Mercenaries, mystics, and madmen

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Over the course of the last couple nights, I was befriended by one of the longer term gringo inhabitants of Lago de Atitlan. We'll call him Joe. I think Joe liked me primarily because I was able to go head to head with him and not fall down, resulting in a couple of expensive nights and a couple of rough mornings. Nevertheless, as the Dirty Willies flowed (Dirty Willies - rum and ginger ale, known elsewhere as Quebec Libres), Joe told me a bit about himself and a few of the odder denizens of this navel of the world.
Among the more sinister aspects of the lake of which he informed me, the revelation that there were many mercenaries and/or assassins living there surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn't have, Central America being the home of American trained death squads, and all those teachers needing somewhere to live in between assignments. At any rate, Joe told of a number of acquaintances, ex-military, who lived in some of the large estates around the lake, and who would suddenly disappear for months on end, returning just as suddenly with no explanation as to where they'd been or why.
Then there are the spectacularly rich Guatemalans (apparently some twenty families hold ninety percent of the wealth of the country). Boating around the lake you see hundreds of magnificent estates, and occasionally a helicopter pad. Every couple days somebody arrives or departs the lake in a helicopter, most likely a member of one of these families taking the faster and easier way from the capital to the lake.
In San Marcos, there are New Age mystics of every description, studying or teaching everything from yoga and transcendental meditation to hypno-therapy, auras, and (more recently) the Kabballah. Here you can live in a Pyramid (better to absorb the postive energies that flow abundently around the lake - but then what about the mercenaries and banditos), get past life regression (better to understand why you are fucked up in this life), or fast and take a vow of silence (to relieve everyone of having to hear you blather on about your past lives).
In Santiago, there is an Estonian who apparently lost a fortune in the Savings and Loans crisis, and escaped to the lake with enough money to buy a house. He then proceeded to act as bizarrely and aggressively as he could, to convince the locals that he was crazy and should be left alone (for instance, having one day cut of a large chunk of his thumb, rather than going to the hospital he sat down in the town square with needle and thread and proceeded to sew his thumb back on). He is now apparently the only gringo who can walk outside the city limits without fear of mugging or outright assault at machete point.
Also in Santiago is a young American who arrived fifteen years ago and has established himself as a shaman and curandero.
Others include a descendant of the royal line of Norway and current English Lord, the owners of the national brewery of Guatemala, a trigger happy Brit who, arriving home drunk one night and going to bed without turning out the lights around his house, decided to try to shoot them out with his pistol (needless to say he missed them all) the cheese lady (a Maya matron who makes the rounds of the docks selling cheese out of a basket, but who also dispenses magic mushrooms from underneath the cheese) and of course hundreds of coke-head backpackers who lead a vampiric existence in San Pedro because coke is altogether too cheap here.
It's all kind of bewildering, but it does explain why many of the Maya native to the lake think we are children, idiots, or worse, and wish we would all just go away.

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