The Basurero is Burning in Guatemala City

In writing at Vice, Benjamin Reeves has a story on The Basurero is Burning: Life at the Gates of Hell in Guatemala City.

When I visited the dump in an attempt to document conditions there, I was turned away at the gate by police and told I couldn’t take pictures without a special permit from the city—a predictable result given the way the authorities have stopped information about the basurero from getting out.

Guatemala's press has largely failed to cover the humanitarian crisis in the neighborhood. What coverage there has been focused on the efforts of the fire department to control the blazes that periodically break out there—and reports do not mention, as José did, that the fire smoldered for a month prior to the arrival of the fire department. There’s very little attention being paid to the ugly conditions of day-to-day life in the basurero. José believes that “the government pays journalists not to write about the dump.”

In any case, it wasn’t very difficult to dodge the police at the gates. I was able to photograph the gates of the dump from a moving car, and the city's public cemetery is perched precariously above the cliff wall of the dump—the vast hell-scape can be hazily seen through the smoke.

Even the poor surviving in the city dump are extorted by maras.