Lynchings in Guatemala

Dec. 6, 2009

My Chilean friend Lalo passed us at a fast trot exclaiming, ¨They´re burning people in front of the police station.¨

Two weeks ago the pueblo of Solola, adjacent to Panajachel, demanded of the police the three people who had robbed and killed the bus driver and passengers on a local bus earlier that day. The town gathered in front of the police station until they eventually burned the two women, one of them pregnant, the man and eventually the police station itself. This I saw and heard about through the news, through the grapevine. Today, it happened here in front of my own eyes.

With Lalo, I walked up near the central market of Panajachel to the police station. A mob of people met me. Police in their full swat team armor stood around with their automatic weapons and tear gas guns ready. A mob circled around something on the ground I couldn´t see. I pushed my way closer and got my first glimpse of a man, bound and tied with a thick stained with blood rope, kneeling, praying and swaying in pain. Covered in his own blood. The mob took turns beating the man. Two machete strikes to the head. The people who couldn´t reach him ranted and yelled ¨Quamalo¨....burn him.

He and three more women still inside the jail, robbed a local store of 7,000 Quetzales. About $900. The police arrested all four of them, but the pueblo, knowing one too many years of police corruption, demanded to take vengance with their own hands. ¨Uno por uno,¨ they yelled. Eye for an eye.

A shirtless drunk was the one to finally take the life of the man lying in the street. Fueled by alchohol and mob mentality he stomped out the life of this man. The mob yelled to burn him. ¨Gasolina,¨ they shouted. The police managed what little control they had by saying that before the crowd could burn the man, women, children and cameras had to be put away. The cameras left. Women and children did not. They dragged the man 10 feet. He lay motionless on the hot concrete. A paramedic pushed through the crowd and checked for a pulse. No. He was dead. Almost immediately the energy shifted back to the jail where the three women were still. ¨Protected¨by the police.

As ancient and barbaric a custom as this all seems, it is something new for Guatemala. Since 1996, these public lynchings have been occuring at an increasing rate. I spoke with a grad student from Yale who is in Panajachel doing her graduate research on the reactions and sentiments of the pueblos where these lynchings happen. When the police capture these theives and murderers they are quickly released within a matter of days if they can pay their way out. A local store owner told me, ¨no podemos vivir asi,¨ there must be consequences for the theives or they will just continue taking from the pueblo. So the pueblos, Solola, Panajachel and many others in the surrounding mountains, are taking justice as they know how. Burning the police station, stoning police, fighting the police until they release the prisoners, and killing them in their own streets, in front of their own stores with their babies and children watching.

On the steps of the police station, the people yelled with blood in their eyes to release the women. ¨Matalas¨ Bring the gasoline. There were about 7 men, ¨neighbors, no mas,¨a woman in the crowd told me, standing and negociating with the police. After much yelling and impatience, the men announced that they were not going to release the women. If they did the crowd would engulf them. The crowd was rabid with a killing fever. But still, women were giggling among each other. Children played tag within the crowd. Men made horrible jokes. Twenty men climbed on top of a truck to see the dead man lying in the street. All the metal smashed down under their weight. Two men started to rock and attempt to overturn the truck. People laughed. Joked. Bizzarre. A man lay dead in the street and the people were acting as if it was merely the county fair in town.

The police announced that they needed five indigenous women to enter the jail. We will not release the women, but five indigenous can enter the jail and kill the three women inside. ¨Con tranquilo.¨ Noone volunteered. The police added, noticing that no woman wanted to do this, they could put a blindfold on the five women so they won´t have to see what they were doing. How they would kill three women. The crowd laughed. Insanity. One woman volunteered. A señora of maybe 40 years. I couldn´t watch anymore. I left. Went back to where we were working on the tourist strip 10 blocks away.

About an hour passed until a señora who sells tamales went running by us saying they were bringing the women down this street to the lake to burn them there. Immediatly shop owners started closing. All the metal doors slammed down. Restaurants kicked out their customers. The indigenous women rapidly took down all the clothes hanging up for sale. The gringos wandered around with lost, scared looks on their faces. Panajachel had transformed from a safe touristy haven to Bagdad.

Smoke pillared into the sky. The mob was burning 3 police cars. Flipping them and smashing the windows. The police began shooting tear gas. People came running, their mouths and noses red from the gas. Crying. Scared. Boys and men walked around with their shirts wrapped around their mouths like bandits carrying rocks. Ready for battle. We left.

The people of Panajachel are not proud of what they did. However, I never got a real sense of regret either. Rather, this is something they have to do. The police take bribes and do nothing, so the people have to defend themselves. A man that was recently lynched in a nearby pueblo was 29 years old. He had been in and out of jail 67 times, a local told me. Sixty seven times in a life of 29 years, this man was arrested, released and set free to only get thrown in jail again for another crime he commited. I read in the paper, El Diario, that since 1996 these lynchings have begun. This is not an ancient Mayan custom. This is a new phenomonon. Perhaps a fad, ¨The people of Solola did it, so we will too.¨ But something that has its roots in a very serious problem.

The police are not paid enough. They are young, uneducated boys from poor familes and are eager for bribes. I spoke with a man from Texas who has been living in Guatemala for some 20 years now. His son, last week, was set up and arrested with seven ounces of marijuana. He was taken to the local jail where locals gathered and fought with the police for permission to burn him alive. The police took him to another jail in order to protect him. There, the family had to pay 3,000 Quetzales to the inmates of that prison so the inmates wouldn´t kill their son. After this, garunteered, the family will have to pay the police if they want their son released from jail. It´s all corrupt. Every part about the whole system. So who can blame the people of Guatemala for wanting their own justice on the spot. The question lies in if beating and burning a person to death for stealing money or selling drugs is justice. Where is the line drawn? When is a person liable for death by el pueblo and when is he not?

The three women on Sunday were rescued from the police station after the crowd began to set fire to the police trucks. The police tear gassed the crowd and a hilocopter flew in and took out the women. The body of the man lay in the middle of the street, covered by a black plastic bag until mid-afternoon the next day. A lawyer had to see the body and sign some papers before he could be removed.

To date, this year, there have been 96 public lynchings in Guatemala.

Guatemala

Antigua...

It feels more like south america here. There's a large number of indigenous here, nearly the majority of the population and it's so cool to see them and talk with them. today we were selling our jewelry in antigua's main market alongside all the indigenous girls and women walking around with huge baskets of fruit and veggies balanced on their heads. they pass us and look at our jewelry and give me the look i've become quite accustom to now, the: "awe, look at the little gringa sitting on the ground selling her little jewelry." they wear beautiful long skirts with embroidered belts with many colors and fancy blouses and dangly earrings. Most have a colorful piece of woven fabric slung over their shoulders holding potatos or jewelry to sell or a little baby, wrapped completely out of sight. and some of these mothers are so young. maybe 15 some of them. an old woman of 50 walks around with 2 or 3 generations of daughters next to her.

Panajachel ladies

Fish drying

Marcelito and I at my house in Panajachel. We met in Colombia and have been running into each other ever since. I cut my hair.

The hammock bridge crossing the river to our house. Panajachel.

Church in Antigua.

Parchando in Panajachel. Passing Tuc tuc taxi.

A bus on a boat going to Monterrico, Guatemala.

Parchando in Panajachel.

The little lady standing is Juanita. 98 years old. She passed us every day offering little handmade bags for one Quetzal. We bought at least 2 every day. Now, we have a whole bunch. But she was awesome.

I'm in panajachel now, in lago atitlan. wonderful. really cheap, everything. we're renting a room for 100 Quetzales a week, we have a stove and everything. i went the other day to san marcos with a chilean friend, josé. she's awesome. we met in nicaragua and travelled to el salvador together and then i met up again with her here. we hitchhiked to san marcos just the two of us and that was really fun. you can take the boat in 30 minutes, but we decided to go by land for free, hitchhiking and seeing the beautiful scenary of the mountains. it took about 5 hours because we got a ride to another city, also named san marcos and we had to backtrack a whole lot. but everyone that picked us up were really nice religious folk. we stayed in san marcos in a house where a friend of josé's is renting up in the mountain. everyone in san marcos is really spiritual and meditating and yoga and i had some really good conversations with people....politics, aliens, religion....you know. it was good to spend some days away from ruben with a group of good girls. i miss my good girl friends. it's not so easy to connect with the girl artisaños. there's a ton of argentiños here and the majority of them, especially the girls, are stuck up and clique and not friendly and i'm sick of being around them and their Porteño accents.

Maria José. El Salvador

A little look at my work right now...

A necklace with a sloth´s claw and tiger´s eye stone above.

Playing around with coconut. My initials for earrings.

Necklace with the main stone, obsidiana and white jade above it.

Peacock feather enclosed in macrame.

Nicaragua

Balgue, Nicaragua

We´re on an island now of two volcanos, one filled with fresh water, the other of lave. The island is on the Lake of Nicaragua, fresh water, it´s name: Ometepe. It´s gorgeous here. We´re staying in a small brick room for $1.25 a night. Outside the door sleep 2 big pigs. Everyone in Ometepe has pigs. The brick bunkhouse is on the property of a woman who has been living here for 50 some years, Inez.

She is a mother of 12 and on this same property in ¨La Casa Grande¨sleep three of her own children and their families. Inez runs a little store out of the front of her house and takes care of 2 of her granddaughters whose mother lives in Costa Rica. The 3 of them sleep in a tiny little nook of the store behind a shower curtain.

There are scorpians here. You must kill them if you find one. They carry their baby´s eggs on their backs. I found one on the wall of our room.

Inez lets us use her kitchen everyone. We cook and give her a plate, she cooks and serves us a plate. We help her make ¨pasteles¨ to sell in the store. They´re filled with meat and others with pineapple. It took us practically all day to make over 100 and she only sold them for about 5 cents. The other day was the Day of Independence for Central America and we made enchiladas to sell at the parade. Rubén and I helped her sell them at the pueblo's festival.

The pueblo gets fresh water from the Laguna in the volcano, so there is no shortage of good water. Inez´s kitchen has a clay pit that she fills with water from the hose. The sink is a huge slab of rock with old water canals running outside to the hens. The stove is a fire pit with coals of firewood waiting to spark up to cook. Inez complains of pain deep in her chest that lingers from years of cooking with wood and the smoke. She lights the fire with pieces of plastic and kerosene and the kitchen fills with smoke.

She has 3 dogs, Tigre, Preciousa and Bobby, who wait and beg for food all day and guard the house at night. They eat everything from chicken bones to the most dangerously sharp bones of fish. ¨These are not Pedigree dogs,¨ Inez says, ¨They eat what there is.¨ I want to adopt Tigre. He follows me everywhere.

Grandchildern, children and their husbands and girlfriends and families come in and out of the houses all day. The property runs all the way back to the lake and is filled with banana trees, chickens and pigs. The showers and toilet pits are all outside. The floors are all cleanly swept and pounded dirt. Washing clothes takes all day. Horses and mules loaded down with platanos and fire wood pass in the evening with their tired owners. Music can be heard everywhere, at all times of the day. The pueblo goes to sleep early and wakes with the sun.

There is sense of humbleness here that makes me think of the material aspects of life I am so comfortable with. Inez and her family are not rich. But they have land and family and they all work very hard and take advantage of what they can. And they laugh so much and sit and gossip and talk with their grandmother or grandmother and their Aunts and Uncles and cousins.

It´s beautiful here.

Cristal. The great granddaughter of Inez.

Inez, sleeping outside the store after a long day.

Little Killian. Her mother lives in Costa Rica. Inez takes care of her and her older sister. She wanted me to stay for Christmas and cried when we left.

Making the dough for enchiladas.

Frying the enchiladas.


Killian in her fancy dress.

Inez working at the parade.

Ready to sell.


Killian and a friend watching the parade.












Killian.


The lake.



Joisinada, a brasilian artisano who we met and hung out with a lot in Balgue.

Time flew

I sit now on my mom's laptop in San Diego, California. A lot has happened, I suppose, since March, the last time I wrote on here. Let me try and sum it all up.

Merida, Venezuela

Ruben and I went to the mountains after spending many months on the beaches of Colombia and Venezuela. We headed to Merida, which turned into a wonderful month in Venezuela. Merida saved my failing opinion of Venezuela. We found a room to rent about an hour bus ride out of the city deep in the country hills, in the farm house of Senora Maria and her sister.

Maria was in her mid-90s and still hand washed her clothes in a bucket on the ground with a straight back, brought the cows in from pasture, milked her milking cow, made DELICIOUS cheeses, danced, took care of maybe 50 ducks, chickens and turkeys and sang her way through every day.

Maria and one of her baby cows.

Her sister had moved up the hill to live with Maria after what she described to me as "too many years living as a prisoner in her son's house." She told me how Maria needed the help, but in reality I think she needed to help Maria more than Maria needed her help. She grew, prepared, and roasted her own coffee beans and would make afternoon coffee every day. Also delicious. Daily, she and Maria carried on a consant sisterly-nit-pick-banter, every now and then escalating and ending with both of mumbling angrily to the cows they were towing by the ropes around the house.

Coffee beans drying in the sun.

Maria's sister leading one of the cows up behind the house.

Maria's chair.
This chicken here started limping around one day. I mentioned something to Maria about it, expecting her to be worried about one of her dear chickens. She loved her chickens. Ruben, who also loves chickens, and her would talk on and on about all the different types of chickens, and their own personal chicken stories all the time.

The side of the house with Maria and the cows up on the hill.

Maria (left) and her sister, the day we left.

Nicole at the river down behind our house.

The mountains from the front porch.

On a hike to some natural hot springs near our house. It was the coolest hot springs I've ever been to.

Gato and Ruben talking in their underwear by the river.

Our view from our room. Gorda, my dog for the month, and one of the baby cows above. When I came to check out the room, Maria showed me a square concrete cell with nothing but a wooden bench in it. I asked about a bed and Maria told me matter-of-factly that "beds are for tourists." So we brought up old cardboard boxes from the city and made a nice hobo-bed. But for about $5 for the month, we didn't have too many qualms.

Gorda and Ruben hanging up clean laundry.

After a month in Merida we left to pass Semana Santa on the beaches where we could make more money more quickly because we had decided we wanted to go to Panama. Erin wrote me a email the day we left Merida telling me she had finally booked a ticket. She was flying into Panama City.

Semana Santa flew by in a rush to make money in order to be there for Erin's arrival. We barely made it. There were all sorts of hoops to jump through as far as buying the plane tickets in Venezuela. We had made the cash during Semana Santa to pay for the tickets, but we needed the cash to buy new materials and to get out of Venezuela. I didn't have any access to an ATM card, so I asked my mom, to whom I never cease to be grateful for (and certainly not just for money reasons), to wire the money from my account to this German store owner's account, from which he could give me cash in Venezuelan currency. If I had had an ATM card I would have been taking out money on the Venezuelan's government market, which meant the tickets for both Ruben and I would have cost about $500. However, if I could buy the tickets in Venezuelan currency they would cost about $200. Total. So that's when this German guy really saved us. He, along with half of the rest of the country, run on the side, black markets for exchanging tourist's money. Tourists transfer money into his German bank account which he uses to buy all his store's merchandise, and then he gives the tourist Venezuelan currency using the black market exchange rate. Apparently this type of opperation is so common that even Chavez, the one who controls the government's outstanding rate, benefits from it.

After much running, worrying and arguing, Ruben and I finally had the wired money in our hands and eventually in the bank to pay for our tickets. We ended up officially buying the tickets about 21 hours before the flight, I think. Erin was already in Panama by this point. I had failed to meet her at the airport.

Once we got there, we sped through Panama. It was really awesome being with Erin again, seeing Panama with her and hearing and watching her reactions to Panama and other primal living experiences. We started off in Panama City, went to Santa Catalina, a surfer's paradise on the Pacific with not too much of a village but lots of good surf. We rented, traded, borrowed and bartered for surfboards whenever we could.

We were also in Bocas del Toro, on the Carribean, where we rented two rooms in La Casa de Moody, a young rasta trying to start a hostel. He had his entire yard filled with rain filled tents, and rented out his two bedrooms in his cabin. He slept on the floor in the kitchen. He was super nice and showed us lots of hospitality.

We stayed in David, a city in central Panama in the mountains. David is one of Panama's "large" cities, but large in Panamanian standards is not too big. It had a slower, friendly atmosphere to it and was a fun place to sell. We were the only artisanos selling there at the time.

Around this time, Shay was back south, working this time for a family in San Jose, Costa Rica. Her time working was about up and we agreed to meet up in Puerto Viejo, a little beach village on the Carribean. Another several wonderful weeks went by spending time with another good girl friend. I realized after being with Shay and Erin again how much I missed my girls back home. This led me to realizing just how much I wanted to see everyone back home. So I went back. I booked a flight for a month in advance and took a month to think it all over and by the time I was saying bye to Ruben in the airport I knew I was coming back.

Now, it's August 19th. I fly back to San Jose, Costa Rica tomorrow. I spent two wonderful months visiting with friends and family, relaxing, working with my dad, cleaning house for my mom, backpacking and camping in the High Sierras with my brother, Sean, my dad, Italy and O.B, my little dogs, listening to music I was missing for ten months, surfing and losing a little of the fried food diet weight that I gained in South America.

I'm rested and equiped with a new little sack of clothes to go back to travelling. The plan is to just go north up through Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize and Mexico. I'll let you know how it's going....

Venezuela

Maracaibo, Venezuela

(aka Mierda-caibo)

Looks real pretty from this perspective, I was just too scared to pull out my camera in the "real" parts of the city

Largest Virgin in Venezuela?

"Country/homeland, socialism or death!"
Not only is this written on the tops of huge buildings, but also on t-shirts and rear windows of cars.

Billboard over the road.

Necklace that I made and sold. The most expensive piece so far. It's a turquise stone from Peru.

Andícora, Venezuela

Our first night in Andícora and with los Chileanos: playing music on an empty beach.

"Chavez's reelection was today. Since Friday, Venezuela has had a "ley seca" and won't "legally" sell alcohol to anyone because if they did "Everyone would be drunk when they go to vote." Odd thinking. Apparently this is a common law throughout south america. Here in Andícora (we left Coro on Friday), everyone is VERY anti Chavez. I guess in richer areas he is less popular and in poorer areas they like him more. The vote is either "Si" or "No". All the really nice, new SUVs and other cars have "NO" written in soap on the windows. Also, the area we are in is very rich in oil, so the people are too. When they go to vote, they dip everyone's pinky finger in purple ink, so instead of a "I voted" sticker, you can tell who voted by their purple pinky.

There are flamingos here. If you look at a map, Andícora is a beach on the eastern side of a big peninsula north of Coro. On the bus ride here, we drove for a while on the narrow stretch of land leading to the peninsula. There were hundreds of pink flamingos in the marshes and water on both sides of us. It's cool. First we were driving through sand dunes and desert like areas and then marshes and low shrub covered areas. As I remember from some animal class (maybe "F is for Flamingo"), flamingos eat shrimp and that's why they are pink. THere is also an abundance of shrimp here. We bought a kilo yesterday from a local fisherman for 20 bolos. That's about 10 pesos colombiano...so...in dollars....about $4. Another old artisaño who lives here let us use his "kitchen" to cook. We met up with a Chilean artisaño couple in the bus station in Coro and have been camping and cooking and selling with them. We're camping right on the beach in the shade of a good tree. It's real nice staying at the beach, because there's always a place to camp for free. Going to bathroom is sometimes a problem, though. Oh! My debit card doesn't work here in Venezuela and I ran out of cash in Coro. So we're watching our money much more now and working so we can eat every meal. Don't worry, though, we've been selling quite well here. So, camping on the beach for free is very helpful. In comparison to Maracaibo, Andícora is very cheap to buy food, so that's good too."

La feria de Andícora.

Los Chileanos.

Gato y Nicole.

Rubén and "Olivia's".

One of our neighbors at our campsite. Raul is the children's grandfather. He looked so funny wandering around like a homeless guy with this beautiful little girl holding his hand and walking along beside him. Raul is not homeless, he just always looked like it. It was boiling hot and he always had the same camo jacket and courderouy pants on.

After a long day of working. It was Carnival/Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday. The beach looked like a "Jaws" beach. Covered in people. We sold about $200 in Yuyitos. Little braids that we braided into people's hair with seeds and beads. Each one costed $5. We sold a lot.

Gato y Rubén with the Yuyitos sign I made and wore as we walked on the beach selling Yuyitos and earrings.

Villa Marina

The other side of the peninsula where we camped for a few days and then rented a house between the six of us for 5 days. I wasn't too fond of this desert/beach. It was hot, filthy and filled with horrible smells. There are only tourists on the weekends and we didn't sell very much so we were living by our teeth, eating spaghetti with canned tuna and tomato sauce, because veggies were too expensive.

Not too many worthy pictures from Villa Marina.

Rubén and I have split up from the group and are on our way to Mérida, in the Sierra nevadas. I'm ever-ready for a change of scenary.