Migrant: A Path with an Insufficient Future
Marcos Antil, a Q’anjob’al child from Huehuetenango, nearly died at the age of five. Severely malnourished, he survived almost miraculously with homemade remedies due to the absence of doctors in his village of Nancultac. At fourteen, he began the journey alone to California, where his family was waiting for him. Along the way, he was […]
The Missing Tourism: The Cost of Failing to Attract Investment
Imagine watching a promotional video featuring aerial views gliding over a turquoise bay and a resort hidden among palm trees. Gentle waves blend into the golden sand of the beach. We enter private villas with their own pools, spacious terraces, and details that combine Mediterranean elegance with Caribbean warmth. The camera moves through the beach […]
What Does a Country Do When It Loses a War in Days? Education.
In 1807, Napoleon’s army defeated Prussia in fourteen days. The surrender was humiliating. Berlin fell without resistance. The kingdom was reduced to half its territory and forced to pay an indemnity equivalent to 60% of its annual GDP. It was not a military defeat. It was an educational failure. From that point on, any cold […]
Neither Caudillo nor Party: Republic
Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was twelve years old when the Bolshevik Revolution arrived in Petrograd. She watched as the State confiscated her family home and her father’s business, a pharmacist who had built his life through his own work. There was no compensation, no due process, no possibility of appeal. The Soviet Constitution of 1918 had […]
Neither Spending Nor Abandonment: Education for Demand
In 1965, Wei Ming was five years old and learning to read English with pencil and paper in a classroom without air conditioning in Singapore. By age seven, he was already studying industrial arts. His father was a fisherman. No one in his family had completed high school. But that year, Lee Kuan Yew made […]
One Hundred Reasons to Rebuild the Republic
It was July 1779, and Matías de Gálvez had been in Guatemala for only thirteen months. In that time, he had accomplished what no previous governor had achieved in six years: laying the first stone of the Cathedral, building the Royal Palace, installing public lighting, putting the Mint into operation, and transforming a maze of […]
Is It Worth Copying Mexico? The Mirror We Should Look Into So We Don’t Lose Our Way
Do you remember Demetrio? The one from the Alka-Seltzer commercials of the 1980s, who would come home feeling sick after a night of excess. Well, when Demetrio wanted to buy his Corolla in the year 2000, he needed to save twenty-seven months of salary to pay for it. That same year, a Demetrio in Guadalajara […]
Geography Gave Us Wings, but the Future Landed in Panama
For much of the twentieth century, Pan American World Airways aircraft regularly descended onto the runway at La Aurora. For thousands of American travelers, Guatemala was neither a secondary stopover nor a remote destination lost among volcanoes. It was a regular stop within the air network that connected the continent’s major cities. The elegant Stratocruisers […]