Photos on Flickr

If anyone is interested, I've uploaded the best of my photos from my jaunt around Guatemala with Kristian on to flickr. You can check them out here. Enjoy!

Curious News Headlines

I know that by putting up this post I'm interrupting the flow of my narrative, but I haven't uploaded the photos from the rest of the trip on to my computer and I want to include some in the next installment of the "Kristian and Krystin Vacation Story." So I thought I would write about some of the interesting news stories I've read in the Guatemalan newspapers recently. It's rather appropriate, given that I'm down here studying, in part, the media. I'll keep posting interesting news stories from down here when they come up.

In today's Prensa Libre, one of the headlines read: "Migrants from Bhutan Remain Locked in the Airport." Ok, so it's not the best translation, but I couldn't think of a better way to translate "encerrados." It's a word usually used to talk about people who have been put in jail; it implies being shut in, locked up, enclosed, captured. The beginning of the article reads, "Like in the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal, three migrants from Bhutan, Asia, reside in La Aurora International Airport since last week after having lost their documents." Apparently no one can talk to them because they speak an obscure dialect so they are communicating with hand signs. Their stuck in a particular terminal in the airport without food and clean water and are sleeping on the floor and begging from travelers for money to get something to eat and drink. The authorities took one of the men to the hospital at one point last week because he was coughing blood and was severely dehydrated, but once he was stabilized he was sent back to the airport. A representative from the Human Rights Commission notes in the article that the airport is not the place to keep people indefinitely. The airport claims it is an ongoing Immigration investigation, while the director of Immigration claims that since these men haven't actually entered Guatemala (since they don't have passports), it's a problem for the airport. If that isn't bad enough, there is actually another case of people being held in the airport here as well: four Chinese women have been stuck in La Aurora airport for 23 days. These women tried to enter Guatemala with false documents, but unlike the unfortunate Bhutanese (is that how you refer to people from Bhutan?), the Chinese women are being taken care of by the airline that brought them to Guatemala. TACA, the airline that ran the flight the Chinese women took to Guatemala, is apparently paying for food and water for these ladies and is letting them shower in the men's bathroom in the hangers and set them up in a VIP area.

Ok, seriously, is that not a little bit insane? It is certainly an interesting case of institutional ineptitude. I wonder if something like this would happen in the States. I seriously doubt it...the Department of Homeland Security wouldn't let immigrants with no passports live in an airport terminal (or whatever agency is in charge of that sort of thing). I'm sure that there is some reason why these people aren't just sent back to their home countries, most likely that either they can't afford the ticket (!) or that they are seeking refugee status or something? But the article doesn't say anything about that. I'm dumbfounded, truly.

Monterico

Ok, well, I'm going to post this half-done and get the rest out later...

There's really not much to tell about our trip to San Pedro La Laguna. It's considered the party town of the lake and is full of backpackers and low to mid-range hostels and hotels. If you follow the hill up from the dock you'll end up in the actual town, which seemed to be filled with signs declaring Jesus as Savior and other Christian slogans. We also saw a ton of quite large Protestant churches. We wandered around for a while, had lunch at the edge of the lake and took a relaxing boat trip back to Panajachel in time to check out of the hotel and catch the shuttle back to Antigua. Although I will add that Kristian got quite a sunburn that morning; it's easy to forget that we are at altitude here and that much closer to the sun. The trip back to Antigua was much less harrowing than the ride to Lake Atitlan (well at least for me...poor Kristian was starting to get sick about then).

I'm going to gloss over a good bit of the next few days, just to save you, faithful readers, the gory details of a case of traveler's diarrhea. I'll just say that we had to get the shuttle driver to stop rather quickly at a street corner while Kristian jumped out of the back of the van and fled to the hotel, leaving me somewhat stunned at her ability to disappear. The rest of the evening consisted of a miserable Kristian turning green at various intervals and dashing for the bathroom. I bowed out of some of this and had a quiet dinner with our German friend that we had met on the way to Panajachel.

The next morning we were supposed to catch a 8:00 am shuttle to Monterico, on the Pacific Coast, but we had to beg off due to Kristian's paralyzing stomach issues and postponed our departure until later that afternoon. Oddly enough, later that morning we ran in to Kristian's aunt and her aunt's sister (who lives in Antigua and teaches yoga classes here) in the Plaza Mayor. And, incidentally, the hotel we stayed in that night was really terrible. The travel agent who booked all of our shuttles earlier in the week had recommended it to us, but it turned out to be a nightmare. For starters, the sink didn't work unless you used the valve under the sink
to regulate the flow of water from the faucet. It was unbearably noisy (we could hear the nightclub next door all night through the wall) and not really all that clean. I don't recommend it to anyone.

On the ride to Monterico we met up with a nice girl from Idaho (but originally from Vermont) who we ended up spending the next two days with. She's a firefighter out in Idaho and is therefore unemployed four months out of the year (I guess there aren't any forest fires there during the snowy months). Once off the shuttle in Monterico we were accosted by a bunch of kids telling us that they had the best information on the best hotels in town, which was a little overwhelming. Within the first few minutes we had three "official" tour guides/turtle hatchery employees accost us as well. And it was wicked hot, especially compared to the places in the highlands we had been earlier that week. Think New Orleans in the early summer. We ended up in a hotel called "Las Brisas del Mar," a rather nice little hotel equipped with mosquito nets, a fan, and (supposedly) hot water just off the beach.

Will fill in more later....

Panajachel, Guatemala

We were dropped off in the Central Plaza after our trip to the Pacaya volcano, so we sat there for a bit to soak up the sunshine. This really is the land of eternal spring. The first few nights here in Guatemala we stayed a nice little hotel near the Church of Our Lady of Mercy (known locally as La Merced), a yellow and white rococo church that also includes the ruins of an old monastery. It has a lovely garden on the roof from which you can see the whole city and the volcanoes that surround it. The photo of La Merced I've included I took from the roof of the hotel. That afternoon, Kristian got a lecture from a bank manager when she went to change money…two days before she changed some money and the bank teller gave her $20 worth of quetzales more than what she gave him in American dollars. This particular bank makes a photocopy of your passport when you change money (for security reasons, they said), and they recognized her from the day before. The manager scolded Kristian and made her pay the money back (not that Kristian had any issue with returning the money…it was just odd seeing her get sternly reprimanded by the bank manager, who tried to explain things in broken English and just made us more confused).

Later that afternoon we hopped on a shuttle for Panajachel, in the department of Sololá. This is one of the few places that I had visited in my previous trip to Guatemala, and I was really excited to see it again. Truly, Lake Atitlan is one of the most beautiful places I have been. Since we would be arriving in Panajachel (the most touristy of all the towns on the Lake), we decided to stay the night there instead of trying to catch a lancha (basically a water taxi) to a quieter town. We more or less picked a hotel at random and had called in a reservation the night before (we “rented” a phone from a Guatemalan version of a 7-Eleven). The hotel turned out to be pretty nice and very cheap, only Q180 between the two of us (that’s about $22.50). If any of you every want to stay a night or two in Panajachel, the hotel is called El Chaparral. It had a lush garden courtyard, a small but comfortable pool, and clean, relatively spacious rooms. We had met a friendly German guy named Heinrik on the shuttle bus from Antigua, and he ended up staying at the same hotel. We ate dinner with him that night in a restaurant overlooking the lake.

Hells bells, I forgot to mention the harrowing drive to the lake! Picture yourself on a rollercoaster, but then replace the rollercoaster car with a fifteen-passenger van and the metal frame of the ride with narrow roads with no shoulder or guardrail. I checked the speedometer at one point, and we were going 90 km/hr around hairpin turns. For those of you who have ever taken the back road from Sewanee down to Winchester, picture those curves on steeper hills and then imagine driving on them for three hours at about 50 mph. Then add in bicyclists and runners at the side of the road, other vans and cars, and a handful of chicken buses (brightly painted ex-American school buses used for mass transportation). I first thought the chicken buses were called chicken buses because you can carry chickens on them, but I’m now almost certain it’s because the drivers play chicken with everything else on the road. I thought I was going to die in a horrible car crash at least five times on that trip.

We spent two nights in Panajachel, both at the same hotel. The first day we took an overpriced private lancha to the town of Santa Cruz, a sleepy village about 20 minutes by boat from Panajachel. A word of warning: go to the dock on the Calle de Embarcadero to catch a public boat and don’t listen to boatmen who try to convince you that there aren’t any public boats in the middle of the day. Learn from our mistake. Lucky for us Santa Cruz was worth the trip, otherwise I might have been a bit more annoyed at being ripped off. We hung around in hammocks at a fantastic backpackers hostel called Iguana Perdida for the day…it’s a fun little spot that I will probably go back to later during this trip. It’s run by a British woman and her American husband. For those of you thinking of taking a trip down here, they offer free room and board (and at-cost drinks at the bar) for anyone willing to volunteer their services at the reception desk for two weeks.

That night we tried to find our German friend but ended up eating alone at a funny little restaurant called the Circus Bar. We caught up with Heinrik later, just as we were getting ready to pack it in for the day, and ended up grabbing a few drinks at one of the few bars still open. Unlike in Spain and Argentina (the other Spanish speaking countries I’ve spent some time in), restaurants and bars tend to close relatively early; they keep hours more like the ones kept by bars and restaurants in the States (well, except for those in places like New York and New Orleans). But this place stayed open until around 1:00 am, and we definitely closed the place down (Kristian is now facebook friends with one of the bouncers). It was an odd but very fun evening, and included drinks that were lit on fire and drunk through a straw. I didn’t try it myself, but Kristian did. We tried to find out the name of it (it was dark tequila in a shot glass that you light on fire and then drink quickly through a straw). One of the Guatemalans we befriended that evening (who, incidentally lives in Connecticut) said it was called “elephant pass,” as in it could make even an elephant pass out, but I’m not sure that that’s really what it’s called. We ended up making quite a few friends that night, did a little bit of salsa dancing with a salsa instructor/salesman from Xela, and Kristian was hit on by a very drunk woman who claimed she was there with her husband (the Guatemalan from Connecticut) but whose “husband” claimed he had just met her a few days ago. We keep meeting the strangest people.

I’ve just realized that this post is getting a bit too long, so I’ll save the rest for later. I’ll just add that despite our debauchery (which actually wasn’t all that bad), both Kristian and I were blissfully un-hungover the next morning and we spent the day in San Pedro, which is across the lake from Panajachel. This time we were able to get ourselves onto a public boat. I’ll fill in the details of that day later. Until then, then….

Pacaya Volcano

So I'll do my best to pick up from where I left off. Tuesday we got up dark and early (before sunrise) to catch the 6:00 am shuttle to the Pacaya volcano. It's about a two hour ride to the volcano, and then an hour and a half hike to the not-quite-summit. Kristian and I were cracking up the whole ride to the volcano due to the interesting soundtrack we had on the bus...I think we heard an entire Avril Levine album (the one with Sk8r Boy), plus a bunch of pop-reggae, including the "cops" theme song (bad boys, bad boy, whatcha gonna do?). The hike up the volcano was steep...the guide told us we went from 1800 to 2400 meters to get to the area where we could see the lava flows. According to an online conversion thingy, we climbed from 5,900 ft. to about 7,800 ft. I could really feel the altitude...catching my breath consisted of a lot of gasping and coughing. The city of Antigua, where I'm staying at the moment, is about 5,000 ft. up in the mountains. Much of the trail was straight up, and our legs were burning after only about ten minutes of hiking. Some of the locals followed us up on horseback in order to sell rides up the mountain for those who were unprepared for the climb.

There are three other volcanoes in the vicinity of the Pacaya volcano: Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango. The Acatenango volcano is in the foreground of this photo. In the middle is the Agua volcano, and the the left is Fuego, which is also active. We could see billows of smoke coming from it's peak every once in a while. The view was absolutely amazing.

The Pacaya volcano is an active volcano, and our final destination was the lava flows themselves, on the far side. First we skidded down a sandy area in order to get to an area of sharp pumice (at least I think that's what it's called). We had to climb over the hardened, cooled lava for quite a ways, until finally we made it to the actual red hot lava that was oozing slowly down the side of the mountain. For those of you who don't know, I've got a bit of vertigo, and the climb kind of freaked me out. The slope was pretty steep, and I almost didn't make it all the way to the lava itself. I was the last person in our group to get close to the lava...we were literally two feet away from it. You could feel the heat in the air, and the lava I was standing on melted the rubber on the soles of my shoes (not enough to completely ruin them, but there really aren't any treads on the soles anymore). Kristian took some video of the lava with my camera. The noise you can hear on the video isn't the lava itself, which was very quiet, but the wind.

Here's the best part of the story...two days after we hiked the volcano, we met some Brits at Lake Atitlan who had some nasty looking bandages on their arms and legs. When we asked them how they had been injured, they told us that they had been hiking the Pacaya volcano the same day that we had, but a few hours later. While they were hiking the volcano erupted and sent boiling hot lava straight down towards them as they were traversing across the razor sharp pumice on the way to see the usually sedate lava flow that we had seen only a few hours earlier. The group of about 20 people had to flee for their lives across the hardened lava, and many were cut up pretty badly by the rocks. But other than a dislocated shoulder, a bunch of cuts needing stitches, and some minor burns, no one was seriously injured.

That afternoon, after we got back from the volcano, we bummed around Antigua for a while and then hopped a shuttle to Panajachel, on Lake Atitlan. I'll post some more later about that. At some point I'll actually catch up to where I am now. I hope you are all doing well! Until later, then...

Antigua, Guatemala

It’s been a long and lively three days since we arrived in Guatemala. Kristian claims she has good airport karma, and I witnessed it first hand. Not only did we not have to stand in line anywhere in the airport (including at the security checkpoint), but we also lucked out in our airplane neighbors. We met a friendly surfing photographer on his way to Costa Rica on our flight from Boston and a lovely French-Canadian woman on the flight from Houston to Guatemala City who had once run an organic farm near Guatemala City a few years ago. A shuttle picked us up at the airport (although not the shuttle that was apparently there for us...the driver explained that that shuttle had been vandalized in the parking lot), and we got to our hotel in Antigua around midnight. After a brief misunderstanding with the night doorman at the hotel (he insisted there was no room for us until I was able to convince him that I was the "krause" listed for room #5), we bunked down for the night.

The next day we spent the better part of the morning sleeping. I think I may have driven Kristian a little bonkers because all I wanted to to was sleep and eat that day. We wandered around Antigua, visited the enormous market (which sells everything from handicrafts to used clothes, fresh fruit and veggies, candles, toilet paper, and everything in between) had fabulous nutella crepes at a cafe, did a little shopping, and met some interesting characters. One lady in particular, who you, dear reader, will probably meet again since she is staying at the hotel we will be staying in when we return to Antigua, sticks out in my memory. She is an older American woman, and I had seen her earlier talking with the tourist police near the central plaza. I had assumed she had been robbed, as she was crying. We saw her later at a hotel restaurant....we had met an employee of the hotel earlier while booking shuttle tickets to the different towns we will be visiting and were reserving rooms there for our return to Antigua. She proceeded to tell us an odd story about how she was being chastised by the police for basically disturbing the peace while she was harassing some Europeans who were selling reproductions of Mayan artwork. I didn't quite fully understand her story. But she liked us, mostly I think because we listened to her story, and I tried to make her feel a bit better and told her to just put it behind her, to get rid of that low energy and just move forward. She decided we were her new best friends, and gave me a beaded key chain as thanks for helping her feel better. A strange encounter.

You are probably thinking that this narrative is wandering a bit, and you'd be right. I'm a little distracted, but I want to get this down before I forget. So as not to bore you with too long a post, I'll give you the highlights of the next day now, and fill in the details on my next post. Tuesday began for us at 5 am, as we caught a 6 am shuttle to the Pacaya volcano. The trip included an interesting shuttle ride with a soundtrack that consisted of Avril Levine's greatest hits and an incredible hike whose pinnacle included some molten hot rocks and slightly melted shoe rubber. The afternoon featured a shuttle ride to Panajachel, on Lake Atitlan, that made us all feel like we were on an amusement park ride.

I hope that all is well with you all up there in the states. Post a comment or send me an email if you feel like it. I know I haven't been gone long, but I always enjoy getting news. Until the next post, then.....que les vayan bien.

Stow, Mass.

We're off to Guatemala tomorrow. The flight leaves Boston in the afternoon and then a layover in Houston before finally arriving in Guatemala City late at night. Oh, and then a hour and a half taxi ride to Antigua. I'm looking forward to a week's vacation before sticking around in the capital for some library time. I've been in Massachusetts (yes, I love to spell it out...it just looks cool) since last night, and spent today hanging out with some of my favorite people. I promise to write something interesting, amusing, or exciting in the next post. For now, I'm still getting over being sick. My brain is not working properly. 

New York, NY

Well, the first part of the journey has commenced. I'm sitting in a friends studio apartment in Brooklyn, getting ready to head in to Manhattan for some breakfast. OK, so it's more like brunch, given the hour, but hey, I'm on vacation at the moment. I've been in New York for a few days, and it's wonderful to visit with my friends here. For those of you who don't know, I've been coming out to New York for the past few years on a pretty regular basis to train an Indonesian martial art called Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen. There is a small but amazing community of people here who train Poekoelan who I adore and it's always an adventure when I get to visit. If anyone is interested, I'll have to share the story about our bowling extravaganza, fake mustaches included. Other than that, I'm just hanging out, eating good food and catching up with the locals. Oh, and acquiring an nice set of new bruises in martial arts class. More later from the road.

Guatemalan Peace Accords

Now that you've learned a little about the Guatemalan civil war, I'll explain a little about the Peace Accords and their aftermath. This will give you guys an idea of why I find this country so fascinating, especially given my interest in crime policy. You'll probably notice that my understanding of the Peace Accords centers around issues of human rights, demilitarization, and transitional justice.

Peace negotiations in Guatemala can be divided into three phases. First, in March of 1990, the UN mediated talks between the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), Guatemalan political parties, members of civil society, and the government. Direct negotiations between the URNG and the government began without any previous cease-fire agreements. The second phase of negotiation was marked by President Serrano’s 1993 failed self-coup, which temporarily derailed negotiations. However, in March of 1994, the URNG and the Guatemalan government signed the Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights and set up a calendar for continued negotiations. 1994 also saw the singing of the Agreement for the Resettlement of the Populations Uprooted by the Armed Confrontation and the Agreement on the Establishment of the Historical Clarifictaion Commission. The final phase of negotiations addressed the rights of indigenous people. Following the election of Álvaro Arzú to the presidency in 1995, both the guerillas and the government declared a cease-fire and agreed on the Accord on Socioeconomic Aspects and the Agrarian Situation and singed an agreement titled Strengthening Civilian Power and the Role of the Army in a Democratic Society. In addition, the government ceased the practice of forced recruitment and began to demobilize the Civil Patrols. Despite another setback in 1996 concerning a kidnapping scandal involving a faction of the URNG, actors on both sides of the war signed the rest of the peace accords in December of 1996, including the Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace, which put into effect all other previously signed accords.

The 1994 Human Rights Accord invited the UN Verification Mission (MINUGUA) into the country. MINUGUA employed human rights monitors, legal experts, police, and military observers to verify guerilla and government activities, raise awareness of human rights issues and to oversee the cease-fire agreement and demobilization of armed groups. The peace accords also set up Historical Clarification Commission, which was charged with investigation past human rights abuses. The demilitarization accord modified the mission of the armed forces to exclude matters of internal security, established the goal of reducing the amount of army personnel and the military budget by one third, and established a new civilian police force. The accords also called for the demobilization of the Civil Patrols, set up a constitutional reform that provided for civilian trials against military personnel accused of crimes against civilians, and authorized the president to disband the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), a notorious military intelligence unit connected to the president that had been implicated in numerous assassinations of civilian dissidents.

While the peace accords laid out an ambitious, far reaching set of institutional reforms and recommendations, these reforms and recommendations were often not fully implemented or did not fulfill expectations. The Historical Clarification Commission, for example, was prohibited from assigning criminal responsibility for specific acts, and prosecutors could not use the findings of the commission in court proceedings. The commission had no power to subpoena witnesses, and the commission’s report was forbidden to publish the names of perpetrators. The armed forces cut back on their personnel, but did not reach the one-third reduction mark set by the demilitarization accord. Military spending went down through the end of 1998, but the military budget rose back to pre-peace accord levels in 1999. While the president had the opportunity to abolish the EMP intelligence unit, it was not disbanded until 2003. Although the new mission of the armed forces precludes the use of the military in matters of internal security, the military has been slow to change its geographic deployment of troops from one that favored counterinsurgency to a deployment based on national defense priorities. The demilitarization accords called for the disbanding of the Mobile Military Police and the creation of a new civilian police (PNC). Under this agreement, ex-military members can join the new PNC as long as they undergo the same selection and training process as new recruits. The government, however, has subverted this process by transferring ex-members of the military police to the Treasury Guards before moving them into the PNC and requiring only three months of retraining. According to reports from the Washington Office of Latin America in 1998, the Guatemalan PNC was one of the most corrupt police forces in Central America. Most members obtained their positions through nepotism or by buying their way onto the force, and many police officers support themselves through graft and corruption. The PNC did not screen new recruits for past human rights violations, and due to low numbers of qualified applicants, the government began accepting new recruits who had failed the entry exam.

Human rights violations continued to be a problem in Guatemala in the years following the signing of the peace accords. High crime rates and low numbers of trained police led the Guatemalan government to reintroduce army personnel into internal security functions. As little as a year after the signing of the peace accords, soldiers were patrolling both urban and rural areas, often escorted by a single police officer in an attempt to legitimize the patrols. MINUGUA reported that instead of reducing crime, these patrols often engage in criminal acts or commit human rights violations. The intelligence arm of the covert EMP, under the auspices of the Anti-Kidnapping Commando Group, was implicated in a number forced disappearances and murders in 1997 and 1998. Right-wing political forces eventually defeated the constitutional amendment restricting the military to matters of national defense in the 1999 referendum. Following this defeat, the government has for the most part ignored other peace accord agreements that addressed the reorganization of the army.

Despite the dismantling of the Civil Patrols, reports by MINUGUA describe the participation of former Civil Patrol members in rural lynchings. These reports examine 100 murders stemming from 120 lynchings over the course of two years. Former Civil Patrol members were directly implicated in many of these lynchings, most of which occurred in areas where Civil Patrols had been prominent during the civil war. In addition to lynchings, MINUGUA reported executions committed by death squads in rural areas. In 1998, groups of heavily armed, well-trained men distributed a list of alleged criminals who they had marked for death. Following the circulation of this list, the groups of armed men tortured and executed ten men whose names were on the list, dumping their bodies on the doorsteps of other alleged criminals from the list. Military officers were also responsible for the assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi two days after the release of the Catholic Church’s report on human rights abuses during the civil war.

Matters had not improved substantially five years after the signing of the peace accords. Former dictator Ríos Montt asserted a strong influence over politics as president of Congress and founder of the ruling political party, the Guatemalan Republic Front (FRG). Death threats against judges and the kidnapping and murder of political activists continued, in large part due to the actions of clandestine death squads. These death squads also persisted in harassing, attacking, and assassinating human rights activists involved in court cases dealing with human rights abuses committed during the civil war. Peasant leaders suffered attacks from both death squads and landowners, and journalists who covered cases of disappearances and executions endured death threats and attacks.

A 2002 MINUGUA report describes how clandestine groups founded during the civil war that have transformed into powerful criminal organizations. A 2002 Amnesty International report dubbed Guatemala a “Corporate Mafia State,” a term they defined as, “[an] unholy alliance between traditional sectors of the oligarchy, some ‘new entrepreneurs,’ police and military, and common criminals.” Within this type of state, hidden powers participate in illicit activities in order to gain huge profits. These hidden powers use their political connections as well as connections within the military and the police to eliminate their competition or intimidate those who try to investigate their activities. The hidden powers often employ clandestine groups, many of which include military and police personnel, private security guards, and common criminals. While it is difficult to gather information on the armed groups, investigators believe the leaders of the clandestine groups occupied high-ranking positions within the military during the civil war.

So that brings us up to the early 2000's. Stay tuned for the next installment, which will give a short run-down of what is going on in Guatemala now.