gunshots and firecrackers: travels in guatemala

"In El Salvador, they
picked him up for going around
talking about agrarian reform
and reading poetry to casual
acquaintances."
-Paco Ignacio Taibo II, _Guevara, a.k.a. Che_

(photos by Simon Helweg-Larsen)

*

From Hope (Esperanza), I moved west, through Thanks (Gracias), to the ancient Mayan ruins of Copán, in the very west of Honduras. The temples and halls and terraced towers of the Copán ruins are covered with ornate and elaborate hieroglyphics, which tell the story of the dynasty's rise and eventual fall, about 700 years before the arrival of Cristóbal Colón. I split the cost of a guided tour of the ruins with a gaggle of yanks, including a woman I seemed to run into at every stop between the Nica/Honda border and Antigua, whose ubiquity may have contributed somewhat to my gringo trail grumblings....

From Copán I crossed directly into Guatemala, and chicken-bussed it lickety-split to Guatemala City to rendezvous with my fellow diasporic haligonians Simon, Rebecca and Cathy. Somewhat bewildered by that crime-ridden hub of chaos, I followed the lead of the pros and was quickly initiated into the G.C. M.O.: buying bootleg cds (for about 1.25 USD) from street vendors by day, and playing dominoes and drinking rum on the rooftop patio of Cathy's apartment long into the night. With the lamentable absence of Cathy and her patio, these nocturnal activities were to persist throughout the remainder of my time in the delightful company of the Helweg-Larsen-Grants.

Simon and Becca had been in Guatemala since September or so, working as human rights accompaniers and as international observers for the October elections. They had recently learned of a dire and challenging accompaniment situation which they invited me to accompany them upon. After a quick jaunt to Antigua for some bookstore and craft market browsing, we returned to Guatemala City and reported to the office of the Fondo de Tierras (Fontierras), where we met up with members of the campesino union we were to assist in the midst of their land conflict.

Much of the non-traditional clothing people in Central America wear, I must digress to say, comes from "ropa americana" stores -- used clothing, sometimes originally made in Central American maquiladoras, then sold in the US, worn a while, and donated or discarded. The ropa americana, often sporting english-language slogans or statements, then trickles back down to central american stores, where it is then sold back to the very people, perhaps, who sewed it together in the first place - people who often have no idea what the words on their clothes mean.

So it is that you will find ultramacho men wearing PMS-humour shirts, or the sweetest woman on the farm wearing an I HAVE AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM t-shirt. And so it is that when we met R., the General Secretary of the campesino union, fresh from a mediation session with the farm's governing Directiva -- he was wearing a blue baseball cap blazoned with the word DISABLED.

At least, we hoped that global economics was the explanation for his choice of hat, as he had no physical handicaps we could detect, and we were basically placing our security in his hands for the next number of weeks.

(As a side-note, perhaps this side-effect of globalization also explains the name of the Costa Rican child Simon and Becca met: "Usnavy" (pronounced "Oos-NA-by") - another yankee castoff, perhaps?)

Anyway, in the company of our new accompani-ees we bussed south to the town of Cuilapa, along the highway towards the El Salvador border, and then caught a second bus to "Finca Concepción," a vast former coffee plantation that had been owned by the army but was recently sold to Fondo de Tierras as part of a land redistribution program. For three years hundreds of campesino families had been settling it and farming it (and working to pay off the debt of its purchase), but in the last year serious problems had broken out when an increasingly autocratic group took charge of the farm Directiva and began requiring weeks of unpaid work per month, arbitrarily seizing land, harassing and intimidating dissident campesinos, and so on.
A campesino union was formed in response, and the harassment and intimidation increased. R. received a typed death threat, guns were fired over union members' homes at night, and union members began to be specifically targeted for confiscations and evictions. An internal refugee camp of evicted or frightened-off campesino families was established in a field in the middle of the farm. The two sides had recently entered into formal mediation with Fontierras.

This was the situation that greeted us when we climbed out the back of the school bus near a field with a half-dozen shacks made of planks, tarps, blankets, and corrugated tin. A dozen people immediately came out to greet us, and many more gradually streamed over from other nearby homes, as we were led to a new-looking shack at the edge of the camp, which was to be our home.

As the entire union membership assembled in front of our house, it gradually became clear, from their fear, relief, desperation and gratitude, that most of the people there had sky-high hopes for us and the resolution we would soon bring to their problems. We were the first accompaniers to come to the farm, and to us, the unexpected gift of their great hope seemed rather more than we could accept in that tangled, dangerous situation we had barely begun to understand. Awkwardly, we thanked them for their welcome, and stressed that the role of a human rights accompanier was to provide an international presence that would hopefully discourage acts of violence, and thereby reduce the tension and danger of the situation; to observe and document and report; not to devise a resolution, but to attempt to create the conditions where a resolution could be reached. They nodded sagely at our cautious words, but it was clear that their hopes for us were undiminished. After they left, we unpacked our things and discussed the situation, as those high hopes of theirs settled rather heavily upon our shoulders.

Our biggest problem, tough, we soon discovered, was gastronomic - how to possibly digest all that they fed us before the next meal arrived. The families around us, you see, had organized to share the burden of our sustenance, and would either invite us to their homes or bring the meals to our shack, three times a day. We tried our hardest to insist on contributing $ to the cost of the meals, but no one would hear of it, and to insist further, we realized, would only have been an insult to their hospitality.

It was heartbreaking, though, to see how often they prepared meat dishes for us, when meat was a luxury they seldom allowed themselves, and we had 1.5 lapsed vegetarians among us. This unfortunate situation was perhaps exacerbated, to Simon's eternal remorse, by a clever but unfortunate play on words: at the first big meeting, when we accepted their offer to feed us, Simon quipped how we would exchange "apoyo" (support, help) for "pollo" (chicken - pronounced "poyo"). Everyone laughed at the pun, but then followed an awkward silence, as they tried to fathom just how much chicken these strange visitors would require in exchange for their "apoyo". If only, we later lamented, "apoyo" had rhymed with tortillas, or beans.

On our second or third day, we were invited for breakfast at the home of Doña Concha, one of our most enthusiastic hosts. After breakfast, she told us she wished to speak with us about the situation, and explained that her husband (in whose name the property deed was written) was in the hospital, and that she was very nervous about the upcoming property verification process (one of the steps agreed upon in the mediation, presumably to weed out the campesinos who were not living on their property, but primarily just another anti-union harassment tactic devised by the Directiva). In a rush of tears, she confessed to us her fears that her land would be taken from her and she would be left with nothing. Not knowing what to say, we offered what little comfort we could, and promised to do everything we could to help.

We spent our days accompanying union members to meetings in Guatemala City or Cuilapa, or touring the farm and documenting cases of property seizure, arson, intimidation, and sexual harassment. We wrote letters to Fontierras and the PDH, the human rights bureau, detailing our concerns and presenting our documentation. We accompanied the verification process and did our best to ensure that union members were not intimidated into silence by a process that could easily rob them of their land if they didn't answer correctly (this was really the union's role, but R., in his blue hat, was shockingly acquiescent in the one-sided interrogations that went on). We sat in on mediation hearings and arranged independent meetings with the PDH to enlist their support. In the intense dry heat of the afternoons, we would go down to the river with the neighborhood children, to bathe or wash our clothes.

Evenings we spent in our cozy one-room abode, playing dominoes or reading, telling jokes and stories by candlelight. Three or four nights a week our comfort was pierced by gunshots after dark, different caliber weapons (sometimes more than one at a time), and coming from different directions. Sometimes in the daytime we would find empty shells in the dust along the roads. We learned that this had been going on for months, a concentrated and sustained campaign of intimidation what was now, it seemed, increasingly directed at us.

The mediation process was slowly bearing fruit. It seemed that a settlement would be reached without bloodshed, although we were often puzzled or dismayed at the union's lack of initiative in the negotiations - they seemed to proceed with a naive faith that a new Directiva, comprising equal representation by the union and the old Directiva, would be proposed and rejected, and then Fontierra would have no choice but to divide the farm in two, giving half to the union. Somehow it was believed that this would solve everything. We were more hopeful for a resolution that would overturn the corrupt Directiva and keep the farm intact, but also more fearful that their attempts to divide the farm would only ignite the conflict and leave the union families worse off than ever.

But at a meeting between the Directiva and the union, the Directiva surprised everyone by agreeing to a shared Directiva; they only insisted that the proposal needed to be ratified at a General Assembly to be held the following week. It was in this climate of hope that, two and a half weeks after my arrival, I took my leave of the farm (as I still had thousands of miles to cover before reaching Canada by late April).

Before I left, R. insisted on organizing a despedida for me, which to my surprise took the form of an evangelist revival. Songs were sung, speeches were spoken, sermons were served. I had braced myself for a rather uncomfortable spectacle, but it was all extremely touching and genuine, and the event left me awed and humbled by the big-hearted generosity and faith of the friends I made there. After the singing ended, everyone formed a cue and bid me farewell one by one with teary-eyed hugs and long blessings, and I was presented with a new box of handkerchiefs and a bag of woven rope, and a certificate they had done up in Cuilapa, thanking me for "el apoyo que nos ha brindado a nuestra organización." Speechless, I was of course asked to make a speech, and stammered something about my gratitude for their hospitality, my hope for their struggle, and my conviction never to forget their friendship and generosity.

I had planned on heading to the beach for a day or two, and as the situation on the farm had calmed somewhat, Simon & Becca decided to accompany me. We bussed and boated to the beach at Monterrico, where we spent two hot sandy days being thrown around by the biggest, roughest, funnest waves this prairie boy has seen. I then bid them a fond farewell, and they returned to the farm, where the situation would soon deteriorate dangerously once again, after a wildfire in the hills and an explosive General Meeting that only left the union further marginalized and vulnerable; and I, burdened by neither sorrow nor need, only the persistent feeling I should be somewhere else, floated north to Antigua.

After a couple of days there, I went to the town of Itzapa and visited the CIDA-supported "Maya Pedal" project, where they turn old bicycle parts into a whole range of human-powered machines, and hung around with my sister's friend Kyla, who worked there as an intern two years ago, fell in love and stayed.

From there it was a short step up the trail to Lago Atitlán, and only a short step further to the bustling, colourful market at Chichicastenango. I'd say more about those beautiful places and the great people I met along the way, but this letter's way too bloody long already, mmn?

After a short exploration of Quetzaltenango, I crossed over into Mexico, and found myself in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, on April Fool's Day, with Semana Santa and all its revelries just around the corner.