Greetings from Guatemala City, where I am currently finishing up close to a month´s worth of research for the book. The city itself is worth some investigation despite the dire warnings of the guidebooks and the almost complete absence of any foreign tourists. The largest, most cosmopolitan city in Central America, it´s sprawling, chaotic, often filthy but burning with energy and not without a few charms. Like my favourite deep-fried taco stall on Avenida 6 in Zona 1. Or the porky Argentinian man with the hot pot of paella in the front door to his grill house near my hotel… and the strange, freqeunt spectacle of clowns interacting with sooty traffic.

Briefly, there are three stories that drew me to Guatemala and provide the kind of case studies/personal stories that I hope are at the heart of broken atlas. I spent about a week in the town of El Estor, on Lake Izabal, a long day’s two-bus journey northeast of the capital. Just outside of El Estor, Vancouver-based Skye Resources is at work reopening an old Inco nickel mine that had been mothballed back in the ’80s. With the fast-rising demand in China for stainless steel (of which nickel is a key ingredient) driving nickel prices to near record highs, Skye, a junior mining company, acquired the property from Inco a couple years ago.

Last fall, one week before the company was to release its feasibility study to investors, five pockets of land within Skye’s territory were occupied by Q’eqchi Mayan families. This type of land invasion by indigenous communities is not unique to El Estor; it’s estimated there are about 300 playing themselves out across Guatemala right now. This is a country where crime and corruption is endemic, and many of the presidential candidates make security their first priority; and yet, unequivocally, land issues have always been the most fundamental and defining.

The Q’eqchi question Skye’s ownership, going back to the circumstances under which Inco first acquired it in the 1960s from the country’s then military dictatorship. They question the scope of Skye’s claim. And, further, they claim they were not consulted about Skye’s proposed use of the land as is required by international law.

This past January police and army marched in and evicted the five communities; two have since returned. The story of the eviction made some waves on the internet thanks to a nine-minute video by Montrealer Stephen Schnoor. (With over 35,000 hits and counting this is a nifty sub-story about 21st century activism in the net-age.) For now there’s an uneasy peace in the hills outside El Estor as the company quietly undertakes backdoor negotiations with the remaining communities. Something it originally claimed it would not do while anyone remained on their land.

By my own unofficial estimate, I’d say support for the mine in the town and surrounding area is split pretty evenly. The opposition to it is itself divided between the Q’eqchi, the environmentalists, and some local businessman who are not so much against it as concerned that the benefits of the mine reach the people. Each one has a different priority and they are in some cases, if not antogonistic, downright dismissive of one another.

That’s the intro. It’s the collision of global and local forces here that interests me, with a hefty dose of small town politics and characters to boot. It’s an evolving story, so I may end up returning to see how it plays out. It’s complex, multi-hued, and it slams past with present… providing a perfect mini-drama within the broader scope of the book.

Plus I kinda fell in love with El Estor, despite the bone melting heat (high 30s, humid, all the freaking time). I’ve checked out a few of the familiar-to-travellers spots in Guatemala: Antigua, Livingston (way over-rated!), Flores/Tikal. But the two places I’ve dug the most and spent the longest? El Estor and Guate City. Many will say this is mad.

Okay, that was a lengthier than promised explanation. So now I will be brief. In Guate City I followed up the two other tangents. First, the dramatic rise in evangelical Christianity around the world, along with the surge in Islam, is proving wrong one of the first lessons I was taught in Sociology of Religion 101 almost 20 years ago: that modernity and religion are incompatible. It has become clear, that with the exception of western Europe, the opposite has become the case. And Guatemala is a great place to study the phenomenon as it is now the least Catholic country in Central and South America. Some studies estimate that somewhere between 30-40% of Guatemalans identify themselves as evangelical or pentacostal. More tellingly, a large number of the country’s Catholics describe themselves as “charasmatics,” which is basically pentacostal with mass, and actual participation numbers (eg. church-going) are way higher among the protestants.

There are many aspects to the story. How and why pentacostalism took root here. Its surprising diversity. And how it has interacted with the political sphere. When I travel to Ghana and Nigeria later in the year I hope to investigate the explosion of evangelical churches there, as well.

And last, the growing urban poor of our third world metropolitan centres. I spent some time learning about a program called Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) which helps the children of families who work as pickers or recyclers at the municipal dump. Many of the children themselves used to work at the dump, picking out shards of scrap metal, tin, plastic, whatever, for resale to middle-men, until a fire blazed through the dump a couple years ago and new regulations ensured children wouldn’t be allowed in. Not surprisingly a large shanty town sits facing the dump, home to the people who depend upon for it for their livelihood.

I’ll try to develop these storylines a little further in the coming days… with photos.