Guatemala's Rivers of Garbage: With thousands of tons of garbage polluting the country's waterways, community volunteers have had to take charge.

• Author: Abbott, Jeff

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.

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 Chacon, 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," Chacon 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.

"Our country is a producer of water--it is impressive," says Melany Lucia Ramirez 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, Ramirez 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.

Some regulations exist on paper, but the country lacks any legislation to protect its waterways. Many communities have long protested the lack of...