Guatemala Gulps

Away from Guatemala

2007-11-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

I feel the need to add a footnote here. I no longer live in Guatemala so I can't continue Guatemala Gulps. Its just not the same writing about a place from the other side of the globe.

I was so overwhelmed in the months before I left that I couldn't find a topic small enough to write on for this blog. I followed a major corruption/murder case involving the assassination in Guatemala of 3 Salvadoran members of the Central American Parliament, followed by the arrest of four members of the National Civil Police for their murder, followed by the assassination of those same four police while being held in custody.... but it was too big. It was, and still is, a book. I hope I write it, but I hope I can write it with hope.

Guatemala is especially in my mind because today it is the second and final vote in the Presidential election. The trouble is, I'm no longer sure it makes much difference who is elected President. The river of corruption seems to run so deep and so wide that these democratic institutions have started to look to me like bobbing paper boats. I hope this is just a passing bout of cynicism and that I'll soon regain my faith in the ability of Guatemala's own people to make themselves a better future. Because they are amazingly resilient people and I don't want to forget that, with the distance that comes from reading news analysis rather than the reality of daily contact.

My experience of writing about Guatemala, where I lived for more than two years, was that the better I got to know the place the harder it was to write about it. Things that seemed clearcut at first, became tangled. The versions of history I read were crumpled around the edges in conversation. People who were cautious at first, started to tell me their real stories and views. Anything I wrote started to look like a photo-kit portrait of a good friend or loved one.

It wasn't my choice to live in Guatemala, but it was an arranged marriage that grew into love.

Travails with my ants

2007-05-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

This is not exactly a commentary or snippet of Guatemalan life. But it is about Guatemalan ants, so I guess that qualifies.

Last night in my kitchen I was surprised to see a sunflower seed propelling itself across the floor. When I bent down to look I could see it was being pushed by three tiny ants. They were struggling, but kept it moving in a more-or-less a northwesterly direction, while I watched.

Then a fourth ant arrived. Instead of shouldering the burden it ran around to each of the three ants that were carrying the seed, dodging in an out as they marched. Then it circled around the whole operation. ‘Oh’, I thought, ‘here’s the overseer ant.’

Oddly enough, seconds after the arrival of the overseer ant, the seed started moving forward in a different way. Instead of moving forward with the seed straight, it began to rotate forward. The three worker ants were now walking anti-clockwise, rotating the seed and moving it forward at the same time. It seemed to me it was progressing faster, and still in the same direction with this new circular motion, although I did wonder if all that circling could be so efficient.

Then the whole thing stopped rotating and sped up even more. I couldn’t locate the overseer ant for a moment, then I realized it had taken a share of the load. The four of them, pushing together, quickly disappeared under the kitchen bench.

‘And the moral of the story is?’

‘Ummm…There’s more than one way for a bunch of ants to move a sunflower seed?’

The cycle continues

2007-01-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

Since coming back to Guatemala after a month away I've been struck by the way the same things seem to keep happening...

Another bank went bust - the Banco Comercio - due to the intervention of the national banking regulator. Like Bancafe last year, this was again because of high-risk offshore investments, and again the investors will be unlikely ever to see their money again.

El Periodico managed to create a big scandal out of nothing when it made veiled accusations that the UN Development Program was involved in corrupt government contracting. In fact they produced no evidence of this, other than the fact that UNDP does indeed manage some large internationally funded projects, and that the funds for these are of course channelled through the organization. As someone commented, it was as if the journalist re-used the copy from last year's scandal involving the International Organization for Migration, and changed the names. Its a pity they put so much energy into beating up non-existent issues when there is so much actual corruption in every area of public life. But it is easier to target foreign organizations. Apart from anything else, they don't make death threats when they get bad press.

The Constitutional Court suspended the operation of a new tax clause intended to fund old-age pensions for people without other retirement funds. The government has said they are looking into how they can now find the funds to start the scheme.

This is the year of Guatemalas' Presidential and Congressional elections, so in reality very little is going to get done between now and November. Already senior public administrators have been resigning en masse so that they can run for election. They are being replaced with caretakers until the end of the year, who will then be replaced by appointees of the new government from January 2008. As with some other Latin Amercian countries, it appears there's no such thing as a professional civil service. All is politics, so each time there's a new President there's virtually a clean sweep, losing organizational history and requiring the reinvention of the wheel every four years (or really 3 + 1).

If the last election year in 2003 is anything to go by, there is also likely to be an increase in street protests and general violence, culminating in the week prior to the November elections. Many private schools will schedule a week's closure at that time (government system schools will already be on vacation), both for reasons of security and logisitics - ie you can't get the buses through when the streets are blocked.

At this stage few Presidential candidates have emerged, but a couple have been on the stage for some time. One of them is Otto Perez Molino, a conservative of the Patriotic Party (Partido Patriota). He is running on a a platform of 'urge mano dura', ie push for the hard-handed approach to criminal violence. It is easy to see his appeal, as personal security is the major issue for middle class and wealthy Guatemalans, as well as for many poor Guatemalans trying to live and make a living in areas run by organized criminal gangs - the 'maras' or 'pandillas'. Plausible estimates put the number of private security personnel at 100,000 compared with 20,000 police in Guatemala, in a population of 12 million. It is natural that this is important to people. After all, what is the use of civil liberties and other human rights if there is a real daily threat to your right to life? But the problem is that the hard handed approach doesn't seem to have worked anywhere in the world (with the possible exception of NYNY under Guiliani?). First of all it takes huge amounts of resources - a large well-trained and 'clean' police force, an efficient and non-corrupt system of criminal justice, and a very capacious and secure prison system, as well as human rights protections for those who suffer abuse of process (though some may think this is an optional extra). I'm afraid it is pretty clear Guatemala is lacking in all of these fundamentals. Besides, cracking down on organized crime is only going to work if it goes right to the top and as long as it doesn't do that, and as long as there are hoardes of unemployed, poor young men with nothing better to do than join the gangs, the source of the problem is not going to go away.

So what would my Presidential campaign be? "OK folks, its time to pay some taxes! And what will we do with them? We'll educate all your kids - provide universal access to primary, secondary, technical and university education - support your old folks, build hospitals and community health centres all around the country, train and resource your police force, create an extensive, efficient and incorruptible judiciary, wrest control of the prison system from the criminal gangs, cut back on military spending, regulate fireams, introduce a proper system of land ownership and land use regulation in the regions (and a spot of redistribution while we're at it), enforce minimum standards for employment conditions and wages, establish mechanisms to appeal against race, gender and other discriminatioon... ummm anything else?'

I'm starting to sound familiar to myself....
Would anyone vote for me I wonder? Evo Morales perhaps? No, wait, he's in Bolivia...

Mariposa Pesada

The Bitterest of Fruit

2006-11-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

So George Washington got a caning when he confessed to chopping down the cherry tree? Last Thursday in Guatemala City a boy was shot dead for climbing a guava tree.

He was Luis Antonio Sosa Valdez, aged ten years. His killer was a municipal policeman employed by the local government in Zona 4, a poor and densely populated part of the city.

The news made page six of Saturday’s El Periodico. It wasn’t something that scandalized the nation. The front page was taken up with sporting and political news relating to whether members of Congress can be prosecuted for criminal acts. The second page, ironically, was taken up with the news that four Nobel Peace Prize winners met in Guatemala – Guatemala’s own Rigoberta Menchu Túm, Óscar Arias, current President of Costa Rica, Jody Williams and Betty Williams. It had looked like a good news day.

But it was the page six story that should have been front page news.

The boy and two friends decided to climb the guava tree, presumably to steal some fruit, while waiting for a bus to take them to a school holiday program. The policeman approached the tree and demanded they come down immediately, or he’d shoot. They didn’t come down, and he did shoot Luis Antonio, right in the head. The others fled.

This was not a case of mistaken identity, or even acting in the heat of the moment, and it certainly doesn’t look like a warning shot gone wrong. It looks like the actions of someone trained to follow a drill and shoot to kill – except that this was not a war zone, and aside from the fact that they clearly posed no danger to anyone, the targets were children. Something has gone seriously wrong with the moral framework when a policeman thinks this is an appropriate response to a bunch of kids in a tree.

Perhaps there is an explanation, if not a reason. First of all, the municipal police are locally employed, little more than armed private security guards, and are notoriously under-trained and under-resourced. Even with the best-trained and resourced police forces, fatal accidents and mistakes happen when they are armed. But when you have armed but untrained police you are left only with the moral framework of those individuals as to how they conduct their duties properly. And if they happen to think it is appropriate to threaten children with a gun, whatever the children are doing, and then to carry out that threat, then what is there to stop them until it is too late?

As it happens, the policeman in question, Héctor Calel Bin, was a former Sergeant Major in the Guatemalan military. I don’t know the man’s age or personal background, but he may be one of the many ex-military who now work as municipal police and private security guards, since the military was downsized after the peace accords in the mid 1990s. In the two decades before the Peace Accords, and especially the late 1970s and 1980s, the Guatemalan military and paramilitaries massacred thousands of indigenous and poor ladino Guatemalans in the countryside – now known internationally as the Guatemalan Genocide. So perhaps this man’s training did little to engender any respect for the right to life?

The boy’s mother, when pleading for the capture of the guard, said, “There’s no justice in him being able to kill Luis Antonio. He wasn’t a street kid. He had a grandmother, and me. He was a boy, not just someone that could be killed like a dog.” It appears that even she, in her grief and desire to explain that her son was part of a loving family, thinks there are different degrees of worthiness when it comes to a child’s life.

There is a famous book, Bitter Fruit, about the US invasion of a democratic Guatemala in 1954. Those events spelled the end of a fledgling democracy and heralded in 40 years of military dictatorship and civil war, culminating in la violencia in the 1970s and 1980s.

Unfortunately it seems that the bitter fruit has fallen, re-seeded, and fallen again…

Mariposa Pesada

But where's our bank gone?

2006-10-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

When we moved to Guatemala and needed to open local bank accounts to receive salary payments and pay bills and rent, we opted for one of the big four banks of the country, Bancafe. We were a little shocked, therefore, to read in last Friday’s paper that the operations of Bancafe had been suspended by Guatemala’s banking regulatory authority. Our response was, ‘But surely this sort of thing doesn’t happen any more?'

Afterwards everyone told us they knew the bank was in trouble. I wonder why they didn’t tell us? Though of course we weren’t the only ones caught on the hop – we’re in there with some very large international organizations and major projects as well as around a million ordinary account holders.

I’m not sure whether I believe in premonitions, but it so happens that we withdrew the last of this month’s cash from our main account at the very time the banking regulators were deliberating. But we do wonder what is going to happen with the as-yet-unredeemed rent cheque we sent to the landlord last week.

The media reports tell us that Bancafe will not re-open, but assure us that all local accounts (dollars and quetzals) will be moved to other Guatemalan banks and that our money will be safe. They might be able to tell us where to go to find our accounts by this coming Thursday. I’ve heard of bouncing cheques, but never hand-passing accounts from one bank to the next!

Apparently the whole problem has been caused by the international arm of the bank, based in Barbados, which has a massive debt problem - something in the nature of a black hole. The reasons given by the banking authority seem sound and cautious, intended to preserve depositors’ money, as they should do. But it all seems very sudden, and something does not seem to add up. Apparently the bank was given two months to get its affairs in order, but this decision was made before the time expired. And, going by the stunned and sickened look on the face of the bank’s founder Eduardo Gonzalez in press photos, he had no idea the axe was about to fall.

The interesting thing is that Gonzalez is a candidate in the primaries within the centre-right political party Gana, for next year’s Presidential campaign. Whatever his decision about whether he will continue, his candidature has effectively been killed in the water by this untimely event. I don’t pretend to understand the machinations of Guatemala’s subterranean politics, but the coincidental timing is remarkable. I would have to say, yo tengo mis sospechas (I have my suspicions ).

We’ve never brought into Guatemala more money than we needed for each month’s living expenses. Somehow it seemed the sensible approach, although I think the backs of our minds were more occupied with the vulnerability of the quetzal and the cost of international exchange and transfer than the unlikely event that one of the four largest banks in the country would be shut down. But now we’re looking for a way not to have local bank accounts at all.

The funny is that, most of the time, it is actually possible to withdraw quetzals from foreign accounts, but it is a bit of a circus trying to do it on a regular basis. I recently thought I’d found a bank whose machines I could use not only to get quetzals per se, but to get more than Q1,000 in one hit (=100 euros). It did work one day. The next week I tried again and the machine insisted that any and every amount I entered exceeded my daily withdrawal limit. Another time the same machine told me my card wasn’t recognised. Then the next time it coughed up, so I figured it was just a network glitch after all. But when I tried the same bank at a different branch on a different day, I again ran into the zero withdrawal limit, until it occurred to me to experiment a bit. In the end I did get the money by calling it a credit card account, even though it isn’t, and even though the other machine in the other branch of the same bank wouldn’t give me a cent unless I promised it was a savings account. It seems to be a new form of computerised gaming, which I’ve decided to call Ruleta Guatemalteca.

So if you hear any reports around Guatemala of bank cash dispensers with large frontal dents and cracked glass … it’ll probably be one of those 1.1 million Bancafe desperado clients (and I have the right to remain silent).

Mariposa Pesada

The Full Montt

2006-10-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

This week the Guatemalan Constitutional Court, with new membership as of mid year, actually overruled itself.

The Court has now held that it was wrong to allow former President Efrain Rios Montt to run for the country’s presidency in 2003. As a person who came to power in 1982 by means of a military coup he should have been banned from running, as the Constitution is very specific about that. Somehow, the Constitutional Court in 2003 found reason to state that he was eligible. And he ran, and had the full status of an upstanding presidential candidate, even though he had demonstrated his disdain for democratic process (along with breaching the most basic human rights of the thousands of indigenous and poor ladino Guatemalans who were persecuted, tortured and died in the genocide under his regime in the early 1980s).

So, he didn’t win anyway - what’s the big deal? The deal is that (a) he can’t run again next year (though he probably wasn’t going to, as he’s getting a bit long in the tooth) and (b) the case is no longer a precedent that would allow others in a similar position to run for the Presidency.

Most importantly, it’s a win for an independent judiciary and for constitutionalism. After all, a democracy is built from its own history.

Go the CC!!

Mariposa Pesada

Guatemala on the UN Security Council?

2006-10-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

It is possible this is news only in Guatemala, but the government of this country is still making a bid for the Latin American region’s seat on the UN Security Council (a non-permanent seat with no veto power). I suspect the balanced speech of President Berger at the UN last month was a little overshadowed by that of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, the other contender for this Security Council seat, who, in a triumph of international diplomacy, said he could still smell the odour of the Devil George Bush at the podium.

What follows is my translation of an amusingly forthright interview on this subject in today’s edition of one of Guatemala’s daily newspapers, ‘El Periodico’.[1] I apologize for any errors – it’s not an expert translation. The interviewee is Antonjo Pallaré Buonafina, ex-Guatemalan ambassador to the UN and, prior to that, to France.

What purpose is served by Guatemala becoming a member of the UN Security Council?
None at all. It will just create problems this government cannot confront. There is a book by the Spanish ambassador who was a member of the Security Council when the US attacked Iraq, in which he says that he has never held a position so useless, so dangerous and so subject to pressure, as that one.

What does Guatemala have to do to obtain the Security Council position?
Hugo Chavez would need to die. He’d have to commit hari kiri. Don’t think that just because he’s mad he’s also unpopular. Guatemala will stay in the voting but in the end it will withdraw. Guatemala’s ambassador to the UN, Jorge Skinner Klée, is known in the Ministry of External Relations as the most scheming person there. He wants to stay at the UN for eternity, and if he becomes a member of the Security Council he will be immoveable.

What action would Guatemala need to take to merit a position on the Security Council?
A change of government and ambassador and a move to act with the dignity of a state. No one believes anyone who is not honourable. There is no point in denying it has been responsible for false rumours in the past. Guatemala is unable to participate unless it changes its policy and enters the arena with honourable people. The Arabs are not going to forget Guatemala’s past actions.

Q. Would the fact that it sent forces to Lebanon help Guatemala’s candidature?
A. The whole world knows that we have a long history of enmity with Israel, and they respect that, and no one is going to believe that we have become friends overnight. It’s something that forms over time, through actions. No one’s interests are served by sending our boys over there where they might kill and be killed. The sentiment is laudable, but Guatemala should not go where it is not wanted.

And I have nothing more to add....

Mariposa Pesada

[1] By Claudia Acuna de Seijas, p. 3.

Fancy a guava?

2006-08-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Guavas - les gustan?

2006-08-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

August is the lull in the wet season. We’ve had a week or more of warm sunny days and only a little rain; enough to keep things brilliant green and to see tall yellow lilies, red gladioli, pale-gold and pink roses, and huge green umbrella leaves bursting from their garden beds. The sickly sweet smell of guava fruit has occupied the front yard again, where we have the most prolific tree since Eden. The smell will stay with us for months, wafting in through the bathroom window, and once again we hear the soft thud of heavy fruit falling to its lawn bed at night.

Some of our neighbours and other passers-by ask if they can have the fruit to make guava relish, a local specialty, and we are happy to oblige. But I’m afraid it’s all wasted on us. The cloying perfume is too much. Last year a neighbour gave us a jar of relish in return for a bucket of guavas, but still we couldn’t stomach it, so the delighted gardener got to take it home. Yesterday I brought just one ripe fruit into the house and it wasn’t long before my partner was asking, “Why does it smell like cat pee in here?” I explained that it was just guava pheromones.

During last year's fruiting a delightful old indigenous couple, who come round regularly to sell typical fabrics and clothing, asked if they could have some of our guavas. We collected them together and they left with two supermarket bags full, faces beaming. They couldn't carry any more, as they already had a big bundle of fabrics each, the man with the larger one which he carries on his back, and which must weigh almost as much as him. They are both tiny, wiry people, and even the man barely comes up to my shoulder. A short while after they left our house I walked down the street to collect my son from the bus stop. The old couple had stopped in a doorway only two houses down, and were sitting there gorging themselves on the guavas! They looked a little bashful as I walked past, but then we all laughed and I went on my way.

I’ve also just discovered that my Columbian friend loves them (“Guayabas! Me encanta!”), and I’m now convinced that guava compatibility is an inherited gene present only in peoples from the Latin American tropics. I’m picking up the good ones each morning and keeping them for her, but I have to keep the bowl of guavas outside. To me they’re worse than the smelliest French cheese.

The only members of our family who eat our guavas are the dogs. Last season our big dog was in the habit of going to the front yard each night before bed, sniffing around until he found a guava that was just right, then taking it inside to eat for his bedtime snack. He seems to like them very ripe. Our small dog likes to munch on them too. She is also a great ball fetcher and has just invented the new game of guava fetch. Each time I throw a bad guava into the compost heap, she brings it back for me.

Mariposa Pesada
23 August 2006

Un Golpe Bajo (A hit below the belt)

2006-08-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last Friday there was a big traffic jam across the road from my son’s school. I drove by on the other side, seeing police and ambulance, assuming it was a car accident. I was glad I hadn’t taken that route to collect him from school, as I would have been late. It was just before three o’clock in the afternoon.

I soon learned from a school staff member that it was no car accident. A woman had been shot dead a short time before. Two men were handcuffed and taken away by the police. My first reaction was, “Oh boy, that was a bit too close for comfort.” I commented that I hate the way these things happen all the time in Guatemala, as if car accidents aren’t bad enough, without people being shot as well. The staff member agreed. It felt like we were talking about the weather. Then I stood there, well inside the school’s tall brick security fence with guards at the gate, and waited for my son to emerge from his classes. I also waited for some other emotional reaction on my part, but I didn’t feel anything, not even fear. As we drove out the school gate, I mentioned the “accident” and the traffic jam to my son, but not the shooting, although of course I was thinking about it all the way home. And I still am, four days later, although I don’t know what to do with the thoughts, apart from write them down.

My lack of emotion is a bit puzzling for me. I can’t seem to find anything other than a cool, intellectual compassion for the woman who was shot, nor anything other than an analytical sense of danger. Perhaps I’m beginning to understand how people in war zones become immune to the threat of imminent death and injury. Danger and risk become part of the background of their lives. This country is not at war, but there are huge numbers of guns and powerful criminal gangs. We hear and read about armed violence every day. Now and then it comes closer to home, as when friends were robbed at gunpoint last year on a bright Saturday morning just a few streets away, or when a group of men were robbed and then shot in the knees at midday in the street where my husband (used to) walked to work…. or, as in this case, when a woman was shot dead at two thirty in the afternoon right across the road from my son’s school. Then we wonder why we are living here and whether it is worth the risk to invest any energy in this country. But, short of shriveling with fear and staying behind locked doors, there’s really very little we can do about it while we are here. So we take reasonable security measures, and keep living as normal a life as possible. I joke that its just a matter of getting the right balance between fear and paranoia.

I often hear people say in Guatemala that foreigners and middle class people don’t need to worry too much because most of the murders are connected with gang warfare and drug trafficking. That may be true. I don’t know. But Sunday’s newspaper told of another aspect of Friday’s shooting (the story made page three). In this case the police do not believe there was any connection between the woman and the gunmen, except that she didn’t move fast enough when they wanted to steal her BMW, when she returned to it in the open-air car park after buying fruit. However, one of the arrested gunmen, named in the newspaper, is an ex-member of the national civil police – and this is where the plot coagulates. He was sacked from the police force in 2004 after he was accused of being part of a group of police who allegedly hi-jacked minivans and then extorted money from their victims, in the towns of Villa Nueva and Amatitlan near Guatemala City. As it happened his criminal prosecution was soon closed by the Ministerio Publico for lack of evidence, at the request of the then public prosecutor.

The spokesman for the police national criminal investigation unit said both gunmen involved in Friday’s shooting were believed to be members of a criminal gang, of some 30 men, which has been operating in the wealthier suburbs for some time. More than 400 luxury cars have been stolen in this area since January. The gang apparently exports the stolen cars to other countries in the region. Police believe that the leader of the gang was a man who was killed on 5 August. He was, as it happens, also the son of the assistant public prosecutor. His death by shooting occurred ten days after police had apprehended him and then released him on bail (even though they found in his house copies of the official seals of a number of key government ministries, including immigration and tax). Now the police believe the gang is being lead by the brother of the dead man – another son of the assistant public prosecutor – although their activities have slowed since their chief was killed, and perhaps they have split into two gangs.

Notice anything strange?

Clue 1. If the police know so much about these guys, why are they still on the loose? Is it a simple lack of resources to find the leaders? A lack of evidence? Or do these ex-policemen and sons of assistant public prosecutors happen to know some of the right people?

Clue 2. How was it that a national police radio patrol car was on the scene within seconds of the shooting, able to get between the gunmen and their getaway car, where the driver was waiting with the engine running? Coincidence? Unlikely. Guatemala has the smallest per capita police force in Latin America – they are not just everywhere - and more often than not they don’t arrive at crime scenes at all, or do so hours later, if anyone bothers to call them. This looks very much like they were tipped off, were perhaps even following the men to catch them in the act, and that the unfortunate woman was an accidental victim in the process. Perhaps there is a struggle for control within the police force in this area?

Clue 3. The supposed gang leader / son of assistant public prosecutor was released on bail. On the face of it one would think this was irregular, given the evidence of high-level fraudulent activity. But ten days after he was released, he was shot dead - killed “extra judicially”? Could this be a form of semi-official “justice” in the absence of access to proper legal process?

This story is a small insight into the shadows around what passes for policing and justice in this country. It is no surprise, then, that a public poll conducted by El Periodico this week, has only 9.5% of the population answering yes to each of the questions: “Do you have confidence in our system of justice?” and “Do you have confidence in the national civil police?” We certainly don’t. Our security instructions are to avoid calling the police, and to ring instead the rapid response private security company that our employer provides. They may be “mercenaries”, but at least they’re ours, we think…..

Mariposa Pesada
21 August 2006

Guatemala Nibbles

2006-06-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

I have to confess I’m a bit disengaged from Guatemala at the moment, looking forward to a month’s holiday away, leaving tomorrow. But that’s not the only reason I haven’t written anything recently. I’ve been trying to write about some of the harder issues here – guns and violence and gangs and ‘narcotraficantes’ – but it is all so interconnected and so overwhelming that it is hard to take it in small gulps. I also feel I have to be careful with accuracy and facts when I am not speaking from personal experience, and that takes time and research. So this posting is a collection of bits and pieces – nibbles rather than a gulp. When I return, refreshed, I’ll dive into my newspaper clippings and notes and see what comes out.

Nibbles....

§ My son told me that the school at the rubbish dump here – Safe Passage – has to pay the children’s parents the equivalent of the child’s earnings from garbage sorting, so that they will allow the children to attend the school.

§ The one-legged lady came back, but only for one day. She looked tired and a bit straggly, and barely managed a smile. I wonder about her every time I drive past her corner, which is most days.

§ The law to provide a monthly old age pension of 500 quetzales (USD 67) to elderly citizens has stalled again. It is in the Constitutional Court on a technical matter related to fiscal policy that I don’t really understand. It might have something to do with the fact that the government originally estimated there were 40,000 citizens over 65 without any pension income, then a consultants’ report said it was actually 240,000, although the agreed working figure seems now to be 200,000. Even so, that’s a difference between an annual pension outlay of 240 million quetzales (USD 32 m) and 1.44 billion quetzales (USD192 m), which, on most accountants’ reckoning, would be pretty significant. It is strange to think that a government can know so little about the economic status of its own population. It is a reminder that, despite the superficial trappings of both development and democracy, this is still a country in development in both respects

§ The elderly citizens have not been going quietly. A group calling itself by the catchy title, ‘Citizens of the Third Age Without Pension Schemes’ (it is even longer in Spanish) has managed to generate a lot of publicity over the delay in the old age pension law. They are a mix of men and women and, going by their faces and clothing in newspaper photos, I would guess that most but not all are indigenous, or at least ‘campesinos’ (poor country workers who may be ladino or indigenous). Last week they met with Vice-President Stein, who persuaded them to break a hunger strike on the basis that the government was doing all it could. Then, with the law stalled again, they met this week with President Berger, who has promised to set up a commission (one of many such bodies) to look after their rights. But their hunger strike on the steps of the Palacio Nacional, the seat of government, was brought to a halt one midnight, when police came and removed them bodily and took them to hospital for ‘medical treatment’. Reported versions of this dark-of-night event vary wildly between the police version of leading them as gently as lambs, to some protesters’ version that warning shots were fired and elderly people were punched. No wonder they did it at midnight.

§ It is not so long ago in Guatemala that protests such as that of the elderly citizens couldn’t happen at all. During the military dictatorships and the period known as “la violencia”, especially the 1980s and early 1990s (before the 1996 peace accords), the organized campesinos and many indigenous villagers were regarded as communist guerillas. In this period there were massacres in 625 villages and approximately 11,000 civilians were killed, most of them indigenous (the total for the 35 years of civil war is usually cited as 200,000). According to the UN and Catholic Church reports on the massacres, 3% of the killing was done by the revolutionary guerilla forces, while 97% was the work of the military and paramilitary forces. The UN report described these as “acts of genocide” against the indigenous peoples. Two of the Presidents who oversaw this period have recently been in the news. One was Lucas Garcia, President from 1978 to 1982, whose quiet death in Venezuela at the age of 81, after some years suffering from Alzheimer’s, was met by mixed responses in the Guatemalan press. One side said he was guilty of violence and abuse of rights and that the only sad thing about his death was that he was never brought to account for his actions. The other side said that he had saved Guatemala from communism and was one of the greatest presidents. The other ex-President in the news has been Efrain Rios Montt, who is far from deceased. He overthrew Garcia in early 1982 in a military coup and remained President for two years before being removed by another coup. He is in the news because Spain wants to try him for events in Guatemala in and around 1980, specifically the burning of the Spanish Embassy with all its staff along with the Guatemalan campesinos and students activists who had occupied the Embassy in protest at Garcia’s policies. Rios Montt was the general in charge of such army operations at the time.

§ Efrain Rios Montt is also not going quietly. He is one of a group of people wanted by the Spanish courts, both for the Spanish Embassy burning and for acts of genocide. One of the protesters killed in 1980 was the father of Rigoberta Menchu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on the Guatemalan peace. It is her foundation that has taken the action in the Spanish Courts. After years of appeals in Spain, the Spanish Judge is here this week to start taking evidence. So far Rios Montt has managed to prevent him proceeding, by appealing to the Guatemalan Constitutional Court.

§ Rios Montt was in fact allowed by the Constitutional Court (CC) to run for president in the 2003 election, despite a constitutional provision that banned people who had participated in military coups from becoming president. In that election he was soundly defeated by the more moderate Oscar Berger, but still Rios Montt strides the political stage as the elder statesman of the FRG, the main right wing party here. And it looks as if he is gearing up for another go at the Presidency in 2007. I don’t suppose anyone will bother appealing to the CC this time.

Mariposa Pesada
25 June 2006

Rubbish, garbage, trash, junk, basura… and kids

2006-05-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

Almost every day in Guatemala City I see plastic coke bottles fly out bus windows, crisp-packets flutter from cars, and everything from gum foil to polystyrene cups dropped mindlessly from the hands of adults and children alike. Something in me wants to yell, every time, “HEY YOU! Pick that up! Isn’t this YOUR country? Don’t you CARE?” But of course I keep my bossy foreign mouth shut.

It takes me back to the days before garbage-consciousness, when we all thought the world was big enough to take whatever we threw at it. I spent most of my childhood without giving a single thought to the question of rubbish. That was before most industrialized countries officially discovered recycling (though frugal country people like my parents – products of the 1930s depression – always hoped to re-use things, so they always had a shed full of junk). But nowadays I suspect every child living in the developed world is as thoroughly inculcated with a motto like, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle,” as we were with the necessity of cleaning our plates because of the starving children in Africa. Our kids don’t get to make weekend trips to the “rubbish tip” and help offload a heap of indiscriminately mixed garbage. They might sometimes visit a waste management centre and deposit sorted containers of paper, glass, plastics and aluminium. Or maybe they are lucky enough to have a recycling collection service in their street.

But it’s not like that in Guatemala. As far as I can tell, the majority of people drop rubbish indiscriminately in public places, and no one seems to sort their household rubbish for recycling. There is no publicly run system of recycling - or garbage collection for that matter, although we pay only Q60 - USD 6.60 - per month for a daily pick-up service. I’ve only discovered one place where recyclable rubbish can be taken and I know of only one other family who uses it – not that I make this a regular conversation topic!

I would have to conclude that in general Guatemalans have a low level of environmental consciousness, including the where, what and when of garbage disposal. This is not altogether surprising, as approximately 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, so naturally their minds are concentrated on survival. And, while the very rich portion of the population is so rich that Guatemala reportedly has the highest per capita helicopter ownership in the world, the country’s wealth does not translate well into tax dollars. So governments are always struggling to provide even basic health and education services, without worrying about waste management centres and broader ecological education.

But the great irony is that sheer, desperate, poverty, means that the streets are kept clean and almost every single piece of rubbish that can be, is recycled or returned for a deposit. The city’s bad rubbish habits provide both employment for the many street sweepers, and a means of livelihood for the people who live off scrounging junk, albeit not the sort of livelihood most would hope for. As I find out more about the latter I’m thinking of reversing my recycling process, because I suspect that all I’m doing is removing the most lucrative part of the trade-in-garbage from the men who collect ours, and giving it to someone else who is already better off. So perhaps I should keep sorting it, but then put the sorted rubbish out for our collectors to take, including all the “good” bits.

On every city road, every day, there is a person sweeping along the edge, while buses, trucks and other old vehicles spew black diesel fumes over them. Sometimes I look along the vast tract of road ahead of the sweeper and wonder how they can keep their heart in it enough to make their arms move. They carry orange “witches hats” which they sit on the road beside them while they work, to alert drivers to their presence, and usually they wear lime green vests with the city crest, saying “infrastructure…. cumple” – the city mayor’s message to his voters that he is achieving his public infrastructure goals. Often there is insufficient space for cars to pass by them in the same lane, so at the very least they tend to cause minor traffic disruptions. This happens especially in peak morning traffic, which also seems to be the favourite time for sweeping (I often wonder why?). But, in an attitude of pure fatalism, many of them also sweep with their faces towards the edge of the road, ignoring the cars flying past within inches of their backs. A number of times I’ve only just seen the sweeper in time to avoid running him or her down, especially on a winding road. It looks to me like a high-risk occupation, but as government paid jobs I suspect the positions are quite sought after amongst the many unskilled labourers competing for any kind of work.

There is a much worse job to be had than street sweeping, and that’s the job of the garbage men. Correctly called rubbish collectors, or recolectors de basura, they are also sometimes called basureros, which is the same as the word for the city rubbish dump. Of course rubbish collection has never been a high status occupation anywhere, but in many countries the nastier aspects have been removed through the use of automated collection trucks. But here the work is very hands-on and the men who do it (they are all men) are invariably thin, slightly ragged and very dirty. They manually take bags of garbage or piles of garden cuttings from the street in front of people’s houses and carry them to the truck. Any loose rubbish is loaded onto frayed old sheets of woven nylon, which were probably sacks once. It seems symptomatic of their poverty that they can’t even replace their nylon sacks when they wear out, but keep using an ever-shrinking piece of frayed fabric. A few of the workmen are old and I often see them struggling across the road with loads so huge they can barely walk. The trucks look like retired removal vans, their dents and crumples painted over thickly in yellow with a green side stripe, and the rubbish is loaded into the back by hand. The trucks drive with one of the rear doors open, so it is possible to see what they do in there. Usually, two or three men collect on the street, while one stays in the truck and sorts every piece of rubbish that enters. They have big sacks attached to the inside walls, into which they fling bottles and cans and plastics. The rest of the rubbish seems to go into a general heap towards the front of the van, although large cardboard cartons and other big items might be tied to the roof or inside wall. The load slowly gets higher until it’s time to head to the rubbish dump. Then the workmen sit up on the pile of stinking loose garbage and snooze, or very occasionally smoke (while I pray there aren’t any flammables on board), while they head out of town.

So what happens next? I don’t know firsthand, especially questions like who gets first go at the profitable things like aluminium cans. But I do know that most of it ends up at a vast rubbish tip near Guatemala City, and that an entire community lives on, and off, the rubbish that goes there. Drifters and families, from the tiniest children to the very old, work the vast basurero - although it may be a misnomer to call them a community, as it is reputedly a rough and cutthroat business. I have never been there, but my son has been driven through a section of the rubbish dump on a school trip, as part of an ongoing community service project. They visited a school established nearby to provide education for the children and youth of the basurero. The school, called Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro, receives support from a range of donors, and it provides, food, clothing and other school supplies, as well as fun activities and academic teaching to children who would otherwise get no education at all. It aims to make a path out of a rubbish life for the children there, who suffer abuse and neglect and work long hours in a hideous and hazardous place. It is also a daily refuge from all that.

Last year my son’s fourth grade class prepared science kits for the children at Safe Passage. The teacher got them to use only materials that could be found in normal household rubbish, I thought probably to show creative use of what was available to the children at Safe Passage, rather than supplying them with short-term rich-kid products that could not be replaced once used. The class went there to meet the other children and demonstrate their science experiments to them. When our kids asked the others whether there was anything they could do to help more generally, one boy said (in Spanish) something like: “It is better if you don’t put rotten bananas in the same bag as useful things, and also good if you can wrap broken glass and sharp things so we don’t cut our hands so much.”

Mariposa Pesada

Note: You can check out the Camino Seguro website (incl English) at http://www.safepassage.org

From cucarachas to colibrís

2006-05-10T13:27:00.000-07:00

As I child I used to go around singing that jolly song about “La cucaracha…morning, night and even noon…” without once suspecting I was serenading a cockroach. What’s more, it wasn’t just any cockroach. My son’s Spanish teacher says it’s an allegorical song about a very adaptable Mexican President in days gone by who, even when he’d been stripped of everything, still fought on, along the lines of Monty Python’s Black Knight.

I suspect cockroaches and mosquitoes – or cucarachas and zancudos – exist all over the world, in many places humans have never managed to settle. But just because they are clever little adaptors it doesn’t mean I have to like them. We have them here in Guatemala too, but we also have other things, both naughtier and nicer.

We saw our first firefly in the garden on the night of 1 May. And, since it was international Labor Day, and a public holiday here, I assume this insect was either a strikebreaker or a mayfly in disguise. I get excited about fireflies, the way they blink their tiny lights on for a second, then off again, then on again, seeming to jump from one point to the next at the speed of light. I can’t help being amazed that these tiny things can produce their own power, without burning coal, or building hydroelectric schemes, or nuclear power plants. The local Spanish word for them is luciernágas, which strikes me as a very long word for a very short light.

Another insect, which is dangerous to people and dogs alike, is the poisonous black caterpillar (guzano) that lives on the leaves of the guava tree. Last year my son accidentally touched one on the ground while tying his shoes and the black hairs penetrated like splinters and caused him acute pain. Apparently a full dose of their poison can require hospitalization. This year we found someone who sprayed the tree with organic, non-toxic pesticide (we had to take this on faith of course, but the referral was from a reliable source). So we were hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with another crawling black mass of them this year, but unfortunately they reappeared yesterday, albeit in smaller numbers. They seem to have hatched from the tree bark. Eeeuuugh!

We may live inside an eight-foot brick wall with razor wire around the top, but a lot goes on in here in addition to insect life. Our garden is large and quite wildlife-friendly, at least for creatures that can out-run or out-fly the dogs. We have mature pine trees and fruit trees, including oranges, a rose apple, an avocado, guavas and banana palms. Even so, it’s surprising how much wildlife manages to appear in our backyard, given that we live in a large city with almost no public parks or other large green zones. However, there are quite a few street trees in our area as well as some walled estates around the city that appear to harbor small forests, and from the air you can see that the plateau on which the city is built is slashed with steep green gullies, called barrancas. The bottoms of these are smelly drains that become rivers in the wet season, but are too steep and inhospitable to use for recreation, even in the dry season. In poorer parts of the city, jerry-built shanties cluster on the edges of the barrancas and spread down into them, forming slum neighborhoods, or barrios. Even so, these gullies probably act as unplanned green corridors in this city of around four million people.

Now that we are in our second year here, we have an idea of what wildlife to expect, and when. For example, now that the first rains have come the woodpeckers are passing through. Here they are carpenter birds – carpinteros – which I think sounds much more purposeful than merely pecking wood. I’ve only heard them so far; that characteristic tap-tap-tap which echoes in the tree trunk, but other members of the household have spotted three this week. Last May I was thrilled to watch two carpinteros working on each side of a tall tree stump just outside the kitchen window. Their vivid reds and blues, speckled backs and sharp-angled heads made them look like animated cartoons. But they weren’t felling the tree like Woody Woodpecker, only eating bugs from under the bark. They stayed for half an hour and then flew away. I think we were just their lunch stop.

Any day now we should be invaded by the ants of May – hormigas de Mayo. Last year they flew in overnight, and then almost covered the ground with discarded wings and their large, inch-long bodies ambling around. They didn’t bite and were very tranquilo, but also seemingly without purpose. Our gardener and cleaning lady both told me (the latter with undisguised disgust), that some indigenous people like to fry the ants’ bodies and eat them in bread as a crunchy sandwich. Needless to say no one offered to slay one and fry it up for me, so I still haven’t tasted that particular delicacy. But the strange thing about the ants is that, after wandering around minding their own business for two or three days, they suddenly disappeared. I still don’t know whether they all went and buried themselves somehow. They had no wings and surely couldn’t walk very far, but if they died en masse why was there was no sign at all of their bodies? Did another army of smaller ants move their carcasses?

We have furry creatures too. A small gray squirrel used to frolic in the fruit trees, just out of dog-reach, and would sit there carefully holding a guava in its tiny hands, munching happily while the big dog went hysterical below. Unfortunately our squirrel wasn’t so clever with cars, and came to a sad end on the street near our house. One night we also had a short visit from a bat that I managed to rescue from the hysterical dog. I got to see the bat swoop over the high fence into the safety of the neighbors’ yard. It was only the size of a well-fed house mouse and had a lovely ginger coat, like a red fox.

But a more formidable furry friend has emerged in force recently. It is the large native rodent called a tacuasin (ta-kwa-sin). Apparently they live in burrows (I had wondered about that strange hole under the avocado tree) but they can also climb trees and love to eat any kind of fruit, including bitter oranges. I’ve now seen some at close quarters, both dead (compliments of our hunting spaniel) and alive (cornered in a tree by said spaniel). They have large and beautiful eyes, cute ears that point up and move around, and soft gray fur. But they also have distinctly rat-like teeth and tails. I’m torn between revulsion and fascination with the creatures. Our gardener tells me we have an entire nest of them in our yard. The dog has killed some of the smaller ones, about the size of sewer rats, but the parents are too big even for him. The first time I saw one of the adults at night, with its fat bottom squashed into the fork of a tree, casually looking down at me as if I was something the dog dragged in, I thought it was a cat. But then I noticed the long rat-tail. I decided not to argue with it and persuaded the dog to take a break indoors. Tacuasin can apparently bite quite viciously if cornered, so I’m glad the dog is up-to-date on his rabies vaccinations. I’m not, but I also don’t plan to have my rabies resistance put to the test by tackling one of them.

But of all the exotic little creatures, the ones I love most are the hummingbirds - colibrís. I had never seen a hummingbird before coming here, except on those BBC nature shows, in which the slightly breathless British-upper-crust voice of David Attenborough confided that the wings of the humming bird can beat up to 70 times per second…. But the breathlessness was warranted. Ours are tiny, green-tinted birds that you can mistake for butterflies at a distance, and their wings really are an unfocused blur. I can lie on the back lawn and see them busy in the treetops or, just occasionally when the dogs are sleeping, feeding from a lily in the garden bed. But the other day, while we were sitting in our living room admiring the cascade of pink, purple and white fuchsias in our enclosed courtyard, a tiny hummingbird darted down to the hanging pots and began systematically to visit each flower. It darted, hovered while it drank the nectar, darted again, hovered again, sipping from a dozen flowers while we watched in silence. Then it paused in mid-air, just for a moment, and flipped itself back into the blue sky.

That made my week.

Mariposa Pesada

The One-Legged Lady

2006-05-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

The one-legged lady has gone. I haven’t seen her at her usual set of traffic lights for almost two weeks. I still keep her money ready as I approach the intersection, but again today I can’t see her familiar silhouette on the footpath as I approach and she’s not resting under the trees on the median strip, as she sometimes does. I’m wondering if she’s ill, or if she’s gone back to her family in a village somewhere with the start of the wet season, and it strikes me that although she’s now so familiar I know nothing about her, not even her name. And that makes me feel a bit sad.

I think of her as Maria, because whenever I give her money – from my car window while stopped at the lights – she blesses me and calls on the Virgin Mother to intercede on my behalf, looking towards heaven and crossing herself. This is no mean feat to perform in a matter of seconds, while balancing on your crutches, still leaving time to move on to the next car before the lights change.

She is probably one of Guatemala City’s most successful beggars. Her weathered brown face is beatific – saintly as well as beautiful. She’s old enough to get an aged pension, if such a thing existed here (the legislation has passed, but has yet to be implemented) and she looks like the world’s kindest grandmother. Each day she’s out there at peak hour, her long hair twisted into a chignon, wearing a neat but faded dress and frilled apron. She swings along cheerfully on her crutches, smiling fully and openly at the car drivers, blessing anyone who gives but never betraying the slightest sign of ill-will to anyone who doesn’t. Clearly it’s her job and she does it so well, and with such dedication and nobility, that I have actually come to look forward to seeing her each day. I put some effort into trying to time it so I have to stop at the red light, and sometimes if I am too far back in the queue for her to reach me, I put my hazard lights on and creep up slowly to give her her pay, before going through the green light. No one behind me has ever tooted their horn or shown impatience at this. She knows my car now and keeps an eye out for me too. Sometimes when it doesn’t work out we just smile and wave… and I give her a bit more money the next time. I’m not a grand benefactor, just someone who contributes to her weekly income on a regular basis.

The one-legged lady has given me cause for reflection about the whole question of begging and giving. I know as well as anyone that giving a few coins to a person who appears to be in need won’t fix the system, and won’t even make that person’s life significantly better. But it might buy their corn tortillas for the day and save them some hunger pains, and it seems harsh to ignore a request like that when I have the means to help. I’m not the only person who does so – the askers would hardly bother if the response rate were negligible. I see many others putting their hands out their car windows, both Guatemalans and foreigners, holding a few coins or a small note. But what I often wonder is – what criteria do I apply to decide which person “deserves’ my money? Do they have to look me in the eye? Must they seem grateful? Do they need to appear kind, or is it OK for the bitterness of their lives to show in their faces? What if they are really hard to look at, like the poor skinny man with horizontal buckteeth, eyes magnified enormously through thick glasses, who moves with a jerky walk? And how do I know someone really is poor and not just faking it?

Guatemala city is not overrun with beggars by any means. They are mainly regulars who have staked out their own intersections at a dozen or so points around the wealthier parts of the city. Most of them go to quite a lot of trouble to scrub up and dress neatly, which seems literally to “pay off” in a culture where personal presentation has a high value. This is the complete opposite of the begging culture I witnessed in Varanasi, India, twenty years ago, where the beggars seemed to try to look as dirty and sick as possible, displaying running sores and withered limbs and, I was told, sometimes faking disabilities until the potential givers had passed. The beggars in India also seemed to congregate in certain thoroughfares where wealthier Indians or tourists had to walk by, so that it was hard to give to one without fear of being mobbed by a hundred grasping hands and high-pitched pleas. I ended up walking past the rows of beggars in India with my eyes averted because the situation was impossible. Here in Guatemala hardly anyone with wealth walks anywhere, due in part to a valid fear of street robbery, and in part to the fact that this is the backyard of the USA and the car reigns supreme. But even if they did walk, few people of means would dare to pass a mob of beggars on the street, for fear of violence. And even if they weren’t in a mob I don’t think the Indian beggars would do very well in Guatemala. They would probably be viewed as having let themselves go.

The majority of beggars here are people who are just too old or too disabled to find work in a country which doesn’t have a welfare safety net, and I think most people who live here understand that they have few options. Even if other members of their family work, the wages are low and it would be hard for them to manage. But if they don’t have family support there is nowhere to turn for long-term assistance.

There are half a dozen major intersections on my daily route where a particular person has staked out a begging beat. Most of the beggars share their intersections with newspaper men, families selling plastic bags of fruit, people draped in bundles of car phone chargers or the latest shipment of junk toys from China, and the ubiquitous vendors of mobile phone cards. But generally there’s no more than one beggar (and one of each type of vendor) per intersection. Each has their sphere of influence.

On avenida las americas there’s a youngish man in a wheelchair, who takes some risks squeezing along beside the cars stopped at the lights to collect, then swinging around to the end of the median strip, as the lights turn green. On my daily return trip there is an old and thin woman in indigenous dress who carries a tiny brown plastic pot for her money, and doesn’t look you in the eye, but seems sad and faraway. An elderly man in a very threadbare short wrap skirt and baggy trousers, the traditional dress of the people near Lake Atitlan, often appears a bit further along, and he looks both weary and humiliated. If I take a slightly different route along sixth avenida I meet the smiling young man with no hands who carries his leather carpenter’s pouch looped over his wrist stumps and wanders amiably between the lanes. He is confident and cheerful and he seems to do pretty well. There used to be another, very old, lady who held one of the busiest intersections in this part of town, near the big roundabout with the monument know as obelisco. She was so tiny and bent that she barely came up to the bottom of the car window and her whole face wrinkled in towards her toothless smiling mouth, but she was strangely loveable and seemed to do well from her regular customers. My friend who had lived in Guatemala long before we came told me the old lady had been there for years – and that in their family they joked about how long it would be before she retired to her beach house on the coast. I like to think she might have done something like that. All I know is she’s not there any more.

I’ve occasionally seen one man in Guatemala City who displays his withered leg by rolling his trousers above the knee, making it evident that he would have trouble finding manual work, but I find him very confronting and I think others do too, as he doesn’t seem to collect much money. And then there’s the pale woman with her little dark-skinned boy, who sometimes tries to sell individual sweets in beaten old wrappers, and sometimes just walks along the row of cars with her hand out in a hopeless gesture. In a society where white skin is privileged, she’s a puzzle. Every day she looks defeated. Perhaps she has fallen in-between the social groups, a woman who looks ladino (the word used here for people of mixed European descent) but has a child who is moreno (dark skinned). I often puzzle as to why I don’t feel the same sympathy for her as for some of the others. Is it just that she seems well and able-bodied enough to get work? Or am I racist? Do I see only indigenous people as the ‘deserving poor’ and have I therefore typecast them all? After all, hardly any of them beg, although most of them are poor. They work hard for miserable pay, grow a little food if they have a village plot, and scrape along. But there are also many poor, landless, ladinos.

I really have only one clear rule, and that is that I don’t give anything to children who beg. There are not many child beggars, and no regulars that I’ve seen in Guatemala City, although the numbers increase during the long annual vacation, but as a means of livelihood for children I prefer to discourage it. It’s so open to exploitation by behind-the-scenes adults, and child beggars are learning too young that they can get money out of rich strangers by being cute. I can only see that leading to a life on the streets and/or in the sex industry. And there is a public school system here, so if the kids are out begging that means they’re not at school, which just perpetuates the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and dependence. Many public schools also provide food to the children, I think mainly through foreign aid projects, as the education system is very poorly resourced and teachers are paid less than most live-in maids.

For the most part, however, my response is pretty irrational and ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. I haven’t been able to work out a better way of dealing with my own feelings at being confronted, daily, by people who have no apparent means of support, other than asking others for money.

One day I encountered a young indigenous woman, standing on the kerb with a baby on her back and a toddler by her side, who looked so sad, and desperate and humiliated by asking, that I quickly gave her enough money to feed them all for a couple of days, just to alleviate her misery. She didn’t look like a city person. I wondered if she’d come here looking for work and what she and her children had suffered, apart from hunger. But her face still haunts me. I wish I’d given her a lot more, even though I know that wouldn’t solve her problems – being a poor, indigenous woman, alone with her children, puts her at the bottom of the heap.

Mariposa Pesada

Where in Zunil is San Simón?

2006-04-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

We didn’t exactly go to Zunil looking for San Simón, but our friend told us she’d seen him there, so we thought that would be an interesting thing to do. We knew we would have to ask around, as he doesn’t have his own chapel but moves to different family houses each year. Physically, objectively, San Simón is a life-size, jointed mannequin who can sit in a chair, or lie down, and can be fed liquids through his open mouth. Culturally he is an entity somewhere between a Christian saint and an ancient Mayan god. Also known as Maximon, he is found in just a few villages in Guatemala and there are many indigenous people who fervently believe that lighting candles, praying to him and bringing him gifts of bread, eggs, alcohol and cigarettes, will bring them good fortune. We had heard stories of him from European friends, who also spoke of him with some reverence, as if seeing him had caused suspension of disbelief.

The day we went to Zunil was also Easter Saturday, which is the end of semana santa (holy week), the biggest holiday of the year in Guatemala. So we thought that even if we didn’t find San Simón there might be other interesting things to see, including textiles from the local women’s cooperative.

It wasn’t hard to find the central square in Zunil because the church, which faces onto it, was a brilliant square of white halfway up the hill. Its ornamented colonial facade stood out in the hard sunlight because the rest of the town, which spreads over the bottom of a deep valley, was built entirely of grey concrete bricks.

The ubiquitous grey of the built environment made the few dashes of colour more brilliant. On the main road, stalls sold farm produce so fresh their colours seemed to leap out of the shade – red radishes and strawberries, orange carrots, pale green cabbages, and bundles of deep green herbs. And when we got to the central square there were women selling cut tropical fruits in front of the church. The colours of the fruit - golden mangoes, pink watermelon, orange paw-paw and yellow cantaloupe - were repeated in the colours and patterns of the fruit sellers’ clothing.

All the traditional clothing I’ve seen in Guatemala is colourful by anyone’s standards, but it struck me in Zunil that they seemed to have a special enthusiasm for the newer iridescent colours and sparkling threads available in synthetic fibres. And there was no such thing as a plain colour – each of their long wrap skirts (cortes) and poncho-blouses (guipiles) had at least half a dozen colours, woven into intricate designs, or hand-embroidered. After a while I noticed that the medallion designs between the stripes in one woman’s corte included schematic dogs, and cats with arched backs, while another had rows of roosters and turkeys, and something that looked like an altar decoration.

My friend and I asked a woman selling fruit if she knew where to find San Simón. We established that he was mucho mucho arriba, or, way up high in the town.

As we started to walk upwards, in the direction we’d been shown, we came to a side street that was covered for about 50 metres by a large carpet, or alfombra. Although it looked just like a textile carpet it was actually made of bright-coloured sawdust, in the semana santa tradition. The base colours of orange and yellow and green had been overlaid with intricate designs made using stencils. There were quite a few people from the town waiting around the street. Almost all the women and girls, down to the tiniest toddlers, were dressed in brilliantly coloured guipiles and cortes. One child was so improbably tiny, and so beautifully clothed, that she reminded me of the display dolls some of my childhood classmates used to collect, showing girls in national costume from around the world. We guessed there was a religious procession due soon, although since we had just seen half a dozen over the previous two days in nearby Quetzaltanenago (Xela), Guatemala’s second-largest city, we weren’t too eager to wait around for it.

Next stop was further up the hill. There was a woman running an informal bar from a wooden shanty at the intersection, and a more salubrious looking bar in a neat white building nearby. I avoided a group of men who were quietly, but obviously, very drunk. Instead I asked a man who was sitting serenely by himself on the raised curb, although as soon as he spoke I realised that what I’d taken for sober dignity was in fact just the erect posture of a practised drunk. In response to my question about San Simón he answered belligerently, “Why do you want to find San Simón? He’s not a saint. He’s an idol! If you want a saint they’re in heaven!” I thanked him and excused myself, trying to wander off aimlessly as if I wouldn’t dream of going to see an idol, now that he’d me straight. I didn’t want to insult him, both because he was drunk and because it was a perfectly sensible point of view. We guessed he was probably one of the many evangelicals in Guatemala, a brand of Christianity that seems rapidly to be overtaking the Catholic Church, and which doesn’t accommodate pre-Christian crossovers like San Simón as readily.

But sometimes an idea takes hold of your legs and they just keep going, and then every now and then your mouth helps out, even though your mind might not be so sure. So we kept strolling up the dusty street in the hot sun, until the 10-year-old of the party complained so loudly about needing a toilet that we had to turn our minds to that problem. Not surprisingly, none of the bars or roadside tiendas had a toilet. Guatemalan men often relieve themselves against a tree or wall in the street and the women presumably hold on. But my partner remembered seeing a public toilet down by the church, a rarity in itself, so those two walked back down while my friend and I continued the search for San Simón.

Next we asked a little boy skipping ahead of his grandmother, who was in turn trying to drag his screaming sibling up the hill by one arm, but the boy ran back to her without responding. Then they all walked past us in silence, up the paved grey street only half the width of a car. Maybe the boy was shy of these two enormous pink women, or perhaps he didn’t speak Spanish but only Quiché, or maybe he’d been warned not to talk to strangers (the myths about white people stealing indigenous babies and children in Guatemala are apparently strong, with a factual basis in shady adoption practices over the years).

Finally my friend asked a middle-sized girl and her impish brother if they knew where to find San Simón. The girl stayed with the tienda which they seemed to be minding, but the boy promptly dashed up the street with my friend in tow, pointed out the house door, and explained that we had to ring the bell and wait for it to be opened. But this was only after we’d all been up to the main road, found the San Simón sign another man told us would be there (hanging from a large sign that advertised a local beer), then walked down past the unmarked correct house, and ended up back at the intersection with the bar and the dignified drunks. Anyway, the little boy was pretty tickled by earning two quetzales (2Q) so easily – the equivalent of 26c US.

While my friend and I sat on a sunny step nearby and waited for the return of the toilet expedition, a young indigenous couple arrived at the San Simón house door and rang the bell. She wore a guipil and corte and carried her baby in a striped shawl slung across her back, in the usual way. He was dressed neatly in shirt and trousers. Neither wore shoes. They both seemed serious and preoccupied, their clothes were a bit threadbare and they looked hot and dusty. The door was opened and they stepped inside.

When our turn came we were asked for 5Q (70c US) to enter – one of the ways San Simón brings good fortune to the family which wins the bid to host him – and walked into a dark, enclosed courtyard where a few family members sat around a cooking fire. Immediately in front of us was a room lit only by a dozen candles sitting on the floor, and to the side was a little tienda selling San Simón statues, and offerings, especially small bottles of the sugarcane firewater, aguardiente. The host told us that San Simón was resting, as he had been sitting up in the other room throughout Good Friday, and would need to do that again on Easter Sunday. The host lead us into the room with the candles, which contained a beautifully carved mahogany bed, almost the only piece of furniture and certainly the only thing of beauty so far evident in the low, grey brick interior. The home-made covers were pulled up to the neck of a shiny pink-faced San Simón, who wore a black leather sombrero and a black knitted scarf over his mouth. Two men stood at the back of the room, with the candles between them and the bed. We joined them there.

I then realized that the young couple we had seen enter were standing next to San Simón’s head and that the man was addressing him in a pleading tone. The accent sounded strange, and it dawned on me that he wasn’t speaking Spanish, but a Maya language, probably Quiché if he was a local, which I’d heard on Guatemalan TV a couple of times. So I felt less worried about intruding on their prayer, even though it was a semi-public one, because they knew we at least could not understand what they said. The man took San Simón’s hat and placed it on his own head while he spoke. Then he took the small bottle of aguardiente (which he had presumably bought from the host for 7Q), poured it into a pottery gravy jug, pulled down the scarf from San Simón’s mouth, and slowly fed it to him. The young man then replaced San Simón’s hat and scarf, and stepped back to allow his wife to move forward and pray.

After a while the young couple turned away to leave the house and the host gestured for us to move forward. Then my son said he too wanted to give aguardiente to San Simón. I was a little horrified, but we agreed to let him, thinking that it wasn’t very consistent to bring him along and then not allow him to participate as others were, even if the three adults in the party would have preferred to be a bit less hands-on. (Of course this type of logic does have its limits, but this seemed pretty harmless). So my son and I approached the head of the bed, while my partner stayed back to take the one photo we’d agreed on, for the price of 10Q. I let my son feed the drink into San Simón’s rounded plastic lips, finding myself a bit revolted by the thought of doing it myself, and preoccupied with wondering where all the aguardiente was going. (Afterwards my friend, who described the San Simón phenomenon as “ a bit creepy”, suggested they probably have a tube going into a bucket, then rebottle the drink and sell it again – although I think the bottle we purchased did have a sealed lid). Anyway, the upshot of all that was that it didn’t even occur to me to ask San Simón for anything, which was probably just as well, as it saved me from yet another moral dilemma.

After we finished and moved back, the host quickly stepped forward and covered San Simón’s mouth with the black scarf. Apparently we had made a faux pas by not doing so.

On our way out the host showed us the other room where San Simón normally sat in a chair. That was set up like a chapel with a vacant black wooden seat in the centre, and a table in front of it that held many loaves of the special round Easter bread, cigarettes, candles and bottles of firewater and whisky.

Afterwards, back out in the bright sun and dusty streets, we did go to the Santa Ana women’s textile cooperative, where they offered beautiful handmade clothing and fabrics. We also saw the procession, at least the beginning of it, headed by a column of masked and plumed young men wearing blonde wigs and the armour of the Spanish conquistadors, who did a slow funereal dance, pacing forward and then back. But all of this seemed almost work-a-day compared with San Simón.

The next day, which was Easter Sunday, we set off in the morning to beat the worst of the traffic returning to Guatemala City after the holidays. On the way we stopped at one of the many roadside stalls, interested in a rustic wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which we did buy, albeit after the price did some strange things (due to the arrival of the father – “I have Mayan antiques up at my house too” - after the boy had apparently started the bidding too low). But we also bought another statue, a carved man wearing fabric clothes and a black sombrero, who had a wooden cigarette in his mouth and was sitting in a small black chair.

I returned to the car after the bargaining process and handed the two plastic bags into the back seat. A few minutes later, after some rustling, I glanced into the back seat and was surprised to see a foot-high San Simón sitting in his chair on the seat next to my son.

We got back to Guatemala City safely, and also in record time, neither of which can be taken for granted at the end of semana santa…

But I wouldn’t want to encourage too many ‘idol’ thoughts.

Mariposa Pesada

Pig on Proceres

2006-04-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

2006-04-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Driving In Guatemala City

Wherever I drive in Guatemala City I’m conscious that I stick out like a sore thumb; a large, fair-skinned foreign woman in a big white SUV in a city populated principally by short, brown-skinned people who walk or travel by the public buses (pejoratively known by some foreigners as “chicken buses”). I know that to Guatemalans I’m a gringa, even though strictly speaking the term refers to North Americans; and that, to poor Guatemalans, I’m just a rich foreign person.

When I arrived here just over a year ago, one of the first pieces of advice I got was that I should never show anger on the roads, because people were easily offended and nearly all of them would be carrying guns. I’ve tried to take that advice, not that I was in the habit of running down people who irritated me, but some days it’s hard to stay calm because here, machismo rules. Even if I toot my horn to warn someone they’re about to collide with me, they take offence and toot back, thereby only increasing the chance of a collision. I usually go quietly, but it isn’t possible to go anywhere at all without being a bit pushy.

Most weekday mornings I drive north from Zona 14, up avenida las Americas, along avenida la Reforma, to my Spanish classes in Zona 4. This part of Guatemala City looks much like many other cities, with a well-paved multi-lane road and wide median strip planted with large trees, flowering plants and green grass. I also drive around much less savoury parts of the city, where there are no living plants in sight, narrow rutted streets and crumbling houses - but usually only when I’m very lost. Then it’s a case of lock the doors, and try to read the map while negotiating one-way streets that always seem to run the wrong way, hoping not to end up in the violence-ridden Zona 3 and preferably not even in the old city centre of Zona 1 when I am on my own.

But even the big boulevard is never relaxing. My twenty-minute drive starts something like this. I ‘merge’ into the constant stream of traffic on Las Americas by edging onto the road until there’s no room for another car in the lane in front of me and they have to give way, a manoeuvre which is easier if there are two or three of us doing it at the same time, lined up abreast. Almost immediately the three lanes squeeze into two and a frantic line of buses and cars starts in at us. Buses, spewing black smoke, merge from left to right, rapidly, and without indicators - other than the man hanging out the open bus doorway flapping his arm and trying to catch my eye to let me know he’s coming through. The buses are red, rusty and unroadworthy. They overflow with people and the country-route buses carry fresh produce, large lumpy parcels on their roofs - and the occasional live chicken.

If I want to change lanes I do indicate, for what it’s worth, but must also act by leaping into any gap that becomes available. It’s hard to catch other drivers’ eyes to make sure they’re not going to run into you, as most of the cars on the road have dark-tinted windows. Many of them are large, new, SUVs. I know they carry rich Guatemalans, or gringos, or other foreigners. But on the road they are anonymous. They rarely indicate and never give way unless the other vehicle is bigger and/or flashier.

Yesterday I was behind a slightly browbeaten ten-year-old sedan carrying a Guatemalan family. With no warning they pulled across from the middle lane and stopped in front of me in the right lane. A woman had to be collected from the kerb, although she wasn’t quite ready, and her little boy was still playing around a few feet away, but of course there was no hurry, as ‘hellos’ had to be said and news exchanged before she got in. By the time I had almost managed to get around them, as of course no one would let me into the other lane, they were ready to leave again. This has now happened so many times that I rarely bother wasting my impatience. I try to be Zen about it – or maybe just Latin? Clearly the road is owned by all, to use as they wish.

Indicators are also strictly optional. Recently a friend told me her little story of driving with a Guatemalan man who, she noticed, never used his indicators. When she asked why not, he replied with shrug, “But we don’t always know where we’re going?”

The other day I passed a beaten-up, smoke-churning mover that was little more than an engine on a chassis, with the minimum of body panels, seating and other accoutrements (which, after all, are just so much icing on the car). It had no lights at all, so they used hand signals. The front passenger flapped his hand to the right - on behalf of the driver - and leaned his head out the window, looking cheerfully towards the cars in the target lane, while the car just moved across. I gathered this meant “We’re coming, ready or not, and it’s really no skin off our amiable noses if we get a few more scrapes on this old rust bucket” – or however you say that in Spanish.

Then there are the motorcyclists who specialize in weaving through traffic jams, mixing it between the big bruisers. They also ignore cars’ indicators. Twice last week I found a motorcycle whizzing past my left front fender while I was in the process of making a left turn. Kamikaze isn’t even the word for it – it’s more like a form of total fatalism with no personal responsibility accepted.

Finally, if we’re talking about hierarchies, there are the pedestrians. There are maybe half a dozen sets of pedestrian lights and an equally small number of pedestrian bridges across major roads in this city of 4 million people. Mostly, pedestrians are left to their own devices, meaning that during peak hour traffic they actually risk their lives to get to and from work. The pedestrian road toll is enormous. But this week, for the first time, I saw traffic police actually stopping cars to allow pedestrians to cross Avenida La Reforma – perhaps the beginning of a reform?

I don’t understand why there are not many more car accidents. It could be that the amount of traffic makes it impossible to drive fast in the city (of course there is also a speed limit, but that’s a fairly irrelevant consideration given that it’s not policed). The other reason might be that, despite the apparent chaos, there are some rules about this game of chicken.

They go something like this:
§ buses go wherever they want, whenever they want, and if you have a problem with that your car will spend a lot of time in the repair shop;
§ large, new cars have right-of-way over old, beaten-up cars;
§ flashing indicators count for nothing - it is a point of pride with every driver not to give way unless strictly necessary for self-preservation;
§ the only reliable way to merge is to open your window, look towards other drivers with an amiable expression, flap your arm in the intended direction, and go for it; and
§ always expect that, at any moment, a driver or pedestrian behind, beside or in front of you will do something totally unexpected.

Speaking of accidents… one day, while driving with a well-educated Guatemalan man, I asked him why he didn’t wear his seatbelt. He replied, with a slightly quizzical look, “But I don’t intend to have an accident.”

So perhaps, after all, that is the explanation?

Mariposa Pesada