More than 60% of the population of Guatemala lives in poverty, and the country has one of the highest rates of childhood malnutrition in the world. “They cannot go one month without resources to eat.” “ are the most clear evidence that the social and economic model leaves most people behind” he said. “It is another sign of a society that lacks social services and that does not have a labor market that permits people to have savings to confront the crisis,” Jonathan Menkos, the executive director of the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), told the Guardian. I don’t want to go home because I have no way of providing food for my family.” Now he stands on the street with a white flag. Parezo Sánchez, 77, has shined shoes in Guatemala City’s central plaza for 13 years to support his family. Since then, flags have become common across the country, with an entire lexicon of need reflected in their colors: white means hunger red is for medicine black, yellow, or blue means that a woman, child or elderly person is in danger of violence. White flags first began to appear on the streets of Guatemala City in early April shortly after quarantine was imposed in the village of Patzún, where the country’s first cases of community-transferred coronavirus were detected. “We are suffering during this crisis,” she said. She now walks each day nearly four kilometers from her small apartment on the outskirts of the capital to the historic center to beg for help. Reyes, 37, used to sell donuts and cakes, but the store where she worked was closed amid the pandemic, and Reyes is struggling to pay the rent and feed her two children. “We are asking for help, we are in need,” she said. It is a symbol not of surrender, but of gnawing hunger amid the strict coronavirus lockdown which has brought the country’s informal economy to a grinding halt. América Reyes sits on the steps of Guatemala’s National Cathedral, with her four-year-old son at her side and white flag in her hand.
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