Fernando Cajas
The existential void of education in Guatemala is technical education. Technical education in
Guatemala has neither direction nor meaning. It is not its absence per se. What it doesn’t have is a place
starting point, a vision, a point of arrival, a how, a why and even less a why. Guatemala
offers hundreds of programs in technical education, none of which are going anywhere, no
They have direction. Technical education programs are beginning to be taken by teenagers
approximately fifteen years of age when they decide to opt for a bachelor’s degree in “something”, or a
“expert” in something, this “something” being something very varied. The most common surname in high school
For many years it was Sciences and Letters, an option that gave a more direct path to the University.
During the last three decades, an enormous offer of “technical” baccalaureates emerged from the
more varied ranging from Baccalaureate in Technical Drawing and Construction through
Industrial Baccalaureate and Expert in Electricity to exotic offers such as Industrial Baccalaureate
with Specialty in Beauty.
This offering of more than two hundred secondary degrees in technical education came to
compete, and literally displace, the Baccalaureate in Sciences and Letters, which was the option
traditional of those who wanted to enter university. Those who did not want to enter the
university, or they couldn’t, they chose to go to Teaching or Accounting Expert. During the last three
decades there has been an intense diversification in the offer of secondary technical education
formal, as reflected in the most varied titles, such as “aviation” technician,
“health sciences”, “engineering” technician and dozens of impressive names. The sad
is that aviation technicians have never seen an airplane in their lives. Science technicians
health, who were supposed to go to medicine, are a bad caricature of a real health technician,
reflecting the premature offer of specialization of the system that is only to attract a
public eager for options and who are surprised in their good faith.
There is little offer of high-quality programs in technical education in the country, programs
that really deliver what they offer, but even these few fundamentally lack
address. That is, the graduates of these high-quality technological institutes do not know how to
Where to go at the end of your secondary studies. Guatemalan universities have not
left behind and offer technical programs left and right, without direction or meaning. The
Galileo University has been the champion in this. However, none of the offers
Higher education is going nowhere. The National University, that of San Carlos, has not stayed
back. Much of the offer, whether short careers such as professorships, or even bachelor’s degrees,
They are “technical” in nature. Nobody can deny that an engineer in Guatemala is a technician.
Someone may doubt that a lawyer is a technician, but the review of his practice and curriculum
The fact that he trained him leads to the conclusion that he is a technician, often a technocrat, not a jurist. Many
Guatemalan university programs, whether bachelor’s degrees or not, are a technical offering.
But none of them have been created obeying a north, a directionality, a direction to where,
That is to say, they do not obey the policy that directs them.
This navigation without a compass does not escape other trajectories made by navigators of the
Guatemalan technical education, among them the trajectory of INTECAP, the Institute
Training and Productivity Technician. INTECAP considers itself the leader of the
professional training of workers. And indeed, it has a good reputation in terms of
training, but not so in terms of comprehensive training for life as demonstrated by the use
politician that Sandra Torres of INTECAP made in her presidential campaign and the accumulation of jokes
associated. Although it has a certified management system with quality standards
international, it is training, it is not education, but it cannot be said that INTECAP is
directed to go somewhere that can support the majority of Guatemalans. Is
to support the productivity of entrepreneurs’ companies.
This diversification of the technical education offer in Guatemala is not producing
capable people. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) indicates that 6.3 million people
make up the Economically Active Population in Guatemala and of those, according to the Survey
National Employment and Income ENEI 2-2014, 4 million have a job in the informal sector, a
sector that is characterized by a lack of technological innovation and jobs that, more than helping
Those who own them place them in a vulnerable situation. What’s more, the 2 million workers
from the formal sector, reflect problems in their jobs, which are repetitive and often
unproductive, creating conditions of dissatisfaction. The majority, that is, more than 4 million,
They are employed in the informal sector, mainly in the commerce and agriculture sector, which
which means that they are unprotected by labor legislation and are not certain that their
income is stable each month.
According to the INE, at least 8 out of every 10 people located in the informal sector reside in the area
rural, which allows us to conclude that their income is low. The average salary at the level
Nationally it is around 2,000 quetzales, while at the rural level 1,400 quetzales. Data from 2016.
With these salaries, employees can hardly purchase food to survive, not
Let’s say have a decent life. The INE states that the cost of the basic basket, the estimate of the
price of food for a family of five, until June of this year prior to the
pandemic, stood at 3,500 quetzales. The Basic Vital Basket, which includes payment for goods and
essential services such as education, health, housing and transportation, would be unattainable for those
They have informal employment. In June 2016 it was quoted at 6 thousand quetzales for a family of five
personas.
The current political crisis of the country, this coup d’état in slow motion that is carried out in
hands of the Pact of Corrupts has no time or interest in understanding technical education. Here
There is another underlying problem that must be analyzed and included systematically in the plan of the
new government of Arévalo and Herrera. He who has ears to listen says the saying. The pigeons should broaden their experience, would say Aquiles Faillace, the constitutionalist of Guatemalan democracy.
The background is complex and has to do with Guatemalan productive systems that do not
They have evolved and if they have, they have been few and in few sectors, the monopolies. That must
change. We do not transform our raw materials into something that requires technology. The reason is
that we are exporters of our basic products. We produce a lot of mangoes, but not the
we transform. We produce a lot of avocado and we do not process it. We produce corn and hardly any
we transform but for tortillas with little technological innovation. What’s more, the tortillas are made
hand, not even a single machine have we added to that pre-artisanal process so that the beautiful hands
Guatemalans have time to do other more productive activities.
This beautiful banana country of ours produces bananas to sell bananas, to export
banana, rubber to sell rubber, raw chocolate to sell raw chocolate. If you want
To taste good chocolate you will have to go to Switzerland or Italy or somewhere other than Guatemala,
because here chocolate receives little technological innovation. The same with coffee. almost the same
all. This is the vision of the Guatemalan business community. This is repeated with many of those who
we grow and do in Guatemala in such a way that we have not managed to have a system of
technological scientific innovation that improves productive systems to make us truly
independent capable of getting us out of this business underdevelopment led by CACIF.
Our country, this dream country of the corrupt, has some industries,
mainly that of cane, the production of sugar and the venerated alcohol of which
they intentionally made indigenous populations of the south west dependent when they paid
with this currency. We also have the cement industry, a monopoly of the
Novella that has laid concrete throughout the country, done well and badly. This industry does
innovation, transforms raw materials using technology and creates many jobs in exchange for
deforest, prey, destroy our mountains. Yes, of course they have programs
reforestation, but that does not really recover what was depredated. Along with that, the monopoly of
cement has actively participated in corruption, particularly in the construction of the
state works through several subsidiary companies.
There are very good, forgotten industries, such as the textile industry that emerged in the 70s.
with great intensity but that were abandoned due to poor State management. The textile industry
of Quetzaltenango could not evolve simply because the Municipal Electric Company did not
was able to satisfy its demand for electrical power to grow. Along with that, local universities
They never offered textile technicians, much less textile engineering programs. As usual
Local universities are full of law and auditing students and not engineering students
innovative solutions that support industrial processes already in process. There is one or another project
cooperation between the fifteen universities of Quetzaltenango and companies in need of
intense technological innovation.
The other industry that was planned in the seventies was the chemical industry and here there were
university support with chemical engineering faculties and chemistry faculties
However, the associated industrial processes such as the mass production of sulfuric acid do not
the only innovation institute related to the industry, the ICAITI, was closed
by Portillo, another known scoundrel. But the pharmacological industry, which requires solid
chemical industry and scientific understanding of biochemistry, pharmacology and health, had its peak in
the 80s and declines to the extent that technical education in industrial chemistry does not evolve with
the same speed of market demands. Guatemala stopped being the power
Central American pharmaceutical industry. Medicine importers began to
buy to resell to the State, mainly to Social Security and national hospitals and
health centers at exorbitant prices to pure corruption.
The non-alcoholic beverage and prepared food industry is another industry in
expansion and this one has received technical education support from a couple of universities,
including the national university. This accompaniment did not obey any plan. The only
technical education system that has been strategic is INTECAP, an institute focused on
private initiative whose objective is training, not education, produces workers not
necessarily critical of social problems. They are good technocrats who do not produce
citizenship.
This brief tour of the national industry and its associated educational systems reflects
a real underlying problem of the country. In fact, Guatemala’s existential problem is the
absence of a national technical education policy. Focused on the situations, such as
fight against corruption in 2015, we have abandoned reflection on the substance, on the long
term. Our fight to demand a process for the election of the rector of the national university
which is characterized by fraud, took away our time from thinking about the long term. Our time
locked down by COVID and then the National Strike of October 2023 also focused us on the
situation, abandoning long-term planning. We have been trapped in the situation.
To analyze underlying problems and find a viable solution, a democracy is required.
minimum, which is what we are protecting with our fight against the coup d’état that
They are subduing this beautiful but unequal country. That is why we must defend, with the truth, the
democracy. Either it is now or it will never be.
