Skyscrapers and Shacks: Report from Guatemala City
Latin America has some of the highest levels of social inequality in the world. That is why it is one of the few parts of the planet, besides universities, where people still take Marxism seriously and why drug cartels flourish. The rich just get richer and the poor struggle to survive however they can. One consequence of this is a massive construction boom in the cities as the wealthy invest and launder their legitimate and ill-gotten gains in real estate (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Nearly completed apartment building in Zone 10, Guatemala City. Source: Photo by Author.
Most of the largest cities in the Western Hemisphere indeed are in Latin America, not the United States. The rural poor flood into the cities to seek better-paying employment and educational opportunities for their children, at the same time, throughout the hemisphere, megacities with striking skylines emerge. The workers that build the sky-scraping buildings, especially massive condominiums and office towers, usually live on the lower floors of the buildings themselves or in nearby workers’ huts or barracks. As a result, the new Latin American metropolises are filled with skyscrapers and shacks.
In early March 2026, while visiting Guatemala City, I had a snack at a little canteen filled with about three dozen cement and bricklayers from a nearby roughly 25 story apartment complex. The food was enticing: fresh meat cooked over hot coals accompanied by guacamol (the local guacamole), grilled onions, pasta salad, or Chinese noodles with mild tomato and chile sauce, black beans, and small corn tortillas. The smoky grilled meat smelled great, but the food turned out to be quite bland (Figure 2). It was made with extremely cheap ingredients and so cost only 15 quetzales (two dollars). It was dinner for the construction workers.
Figure 2. Grilled chicken stand in Guatemala City. Source: Photo by Author.
Figure 3. High-rise buildings in Guatemala City and one under construction. Source: Photo by Author.
I sat on a small stool and shared a plastic table with one of the workers. We ate with our tortillas with fingers, no silverware. The cement worker came from Cobán, in the heavily forested Mayan highlands. He had been living on the site of the building under construction for about two years (Figure 3 and 4). I asked him where the men slept and he said on wood, perhaps pallets, with a mattress, and no blankets amidst the dirt, dust, and debris of the ground floor. I said, that sounds rough. He replied that you got used to it. Their work week is six days straight from seven in the morning until six in the evening. The next morning, on Saturday, I could hear their hammers banging away.
Figure 4. Another chic apartment building in Zone 10. Source: Photo by Author
So, when you finish this job, what will you do? Find another skyscraper to work on, he said. The workers make about 550 dollars per month. At night they crowd around the nearby makeshift cafes and restaurants and get their dinner or some drinks, and some smoke a cigarette or two. Others call their girlfriends or wives on little cell phones. All the men were noticeably short in stature and had the distinctive facial features and carob brown skin of the Maya. To a man, they wore short military style bowl haircuts. The workers speak a native language among themselves when not talking to the female cooks at the canteen or the Ladino foreman on the construction site. Across the street there is a shadowy chic bar selling fancy mixed drinks to the better off denizens of Zone 10 where I stayed. A block away I could see a huge Chili’s restaurant with a garish neon sign packed every night by upper-middle class Guatemalans, a mostly empty luxurious American sports bar, and the Intercontinental Hotel, the elite hotel chain of Central America. Groups of white tourists and yuppie-type local partiers stumbled by on the dark, cracked sidewalks. But the Mayan workers and the high livers of the night ignored each other. They stay in separate worlds.
Figure 5. Flowers for sale at the market. Source: Photo by Author.
Figure 6. Typical street congestion in Guatemala City. Source: Photo by Author.
Alternative occupations to construction work for poor Guatemalans are equally bleak: back-breaking agricultural labor for five dollars a day, slightly better paid toil in maquiladora textile or plastics factories, paltry earnings from street sales of flowers (Figure 5), candy and other cheap items in the informal economy, prostitution with its attendant dangers for five to seven dollars a trick, and so on (Figure 7). Large numbers of mostly female prostitutes, and a few male sex workers, can be seen every day at the city parks and plazas, on main downtown streets, along the railroad tracks of the legendary La Linea brothel zone, and in countless bars, brothels, and sex-oriented websites. The supply vastly exceeds the demand. The same can be said of most kinds of informal economic activity in the city, including petty drug-dealing of mostly cocaine and marijuana.
Figure 7. Mercado La Terminal, Zone 4, Guatemala City. Source: Photo by Author.
Guatemala City is infamous for rampant street crime, a constant topic of local conversation; consequently, cameras and armed guards protect thousands of small businesses (Figure 6). The fancy sports bar, although mostly empty when I saw it, was patrolled by at least five guards with pistols and shotguns. An UBER driver I spoke with felt, like me, that the bar must be a money-laundering business since it had too many guards and too luxurious furnishings to support so few patrons, and yet it stayed open. In any case, the rest of the upscale restaurants, bars and hotels of tony Zone 10, and its armies of underpaid workers who keep the businesses humming, exemplify Guatemala City’s two-tiered economy of skyscrapers and shacks. There is little middle-class in between and a vast, often hostile, social divide between the top and the bottom. Hence, extreme socioeconomic inequality becomes a recruiting boon for criminal insurgencies and social unrest.[1] Thus, for much of its history, Guatemala has been wracked by bitter class struggle, virulent racism, violent civil wars, and perpetual social tensions that now includes drug-trafficking violence as well. Moreover, the violent transnational prison/street gang Barrio 18 is a constant source of extortion, predation, and casualties. It is a plague on civil society, like the harm caused by the Mara Salvatrucha in El Salvador.
It is a liberal platitude but nonetheless true that adequately remunerated employment and educational opportunities lessen the likelihood of young people engaging in street crime, taking up dangerous and degrading occupations like street prostitution or joining organized crime. Let us not forget that many of el Mencho’s soldiers in Mexico are just poor kids needing an income. A considerable number were tricked and then press-ganged into carrying a gun or selling drugs for the cartel. But ample employment opportunities alone are not enough to stop the lucrative pull of organized crime in poor countries like Guatemala. The problem is especially acute as the country has become a major stopover for drug loads heading to the United States from South America.
Stuck as it is between Mexico and El Salvador, the Guatemalan government faces two markedly different strategic security options: a Salvadoran Bukele-style clampdown on crime (which much of the public desires) or the more moderate Morena approach in Mexico, downplaying direct confrontation with cartels most of the time and seeking to ameliorate the allure of crime through social programs and hand-outs. Under great pressure from US president Trump, Mexican president Scheinbaum has recently pursued a more pro-active anti-cartel approach (including the killing of the CJNG’s leader “El Mencho”). But Morena’s avowed policy is still to try to lower violence through social and economic programs. Unfortunately, Guatemala’s reformist president Arévalo has had his hands tied by a well-organized, intransigent opposition. Thus, his ability to carry out security policies whether moderate or hardline has been extremely limited. Hundreds of US missionary groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) attempt to bridge the poverty gap and crime boom with assistance programs and, in the case of the church groups, “spiritual salvation.” However, whatever largesse these mostly Protestant churches and Western NGOs have offered the rural and urban poor has done little to change the two-tiered society. Additionally, remittances from relatives working in the United States and elsewhere throw a lifeline to the poor, but even these sums are being reduced by Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown and attempt to tax remittances.
The best hope to create social stability and peace in Guatemala is to somehow reduce the gap between the shacks and the skyscrapers, but it remains an intractable problem.
Endnotes
[1] On how social inequality becomes a recruitment opportunity for cartels, see the following: John P. Sullivan, “From Drug Wars to Criminal Insurgency: Mexican Cartels, Criminal Enclaves and Criminal Insurgency in Mexico and Central America Implications for Global Security.” Working Paper No9. Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme. 2011. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00694083/document; Rafael Prieto-Curiel, Gian Maria Campedelli, and Alejandro Hope. “Reducing Cartel Recruitment Is the Only Way to Lower Violence in Mexico.” Science. Vol. 381, no. 6664. 2023: pp. 1312–16, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh2888.
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