by Dwight Wayne Coop

Could a snake eat a banana? Once upon a time the keepers at Quetzaltenango’s Minerva Zoo had little to lose by experimenting. A vegetarian snake, had they produced one, would have been worth its weight in platinum. Of course they failed, but their live-and-let-die policy continued: they lived it up while the animals died. The place had become, in a word, a zoo. But one day Lucy Guzmán crashed the party.

Zoo Director Lucy Guzmán
with two new additions to
“the family.”

Tiny and pretty, too soft-spoken for a career teaching PE, she studied biology at nearby San Carlos University. While there, she discovered — and agonized over — the animals’ plight. In 1990, while still a student, she convinced Mayor López to put her in charge of the zoo. Right away, things started happening.

“The keepers,” Guzmán recalls, “were beer-chugging machistas with no training, no knowledge of animals. Even the ‘manager’ had no more preparation than the rest. You can imagine how they reacted to a [twenty-something] woman being appointed over them.”

“One change I ordered right off was turf flooring for the coyote cage. The animals were miserable on concrete, but the keepers liked it because all they had to do was hose it now and then. Turf requires maintenance — real work. This and a dozen other things put us at odds, so one day they hatched a conspiracy over lunch.

“They decided to pen a letter to the mayor, smearing me. The only problem was that none of them could write. So they hired someone to compose the letter.”

The next week the mayor himself showed up, brandishing the letter and demanding a tête-a-tête.

“The ploy not only failed,” Guzmán says, “it backfired. The mayor went away with more confidence in me than ever.”

But the challenge remained: she was boss, but she had no authority to summarily fire anyone. Like two adversaries at summer camp, she and her crew of 15 had to bunk together until they learned to get along. Despite her humble demeanor, Guzmán saw that most of the learning would have to take place among her opponents. She never imagined the extent that it actually would occur.

The circumstance which limited her hand was a reflection not only of Guatemala’s enforceable labor statutes, but of Quetzaltenango´s famed proletarianism: the keepers were protected by a powerful municipal employee’s union.

“A couple of times, I was able to fire someone. But they were extreme cases, such as the guy who showed up drunken everyday, if at all. And then there was Pedro.”

Pedro, a smoker, had been a night watchman assigned to the huge mercado separated from the zoo only by a fence. The details never surfaced, but one night he managed to set the mercado on fire, nearly burning it down.

“You’d think that’d be serious enough to warrant a termination. But no. They transferred him to another municipal agency — the zoo. And they didn’t tell me he was the one who torched the mercado.”

One of Pedro’s duties at his new job was stewardship over the zoo’s trophy specimen, Felix — a full-grown African lion.

“One day Pedro left the lion’s cage open,” Guzmán says, sighing and smiling. “Felix was following Pedro around, a few paces behind, without Pedro even realizing it. The other keepers were signaling him that something was up. Fortunately, Felix is very docile. He was recaptured without incident. But just imagine. Good thing Felix wasn’t hungry!”

Stuck with Pedro even after this, Guzmán tried to find him a niche where he could do relatively little damage. The big concrete fish pond seemed safe enough.

“Like a household aquarium, the estanque needs its water periodically changed. One day, Pedro was refilling it but didn’t turn the water off. When the water got high enough, it started pouring through the overflow pipes below the brim, suctioning fish along with it.” The pipes, as it turn out, lead directly to Calle Rodolfo Robles — one of the city’s busiest streets — at a major intersection, no less.

“Passers-by noticed that there were fish all over the street for some reason. People were picking them up, taking them home, cooking them.” Guzmán estimates that half of her fish were lost. But she also lost Pedro. “That was the last straw. Then they had to let me replace him.”

The remaining keepers were secure in their jobs. Conciliatory by both necessity and temperament, Guzmán saw no option but to connect with them. “That they were illiterate, for instance, was not only their problem. It was a liability for the zoo.”

Guzmán had acquired manuals from bigcity zoos, including the one in São Paulo, where she had the fortune to attend a zookeepers’ conference. Translating the manuals from Portuguese was only the first step in professionalizing her crew.

“My first procedures manual had been all pictures. As such, it was woefully inadequate.”

In Guatemala, future teachers are required to teach literacy to people who lack it. Guzmán went to the Education Ministry and recruited some interns for a nighttime literacy class in the zoo’s main building. Today, every one of the keepers — including four who scrawled their X on the letter to the mayor back in 1990 — can read and write.

“They also have uniforms, which they are proud of,” Guzmán says. “They take pride in their jobs. And they respect the animals, to say nothing of themselves.”

Guzmán herself wears no uniform. Nor do the volunteer docents found in the zoo’s office — which also houses its herpetarium, some budgerigars and hamsters, and a classroom. One other person without a uniform is Guzmán’s son, Carlitos. Wise beyond his 15 years, Carlitos is his mom’s right hand.

“I’d come here after school everyday while growing up,” he says. “I know everyone’s job, inside and out, and the needs of each animal.”

Minerva Zoo is an enviable place to grow up. Aside from the animals, there is a parque infantil with swing-sets and the like, shaded promenades and a stylish gazebo where concerts are staged. Carlitos likes to point out the improvements his mother has wrought. Among these are the well tended flower beds enclosing the cage complexes. Guzmán also removed the monkey cage — but not the monkeys.

“Not even Aurora [Park Zoo in Guatemala City] has this,” Carlitos boasts. “We built a moat around the monkey habitat and tore down the cage. It’s better for the monkeys. It’s also a better exhibit.”

They found a more prosaic remedy for the other cages and aviaries. Formerly, these were separated from the walkways by a meter of turf; nothing separated zoo-goers from animals but the cage meshes. People would stick their fingers in and get bitten by animals thinking they were getting food. The Guzmáns converted the turf zones into another sort of moat — fenced, foliage-filled buffers.

The innovations are not failsafe. One day, the convenience store across the street called to say that a mink had taken up residence in their trash dumpster.

“It didn’t take them long to guess where the animal had come from,” says Guzmán. “So we went over and collected it. When we got the mink back home, we noticed its mate was missing. A few hours later, the Stop-N-Go called again. There was another mink in their trash.”

The escape one day of a monkey had an unexpected but catalyzing effect on zoo policy. “[The man called] Fat Felipe was responsible for the monkeys,” Guzmán explained. “Well, there was Fat Felipe, ambling all over the place after the monkey, with no hope of recapturing it. The other keepers thought this was some big joke. They all stood around laughing. I told them to get moving. Later I scolded them. ‘From now on,’ I insisted, ‘we’re a team. End of discussion’.”

This teamwork is critical in Guzmán’s campaign to reform attitudes. She has an educational outreach, but she also counts on her keepers to enforce rules that — at the time of her own arrival — they themselves would have disdained.

“Too many people abuse the animals. They shout at them, throw rocks at their cages, feed them things that could harm them. They litter the premises and trample the flowers.”

The educational outreach is aimed at the younger set, on whom Guzmán is banking her hopes. “Their parents and grandparents teach them one thing, by bad example. We teach them something else.”

Minerva Zoo not only sponsors events but participates in them. In 2000 Guzmán, ever on the lookout for ways to raise the zoo’s profile, eyed the annual City Worker’s Sweetheart contest. Each municipal sector nominates a contestant; there is a Water Queen, a Police Queen, even a Sanitation Queen. Guzmán saw no reason why there should not also be a Zoo Queen, so she commandeered a friend who went on to win the citywide pageant.

One non-elective staple of the outreach “curriculum” is how zoos operate. Guzmán’s zoo is small, but she works closely with other zoos — particularly Aurora Park and Auto- Safari (near Escuintla) — to rotate stock and bolster gene pools. “In that sense,” she says, “all zoos in Guatemala form a single collection.”

Guzmán’s particular interest is felines. She has no cats at home, but she envisions a special feline exhibit. The plan was chosen from a stack that became available after she appealed to Landívar University for ideas. The school assigned each of its civil engineering majors to submit a comprehensive redesign of the zoo. The one Guzmán favors includes a circular pavilion of New-World cats — pumas, lynxes, bobcats, ocelots, jaguars, jaguarundis — with Felix thrown in for good measure.

This would cost an estimated $60,000, so Guzmán is seeking a sister zoo in the United States for Minerva. It is not so much money she is shopping for as hand-me-down equipment that larger, wealthier zoos are replacing. This would free her budget for additions such as the feline project. Sister zoos can also provide interns and data exchanges; Aurora Park has long enjoyed a profitable sisterhood with the Dallas Zoo.

One funding source will be admission which — to date — has never been charged. An infrastructure is in place: two collection booths, partly constructed, sit near the present entrance. Space is set aside for a restaurant and gift shop. The admission will be within everyone’s reach, but Guzmán expects it will have an additional benefit: if the institution is not free, people will take better care of it. This transition will only be the latest at a zoo where the wildest animals once lived outside the cages, a zoo which had no three-toed sloth — but no shortage of the five-fingered variety.

“That’s all over,” Guzmán says. “I respect my men. They respect me. There’s not even a trace of the old animosity, on either side.”

Carlitos — her likely heir apparent as director — nods his agreement

Children from 5 to 12 may join “Friends of Minerva Zoo” for free. The colorful membership card (complete with the child’s photo) is a whimsical take on mom-and-dad’s cedula. Kids get to attend zoo events and, for a small fee (or via sponsorship), enroll in the annual November vacation class. Each year’s class has a theme (ecology, camouflage, nocturnal living) and is so well received that in recent years it has been extended because the attendees beg for more. The administrator of the Friends’ club is the zoo’s resident kid — Carlitos Guzmán.