Guatemala: Landscapes

Abstract

This chapter seeks to position disability within the specific Guatemalan context, while framing this context in historical terms. Guatemala is a very complex and hetero\geneous country that can hardly be captured in a few pages, as in this chapter. What I do provide here is a very partial and selective picture, but one which I hope still serves to position, even if conditionally, and provide a background for the disability and poverty relationship explored in the chapters that follow. It then moves on to map out the disability policy and service scenario in the country. Again, this picture is most likely fragmented, not least because there are dramatic research and information gaps.

Now and then

I walk backwards

It is my way of remembering.

If I only walked forward,

I could tell you about forgetting

(Humberto Ak’abal, Guatemalan poet)