What do Guatemalans do to their pineapples to make them SOOOOO tasty? It´s just like - gotta LOVE da pineapple. But jokes aside. Live in Guatemala is good. Many volunteers don´t really want to leave after the year. Why go back to a stressy, cold, hectic life in the global North if Guatemala´s cheap treats are tempting you to stay.

Last weekend we visited blue blue Lago Atitlan, surrounded by three majestic volcanoes. Eucalyptus trees were spreading their tantalizing smell in the warm breeze, papayas and bananos were gently waving and crazy punk hummingbirds spotted the sky. We stayed at a hotel, had a six-course dinner and a harp concert for 35,- Euros. What more can you possibly want?

Well, some explanations would be nice actually. For example, why are most of the hotels (including ours where a German-Austrian couple were living a seemling divine bohemian lifestyle) around the lake run by foreigners? Why are the Guatemalans living around the lake still mostly just dirt poor farmers? The documentary ¨Los Civilizadores - Alemanes en Guatemala¨ gives some answers. A number of Germans came to Guatemala in the late 19th century/early 20th century, escaping Germany's economic nightmare of the early 1920's. They came to grow coffee in Guatemala to sell it back to their homecountry. Guatemala had not been much of a coffee-producing country before. The Germans were granted huge plots of jungle land by the Guatemalan government. The native inhabitants of the land were either resettled or offered work on the plantations at very low wages. The Germans were so successful in their coffee planting endeavours that the German community continues to be a formidable presence in Guatemala to this very day. Not even the Americans have been able to replace them in their positions of economic and political power.

That was the old and ugly imperialist past of course. I cannot help noticing the parallels though when people from Europe and North America own very many of the most lucrative tourist enterprises in some of the most attractive spots in Guatemala. They of course make money mostly of tourists from Europe and North America. Just like the early Germans were making good money selling their coffee back to their homecountry. The exchange of knowledge and technology that happens when foreigners come to settle in Guatemala can be fantastically important and beneficial for the country. However, the problem begins when the economic enterprise of a foreigner receives preferential treatment over that of a native Guatemalan and that is what continues to happen to this very day. During the Civil War natives occupied the German coffee plantations demanding some of their land back. On many occasions the military moved in and massacres occurred. Not that the German owners could have necessarily prevented the massacres but neither did they try to do so.

Economically the foreigners coming to Guatemala bring benefits to the country as a whole by encouraging tourists to come to visit their well-established and maintained hotels and resorts. However, any preferential treatment of foreign economic enterprises will create political opposition and resentment by Guatemalans against the foreign influence. This might create a political drive for economic and political isolation as we are currently seeing in Venezuela to the potential detriment of the country. The owners of our hotel at Lago Atitlan hired Guatemalan staff and even paid out a monthly pension to the older people in their village. That's great, but as long as these things depend on mere individual goodwill while real or perceived political discrimination of native Guatemalans vs. foreigners continues, the situation can become very explosive.

Everyone travelling to the global South has to ask him/herself whether it is OK to be treated better just because our money is worth more or because people think we have a lot of money. Imperialism being seen as a political monster of the past does not mean that each of us would not have to face up to the contradiction between the general equality of humankind and the economic inequalities which negates that equality, just because the latter's cards are currently laid in our favour.