A dense white smoke rises from the depths of the earth, creeping across the detritus filled flat plain and cascading into a steep sided ravine, which fills and spills over the rim and into the streets. On its slow march through the dusty earthen streets, it washes over vehicles and people, over houses and into and through open doors. It flows like a the last foam of a breaking wave creeping up the beach and splices over the walls and through the cemetery’s iron gates, found and over the monuments and gravestones. It carries an almost sweet miasma of burning plastic and dozens of other indistinguishable combustibles – unbearable within the body of its thick white mass and unpleasant and impossible to ignore far beyond, sometimes reaching the central square – the Plaza de la Republica – and the national palace less than three kilometres away as the vultures glide, to where Presidents and military dictators have sat, governed and ordered the slaughter and scorched earth of poor indigenous peoples and farmers on the Altiplano and in the mountains, in the jungles and on the flat plains of the Pacific Coast cane and the Caribbean Coast banana plantations.

The armed conflict – the National Security Doctrine war waged by the USA and it’s bourgeoisie traitor class proxy – has displaced many and created loss of life and livelihoods and generated poverty – the city shanties and a population that lives on the edge and on next to nothing in the shadow of the volcanoes, while the white ruling class bathe in Guatemala’s agricultural wealth.

Thousands of tonnes of refuse – creeping down and filling a steep sided gully – down in the depths of the gulley is not a faustian hell but green shrubs and grasses and fresh, pure water… less than quite close A damp fire smolders beneath the surface, emitting a dense shroud of smoke that rises to obscure all from view. At times, it even veils the imposing sight of the Fire and Water volcanoes to the southeast. Even the light of the mid-morning sun cedes to the choking cloud that diffuses its rays into feeble backdrop in which a shadow play of vultures glides and circles in the vast expanse of the heavens.

The air is saturated with a pervasive aroma, the sweet-smell of putrefaction and decay. It emanates from the piles of waste that have been bulldozered and tumbled down into the gully below.

Yet, deep in this desolate abyss, where one expects to encounter some Faustian underworld, nature stubbornly persists. Birds hop, twitter, and flutter between green bushes that defy their toxic surrounds and crystalline waters spring from the earth, pure and transparent, these flow for a few metres before they succumb to the rancid bleed that seeps from the heavy and poisonous mountain of trash that is the most eloquent of monuments to greed, waste, excess and deprivation of humankind.

I didn’t know a soul when I arrived in the rubbish dump in Guatemala City’s zone 3 where daily hundreds of drifters and families who live in and around the stinking and often smoking mountains of trash. All I had was a name, but no surname, of a Catholic preist from the USA who was working with the community in and around the dump in Zone 3 of the city. He was outof the country I found and wouldn’t be back for some weeks or months. Nevertheless, as I

I had a name of Guatemala City’s arrived in the dump in Guatemala City’s Zona 3 on a hot morning…

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