Guatemala City, 1992.
It's after midnight. I am a penniless gringo journalist, sitting in my 70 cent hotel room. The walls are unfinished sheet rock, covered with graffiti. A lot of it contains the word "jodido" (fucked up). This is the country that invented the term "death squad" (escuadrón de la muerte).
Outside, I hear what sounds like gunshots and then screeching tires. I look, but it's too dark to see anything. There's commotion and loud thuds, like a body being punched. Desperate pleading in Spanish, then groans, then silence.
Next morning, the Mayan man in the room next to mine says that a few days ago death squads hacked off someone's head. The victim was later identified by Guatemala Watch as Transito Rosales Lorenzana, 55. As often as not, you never know who's dead or alive because their bodies are "disappeared." I never find out what happened outside my window that night.
In 1950, Jacobo Arbez Guzman is freely elected President of Guatemala on a platform of land reform, favorable to the impoverished Indians, but is ousted by the CIA when his policies infringe on U.S. business interests. After that, a series of right wing dictators rule the country during a 40 year, U.S.-backed civil war, and virtually any Mayan Indian becomes the enemy, subject to summary execution. In the 1970s the army drops illustrated death lists, followed by flyers of corpse photos. Over 100,000 civilians die.
Since the early 1980s Guatemala has been run by several fundamentalist Christians. José Efraín Rios Montt, president from 1982-1983, is connected with the California-based "Church of the Word." The President during my stay is Jorge Elías Serrano, distinguished representative of the U.S.-based Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship. Recently, under Serrano's presidency (according to the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission), there have been almost 400 "extra-judicial" executions, 53 kidnappings, and 90 cases of torture. Those are just the ones we know about. Some say the fundamentalist missionary push in Guatemala is officially encouraged because its adherents will accept authority from someone of their apparent religion without question. It makes it easier to claim that "unsaved" Indians are bringing genocide upon themselves.
Universidad de San Carlos. There is a student protest against government repression. Photographers are everywhere, most of them G-2 army intelligence. A bus is in flames. Platoons of police in gas masks surge into the crowd. They go after the weak ones who fall behind, beating them unconscious. As an American, everyone wants to stand as close to me as possible in case the bullets start to fly. A dead gringo can be trouble for the police. Dead Indians, no problem. Especially poor ones. I see a dark-skinned street kid cornered by soldiers with clubs, and when they walk away, he lies in a pool of blood. If it's the same kid reported by Amnesty International, he dies. Vendors sell roasted peanuts and chips to onlookers. Suddenly someone runs up with a camera and takes my picture.
Next morning. The front page of the government puppet newspaper, Siglio, runs a photo of the burning bus, like the one many people have to ride to work, blaming it on student protestors.
Evening. I encounter several bands of street kids, scrawny, dark descendents of an ancient civilization, historically exploited and enslaved by foreigners. There are as many as 6,000 niños de la calle (street kids) in Guatemala City. Because they steal from shops and pick pockets and are a general nuisance, the army routinely exterminates them like rats. The lucky (or unlucky) ones are kept in children's prisons. They smell like rubber cement, which they buy and sniff to alleviate hunger and warm their emaciated bodies. It's manufactured by the H.B. Fuller Co. in St. Paul, Minnesota, under the name Resistol, and is sold in large quantities to Central American countries with 40 to 50 million street kids commonly called resistoleros. The police, who make lots of bribe money from narcotraficantes, have zero tolerance for this low level substance abuse. They sometimes pour the glue on the kid's hair or hands and set it on fire.
I try to interview these skittish kids, many of them war orphans, who behave like the stray, starving dogs they sometimes sleep with. They all seem under eight but are probably older. Some of the girls might end up prostitutes and avoid an early death from bullets or an overdose of rubber cement. I act like I'm trying to buy some cola (glue). They lead me here and there in the near total darkness of Guatemalan alleys and rutas (back streets). Once they realize I'm an American, packs of them emerge from doorways, boxes, and generally any dark place. They stand as close to me as possible for two reasons. One, to pick my pockets, and two, so the police don't shoot at them and accidentally kill a gringo. (Intentional murder-as in dropped from a helicopter into a live volcano-is another matter.) One of the bigger kids pulls out a baby food bottle. He pours some runny glue into a baggy and gives it to me. Gringo price: 20 quetzals (about $4). I try it. Rush of toluene, like a chug-a-lugged martini. A wave of warm contentment rushes through my body, and I understand why they take it. The kids are entertained by this and as they laugh, I feel their little hands sneaking into my pockets.
March 6. I meet a human rights worker named Carlos, who speaks English. I tell him I'm a periodista (journalist), posing as a tourist. He tells me to be very careful. Shows me cigarette burns on his arms and chest, the Guatemalan equivalent of a slap on the wrist. I interview him, but he definitely doesn't want me to use a tape recorder, take photos, or use his real name.
"Because of human rights violations, it's hard for the U.S., even under Reagan, to send aid. But if you're a Pentecostal [sic], monies come in from the U.S. churches in massive quantity. They have connections with the CIA and linkages with networks of power in the U.S. It is very contradictory. You have this Christian love and yet they are part of the killings. Rios Montt was a born-again Christian and he killed many people. There are Catholics who do the same thing. Kjell Eugenio Laugerud Garcia was an overtly practicing Catholic in the late 70s. He'd go into church and carry the image of Christ in a coffin and make a big display out of being a Catholic. Then he'd order whole villages of people massacred from helicopters with machine guns."
I ask if President Serrano, in his own way, might be trying to reign in the military.
"Manuel Colom Argueta and Dr. Alberto Fuentes Mohr were about the only two candidates who had the moral integrity to preclude any dealings with the military. They were both assassinated [in early 1979]. All the others-including Serrano-were ready to enter into a pact with assassins. There was a case, Donaldo Alvarez, a happily married family man with kids, who had a torture chamber in his basement. On the other hand, there is a treatment center for torture victims that sometimes treats torturers who are haunted by what they did. Serrano must be dealing with the same problems."
March 13. Several human rights workers are detained. One of them disappears completely-a tough young German woman I once saw slap a bus driver who tried to short change her. (Everyone's desperate. You do what you can.) Police show up at my hotel room. They wear the drab uniform of the polícia municipal. They want to see my passport, but of course I don't have it. I'm sure they know that foreign passports are always kept at the hotel's front desk. I don't know whether these young bumpkins, with their ill-fitting, wrinkled shirts and half-open zippers, are spreading the usual fear on command, or if my photo from the college demonstration got into the wrong hands. I tell them I'm just a tourist, but they don't seem to care. They try, like bad actors, to be intimidating, then leave. I assume this is a first warning, maybe the last.
One can argue I'm in Guatemala for purposes of exploitation. But I'm not looking for wealth-that's already claimed and held on penalty of death. What I'm looking for are stories, and here there's a gold mine of sad ones. However, drawing the wrong kind of attention can get others killed. I could end up with alligator clamps on my own body, plugged into house current, or find myself pushed out of a whirlybird into the churning crater of Fuego Volcano.
Unlike those more reckless than myself, I feel it's time to leave. I don't want to end up like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. When I finally get out of the country, filthy and covered with fleas, no one says good-by.
© 2007 by John-Ivan Palmer.