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reach mortgage advisers—who will
assess the value of their land—and ac-
cess small- business coaches.
This kind of financial education
works because it speaks to people
in their language, says Jorge Mario
de León, who has been consulting
since 2016 out of a branch of Mi-
coope, a savings and credit union, in
Salcajá, Quetzaltenango. Sometimes
that’s literal: the multilingual team
offers sessions in Spanish and in local
Indigenous languages like Mam and
K’iche’. But educators also use their
cultural knowledge of their commu-
nities to connect and drive their mes-
sage home.
De León has helped people set up
businesses and build homes. He also
says he has persuaded some not to mi-
grate, drawing on his own experiences
with a people trafficker 22 years ago.
“When I went to the U.S., it cost 35,000
quetzales [roughly $4,500]. Now it
costs three times that,” he says. “So I
say to people, is it worth investing that
much in the journey? Why don’t you
invest it in a business here? I was lost
in the mountains for a month. I had to
drink water from a puddle to survive.
Don’t do it.”Discussing the importance of
migration and remittances to the Gua-
temalan economy puts the national
government in an awkward position.
President Alejandro Giammattei has
vowed to crack down on people smug-
glers and reduce the exodus, in line
with U.S. goals. But at the same time,
as the Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre
has noted, remittances are a crucial
“escape valve” for millions in a coun-
try where more than half of families
live in poverty. Much of Guatemala’s
rapid economic growth over the past
decade is due to more citizens going
to the U.S. and sending money home.
“We’re talking about billions of
dollars coming into the economy that
the government is just kind of gifted
every year,” Kathryn Klaas, then an
associate at the Dialogue’s Migra-
tion, Remittances, and Development
Program, told TIME in 2021. “That
means that the urgency of creating
sources of income that are enough
for people to live on in Guatemala—
which means formalizing the econ-
omy, creating a living wage for people,
having regulations—that’s one agenda
point that the government doesn’t
have to deal with.”
The government has so far been
slow to establish formal programs
designed to capitalize on remittances.
Its current $200 million plan to
reduce undocumented migration,
though heavily focused on helping
to generate new businesses and jobs
for people in high- migration regions,
doesn’t mention the money flowing
into those areas from abroad and the
role it could play. Local development
experts are doubtful that the
plan will be more successful than
previous efforts.But officials may be waking up to
remittances’ potential. Guatemala
is undergoing a rapid period of ur-
banization, projected to take the
proportion of people living in cit-
ies from 54% now—among the low-
est in Latin America—to around 65%
in 2030, according to U.N. estimates.
At an event organized by the Dia-
logue in July, Guatemala’s vice minis-
ter for housing said helping citizens
manage the money from remittances
to build good, well- ordered neighbor-
hoods would be key to the nation’s de-
velopment. The ministry plans to work
with Guatemalan consulates to make
sure migrants are using their money
on “supervised projects, with some
support [from the state] so they don’t
end up being structurally unsound,”
he said.
Many want more from the govern-
ment, though, says Quique Godoy, a
radio host and economist who dis-
cusses remittances once a week on his
show on Guatemala’s Radio Infinita.
He argues that officials should fol-
low the example of Mexico’s govern-
ment, which in the 1990s established
so-called three-for-one programs: or-
ganized groups of migrants in the U.S.
would fund projects in their neighbor-
hoods back home, and for every dollar
they spent, national, regional, and mu-
nicipal governments would each put in
$1, turbocharging the local develop-
ment the migrants were leading. “We
have to give incentives for migrants, so
that instead of giving their money to
people for consumption, they decide
that they give part of it to a commu-
nity investment project,” Godoy says.
Ideally, Guatemala would start a
four-for-one program, supported by
local businesses and banks, Godoy
says. “Because that will create more
consumption in the long run, which
benefits business.”
But for now the migrants them-
selves are leading the way, says Prima-
veral’s Santizo. He wants to see all 340
of Guatemala’s municipalities set up
credit co-ops. “We have [aid agencies]
expressing interest in working with us,”
he says, “but if they don’t, then we the
migrants will do it ourselves. We’ll do
our own development.” —With report-
ing by EloisE Barry/london ‘We’re losingour youth.’
—ROSARIO MARTINEZ,
GUATEMALA CITY CHAPTER, LATIN
AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCES INSTITUTE