis that had spiraled into a full-out meltdown by that October 1 in the United States, only raised the stakes higher for the scavengers of Teculután. By October the worldwide demand for commodities begun to finally decline after its sixth boom year, with metals like aluminum, copper and nickel declining in price by a third or more, according to the New York Times.

This was good news for American consumers, but bad news for people whose livelihood depended on selling aluminum scraps. Not only were there less soda cans and recyclables to pick up because of the extra competition, but in October, guajeros here started to get less money for what little they collected. “I can’t find a pot to pee on,” said Pedro.

Choveto Morales, who buys the most scraps from the scavengers, pays 3Q per pound of scraps. He sells those scraps to a recycling plant in Escuintla, which then resells them to various outlets, among them Pepsi Cola bottling plants that melt them into soda cans. In late September, the Esquintla recycling plant paid him 80Q for 100 pounds, but this week the price dropped to 40Q, or almost $5.

“I can’t figure out why the price is so low since the material is so expensive,” he said. “It’s actually embarrassing to come here and give them so little money. But you know why I do it? Because if I help them out, God will help me out. Another guy just gave them 20Q for 100 pounds of scraps.”

The sun is setting.

Zacapa is one of the hottest provinces in Guatemala, with temperatures sometimes rising to 93 degrees Fahrenheit. In the afternoons, the landfill of Teculután is steaming. At the bottom of the landfill, where Oracio has set fire to several piles of logs and trash, and one huge pile of what appear to be beer bottle labels, the temperature is melting the cow shit scattered everywhere. Even the flies have left this place. Above, they’re swarming the garbage trucks. The children beneath the trucks, pulling the garbage bags closer, don’t seem to mind.

Luis lunges at the garbage bags with determination. It’s almost the end of the day and his own sack is still empty, save for four soda cans, a can of air freshener and a box of paper clips.

He feels a hit to the abdomen.

A crotchety grandmother, Pastoral Alvarez, punched him in his stomach with her elbow and shoved him aside. As he watches the gang from El Remolino empty what is probably the last garbage truck of the day, Luis suspects he will go home empty-handed again, with only the scar on his hand to prove his presence at the dump.

Ingrid is at the bottom of the landfill, under the threatening sky, surrounded by brimstone and fire. As often happens in moments of anticipation, her mind drifts. She is having a private moment. The trucks are pulling up above her, but they feel distant. Her front teeth are coming in, those sharp ones at the front. She moves her tongue upwards to the farthest reaches of her jaw, feeling every tooth, every crevice. The falling ashes warp her silhouette, so that from a distance she takes on a misshapen form, like a tear in the landscape.

The garbage men above throw bags over the edge of the truck, and the punks of El Remolino, in charge of the good spots beneath the truck, pull at them with sturdy wire hooks. Being at the bottom of the landfill is an act of resignation. Nothing of value is ever found here. This is where the smoke is thickest, and where the heaps of burning trash are not just palpable, but menacing. Junk, as usual. Ingrid wonders, when will the molars come in?

The sky had taken an unpleasant pallor minutes earlier. The sun is setting. Ingrid turns her face to the mountains and notices a truck driving towards the farthest part of the landfill.

The two other girls next to her notice the truck as well. Maybe the women at the top saw it too. The truck could be belong to the man who buys the scraps. The truck might come from one of the factories. It could have some aluminum scraps.

She runs.

Ingrid whispers the word painted on the side of the truck – Areca. Already the old woman - Pastoral - has set up a mat of cardboard boxes next to the truck. Her expression reads: my property.

“Spread them out more,” she tells a child.

Blue plastic boxes start coming down the back of the truck, filled to the rim with what looked like wet fetuses, arms akimbo, but no heads. Whole chicken. Areca, one of Guatemala’s three chicken distributors, with clients like McDonalds, dumps their spoiled chicken here. The driver - Pablo Enrique Romero - comes here every two weeks or so to dump chicken that has spoiled.

“The power failures we have make it go bad,” he explains. The old woman gets her boxes directly from the driver, turns them over on her mat, and then hands the box to the driver again. She is soon overcome.

Ingrid and the children and women who ran from the top of the landfill, a not so close distance of about 80 feet, now crowd the back of the truck, hands up in the air, like they are asking for communion or a blessing. Instead of handing the boxes to Pastoral, the driver starts throwing them over the crowd.

“You have to give me the boxes back!” Romero says to the mothers, who stand to the side, their eyes confusedly jutting back and forth between child and chicken. “They never let me dump them,” he says.

The children dump out the sack of scraps on a hideout of their own and fill up the sacks again, this time with whole chicken.

“They have to choose,” Romero explains, “because not all the chicken is good. But they do that later, at home. “Nothing happens to them. They cook them real well.”

Some children walk away with five or seven, or even ten, whole chickens in their sacks. It is almost 6 p.m. They won’t be collecting any more cans today. Ingrid has stayed behind the whole time.

“I don’t take this,” she says. “I only take the ones that come frozen.” Luis watches the spectacle from a mound facing the chicken truck. He only has one question on his mind: should he risk getting some for himself?

Vultures circle the truck above, giving a minatory shade to the scene.

Sunset.

His eyes linger on boys that only minutes earlier he had considered adversaries. They're ramming chicken bits, stillborn-like, into dirty burlap sacks.

He couldn't.

“They’re eating more flies than food.”