And lo, young Daniel´s time in the land of eternal springtime drew nigh to a close. But yet there were wonders, and astonishments, and signs of things most strange. Where then, to begin his penultimate correspondence from the tranquil yet noisesome southlands? With seeing a cow being slaughtered in a dusty mountain village, or with getting bitten by a possibly rabid dog in the middle of nowhere? Okay, I´ll start with where I am now, Antigua. Antigua is
the Guatemala you want to visit if you want a pretty, clean, relatively painless way to experience Guatemala. It truly is a beautiful city. It was the original Guatemala City and colonial capital before they had to move the capital in the 18th century after too many earthquakes in this location. By and large it is older and prettier than maybe any other city in the Americas and most in Europe. There are lots of gringos about, but their presence is somehow not overbearing or annoying the way it was in San Pedro. For all its quaintness and tourist presence, Antigua is still genuinely Guatemalan. I´m honestly sort of relieved to be again in a place that is a bit "civilized" after my recent experiences in the back of beyond. On the other hand, being a touristy place, I find I am more often beseiged by people wanting to sell me something or guide me somewhere, than anywhere else. Honestly, sweet Mayan ladies with an armload of textiles have perfected the art of looking sad when you don´t want to buy their stuff. They are actually classic salespeople. There is no saying no to the way they pose their questions. ("You want this one or this one? I give you good price. What price you want?) In Xela there were lots of wandering vendors, but they were definitely not as insistent.
As you may recall I had taken an almost broke-down bus over the mountains to the town of Nebaj to spend a few days hiking. I did a couple day hikes there and then a crazy 3 day trek over the Cuchumatanes Mountains to the even more remote town of Todos Santos.
My first hike in Nebaj was guided by an independent local guy named Gaspar. He lost both his parents in the civil war and fled with other family to Chiapas, Mexico when he was eleven. He returned about 8 years ago and makes his living as an independent hiking guide. We walked several miles down a verdant valley from Nebaj to a thundering waterfall. However the river is choked the whole way with plastic garbage and smells like a sewer. Kind of detracts. Gaspar took no notice, and repeatedly asked me "¿Es tranquilo, no?" with a tone of pride. I did manage to take a neat little digital movie of hundreds of plastic bottles bobbing and swirling in the current next to an
otherwise idyllic smaller waterfall. The thing that really turns me is when a dirty plastic diaper floats past.
Next day I took an unguided hike up the mountain at the edge of town to the ridge overlooking the village
of Acul. These people here are real mountain people. Casually walk home from town up and over 2,000 vertical foot ridges. Old man with 50 pounds of firewood on his back. 12 year old with same. Mule with about 300 pounds worth. Two young women with intricately woven dress, parasol, and sacks of shopping from the market. Guy riding up on a horse. Guy herding four cows down. All this wouldn't have looked different 100 or even 500 years ago. Even in town there are packhorses, loaded for the trip back to village. But there is no escaping the "Turkey in the Straw" ice cream truck song. From the ridge several kilometers above town, there's the electronic chiming from far below. Later the offending truck drives right past below my unpaned wood-shutter window at Hospedaje La Esperanza. It is a retrofitted pickup truck with a megaphone blaring on the roof. It is a Sunday. Children either smile or stare wide eyed at me, no simple indifference. I'm in a corner room on the second storey below a tin roof. My highland Guatemalan garret. Five dollars a night, the going rate for private room with shared bath.
Next day I embarked on the 3 day trek over the mountains. My guide was a 50 year old Mayan guy named Nicolas. I learned lots of interesting things from him, to the extent I could understand his spanish (he spoke no english.) The highest reaches of the Cuchumatanes Mountains are a beautiful series of rocky, pine studded valleys, mostly over 11,000 feet in elevation. You see more packmules than pickup trucks. There isn´t even all that much litter. I think I went a whole hour at one point without seeing any. The pines look like Ponderosas to me but may be a
different species. There used to be more of them though. I noticed a lot of blackened stumps. Nicolas explained that the army burned the forest down with napalm in the 1980's to try to drive out guerillas. The funny thing is that both the army conscripts and guerillas were all Mayan (army officers being Ladino.) Quite frequently guerillas would capture soldiers, who would then become guerillas. Sometimes they were captured back again by the army and became soldiers again. This could go on back and forth several times with the same soldiers.
I saw a cow being slaughtered in a little village. Half the village was crowded around a concrete enclosure, so I'm like "hey, what's the attraction?" and sidle over. Just in time to see a big black steer with its hooves roped together flop its head for the last time onto the concrete as gallons (seemingly) of blood flowed from its neck and into a drain in the floor.
We spent the nights in little informal hostel rooms next to some people´s adobe houses, with dinner cooked on a brick woodstove and served by the Mom and helpful little kids. Every family seems to have chickens, a
rooster that crows at all hours, two or more dogs, and a pig on a rope. The dogs, I have decided, exist as the garbage disposal system. Which works fine for everything that isn´t plastic. The plastic just lays there forever.
On the third day, as I was walking through a tiny highland village, a dog appeared from seemingly nowhere and bit my leg. One quick bite. That's all it takes to get rabies and die. They say rabies is fairly common in Latin America. I washed the wound at a Pila (communal faucet) and continued on down to Todos Santos. I had wanted to stay there longer than one night. It is surely the most beautiful place in Guatemala, at least to my tastes. It looks like a steep, evergreen-forested, cliff ringed valley in the Cascades. And unlike most places in Guatemala, not only the women but the men wear their traditional dress. They wear beautiful red and white vertically striped pants, embroidered shirts with amazing big intricate purple collars, and flat brimmed straw hats or cowboy hats. Everyone from the little tykes to the grandpas wears this. It was the tail end of a market day and literally half the town seemed to be drunk. Later that evening the evangelical church blared its oddly tuneless singing from a loudspeaker until about 10:00 PM. This goes on practically every night in practically every little town.
I caught the pre-dawn bus out of town to the regional capital Huehuetenango. In remote Guatemalan villages the first bus of the morning announces its impending departure with a deafening series of horn blasts at about 4:00 AM. Actually all the buses announce their departure and anything else the driver feels like expressing, in this fashion, but it is astonishing to be woken at such an hour by such a sound, in a village clinging to the side of a forested mountain in the middle of nowhere. The descent from the top of the Cuchumatanes (a 12,000 foot plateau) down to this city (about 6,000 feet) is the most amazing, mind boggling stretch of hairpin turns and sheer drops I have ever seen, with views to match. There is really no way to describe it. Three more buses later I was in Antigua checking into a hotel and girding myself for the prospect of a full series of rabies shots.
My experience of the Guatemalan health care system has been interesting, to say the least. At first I went to the public hospital. There was no delay or bureacracy involved in admitting me. They gave me a prescription for antibiotics, then sent me post haste down the street to the local vaccination clinic. But there was no apparent process of admittance, just crowds of parents and kids waiting for their vaccinations of various kinds. I spoke with a nurse and was told (wrongly) that I didn´t need any shots. Rather than go back up to the main hospital I decided to head to the nearby private hospital. They took me in immediately and within 5 minutes gave me the first shot (in what will be a series of five) and a list of dates to return. Although in the US the full rabies vaccine series costs the patient upwards of 1,500 dollars, in Guatemala there is no charge, whether you go to a public or private hospital. It is apparently considered a matter of public health, and funded or reimbursed by the government. I found this very interesting. For all its obvious dysfunctionalities, the Guatemalan "system" in this case (except for the hitch at the city clinic) was quick, painless, and free to the patient. To me it sort of exemplifies the informality you find in so much of Guatemalan life. You see it in all sectors. The bus system obviously. And if there is no bus on the road you are on, just wave at a pickup and it will probably stop for you. Absolutley everyone in the countryside uses this
method. It is customary to give the driver a couple of Quetzales. The classic laissez-faire shows up at the
marketplaces: there are a bunch of tables (in larger markets sometimes covering several acres, inside and outside.) If someone has something to sell on market day, they show up and put it on a table, or spread it on the ground, or walk around proclaiming its merits. There is no formal process, or at any rate there is a gradation from permanent stalls to complete informality, and on a scale and a level of vibrancy that is impossible to describe in North American
terms.
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote an April Fool's Day entry on my www.travelingdan.com blog about having suddenly flown to Costa Rica to attend an esoteric astrology seminar at a New Age eco-lodge retreat center in the jungle. It seemed pretty unlikely to me at the time, although several people believed the spoof. Now here it is just over one year later and I have just attended a class on esoteric astrology at a New Age eco-lodge retreat center in the Central American jungle. How weird is that? A year ago I was just blindly speculating that such places even exist in Central America. Actually the real class was on Kaballah, with tangents on astrology, and the woods here aren't quite jungle as such, but close. I attended the class to get a flavor of the place, Los Piramides Meditation Center (where most of the buildings are pyramids) in San Marcos on Lago de Atitlan. A friend (the indefatigable Norma Keller, for those of you who know her) is here taking a three month spiritual development course that will culminate in 40 days of silence. Hardcore.
The fabled Lago de Atitlan. Imagine a combination of Lake Tahoe and Hawaii and you'll sort of get the picture. An enormous, deep highland lake of unworldly crystalline blue surrounded by green volcanoes, jagged ridges, and picturesque villages. To get to San Marcos I caught a boat (outboard fiberglass "Lancha") from the town of Panajachel. Weather was murky that afternoon, volcanoes barely visible but the shore mountains rising up along the route were spectacular, with little villages clinging to the steep edges.
At the San Marcos dock I was descended upon by a small pack of boys who wanted to "guide" me to a hotel and carry my pack. I did not need their help, but indulged them. I ended up at Hotel Unicornio. I have never been a fan of Unicorns, but it is a very pleasant place with leafy garden courtyard and tile-mosaic benches. My guides asked for 10 Quetzales for each of the two older boys, then dropped it to 5 when I balked. I gave them 15 and told them to share it with the two younger ones. Later as evening was coming on, 3 boys came up to me asking for 1 Quetzal each, claiming hunger. I asked them "¿Tu mama no cocina?" (Your mom doesn´t cook?) because they looked rather well fed, to which they said No. ¿Y tu Papa? "Esta borracho" (He's drunk.) I asked them if they wanted the money for candy. No, bananas. I knew it was soemthing they tried on every gringo in town, but I gave each of the younger ones a Quetzal. The older one thrust out his hand too and I said "¡Pero tu, tu eres fuerte!" (But you, you're strong!) and he proudly showed me his muscles, then thrust his hand out again. I gave him my remaining 55 centavos. I was never once panhandled by children (and only twice by adults) in Xela. They know they can do it here in San Marcos though. Gringo hippies will fork over.
I enjoyed the tranquility of San Marcos despite the incongruity of the place. This super woo-woo gringo enclave of meditation and massage centers and New Age thatch-roof hotels, cheek by jowl with the Guatemalan villagers, many of whom work service jobs in the hotels and restaurants. God only knows what they think of it all. But I really liked the place too. The hotel with leafy courtyard, crickets chirping, relaxed pace, vibe of spiritual intent (for lack of a better way to put it) from the other tourists, fireflies glowing along the verdant alley pathways, the loudspeaker from the evangelical church up the hill blaring sermons and hymns until 10 at night. There's always a crazy louspeaker blaring in Guatemala.
After a couple days of San Marcos I took the boat to the larger village of San Pedro. San Pedro is also a gringo-hippie enclave but VERY different than San Marcos. Where San Marcos is the healthy-living self-development hippie place, San Pedro is the bacchanalian excess, cheap liqour and clouds of pot smoke hippie place. Thus much more populated. Actually the town itself is very quaint with its steep, narrow cobblestone streets, ect., but the dirty gringo vibe near the lake is too much. There's seemingly nowhere to eat that isn't a gringo bar of some kind, serving bad bar food. What's the point? Cheap drinks and pot, basically. Lots of spanish schools here, but again, why? Because it is beautiful and quaint and cheap, that's the original impulse, the reason why the hippies started showing up decades ago. I don't blame them. Here I am myself. But the unfolding reality has followed the predictable path of tawdry exploitation. It's kind of a Haight-Ashbury of the Guatemalan Highlands. A lot cheaper though. But it is still commercial. That's the thing that gets me. Why come all the way to Guatemala to party with other gringos in places that just want your money? It makes me very glad to be part of an awesome community of people back home who excel at making their own fun, and for free.
But the gringo influence isn't all bad. I met a bright young Mayan woman named Maria who works at the local hiking-guide agency office, whose life is demonstrably better for the opportunities the tourist economy has given her. The overwhelming majority of women in Guatemala do nothing else day in and day out except wash clothes by hand, cook, clean the house, possibly cook or clean for someone else as well, and bear children. That is literally all they are allowed, in their culture, to do. It is easy to dream romantic about indigenous and traditional cultures, and in fact I believe they have a lot of major strengths. But they are also conservative in a way that most North Americans (whether conservative or liberal politically) cannot comprehend. But in a few places like San Pedro, the influence of a continuous flow of people from other continents has allowed little windows of opportunity to open up for people like Maria to transcend (at least partially) their life sentence of wading into the lake every day to wash clothes for three hours (after making breakfast for the family and before the rest of the day's chores.) She explained to me that neither of her parents speak spanish or ever went to school.(The native language in San Pedro is the Mayan Tz'utujil.) Maria attended school through the secondary level and speaks fluent spanish and decent english. (I found it interesting that her accent when she spoke english sounded, to me, Japanese.) She said that she hopes that her own children when she has them will be able to attend university. Very few Mayans, though they are over half the country's population, yet attend a University. She said she is very glad to work as the secretary of the guide office, because when she has gone to Guatemala City to look for similiar work, prosepective employers take one look at her Mayan clothing and send her away. Women who dress and look like Maria are cleaning ladies or coffee bean sorters, not office personel. Her dream, she says, is the election of an indigenous president of the country.
One night of San Pedro was enough (there was more, including a mentally unbalanced German neighbor in the room next to me in the hotel, and the worst plate of "Mexican" food I have ever eaten.) I am now in the remote mountain town of Nebaj. It only took 2 buses (and 5 hours) to get here from the lake. The second bus kept overheating on an incredibly long and high mountain grade leading to Nebaj. The driver had to pull over and have his assistant refill the leaking radiator with water he fetched in a large bucket from peoples' houses by the road and from a roadside spring where a woman was washing her hair.
Who doesn't love coffee? Personally, I don't know any adult Americans who don´t indulge at least occasionally, most daily. Fun addiction. Get all nice and wired for like a dollar, totally legal. Big subject though once you start to look into it, and Guatemala is a very natural place to look into it. It leads inevitably to a bigger topic, the meta-topic
lurking behind all other Guatemalan topics: war, struggle, and the de facto Apartheid of Guatemala's economy and society.
I visited a coffee plantation called Finca Santa Anita a few days ago on a trip arranged through my language school. It is in the mountains to the west towards the Pacific but lower down than Xela, thus much warmer. They grow coffee for export, bananas for the domestic market, and macadamia nuts. When you hear about "shade grown, organic, fair trade coffee" it comes from places like this. Former rebels turned entrepeneur. The shade comes from the banana trees and other trees that they grow for fuel or lumber. There's lots of other plants too. The "Fair Trade" part comes from the fact that the finca is owned by the people who work it, and marketed through the official "Fair Trade" program. There's a lot that can be said about this, you can read a bunch at the website http://www.transfairusa.org or in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade Check it out. Overall I believe it is something very worth supporting. To me it is a simple matter of deciding to buy something more than just the caffeine. I may explore some of the nuances in another email.
We took a hike of several kilometers to a waterfall down in the canyon below the settled part of the finca. Although the workers here own the place themselves, it is still hard work. We saw a couple of young guys (maybe 14)hauling firewood on their backs half a kilometer or more to the kitchen house. The trails were well maintained, a continuous process of people always carrying a machete to clear vines. The coffee is harvested from October to December, most of it exported to coffee roasting companies in the U.S. Some of it they roast themselves with a roaster donated by the Japanese government. The Guatemalan government hasn't really given them anything other
than the pleasure of living unmolested by the army for almost a decade now.
Ah, yes, the army. It is awfully easy for those of us who yearn for a better and more just world, to believe in and expostulate on the struggle against injustice, and the virtues of non-violence. But suppose you were part of a group (like the Maya of Guatemala) which, although the numeric majority, was systematically denied property, education, basic civic services, and equal treatment before the law. And I don't mean just a little bit. I mean comprehensively, totally, fundamentally. And that to stay alive, you and your family had to work for 2 dollars a day harvesting crops in the hot sun, then turn around and buy your necessities from a company store. (Most coffee and fruit fincas are still run like this: 3 dollars per hundred pounds of coffee, which if you work very hard you might do in a long day. Housing in horrible run-down company shacks, water from a single pipe, etc. Owner who lives in a palace somewhere else.) But in the off season you were at least able to return to your home village to grow some corn or potatoes on a little patch of rocky soil (probably owned by someone else,) and maintain your culture. You might decide though, at a certain point, to fight for something more. Unfortunately you've been barred, in totality, from the political process. And in fact the government, such as it is, is nothing more than a clique of authoritarian Generals and their lackeys, doing the bidding of a tiny, socially inbred, pseudo-European aristocracy.
So there's the basic picture of post-conquest Guatemala. Except for a short window of ten years, there was never a popularly elected government in the history of the country. Those 10 years were 1944 to 1954. By the end of it the United Fruit Company and other hyper-rich landowners started to fear that some of their unused holdings might be distributed to campesinos. So with the direct assitance of the U.S. government, the was a coup in 1954 that initiated decades of authoritarian and often brutal governance. Over half the population of Guatemala is indigenous Mayan (for whom Spanish is usually a second language.) Along with disgusted contingents of the educated Ladino professional classes and students, they made up most of the armed resistance that fought the Guatemalan Army during several decades of bloody civil war. The bloodshed peaked in the early 1980's with the scorched earth policies of José Efraín Ríos Montt, a supposed Evangelical Christian. Over 200,000 people died, mostly non combatant villagers. When the Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi of the Guatemalan Archbishop's Office released an investigative report in 1998 stating that nearly all of these deaths were at the hands of the army, he was beaten to death two days later outside his home.
The civil war came to an official close in 1996. But all those erstwhile guerillas had to do something with their lives. I can't speak to what all of them have done. But a number of them have, by some small miracle (and very little help from the Guatemalan government) bought their own land and now grow and harvest coffee which is marketed and sold under the Fair Trade banner. Finca Santa Anita is such a place. They were guerillas. They spent years roving in the mountains, skirmishing with and capturing government soldiers. They saw a lot of blood. They learned in a way that few Americans can even comprehend the relative merits of violence versus non-violence in a struggle for social justice. Now they are farmers and business people. They have a poster in their roasting room that says "No Más Violencia" (No More Violence.)They know the pros and cons. It was years of back and forth struggle. The army had brigades of conscripts and superior weaponry. The guerillas had conviction and the support of most of the Mayan populace. The army killed with impunity. Our host explained their policy: destroy entire villages, by land and air, to try to eliminate the guerillas' basis of support. As I said, over 200,000 people died. More than a million were displaced. In the end no one really won in any conventional sense. There were peace accords in 1996 after seven years of negotiations.
In the late 1990's the European Union initiated a program of loans to former guerillas in Guatemala, for the purpose of purchasing agricultural land. The Guatemalan government facilitated the loans but provided no actual money. This particular band of guerillas was able to buy, from its former owner, the Finca Santa Anita. Our host told us that a couple of months ago he spent several weeks in the U.S. going to various coffee companies, forging business relationships. He said that if, during the civil war, you had told him that one day he would be traveling to North America to conduct coffee business, he would never have believed it. He said "Our weapons used to be M-16's and AK-47's, now our weapons are machetes" (for cutting plants.) He says it has been a very interesting challenge to learn to live and work in such a community, much different and harder than the logistics of camping out as a guerilla band in the mountains. There are about 130 of them at Santa Anita, including children. All kinds of nuts and bolts business decisions and community decisions to make. Paying off the loan is a challenge, especially because it only covered the land and none of the equipment and other hard goods required in running a plantation. These they have to cover in cash out of their operating budget. He seemed very hopeful that as more people learn about Fair Trade goods, they would be able to succeed and prosper. I certainly hope so. Places like this offer hope of real stability and normality for the country, and a chance to forge grassroots business and personal relationships with the big country up north. In a country where people feel like they have a piece of the pie, and some dignity, they won't be compelled to take up arms. But inbred hyper-elites often have a hard time seeing what is in their own longer term self interest. Luckily Europe and Japan have stepped up, from whatever ultimate motive, to assist where the national government has consistently failed. Without such programs, and the general prosperity of current times (good work up north, strong markets for domestic production, bleeding heart gringos buying Fair Trade goods, etc.,) Guatemala would be on the road again to overt internal conflict. Who knows what the coming years will bring, but in this moment of Guatemala's history there are many thousands of people who know from deadly experience the virtues of "No Más Violencia."
At a certain point, what more is there to say? Oh, a lot I suppose. They have this ice cream store here called "Pops". It is a chain, or at least there are two of them. But their ice cream is as good as or better than Haagen Daz and Ben and Jerry´s for about half the price.
I went for a hike on Saturday to a sacred Mayan lake called Laguna Chicabal. It is in the caldera of a forested volcano and to get there you first: ride a ridiculously packed chicken bus 22 kilometers (45 minutes with all the stops) to the village of San Martin Chile Verde, get out (or like me, miss the stop and continue 20 minutes more down the road, finally get out, cross the road and catch another bus back to the right spot and get out), walk down and across a muddy eroded rivulet, then if you´re lucky (as I was) hop in a passing microbus for the nearly vertical
climb past various tin-roofed shacks and potato fields to the national park entrance. Pay the foreigner´s entrance fee (still only 2 dollars) and hike 2 kilometers up a muddy track to the rim of the caldera, then down the longest flight of stairs I have ever encountered, to the misty shore ringed by designated Mayan altar spots (many with offerings in place) and throngs of Ladino Guatemalans picnicking, playing soccer on the gravel, or singing evangelical hymns. That they do these things in a place of deep spiritual significance to those who still revere the oldest ways, is evidence that they either are themselves drawn to the innate sacredness of the place, or fundamentally don´t care. I´m not sure which. Tourists here (by which I mean local Guatemalan tourists of the Ladino class and ethnicity) are pretty much the same as tourists everywhere. They flock to a place like this to "been there done that" and eat some fried chicken, or to Xela to gawk at and snap pictures of the Easter processionals, and buy trinkets and cotton
candy, just the same as gringo tourists. Actually they probably eat a lot more cotton candy, candied peanuts, local-brand candies, sherbet, peeled oranges, fresh squeezed juice, and fried plantain bananas smothered in cream and sugar, than any gringo could ever stomach. Actually those last several things are really wonderful. I´d be truly addicted to the fried bananas with cream (especially from the guy by the Teatro Municipal) except that they are so incredibly greasy. And good. But the 9 year olds hawking candy and plastic toys will have to do without my business. Don´t they have school? Well, maybe not. It was Easter week anyway. The processions were something. After the fifth one they get to be all alike, but still. Where else will you see hundreds of people from age 5 to 90 in purple cassocks and strange phallic skullcaps, swinging incense burners and hoisting 50-foot long depictions of the torture of Christ? Or a powder-white Mary and various angels? Or Christ in a glass coffin?
Just as amazing are the giant long designs made of colored sawdust and flowers in the street. These only last a little while before being trampled by the processions and then swept up.
Other random observations: there is no self-service photocopying here, like Kinko's. There are Mom and Pop "Fotocopias" places on practically every block, where they make the copy for you.
A Big Mac is 30 Queztales (almost $5.00) but at a little "comedor" you can get a heaping plate of black beans, chicken or beef, rice, salsa, and hand-made tortillas, for 10 or 12 Quetzales. So why go to the Clown? Who knows. It´s all about the influence of American pop culture. Guatemala sends us workers, we send them Big Macs. And the Guatemalans working in the US send back their earnings (the single largest cash source in the Guatemalan economy) to family members who circulate the bonus throughout the country, making possible (for example) the presence of 3 McDonald´s and a Burger King in Xela, not to mention a bajillion other locally owned enterprises, a cell phone in every hand, and new construction on practically every block of the outlying neighborhoods. If trends continue (which I doubt, but for the sake of discussion) one might envision a long continuing boom in the Guatemalan economy, resulting ironically in less incentive to go to the U.S. to work. The obvious driver of the current migratory pattern is the huge difference in prices and wages between the two economies. One of my spanish teachers explained how, for example, he could make twice as much money in one month of restaurant work and sleeping in a crowded apartment in New York (which he has done for up to six months) than a University professor´s monthly salary here in Xela. He, like most migrant Guatemalan workers, had no intention of staying permanently in the US (although many do.) The point is to make a little pile of money and bring it back to Guatemala where it will go a very long way: buy a car, a house, send your kids to private school, etc. It is an equation which will work as long as (but only as long as) there is a large disparity in prices and wages between the two countries. It is also the driver of GRINGO migration to Guatemala. There are literally thousands of gringos (and not just Americans but Europeans, Australians, and affluent Euro South Americans) staying for various lengths of time (from a few weeks to forever) in this country, particulary in Antigua and Lake Atitlan. What the implications of this migration are for the culture and economy of the country, I will leave to speculation. Suffice to say that the attractions and dangers of unchecked migration cut both ways.
Once again, where to begin? The streets are thronged with uniformed schoolchildren every day in the early morning and early afternoon. All the schoolkids wear uniforms. But the school system, like many places, has two tiers: shoddy public schools and clean, well ordered private schools. But the "private" school system is so pervasive that it is really the school system, period. Thus the streets thronged every day with the kids in their uniforms. But last Friday: the streets were thronged with mysterious characters in hooded robes of every color (including white.) What, a massive Klan presence in Guatemala? No, it is the annual "Huelga de los Dolores", the "Strike of thePains/Pained Ones." The hooded robes have no KKK association here. They are the method long used by discontented university students to remain anonymous in their protest against the government. It is a tradition that started in 1896, and although the society remains about as socially unequal now as then, it continues, culminating in the weeks and days just prior to Semana Santa (Easter Week) with a series of rallies and a parade from the University down to the Central Park and City Center. At times in Guatemala this sort of activity has been extremely dangerous. The last time they were actually machine-gunned was in the civil war years of the 1980's. There were no idle gringo tourists and spanish-students here in those days. But even then the students celebrated La Heulga de los Dolores. The most controversial aspect of their activity is the extortion of money from businesses to fund their activities. This is what they do: send a friendly letter to a business (for example a language school)thanking them for their impending donation of, say, 1,000 Queztales ($150). This amount however is open to negotiation, and usually ends up around Q300. The businesses that don't donate are put on a blacklist, and on the night before the Friday parade, "painted" with brooms dipped in used motor oil. This is a longstanding, and more or less tolerated, tradition. Until this year. This year the students decided to go out on Wednesday and target McDonald's and some other transnationally owned businesses, but the police were ready and arrested eleven of them, basically the whole actual painting crew. The police were back out en masse on Thursday night, so there was no painting. The headline Friday morning screamed "NO HUBO PINTA", "THERE WAS NO PAINT." Who knows whether it is the end of the tradition.
The parade Friday was a hoot. Many of the floats had hilariously crude and graphic depictions of the perceived abuses by various bad guys, and the protest mascot, a dancing skeleton. And the sight of hundreds of people in hooded robes dancing down the street while vendors walked or rolled past selling ice cream cones or cotton candy to the throngs of onlookers: to an American, downright bizarre. And ironic moments too, like one of the hooded protesters drinking a Coca-Cola.
But if it wasn´t a Coke it would have to have been a corporate bottled water: The entire *drinkable* water supply is bottled water, of one brand ("Salvidas".) What kind of stake do THEY have in making sure there is no municipal water purification in Guatemala? And here you get a clue as to the motive force behind this country's seemingly loose approach to government action and civic services. Whatever is most in the narrow interest of a specific super-rich post-colonial economic overclass, is policy. Intercity highways are decent. Goods do need to get through. There´s an electrical system, water for flushing toilets, a bit of garbage pickup. There is a court and police system. They don't get paid much though, so bribes at all levels are welcome. Beyond that, it's a crap shoot. Like I said before: a preview of Grover Norquist's America.
Another ironic (but probably inevitable) flipside to the loose provision of services is the proliferation of armed personel and control. I have never seen a wider variety or number of armed police, soldiers, and private security guards. Partly it was because they brought in the National Police to quell possible disturbances related to the student strike, but it is common to see armed security goons of various levels of neatness, down to the shabbily uniformed guard outside of some random store, toting a gigantic shotgun. He stands there all day doing nothing, just boredly holding the gun.
This week is Semana Santa and although almost half the population is now some kind of evangelical or pentacostalist, there will still be many colorful processions to the Cathedral. Antigua is more famous for this, but Xela is renowned too. Palm Sunday morning one went right past my new digs on Calle 4, a long procession of women in colorful dresses and ribbons, men in dark suits, a woman with a bowl of burning incense, about 16 women carrying a life-sized golden haloed Jesus on a sedan-platform thing on their shoulders, and a festively funereal brass band taking up the rear.