Early last week there were three seemingly coordinated attacks against bus drivers in Guatemala City that seriously blocked up public transportation in the city (a serious problem when 80% of the work force in the capital use public transportation). The attacks left 3 people dead and 7 in the hospital, which, while it may sound outrageously horrible, is not all that uncommon. There have been over 33 bus drivers killed here in since January (there were a few more killed later in the week, and two this morning, so I'm not sure where the count is now). 85 bus drivers were killed last year, a huge leap from the 37 that were murdered in 2007. The city was panic stricken...a local radio station that reported on the incident largely exaggerated the number of deaths (it claimed that 10 people had died) and claimed that the government had placed the city under a state of siege or state of exception. Schools were closed, children sent home, the presidential palace and other political buildings sent their employees home, and there was a rumor of a complete shut-down of public transportation. I first heard about all this when one of the librarians at the newspaper archives told me they were closing early because of a bus strike and the violence earlier that morning. Anyway, the president announced via radio and tv that there was not in fact a state of siege and urged the city to remain calm (yeah, right). He claimed the attacks were attempts by organized crime (which is never defined by anyone who talks about it...what do they mean by organized crime?) aimed at destabilizing his government due to a recent crack-down on drug traffickers. Rumors ran rampant as to what was really going on. No one in the media bought the government's story that this was in retaliation for a crack-down on crime. Nor does any of the Guatemalans I've talked to. Some say it's drug dealers trying to divert attention away from their other, more lucrative, pursuits. Others say it the maras, the tattooed youth gangs that dominate many marginalized neighborhoods, who extort the bus drivers, demanding Q100 or more daily for the privilege of not being killed. Others say it's a political ploy by the Partido Patriota, (Patriot Party in English) to destabilize the government. The PP candidate for president in the last election came in second with a campaign slogan of "urge mano dura" or urge the iron fist, a slogan aimed at promoting hard handed, punitive crime control (among other things). The leader of the PP has already made numerous statements and placed ads in the newspapers criticizing the current president and calling for drastic measures against rising crime rates. The whole city is a-buzz with these rumors, and everyone has an opinion. Most people are sick of being afraid of leaving the house or wondering if they will make it home from work safe and sound. Which, of course, leaves me with the worry that vigilante justice will take a firmer hold here in the capital. Lynchings (or attempted lynchings), which consist of angry mobs capturing suspected criminals and burning them alive, are not an uncommon occurrence in the departments (Guatemala is made up of departments, not states or provinces, since it is a unitary and not federal country). I don't think this will start happening in the capital, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. Last week, in the northernmost edge of the zone that I'm living in at the moment, a group of neighbors caught a man who had robbed a pedestrian and left him tied up, naked and beaten, at the side of the road for the police to pick up. Online comments to editorials in newspapers have included many calls for widespread arrests of maras, some going to the point of calling for "social cleansing," adding the slogan "marero visto, marero muerto" which basically means that any ganster (marero) found should be killed. Obviously this is a pretty extreme reaction, but not a completely unpopular one. Anyway, things have calmed down a bit in terms of the level of fear in among the city's inhabitants, but violence continues to disturb things. As I mentioned earlier, two more bus drivers died this morning...official statistics put the number of murders in the country as a whole at an average of 17 per day.
Of course for me it's not helping that I spend much of my time in the library reading about crime in years past. I've finally been able to start on the papers before the 2007 election, and I have to admit it's getting to me. I can only take so much death and blood and tragedy. For one thing, many of the people killed are young. I was reading today about a police detective killed while trying to stop a robbery in March of 2007. He was driving by with some co-workers and stopped his car to see if they could help the victim of the assault. This police detective was only 25 years old and was shot as he stepped out of the car by two men with guns. That same day there were reports of a couple shot outside a restaurant by unknown attackers, a woman murdered inside a hotel by hired assassins, a young boy shot 4 times while leaving a store, a man shot to death by armed men while he was driving his truck, two brothers dead after being attacked by unknown assailants, two people murdered with machetes in separate incidents, and a man murdered by another customer in a cafe, who got up out of his seat and shot the victim without saying a word. These reports all come from a newspaper called Nuestro Diario, the most circulated paper in Central America. It's kind of a tabloid, full of pictures of blood, dead bodies, grieving families, soccer stars, and girls in bikinis. I'm including a photo I took of the front page of one issue from 2007 as well as a two page article on a shoot-out between mara gangsters and police. It's really quite horrifying, particularly for those of us from the States who are never really exposed to this kind of graphic photojournalism (if it can really be called
photojournalism). The headline on the cover of the first paper reads "They Killed 3 Prisoners!" and goes on to say "Mareros Riot in Hell's Prison; 8 Wounded." The pictures, which are hard to see in such a small photo, are of policemen surrounding a gunshot victim, police surrounding a wounded police agent, and various shots of police subduing prisoners. I am particularly disturbed by the shot of the marero in the bottom right who is looking at the camera straight on with blood coming out of his noose. The other photo I've included is one from a shoot-out between police and mareros, also from 2007. The headline reads "Deadly Shoot-Out: Gunfight Between Gangsters and Police Leave 6 Dead and 3 Wounded." It 
includes photos of police entering the home where the mareros took refuge, a wounded little girl being taken to the hospital, a dead marero with an AK-47 and a woman crying over her the body of her husband, who was caught in the crossfire. Reading about all this death is kind of catching up to me. It's pretty grim, and I can see why people claim that Guatemalans have become immune to reports of violence, that life doesn't seem to have much value when faced with all this death. I love it here in Guatemala, but it really is overwhelming to read the newspaper every day.
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