At noon today, Professor Michael Salovesh will be lecturing on recent political changes which have occurred in Guatemala in the Holmes Student Center.

Salovesh arrived in Guatemala in mid-June after unprecedented political changes swept the Guatemalan government and impelled him to ask the question “why?”

Salovesh soon found out this was a question that could not easily be answered.

A radical change occurring in Guatemala was a new voice from a press once silenced through violent government intimidation.

“The newspapers were wide open in criticizing the powers that be – the army, politicians and the supreme court. It struck me as a real change,” Salovesh said.

It isn’t so much the government allowing this to change, as it is the journalists themselves. The repression still exists. The journalists just chose to ignore it, Salovesh said.

Ignoring these powers that will retain integrity of the press can be fatal for some journalists in Guatemala.

“The editor and publisher of the second leading paper, also the first-cousin to the president, was assassinated during my stay in Guatemala. Another reporter was hauled out of a bus, beaten and shot. They are ignoring (the threat on their lives) to expose the real story of corruption, in the press and in Congress,” Salovesh said.

Salovesh himself successfully survived particularly dangerous situations while in Guatemala. It’s his love of anthropology and learning which motivates him and brings him back.

Salovesh first became interested in anthropology after working as a chemist for two years. Feeling unfulfilled, Salovesh sought guidance from a counselor who asked him a question that would soon open up a very different world for him.

She asked him this question, “Supposing you don’t have to work for a living. You had money. Under those circumstances, what would you want to do?”

“I’d like to go to some other country, learn another language. Find out what makes people tick, come back and think about it and do it all over again,” Salovesh said.

The counselor then suggested linguistic anthropology. Salovesh has since crossed over from linguistic anthropology to family kinship to the political aspect of anthropology.

For the last 35 years, Salovesh has been working in parts of Mexico and Central America.

“You can’t get bored because if you get bored, you do something else and it is still anthropology. Me and my wife, we are both happiest with the world when we are learning something. We are constantly learning, I love anthropology,” he said.

Salovesh has earned four degrees. Two undergraduate degrees are from the University of Chicago in Liberal Arts and Sociology. Salovesh also earned a master’s and doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Salovesh’s lecture, “Guatemalan Politics and the Press,” is sponsored by the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies and will take place in the Student Center, room 505.

For more information, contact the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at 753-1531.