Central America: Random Notes

7/10

Guatemala Highlands

Central America random notes:

. The ubiquitous tuk- tuks, scrambling around the border control area in El Salvador, where are they  ferrying people from and to?

. There are armed guards in every public space in Honduras. And El Salvador. And Guatemala. With automatic weapons.

. Men don’t wear shorts. Women don’t either.

. Camionetas individually painted like works of folk art. Bearing the name of wife. Or girlfriend. Saint or Pentecostal exhortation.

. Tiendas, bodegas, barberias, casas de belleza, ferreterias with names like Rey del Mundo, Corazon de Caridad, Reina del Cielo....


. Futbol Copa de Oro on every tv.

. During the civil wars and deaths quad days I ran 5 miles a day every day. A bit crazy but...Today we are confined to patrolled bounds of our hotels, dorms....todays lawless chaos more dangerous than yesterday’s wars.

. Honduras accepts dollars as well as its own currency. Guatemala only Quetzaltes. El Salvador has just given in and made the US dollar its official  currency. Pocketsful of Sacajaweas and Susan B’s ...so that’s where they all went....

US dollar coins in El Salvador

. US fast food triumphant everywhere...Mc Donald’s. Burger King. Dunkin’ Donuts. Pizza Hut. Honduras’ homegrown Pizza House has a pretty good knock off of Pizza Hut logo. Oh, and donuts are donas.

. Honduran food has the baleada with convoluted story of a woman tortilla seller who got shot, as in, I'll buy from the shot one. And rice and beans, gallos pintos in Nicaragua, painted roosters, are casimientos, or married ones,  in Honduras.

. Morning juices are high fructose concoctions. The real stuff is all exported.

. Leaving Tegucigalpa....miles and miles of bananas....they called them banana republics for a reason....then the miles of sugar cane...,in Guatemala cornfields crawl up hill sides and hold on for dear life...,

. “Auto hotels” are everywhere along the highways . A place for that illicit triste. Or maybe there’s just no privacy and everyone deserves a little romance...

. In the highlands, Guatemalan men and women in traditional dress. Including skirts for men. 

Guatemalan women

Man in traditional dress

. The two monuments we see in Guatemala we see are a warrior chief who resisted the colonizers and the statue migrant. A story without words dances between these statues.

. At an overlook high in the mountains, in a market filled with folk crafts, a New York Yankee hat for sale. 

2nd row up, Yankee hat for sale

. Many of the people I have spoken to were not even alive the last time I was here.

. Stunning how in the midst of poverty one can always see the breathtaking beauty of Gods creation. Despite our efforts to destroy it, it is

in the highlands of Guatemala

still there......

Remembering Guatemala

10/14

Dennis Smith 2017

Being with my old friend Dennis Smith has brought  back memories of our time in Guatemala. These memories were made even more present by the fact that two days ago, it was announced that the second trial of Efrain Rios Montt for genocide was set to begin again.  

I remember that as our Presbyterian Task force prepared to leave for Guatemala, one task force member decided to remain in Mexico City and our then South American staff person had to be persuaded to go.  That was the level of anxiety that preceded our visit.

I remember Dennis coming to visit our hotel room, turning the radio way up loud to thwart obvious bugging  attempts. I remember passing a table of officers in a steakhouse and knowing by their accent they were Argentine advisors. (Israeli advisors were a little more behind the scenes.... )

We spoke with indigenous fellow Presbyterians telling us of  whole villages disappearing, cultures eons old being wiped from the earth.

We were called to visit the  country’s President Efrain Rios Montt.or ”El Viejo” as he was called. Over coffee on a balcony veranda, he pointed to a faded mural of a Mayan Indian ritual including human sacrifice and the bloody removal of a heart. “You see”, he said, this is what we come from.”

We were taken to visit the headquarters of Montt’s California based evangelical church, “El verbo.” We were greeted at the church’s headquarters, surrounded by a razor wire topped chain link fence, by loudly barking German shepherds. A short man in a leather jacket opened the door and let us in. When we asked him about genocide, he folded his hands, crossed his  knee, leaned forward and said, “You must understand, For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” And nodded as if that was that. Not humans, but “rulers of darkness…”

The primal beauty of the country was in  stark contrast to the apparent apocalyptic reality of the violence that surrounded our visit. 

We prepared our report and took it to the 1983 joint assembly of the two branches of US Presbyterians in Atlanta fully prepared to call out Montt’s genocide and call for end to US aid. Guatemala was a clear part of US Central America strategy and the Reagan administration’s relationship with Montt was on of the  many things I could never forgive Reagan for. 

Montt was the darling of American evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. His open declaration of wanting to create a “Christian nation,” his Sunday night broadcasts demanding personal piety and socially conservative moralism while hiding genocide and his tough talking peasant program ‘frijoles and fusiles” (beans and rifles)  made him an iconic leader. In a word, Montt 

was to the Christian Right what the Sandinistas were to progressive Christians.

As our report was being debated in a late night General Assembly session, we were taken by surprise by a   strategic move by the conservative evangelicals. They had brought in two old school missionaries who sang Montt’s praises. A substitute motion was introduced, lifting up Montt’s faith and asking that we recognize him as a brother in Christ  and pray for him to prevent “a worse bloodbath..” The assembly was confused, we couldn’t get a commissioner or mission rep to a microphone, and  the substitute motion was approved. The Presbyterian Church was on record praying for Brother Montt.

Later that night I came as close as I would ever  come to throwing a punch at a church meeting when the gloating head of  Presbyterians for Biblical Concerns (what an unfortunate acronym that was!) came over to goad me about Montt, but friends intervened.

In another year, Montt was overthrown. (Though like a character in a franchise horror movie he never stopped coming back ..) Subsequently, the UN Commission on Historical Clarificationn declared him responsible for “acts of genocide” and perhaps as many as 200 thousand dead . It was estimated that at it's peak the war claimed 3000 lives  a month and 10000 between March and July 1982. In 2013, Montt was convicted for the murder of 1771 Mayan Ixil people in one village. While that was overturned on a technicality, he is up for trial again. His fragile physical state has led to a pretrial humanitarian decision that he will not serve time. 

In 1999, US President Clinton surprised us and  apologized to the Guatemalan people.

That same year, Guatemala President Portillo apologized to the people as well.  

The Presbyterian Church has yet to apologize…

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The Presbyterian Church essentially put its arm around Rios Montt while he killed his own people and   indigenous people who were also Presbyterian. That apology is still due….