pretty pictures replaced by long rants...my apologies.

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the problems i was having uploading pictures worsened significantly when some ladrones relieved me of my camera. this sort of set of a whole host of honduran unpleasantries, leaving ben and i questioning once again why we ever bother leaving guatemala....

then we got to utila and life improved, as it tends to on tropical islands. we went for the same reason everybody goes...extremely cheap scuba diving.

most of the time in life, i am terrified of something and then experience it and find out that i was silly for ever being afraid. for some reason with scuba diving i was not afraid at all thinking about it. and then i started doing it and was horrified. this was happening in 8 feet of water, so for a few moments i doubted i´d ever be venturing to deeper waters. to defend myself, most diving trainees do a series of confined water dives in swimming pools before ever venturing into open water. the bay islands offer a more streamlined class... the first time we used an ¨underwater breathing apparatus¨ was in the caribbean. yes only 8 feet of it, but hardly confined. plus, during that session we were simulating everything that might ever go wrong....turning off our air tanks, losing various pieces of equipment, and so on. i was pretty sure i was going to die. eventually, i learned to trust the equipment and realized that the only thing that might kill me scuba diving was my tendency to panic. that chilled me out. after that first ¨dive¨things were great. we got our certifications, and went on six dives checking out the second largest barrier reef in the world, saw lots of fish, turtles, and so on. sadly, we never saw the whale sharks that frequent the island´s waters.

the island was kind of a weird place. full of people that had come for a week and just ended up staying, most of them to become divemasters and work in one of the 12 or so dive shops till they tire of island life. you would hear them talking about how they ended up there....they all just fell in love with the ¨honduran¨way of life.....you know, scuba diving, sunbathing, drinking imported beer and using large amounts expensive drugs. most of them couldn´t speak a word of spanish. our dive school was one of three shops on the island that are actually locally owned. pretty sad.

after utila, we would only see honduras from a bus. it is beautiful country. lush green mountainsides and valleys. on the coast, endless banana trees. planted and american owned, of course....honduras is the original ¨banana republic¨. i don´t actually know much about how it has affected honduras, but in guatemala the story breaks my heart. american owned united fruit company obtained it´s first bit of guatemalan land right at the start of the 1900s. within 20 years it owned huge amounts of land, plus the railroad, the main port, etc....basically the company controlled the country´s land, exports, and transportation, eventually gaining huge political influence. in 1950, after years of horrible, oppressive (often U.S. supported) governments, Jacobo Arbenz won presidency through a legitimate election. he sought to end economic dependency, initiating many reforms and projects to challenge american domination. the largest of these was his law of agrarian reform that would distribute idle land to the landless. united fruit company would suffer the worst from this...of its enormous landholdings it only used a tiny percentage of them. furthermore, they were compensated for the distributed land based on the taxes that they had been paying...of course they had snuck out of paying fair taxes, and as such, for a moment, got what they deserved and were payed almost nothing for their land. the land that was distributed benefited more than 100,000 families. it was huge...the first time in history the government had acted on behalf of the indigenous. things were looking up for guatemalans.

luckily for the fruit company, one of its board members happened to be the director of the cia. with the approval of eisenhower, the cia organized a military invasion to overthrow Arbenz. Arbenz would appropriately name the invasion a ¨heterogeneous fruit company expeditionary force¨. the mission was successful, and so guatemala´s chance for social change was squashed to protect the business interests of the united states. the country would not see another free election for thirty years. instead it would see thirty years of violence (much of it in the form of political killings) and oppression, as the governments that the united states deemed more fit and inserted into power were usually a touch tyranical. the story of course gets sadder and sadder....eventually there was armed resistence, villages were terrorized to suppress support for the guerrillas, on and on and on until 1996....not even 15 years ago. and it all started over fruit, big business. like i said, it breaks my heart.

part 1 of xxxxx of how american brand capitalism destroyed the world....

i used to spend my long bus rides thinking about these things, whether it is too late to undestroy the world. these last few days i have thought mostly about getting home, where i can eat ripe bananas in colorado in the dead of winter, and not think anything of it. i guess i am kind of joking. but en serio, we have had an amazing go of it down here, but are ready to get home.

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