I’m an American who spent the pandemic in Guatemala. This is what I learned.
In a sense, I experienced the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in two places at once. Physically, I was in Santiago Atitlan, a Maya Tz’utujil community in Guatemala, but I also consumed U.S. media, worked within the U.S. economy, and spoke regularly with friends and relatives back home — keeping me in constant contact with the American point of view. From this dual perspective, I was surprised to see the same trends developing in both places — vaccine hesitancy, harmful social divisions, and shocking displays of violence.
In the United States, many experts blamed the country’s failures on uniquely American dynamics. Reading the commentary from my home in Guatemala, I knew there was more to the story.
Frustrating Levels of Vaccine Hesitancy
In both the United States and Guatemala, alarming numbers of people have been hesitant to take a COVID-19 vaccine. In the U.S., experts have blamed the right-wing media, conspiracy theories, and a lack of trust in institutions. In Guatemala, where vaccination rates remain shockingly low despite widespread availability in most parts of the country, similar factors seem to be playing a role.
There’s no Fox News equivalent in Santiago Atitlan, but there is something worse: misinformed gossip. Stories of supposed vaccine-related deaths course through the market faster than any contagion, convincing vast swathes of the population to forgo inoculation. The mistrust of institutions, meanwhile, is even deeper than in the United States — hardly surprising in a country where the indigenous, accounting for 43% of the population, have been subjected to centuries of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and genocide.
But beyond the social factors, there’s something else at play. When asked why they’re still not vaccinated, people — both in Santiago Atitlan and the United States — don’t often quote a television host or express distrust of a public health institution. They’re more likely to talk about potential side effects, display an unreasonable doubt in the vaccines’ efficacy, or dismiss the subject altogether out of embarrassment or fear. Why? Because vaccines, like many scientific breakthroughs, are counterintuitive and, to many people, scary. Mixed with the social factors, whatever they may be in a given location, this fear drives a level of hesitancy that’s statistically significant and detrimental to the cause of promoting public health.
Divergent Perspectives Based on Group Identity
Almost since the start of the pandemic, Americans’ views on the crisis have been shaped by political affiliation. Liberals are more likely to see the virus as a serious issue, and they generally support more stringent measures to slow the disease’s progress. Conservatives, to varying degrees, tend to dispute the virus’s categorization as a major threat. Some recognize the pandemic as a genuine public health emergency but remain wary of policies that could infringe on their freedoms. Others, whether deceived by conspiracy theories or right-wing media, dismiss the virus as a liberal boogeyman.
In Santiago Atitlan, the population has also split into “pandemic-concerned” and “pandemic-denying” camps, and, just like in the United States, the cleavage has occurred along the lines of group identity. The only difference is that for Americans it was political identification that determined the COVID outlook, whereas for the folks in Santiago it was religious affiliation. The Catholics, led by a priest who has taken an active role in public health, have remained committed mask-wearers and hand-washers since the earliest days of the crisis. The evangelicals, especially those of a particularly rebellious congregation, have denied the pandemic’s existence even as their leaders succumbed to the disease. Walking the streets of Santiago, you can tell a person’s religious proclivities as readily by the mask on their face as by the church you see them walking into.
We really are herd animals — and herds develop everywhere, not just within the U.S.’s two-party system. A long, painful period of intubation might sound scary, but ostracization by one’s fellows is scarier and more immediate. When a group takes a position on a public issue, every member of that group feels pressured to follow along. This dynamic doesn’t free individuals from responsibility for their thoughts and actions, but it does suggest who the real villains might be: the leaders — whether pastors, pundits, or politicians — who shape a group’s harmful platform to further their selfish ends.
Heightened Anger and Violence
Acting on the advice of public health experts, political leaders around the world have spent much of the past two years enforcing lockdowns, mask mandates, and other measures meant to slow the spread of COVID-19. In many places, these limitations of freedom have met with fierce resistance and, in extreme cases, violence. In the United States, a group of right-wing extremists plotted the murder of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Less dramatically, irate consumers across the country have harassed shopkeepers, servers, and flight attendants for enforcing regulations.
Santiago and other communities in the Guatemalan highlands have seen similar acts of violence and aggression. With the community in total lockdown during the early days of the pandemic, one of the police officers charged with enforcing the rules was discovered to have snuck out for a night of heavy drinking. Thousands of townspeople, long angry about the shutdown, rushed to the police headquarters, demanding that the officer be turned over to them so they could enact immediate retribution. A lynching was prevented only by the mayor, who diffused the situation with a timely speech delivered via megaphone. (Incidentally, one of the mayor’s main themes during the intervention was that the folks in Santiago should avoid acting like Americans, who had become internationally famous for spreading the virus through disobedience. This was in the spring of 2020).
Not all violent acts have been similarly thwarted. When Guatemala enacted a “stoplight system” for determining restrictions, some residents of San Lucas Toliman, a community just a few miles from Santiago, were incensed to learn that their municipality’s case count had landed them “in the red.” They responded by burning the town hall to the ground.
It’s not a secret (nor is it a bad thing) that humans have an impulse toward freedom. Nobody likes being told what to do. In questions of public health, policymakers have always had to strike a balance between promoting the general welfare and granting people the liberty to make their own choices. Laws against drunk driving represent a constraint to freedom, but we see no violent reactions to their existence. That’s because the constraint to freedom exists for an obvious reason — to prevent the tragic deaths of innocent people. The problem with COVID-related restrictions is that the reasons for the constraints to freedom were never universally accepted or widely understood. Feeling the constraints to be arbitrary, unjust, or — in the case of some conspiracy theorists — ill-intentioned, people reacted with indignation and violence.
Mark Twain famously described travel as “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” It’s also a great antidote to notions of exceptionalism, or the idea that things are happening in one’s own time or place because of some special set of circumstances that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
If I had spent the pandemic in the U.S., I’m sure I, too, would have attributed the divided COVID response to our political polarization and the low vaccination rate to unscrupulous right-wing pundits. Having witnessed those same phenomena here in Guatemala, I know that, even if those specific American factors played a role, there’s something more general and less resolvable to blame: human nature*.
*Human nature, of course, is infinitely complex and widely variable — which means there’s a whole other layer of analysis that could, and maybe should, follow this conclusion. But then, in a universe as complicated as ours, conclusions are always provisional — so, for now, we’ll have to leave well enough alone.
(Enjoyed this article? Think others might enjoy it, too? Hit that “like” button to increase its visibility! Even the most fascinating of insights don’t travel the web of their own accord.)
