Exorcisms in San Marcos

---

Demonic Possessions

We were about three-quarters the way to San Marcos, crossing Lago Atitlan in a little boat, when the vibrantly tattooed ex-pat ex-lawyer from Los Angeles told us, "Yeah, some indigenous were moving some church walls around and disturbed some bones, some men were touching them, messing around, and then they started getting sick. Like they have seizures and attack people, the other day I saw three huge men trying to hold down one skinny man who went wild. After the men, the families got sick and neighbors, now it's like an epidemic, people are going crazy. People believe souls are rebelling and leaving the bodies, so they go around the town with whips, whipping the souls, herding them like livestock back to the bodies. Every night they go by my house, whipping at my doorway, to herd the souls. And they think the gringos caused all of this, that we brought the devil to San Marcos, so they're pretty pissed off at us." Okay, well, nice preface buddy. We asked some questions, laughed a bit, and within five minutes..."Well, we're here! Here we go!"

Everything seemed pretty normal...during the day. Then last night I was walking around alone int he dark and from all over town came the sound of singing, really eerie singing. On a hilltop, from a small cement building,loudspeakers belted out the chanting of a woman which quickly became wailing. The painful, exhausting kind of wailing, tormented crying ....in a melodic rhythm, echoing over the entire town. And I was walking around in the night, surrounded by wailing, people sitting in groups at tables, talking quietly amongst themselves. I went to sleep in my little closet room, with the waves of sound coming in through my window, echoing around my small space, wailing, crying, exasperated. At around 11:30 or midnight last night, a woman from my hostel and her boss came upon a congregation moving through the streets, ever so slowly, carrying incense and chanting slowly. They scurried by quickly, trying not to interrupt a thing. "And I heard they think the gringos caused it, with all of our hippie magic beliefs."
But see, people are incredibly nice here, plenty of smiles and hellos, and it would be pretty hilarious to find out that this gringo-hating rumor was started by a gringo and subsequently caused all of the gringos to freak out over whether or not they were going to be whipped to death by Mayans late at night instead of focusing on....oh, I don´t know, let´s say, the fact that some 40 children are experiencing extreme physical pain and tormented families roam the streets each night wailing, making offerings to God, just hoping for an end to their grievances.

Guatemalan Death Showers

I'm sick of taking showers in hostels in Guatemala. They are death traps, electrocution chambers. To "heat" the water, a device has been attached to the faucet head. There are loose wires all around the device, and a spigot sticks out the side that spews most of the water onto the shower wall. Every hostel has its own way of dealing with this mysterious spigot. Some stick rope in the hole, others plug it up with gel. When the pressure builds up and blows the spigot cover, naive shower-goers attempt to replug the hole, and *pzzit*! that's when they get the shock. Electric shock comes from the water or the plastic or the plug....hiding in there are little bits of electricity just waiting for the right time to build up to a full-blown shower electrocution. Sometimes when I´ve already been shocked by the spigot plug, the tenacious shower head shocks me a second time as I reach to shut off the shower lever. The fear of jenky shower heads has taken me over-I'm going to get real stinky real fast, like all those "real travelers" I've been seeing along the way, who have been traveling two weeks but look like they were stuck in the desert for months.
Conclusive irony: the showers are freezing.

This Morning I Pissed Off The American Couple

We three Americans had been talking about coffee in Guatemala, how they had just come from a cooperatively-run finca near Xela run by ex-guerrillas and how I had an interest in seeing the inner-workings of both large and smale-scale coffee and cacao productions all over the country. In Eastern Guatemala I found both a large-scale coffee finca that exports for Starbucks as well as a house where a family owns just ten cacao trees, from which they harvest pods, sun-dry beans, hand-mill the seeds and add a small amount of sugar and some milk from the cow in the back. These two models are regional neighbors and yet are worlds apart. This conversation took palce just after laughing and joking about the awkward complexities of homestays and the juxtaposition we all are currently finding ourselves sitting in, here in this self-proclaimed euro-hippie town on the shores of a volcanic crater lake.

Everything was getting comfortable, going smoothly, until I brought up Finca Los Nietos in Antigua. My point was to bring up a coffee production system that varied from the previous three we discussed, just for the sake of diversity in our discussion. It was obvious there would be a problem when after my first sentence ("They are a small-scale organic coffee production, just 1.5 acres, that supplies coffee solely to Antigua...") I was interrupted with, "And do you Guatemalans work there?"..."Yeah, picking the coffee, alongside a young woman from Maine doing and internsh-" "Yeah, but are there any Guatemalans in management positions??" "No, it's just these two people from Maine, a plumber and a teach-" "Of course, no Guatemalans, ughhhhhh."

So I asked with a gentle laugh if they could please suspend judgment until the end of my description of the place, but my explanation becomes a bit too defensive as I give examples of positive effects this couple has made on their community, of the renewable resources they are cultivating in attempts to help just their neighbors in their pueblo and on and on being repeatedly interrupted with loaded questions. I realize I'm not going to reach the end of my description, that I should just let them vent about whatever grudge they have, like "Look I get that they're trying to do something good, but Guatemalans don't need coffee, they need food." Here I realized they really didn't get my point but I was so caffeinated and defensive at this point that I just retorted with a remark like, "I'm not saying I support their project, I'm only giving an example of a production system, and besides plenty of Americans don't care about anything outside of their own lives, you can't chastise people for doing something that isn't absolutely perfect." I tried to give out examples of how the food issues is a larger one than jsut handing over food to Guatemalans like some act of charity, attempted to discuss how some twelve families own an incredibly majority of wealth in the nation, but all I was getting in response were "mhmms" and "uh-huhs"....they seemed to be incredibly upset that I would even bring up an American-owned finca.

They seemed to think that my point in all of this talk about coffee was to bring coffee to Guatemalans, and when I bring up the fact that Guatemalans don't consume the coffee and cacao they produce, they say to me, "But Guatemalans don't care about coffee or chocolate, they don't eat it," and since I know this isn't true I bring up "Well actually Guatemalans tend to grow enough coffee and chocolate to consume it themselves but put far less effort into the production process than people looking to make a profit do." But of course, this isn't the point I needed make, what I really needed to do was point out that it doesn't matter if they drink coffee or eat chocolate, what matters is that neither the product of their vast labor nor the majority of the profit remains in the nation, almost everything of value is exported, leaving the nation as a whole impoverished, and many Guatemalans without food (or adequate medicine, etcetera) and that this is why it matter that coffee is being sold in Guatemala and the money from the sale is being used to pay Guatemalans and buy more commodities from Guatemalan stores (it's staying in Guatemala!), whether or not Americans are making it happen, it's something new, it's a shorter loop from soil to table, from profit to communal return.

Anyway, they got quiet, asked to read a travel book I had nearby, went outside, and were obviously speaking hurriedly to one another instead of actually reading, evidenced by the girls shaking head and repeated hand gestures. They returned the book, cleaned their plates (although they had been waiting to make more food), and walked out of the hostel, again shaking heads and making hand gestures. From the way everything went down, I'm assuming there was a big misunderstanding that resulted in them believing that I am just another American imperialist (like so many ex-pats around these parts buying up all of the land and making a huge profit off of the lack of taxes and the abundance of Europeans looking to buy yerba mate and organic salad), looking to bring coffee to all Guatemalans through American business.....which is so far off it's hard to know where to start. So I walked around the little town looking everywhere for the couple, to apologize and at the very least explain that A. I don't support Americans moving into Guatemala to create a local coffee business and B. I'm not solely interested in giving coffee and chocolate to Guatemalans (luxury items before food). If I'm given the chance, I could explain that coffee and chocolate only represent exploitation commodities, and in other nations it might be bananas or fish or gold. I don´t want to give diamonds to Africans in Sierra Leone- those diamonds are a method of exploitation and within the diamond commodity system the profit hits the middle-man while people starve, choke, die in the mines.

I know I won't get a chance to explain myself to them, so I want to break it down here (warning: soapbox):

I'll just stick with the most important point, the statement that really stuck with me:
"Guatemalans don't need coffee, they need food."

Some reasons why they don't have food:
1. Individual Guatemalans don't have money with which to purchase food

In areas where it matters whether or not an individual Guatemalan has enough money to purchase necessities, there are a multitude of reasons why they can't obtain adequate food. Of primary importance to this discussion is that a system of monetary exchange has displaced traditional subsistence farming so that an individual may trade their labor for nutrition only through an arbitrary intermediary (i.e. Quetzales). This system reinforces national and international trade over regional barter. The very existence of a national monetary system places importance on large-scale profit over small-scale regionalism, diversity, tradition and quality. The attention and respect given first and foremost to the betterment of the national GDP has been exploited by advantageous entrepreneurs, concentrating a majority of the wealth (paper money) of the nation to a relative few, with bits of monetary scrap left over for the majority of the nation to split up amongst themselves.
In this setup, it doesn't matter how skilled a person is at building a home, farming land, making clothing or hunting game, because all of the medium with which to obtain materials and arable land is money, the determiner which is most-completely owned by the few.

2. Guatemalans do not have arable land with which to grow enough food to support themselves

In areas where paper money does not hold as much power, where people are farther removed from the urban landscape and are continuing to exist in a way that has worked for their community for centuries, arable land is becoming increasingly unavailable. The parcels of land most suitable for agriculture are being bought up (with money!) by the few wealthy Guatemalans and scores of opportunistic ex-pats. The scarce resources left behind are being shared by an increasing amount of Guatemalans and are therefore being depleted rapidly (hillsides used for centuries for harvesting wood are now deforested, rivers are polluted and parasitic, agricultural land is undergoing deforestation-these results are obvious throughout the nation). And why can some afford to buy up all of the arable land while others are forced to split up the leavings? Why must rural people move to areas where the main form of exchange is paper money?

3. Concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Europeans and advantageous Europeans and Americans

There are a myriad of reasons why the wealth is so unevenly distributed within Guatemala as well as between this nation and others, the United States for example. A major one, central to our conversation, is that Guatemala is based on an export economy. I've got an idea about it, but hey I could be wrong, it goes like this, I'll lay it out simply:

All of the best Guatemalan land is taken up for the production of commodities. Intensive labor is undertaken to produce these commodities. Paper money, a pittance, is exchanged for the commodities (although it is very uncertain whether or not paper money is exchanged directly for the labor put into the production, often labor is exchanged for set meals or lodging all throughout Guatemala), the
commodities are sent to a distributor, then to a store and you, the consumer. You pay a lot for the Guatemalan coffee (especially if its "organic, shade-grown, fair-trade"), but that does not necessarily determine the price given for the original raw bulk coffee purchase or dictate how much of what is given to the land laborer as compensation.

A complex web of international trade subsidies, paper money business dealings and an attitude of "you only have to pay the workers enough so that they don't understand their relative poverty" have come together to concentrate the wealth of these coffee, cacao, water, gold, silver, diamond, cocaine, heroine, etcetera transactions in the hands of the middle-men and most often in the understatedly deep pockets of the industrialized nations. This isn't a novel pattern, it's global trade.

And when your nation's wealthy (and believe me, folks, it´s still wealthy) and the minimum hourly wage in your state exceeds the monthly wage of a typical San Marcosian working in the back of an ex-pats restaurant, why not purchase a nice piece of Guatemalan land (the lake properties here are selling at $4k per hectare), build a cafe, a restaurant, grab a couple hammocks and charge rent, and watch your profits grow as more Europeans and Americans move in for the "magical aura" of the place? And then Guatemalans have less land...and the circle continues....

So if profitcan be kept in Guatemala, if respect can be brought back to the land, to the Guatemalan people, if they can enforce proactive management positions and dictate as a majority what happens within their own nation, most importantly outside of the intensive pressure and influence of the almighty GDP, who knows who knows who knows...

And I really don´t think that harsh liberal judgments are going to fix things. Or just handing out food. Perhaps a bit of humble admittance of guilt or participation in exploitation, however indirectly, is appropriate. Seriously, please tell me how you are going to teach a man to fish after you've taken part in the overfishing of the man's lake to the point of extinction?

Sidenotes

One: My first day in San Marcos, I made friends with two kids from the East Bay. Within an hour of hanging out, I got really sick, and we all split a room in a hotel, and one of them let me borrow his iPod to listen to Radio Lab and This American Life for hours and hours on end in the room alone under the covers, curled up, with the shades drawn while they swam in the lake. They hungout with me in my half-awake state and walked slowly with me to get carrot juice. We made some harmless judgy jokes and it was nice to quip pretentiously for a little while, if only for a short vacation from my Guatemalan reality. We rented a canoe and I sat in the middle and yelled at them to paddle right and sang Spice Girls songs for a little atmosphere. Being sick has never been so pleasant. They headed out of town yesterday, and I'm feeling much less ill today, and I'll be seeing them again in Xela.

Two: This morning a girl from Greece asked why I was interested in coffee and I just answered "For my studies," and she asked "what'd you study?" and I said "I'm interested in third world politics and resource distribution," and she said "Woah Ive never even heard of those before," and I said "......it's just sort of...global trade...so you know...coffee fits in..." and she was like "Yeah, if you're into that, you should definitely go to Nicaragua, because there's lots of poverty...like kids are so poor they eat off your plate, its like that much poverty..." "Oh..yea?" and I was waiting for the connective statement, so I could get what she was talking about and she said "Yeah and I learned how to make hammocks there, these street kids taught me...and it was for free....it's like that." ..."Oh yeah, maybe I'll check it out."
Glory be to San Marcos.

---

Photos

P1020487
6 cement blocks, one rope, one block.....
a usual sight, although the incredibly heavy carried items vary

Comments

[freckle freddy]

best. blog. yet.