Tag Archives: Guatemala

Guatemalan McMansions built with remittances

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There may be McMansions built in Guatemala with remittance funds but they require a lot of resources:

The paradoxical strength of Guatemalan migrants’ transnational dreams is nowhere more evident than in the clash between these McMansions — often decorated in red, white and blue — and below-subsistence everyday life in largely indigenous areas like Cabricán…

The remittances they send have increased nearly sevenfold since 2001, according to the International Organization for Migration. The money is projected to reach a record $5.9 billion this year, according to the Banco de Guatemala – over 10 percent of the country’s GDP…

Worse, many experts argue that big houses — unattainable with quetzales, the Guatemalan currency — are risky investments for remittance dollars, too, especially since most migrants already used what little assets they have — land and their existing homes — as collateral for the large loans necessary to pay smugglers’ fees.

A home like the one built from the money sent by the Rojas children’s in San Antonio costs around 500,000 quetzales ($64,000) to build there.

Critics of McMansions might note that such homes in Guatemala reflect the illusory nature of all McMansions: lots of space and an impressive facade but difficult to sustain in the long run with what they cost to build and maintain (and how that money might be better spent elsewhere) and their dubious quality. The Guatemalan McMansions illustrate the downsides of globalization where cultural tastes and spending habits (big homes, lots of features) may cross borders but not all the potential consumers are able to realistically purchase the goods they see.

At the same time, given the cheaper costs for such homes in Guatemala, how long before we see HGTV featuring American retirees looking at McMansion neighborhoods in Guatemala as they try to escape higher costs in the US but still want the private home of the American Dream?

Gated crime-free “private city” under construction in Guatemala

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A new gated community under construction in Guatemala is upfront about being exclusive and crime-free:

Guatemalan developers are building a nearly independent city for the wealthy on the outskirts of a capital marred by crime and snarled by traffic. At its heart is the 34-acre (14-hectare) Paseo Cayala, with apartments, parks, high-end boutiques, church, nightclubs, and restaurants, all within a ring of white stucco walls.

The builders of Paseo Cayala say it is a livable, walkable development that offers housing for Guatemalans of a variety of incomes, though so far the cheapest apartments cost about 70 times the average Guatemalan’s yearly wage. It’s bordered by even costlier subdivisions begun earlier. Eventually, the Cayala Management Group hopes to expand the project into “Cayala City,” spreading across 870 acres (352 hectares), an area a little larger than New York’s Central Park .

Cayala’s backers promote it as a safe haven in a troubled country, one with an unusual degree of autonomy from the chaotic capital. It also embraces a philosophy that advocates a return to a traditional concept of a city, with compact, agreeable spaces where homes and shops are intermixed.

Detractors, however, say it is a blow to hopes of saving the real traditional heart of Guatemala City by drawing the well-off back into the urban center to participate in the economic and social life of a city struggling with poverty and high levels of crime and violence…

Pedro Pablo Godoy, one of the 25 architects who worked on Paseo Cayala, said it is the first project in Guatemala that adheres to New Urbanism, a movement that promotes the creation of walkable neighborhoods with a range of housing types and commerce.

Sounds like a fairly typical gated community that may simply be unusually frank about the reasons it is built and why wealthy residents would want to live there: to avoid the problems of society. I imagine some New Urbanists would not anything to do with such a project that is hardly about mixed-income development or being integrated into the fabric of normal society.

While we could focus on the exclusiveness of this new development, it would also be interesting to study whether and how a community forms in such a setting. It sounds like the developers expect some sort of streetlife, partly due to the architecture and design as well as a younger generation they are hoping to attract that want a lively urban setting. Will this actually occur? Will the perceived safety lead to more vulnerable social interactions? If so, what will this community end up looking look?

This also is reminiscent of plans to build several cities in Honduras that would have their own government and oversight.

More details of unethical US medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s

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Research methods courses tend to cover the same classic examples of unethical studies. With more details emerging from a government panel, the US medical experiments undertaken in Guatemala during the 1940s could join this list.

From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research — paid for by the U.S. government — that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases…

The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts. It was hidden for decades but came to light last year, after a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments…

During that time, other researchers were also using people as human guinea pigs, in some cases infecting them with illnesses. Studies weren’t as regulated then, and the planning-on-the-fly feel of Cutler’s work was not unique, some experts have noted.

But panel members concluded that the Guatemala research was bad even by the standards of the time. They compared the work to a 1943 experiment by Cutler and others in which prison inmates were infected with gonorrhea in Terre Haute, Ind. The inmates were volunteers who were told what was involved in the study and gave their consent. The Guatemalan participants — or many of them — received no such explanations and did not give informed consent, the commission said.

Ugh – a study that gives both researchers and Americans a bad name. It is also a good reminder of why we need IRBs.

While the article suggests President Obama apologized to the Guatemalan president, is anything else going to be done to try to make up for this? I also wonder how this is viewed in Central America: yet more details about the intrusiveness of Americans over the last century?

(See my original post on this here.)

Another reason for IRBs and ethical guidelines for research

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There is a body of known research from around the mid 20th century that led to the formation of ethical guidelines for research and the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Here is another study in the news that shows why these guidelines are necessary:

The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.

In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.

“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

A researcher discovered this case while doing research that followed up on the Tuskegee experiments of the 1960s.