Twenty professors of environmental law and related areas from universities in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the United States, gathered May 23, 2010 for the third time this year for two weeks of intense seminars. The group, which included partners from Georgia State University, the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Universidad Paulo Freire, and the Universidad Rafael Landívar, are training future environmental law trainers in the region and building capacity in environmental higher education instruction as part of a three-year HED-managed and USAID-funded partnership. However, despite the well-planned itinerary, the partners found themselves improvising when two natural disasters struck Guatemala simultaneously, making it impossible to carry out the intended workshops and seminars.
The partners initially flew into Guatemala City and headed to the city of Antigua to start the program and focus on curricular design in international environmental law. Four days later, heavy rains began as the group set off from Antigua to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city. As the group arrived they soon heard news of Volcano Pacaya erupting, and the heavy rains turned into Tropical Storm Agatha causing mudslides, collapsing roads, and severe flooding that left the group stranded in Quetzaltenango and claimed more than 100 lives in Guatemala with many more wounded and devastated by the destruction caused.
The deadly storm enormously complicated the workshop schedule and financial planning for the upcoming year, but the participants took advantage of the events that were beyond their control in service of the project. “We all immediately recognized that we had to use the gift of our time together in service of the project. Besides, even though this was inconvenient and costly for us, we were safe and dry, and so faring better than those who lost their lives or the thousands who were injured or lost much more,” said Colin Crawford, partnership director and professor of Law at Tulane University. The group improvised and engaged in an intense curricular design exercise for each of their three countries. “We emerged from this with a good plan, I think, for each of the three countries going forward in the next phase of the project, in 2011,” said Mara Bocaletti, professor of Environmental Law at Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City. Participants also delivered lectures they had been preparing for future workshops and assisted each other with curricular exercises.
One of the most important outcomes of this travel delay was an opportunity to evaluate the disaster response system in Guatemala, which is presumed to have one of the strongest systems in Central America. It became very clear as a result of the Tropical Storm that the infrastructure in Guatemala is not what it should be to withstand a disaster. This led to many productive conversations about the impact that environmental planning and regulatory enforcement could have on improving the readiness of Guatemala’s army task force and disaster management teams.
Despite the set-backs, the participants seized the many opportunities to connect environmental law strengthening to disaster preparedness. Professor Crawford says, “Such events need to be used to provide opportunities to link realities in the countries where HED works to the themes of such partnerships. For us, the events, though lamentable, opened our eyes to new applications of environmental law work, and in the long term that can only be for the good.”