Providing a magical tour of a country that is both modern and deeply rooted in the past, these beautiful photographs explore Guatemala from unusual perspectives and seek out isolated places and enigmatic people as well as astounding natural landscapes and bright, busy cities. Alongside the pictures, written passages describe the time the author and photographer spent in the Guatemalan countryside.

This Selected Issues note estimates Guatemala’s potential output and output gap using the production function approach, univariate statistical filters, and multivariate models based on the Kalman filter method. In the production function approach, potential output is modeled as a function of potential labor and capital inputs, and total factor productivity (TFP). Results are robust to different methodologies and suggest that its potential output growth is about 3.5 percent and the output gap is on average closed. Structural breaks in potential output were identified in 1994, 2003, and 2008, which coincide to the Mexican tequila crisis, the free trade agreement with the US, and the financial crisis. Going forward, it is critical to undertake structural reforms to strengthen capital, labor, and TFP growth in order to accelerate potential growth. Univariate statistical methods provide a simple measure of potential output. The production function approach also indicates that the absence of productivity growth is a significant barrier to potential output growth.

The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization -- culminating in a stunning medical mystery. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

In the 1940s, an experiment known as the “Guatemala Syphilis Experiment” was conducted by American scientists. Its primary purpose was to test the effectiveness of antibiotics against syphilis and gonorrhea. Approximately 1,500 Guatemalan individuals were subjects of this research. They included patients, mental hospital patients, and sex workers. Many of them were unaware that they were being infected with syphilis or gonorrhea. The research subjects were intentionally exposed to syphilis or gonorrhea through direct exposure or sexual contact with infected individuals. Afterward, they were given antibiotics to observe the effects of treatment on these diseases. This experiment involved serious ethical violations. The research subjects were not provided with adequate protection, and they did not give clear consent to participate in the research. Many of them suffered long-term negative consequences from the infections. Buku persembahan penerbit LembarLangitGroup #LembarLangit

In 1996, the Guatemalan civil war ended with the signing of the Peace Accords, facilitated by the United Nations and promoted as a beacon of hope for a country with a history of conflict. Twenty years later, the new era of political protest in Guatemala is highly complex and contradictory: the persistence of colonialism, fraught indigenous-settler relations, political exclusion, corruption, criminal impunity, gendered violence, judicial procedures conducted under threat, entrenched inequality, as well as economic fragility. Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala examines the complexities of the quest for justice in Guatemala, and the realities of both new forms of resistance and long-standing obstacles to the rule of law in the human and environmental realms. Written by prominent scholars and activists, this book explores high-profile trials, the activities of foreign mining companies, attempts to prosecute war crimes, and cultural responses to injustice in literature, feminist performance art and the media. The challenges to human and environmental capacities for justice are constrained, or facilitated, by factors that shape culture, politics, society, and the economy. The contributors to this volume include Guatemalans such as the human rights activist Helen Mack Chang, the environmental journalist Magal? Rey Rosa, former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, as well as widely published Guatemala scholars.

The Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.