Central American Stories.

 

From the Hotel Pan American, Guatemala City, 1988.

They walked down the flight of musty stairs at the Hotel Pan American in Guatemala City. The stairs creaked and the carpet was threadbare.  In the hotel lobby, the sun streamed in through the frosted glass windows and filled the canary-yellow foyer. The tiled floor was laid in diamond shapes  with yellow and brown tiles and it shone. The walls were varnished and had a warm dark patina. The switch board buzzed and a typewriter snapped behind the desk below a ticking black and silver clock. A glass cabinet was on the reception desk with five small dolls dress in Mayan ethnic costume. And behind the desk a magazine rack displayed the latest headlines. Time Magazine’s read “Central America: Deeper into Danger”.

There was the sound of water falling from a nearby fountain and the waiters were Mayan wearing traditional costumes – the swished past their eyes making no contact, carrying trays of food to the dining room. The tables were for four with yellow cotton table clothes and burgundy napkins. There were framed huipils and weavings in wood frames hanging from the wall.

At the entrance to the hotel, a dark-skinned man stood with a tasseled wooden billy club and a piston on his belt. His name was Garcia and he watched the traffic passing by on the street outside.

At ten o’clock at night, the heavy wooden doors will be bolted shut. The street quiet and empty.  Inside the Hotel Pan American, the ticking black and silver clock beside the glass cabinet with the five dolls locked inside and the magazine rack exclaiming: “Central America: Deeper into Danger”, and the water falling musically. A drab-green army jeep with a canvas hood eases past the stucco walls and bolted doors, through the cobbled streets and soldiers leaning back with their legs hanging down, cradle their M16’s .

Nearby is a yellow-lit bar and pizza joint. Its called Los Ceollinas, The Snail and it serves simple food; tortillas and avocado, rice and beans and beer and Coca Cola. The waitress is moving slowly because her shift is almost finished. Soon she will head home through the darkened city. She will walk quickly, head down, watching the pavement, her heart bumping in her chest until she opens and closes the door of her home behind her. 

Leaning in the doorway is a broad shouldered young man. His face is Indian and his hair is thick and black and shorn high above his ears indicating he probably is a soldier. He wears a satin bomber jacket and he sips beer from the bottle. He seems locked in a frame in the doorway and his sunshine soaked neck is thick and strong and seems to push with crushing force into his shoulders and his arms hangs loose. Outside I can hear the sound of rock n’roll – Elvis Presley echoes through the street.

ALP NOTES

Spain’s burning desire to establish a new Jerusalem in the Americas following the rise of Protestantism in Christian Europe – the New World, a bright and shining opportunity for spiritual conquest and gold. Spain, a country invested in the ecclesiastical state.

Spain achieved unity and a nation wielding the sword with the sign on the cross on their hilt. In discovering the Americas, Spain maintained the tradition of the crusading wars – the extension of “God’s Kingdom” on Earth. 

The Crusades were a series of religiously sanctioned military campaigns waged by much of Roman Catholic Europe, particularly the Franks of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The specific crusades to restore Christian control of the Holy Land were fought over a period of nearly 200 years, between 1095 and 1291. Other campaigns in Spain and Eastern Europe continued into the 15th century. The Crusades were fought mainly by Roman Catholic forces (taking place after the East-West Schism and mostly before the Protestant Reformation) against Muslims who had occupied the near east since the time of the Rashidun Caliphate, although campaigns were also waged against pagan Slavs, pagan Balts, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemies of the various popes.[1] Orthodox Christians also took part in fighting against Islamic forces in some Crusades. Crusaders took vows and were granted a plenary indulgence.

Indians were capable of being molded into true Christains. To accomplish this, the friars leaned Indian language and customs. 

Aristotilian doctrine of natural slavery – the idea that a part of humankind is set aside by nature to service the other.  Not all Spaniard agreed. In 1550, Charles V ordered suspension of all expeditions to the Americas – theologins and jurists argued this.

The Inquisition

Tomas de Torquemada was appointed inquisitor-general of the Inquisition in 1483. In 12 years, the Inquisition condemned 13,000 Marranos, men and women who had continued to practice Judaism in secret. They were tortured in La Casas Santa, the Holy Houses, and burned alive at the stake with their property being divided between the Pope and the King.

Following the fall of the arab stronghold of Granada on January 2, 1492, there was a renewed impetus to remove Jews from Spain. On March 31, 1492, the Edit of Expulsion was signed. The deadline for Jews to leave Spain was August 3, 1492. Columbus and his crew boarded their vessels before midnight, and on the August 3rd sailed before sunrise.

COLUMBUS

The Spanish conquistators rode into the New World determined to plant the cross deep in the heart of the native populations. For Spain, 1492 was not only a year of great discovery but also the year Grenada was recovered when Spanish soldiers stormed the ramparts of the ancient city. 

The fall of Granada holds significance among many important events that mark the latter half of the Spanish 15th century. It completed the reconquista of the eight hundred year-long Moorish civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Spain, now without major internal territorial conflict and with the royal treasury drained, Spain embarked on a great phase of exploration and colonization around the globe. In the same year the sailing expedition of Christopher Columbus became the first European sighting of the New World. The Americas enriched the crown and country, allowing Isabella I and Ferdinand II significant accomplishments in their reign.

On the midnight of August 2nd 1492, when Colombus embarked on what would become his most famous expedition to the New World, his fleet departed from the relatively unknown seaport of Palos because the shipping lanes of Cadiz and Seville were clogged with Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by the Edict of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain.

The Jews forced either to convert to Christianism or to "leave" the country under menace "they dare not return... not so much as to take a step on them not trepass upon them in any manner whatsoever" left their land, their property, their belongings all that was theirs and familiar to them rather than abadon their beliefs, their traditions, their heritage.

On August 3, 1492, the Pinta, Niña, and Santa María sailed from Palos. On board were Christopher Columbus and the Pinzón Brothers, who were natives of Palos.

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If you look at the Central American isthmus, that thin strand of land between north and south America you’ll see seven independent republics. To the south is Panama flowing north out of Columbia and across the Panama Canal completed in 1914. Then Costa Rica and the river San Juan that flows into lake Nicaragua which people used to cross the isthmus before the Panama Canal was built.

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s steam ship company ferried travelers across Nicaragua to California. Then El Salvador and sprawling Honduras which borders Belize in the north and Guatemala to the west. And then Mexico and El Norte.

William Krehm

Early in 1941, with sufficient money to last a year of frugality, a young Canadian named William Krehm arrived in Mexico City to contemplate his life and practice his violin. The Spanish Civil War was over and the fascists had won and soon the world would be plunged into the second great war. And William Krehm would soon be shoulder to shoulder to with political exiles , poets and intellectuals, writers and revolutionaries in cafes that crackled with the dark humor and smelt strongly of coffee and strong cigarettes. In their animated conversations they wondered if America’s trumpeted message of freedom from fascism applied to them.

Krehm found an assignment as Time Magazine’s freelance representative in Mexico but soon his straightforward  appraisals of life in Central America rubbed the policies of Henry Luce, the wrong way. Time magazine had its own view of politics and history that did not accord with what William Krehm observed on the ground. He persisted but was seldom published in Time but  he recorded his observations in a book: “Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean”, published in Mexico in 1948. It would take thirty-six years before the book finally translated into English and published in North America.

Krehm writes that he was a “privileged spectator” to a key period, “The Good Neighbor” policy

On March 4, 1933, Roosevelt stated during his inaugural address that: "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors."[2] This position was affirmed by Cordell Hull, Roosevelt's Secretary of State at a conference of American states in Montevideo in December 1933. Hull said: "No country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another".[3]  Roosevelt then confirmed the policy in December of the same year: "The definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention.

The Good Neighbor Policy resulted in the withdrawal of U.S. Marines from Haiti and Nicaragua in 1934, the annulment of the Platt Amendment, and the negotiation of compensation for Mexico's nationalization of foreign assets in the oil industry in 1938. The policy's cultural impact included the initiation of the radio program Viva America and the 1942 Walt Disney film Saludos Amigos.

The mythology that this policy was an honest effort to change from the American imperialism that had infused foreign policy previously was shown to be a lie by the murder of Sandino and installation of Somoza in Nicaragua, Hernández Martínez in El Salvador, Jorge Ubico y Castañeda  in Guatemala. He admired Napoleon Bonaparte  who he believed he resembled Bonaparte. His nickname was "the Little Napoleon of the Tropics".

Tiburcio Carías Andino of Honduras By the end of the 1930s, the National Party was the only organized functioning political party in the nation. Numerous opposition leaders had been imprisoned, and some had reportedly been chained and put to work in the streets of Tegucigalpa. Others, including the leader of the Liberal Party, Ángel Zúñiga, had fled into exile.

During his presidency, Carías cultivated close relations with his fellow Central American dictators, generals Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Maximiliano Hernández in El Salvador, and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Relations were particularly close with Ubico, who helped Carías reorganize his secret police and also captured and shot the leader of a Honduran uprising who had made the mistake of crossing into Guatemalan territory. Relations with Nicaragua were somewhat more strained as a result of the continuing border dispute, but Carías and Somoza managed to keep this dispute under control throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

Batista - Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar - Batista initially rose to power as part of the 1933 "Revolt of the Sergeants" that overthrew the government of Gerardo Machado, becoming the Army Chief of Staff, with the rank of colonel, and effectively controlling the five-member Presidency. He maintained this control until 1940, when he was himself elected President of Cuba, serving until 1944. From 1944-1952 he lived in the United States, returning to Cuba as leader of a U.S. backed coup that preempted the 1952 elections in which Batista was running a distant third.

Throughout the 1950s, Batista's corrupt and repressive regime systematically profited from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, in partnership with U.S. corporations and the American Mafia.[4] As a result, for three years Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement and other rebelling elements led a guerrilla uprising against Batista's regime which culminated in his eventual defeat following the Battle of Santa Clara on New Year's Day 1959. Batista immediately fled the island with an amassed personal fortune.

Batista eventually found political asylum in Portugal, where he lived until dying of a heart attack on August 6, 1973 near Marbella, Spain.[5]

Trujillo - Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina - He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, otherwise ruling as an unelected military strongman. His 30 years in power, to Dominicans known as the Trujillo Era (Spanish: La Era de Trujillo), is considered one of the bloodiest ever in the Americas, as well as a time of a classic personality cult, when monuments to Trujillo were in abundance. It has been estimated that Trujillo's rule was responsible for the death of more than 50,000 people, including 20,000 to 30,000 in the infamous Parsley Massacre.[2]

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STUDIO RECORDING NOTES FOR WAR, PEACE AND POETRY.

092988

Actors: George Gerdes, Barbara Gruen, Randy Ofsofsky, Bill Nelson, Judith Van Buren.

I ordered limousines to bring the actors from Manhattan to the studio in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill.

George was outstanding.  His attack was forceful and his attention to character was riveting. He told me there were moments he felt himself channeling the characters and it felt like that to me. 

Working with performers of this caliber, actors able to bring their experience, gritty, tough, willing and hungry to work, New York performers are well worth the money.

I found that visualization helped direct the readings. Encouraging the actors to place themselves in the situations of the protagonists – "no experience but in things", I think Ginsberg said that. 

Judith seemed fragile. She read with a tremor in her voice that brought me close to tears. But as the recording session developed she seemed to lose the vulnerability that had worked so well at the beginning. 

Barbara was either right on target or way off. But when she was on, she was riveting. Her character works best in a sotto voce.

Bill was slow to start but grew into his reading. He was reading from Asturias but was unable to give me the performance I wanted. We went back to it near the end of the session and he was terrific. But then he’d grown tired and slowed down.  I told him to visualize a funeral passing before him in a procession and I told him to work close to the mic with an intimate style and a reverence.

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With illiteracy rampant, writers in Central America are accorded a respect rarely seen in North America. As a result they are considered dangerous – regardless of political orientation – by the ruling elite and not surprisingly, many writers have been silenced or forced into exile.

From El Salvador: Manilo Argueta (“One Day of Life” and Claribel Alegria (“Luisa in Realityland”); in Guatemala: Rigoberto Manchu (“My Name is Rigoberto Manchu”, Victor Monejo (“Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village”) and Arturo Arias.

Zoe Anglesey: “..,in that time people gave me poems as if they were secret messages. I remember receiving poems by Otto Rene Castillo killed in Zalapa in 1967, behind books were other books – I knew how precious they were.”

Kidnapping Alaide

By Otto-Raul Gonzales

Translated by David Unger.

Kidnapping Alaide is like strangling a lark

It’s like hunting doves with bazookas and mortars

Or plucking a quetzal’s wings and tail feathers

Kidnapping Alaide is like overturning a truck

Full of apples and mirrors right on the highway

It’s like trampling a bouquet of gardenias

Or smashing a flask of perfume

It’s like throwing rocks through the stained glass  

Of a small church where the sun plays the organ.

Kidnapping Alaide is like unleashing swirls of memories

It’s like setting a trap for an albatross

Or going to the Louvre

Gun in hand and a bandana tied around the mouth.

Alaide Foppa, a Guatemalan poet, was abducted by government security forces as she was visiting her homeland from Mexico. Her body was never found. 

Maria Rodas

We sat together in her home in Guatemala City in the comfortable suburbs in 1987.

 

The bus to Antigua.

The next day the bus to Antigua from Guatemala City is not crowded. The seats are comfortable. The windows open and the fragrant warm air flows across my face. Music is playing through the speakers, providing jaunty soundtrack to our journey.

First we climb a steep mountain on a wide, smooth road leaving the city behind us shrouded in a mist of yellow pollution. The sun is bright and the landscape dry with green swathes of vegetation. Then steeply down to Antigua, the Cathedral dome in the distance and the old capital spread out shimmering below us. The trip takes less than an hour. 

We alight at a crowded bus terminal. Many buses. Stink of diesel and crowds of people. Music. Food vendors. Police. Soldiers. A few tourists. A boy finds us a taxi and we head for the Lutheran Mission we’d be advised provided cheap accommodation. 

I sink deeply into the seat and wonder if my ass will scrape the road the springs are so weak. The driver grinds the taxi into gear and with a blast of noise because the exhaust system no longer exists, we lurch forward. The driver makes contact with two wires and pedestrians scatter to clear our path. 

We find the mission behind a tall white stucco wall and eucalypts trees are growing behind it and a purple carpet of jacaranda petals spills onto the street in front.  Dry, sparse hills rise behind the white walled mission house and its red tiled roof. There are wooden bars across the shaded windows and bougainvillea and exquisite blood red roses surround the entrance. 

A deferential man called Juan shows us our room. And night falls. 

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April 20 1989

Guatemala City – Aurora Aeroporte

The sky was changing quickly now and a red dawn rose behind the city. The night before they’d stood together in the small courtyard naked with the smell of sleep and sex still infused on their creamy bodies.  They’d looked up at the moon which was bright and cold. And they thought how this magnificent moon shone on Tikal this night, on the massive pyramids and Mayan temples, the shadows and pools of moonlight laying across the stone paths that wound through the jungle, past the massive stone structures they’d so recently left. 

He thought about the night he’d stayed in the jungle park at Tikal until dark collapsed around him - “crump” – it was that quick. Where there had been the sharp edges of tropical leaves waving against the pale sky, suddenly they were grotesque floating shadows and the night sounds grew louder and closer and the jungle rustled and shifted and wings flapped against the leaves sometimes and it seemed as if the flapping wings were inside his heart which was now beating faster. 

The path had disappeared and the world was soaked in darkness. He found a small flashlight in his equipment bag and it cut a narrow arc through the blackness but insufficient to find the path he sought through the curtain of plants. In fact the flash light only made the dark more dense and he turned it off and waited for his pupils to dilate and gradually the shape of the undergrowth emerged and he could now detect the jungle path. And then he noticed the cuticle of the new moon through the forest canopy. And though it was a mere slit in the black curtain of the night, its icy light shone down through the leaves to the jungle floor and illuminated the white limestone. With the flashlight turned off he felt part of the forest and less afraid of it. 

Eventually he found his way to the main path that lead back to the Jaguar Inn and soon he could hear the thump of the generator and then the dim blue lights of the bungalows.

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TIKAL

Tikal is sometimes called the cradle of the Mayas. It extends for more than two-hundred square miles and it reveals and exceptional civilization highly advanced in architecture, astronomy and sculpture. Nobody know why it collapsed. It is about 2,500 year old and was constructed over a period of more than a thousand years and the remains are evident everywhere.

The Temple of the Giant Jaguar is more than one hundred feet  high and the view from the top reveals the jungle canopy that stretches to the horizon. 

There are no park rangers at Tikal National Park. No khaki and green uniforms with boy scout’s hats and state of the art hiking boots. There are no rustic railed wooden fenced walking paths and carefully placed directional signs and map boards beside the trash cans. There are no kiosks and souvenir stands and certainly no McDonalds. And there are no lights and no public announcements. You are alone except for all of nature and the night. 

At dusk a man with an old rifle slug over his shoulder had wandered down the path and asked if anybody was still over at temple number four. 

The Department of Peten is the largest in Guatemala and is a carpet of green as far as the horizon and beyond. Sitting high above the jungle I am looking down on the green parrots rushing in pairs, across the forest clearing – watching the sun set. There warm stone blocks were warm and comfortable to sit on. The scale of the structure , its mass and the time it measured – the carvings chiseled into its surface forced me to retreat to a more realistic appraisal of my mortality. And as I did  I wondered if I might ever return to the bungalow hut and hammock that night. 

I thought about flight. It was not about he flying birds in such startling variety,  that shrieked and cawed as the sky rapidly changed color and the sun’s golden eye grew brighter in a final burst of light before it dived behind the distant horizon, but the flight of my own body and soul as it passed it through space and time. 

I saw myself arching over the tree tops, my arms spread wide and the warm air rushing past. This was not Orville Wright’s dream of flight in some complicated contraption but a pure abandonment – naked flight like a bird and a dream.  The urge to launch myself of this Mayan tower was almost overwhelming. I saw myself leaping into the sun but rather than plummeting downward and crashing against the stones below, my arms flailing and my head cracked open and bleeding feeding the sacrificial edicts of Mayan kings and conquistadors – but rising gently like a cloud and gliding through the twilight, catching the dying rays of golden sunlight  that glinted like a sword’s blade cutting through the air. 

The dream was too real to be imagined. It was like a dream of murder and death that came from some altered state. It was only possible in the giant stone temple, dark and somber. And now the sun is gone. The Maya have gone. The dream too is dead.

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The flight to New York would leave early that morning. Their bags were packed. Three green canvas sacks filled with Guatemalan weavings and soiled clothes; scraps of papers, receipts hand written on soft, porous paper, the kind one finds in places like Guatemala where they still stamp official papers with an authoritative thud talking care not to smudge the fresh ink and where their penmanship reveals a curvaceous, flowing script. Everything was set for their departure.

It was not yet dawn. He was naked standing in the frame of the doorway waiting for the new morning to begin, silent and preparing his mind for the jolt back to the United States and New York. The air felt good, gentle and cool and he reached for her and held her close to a moment and then they turned and went inside to dress. 

The Jaguar Inn at Tikal was one of three places visitors to the park could stay when visiting the park. The morning they arrived was uneventful. The driver of the Japanese made mini-bus driven for an hour on a well paved road with practiced efficiency. The man and the woman had talked together for most of the journey. 

When they arrived at Tikal it was quiet. There were some girls carrying their bundles and earthen bowls on their shining black heads and some boys playing soccer with some kind of rolled-up vine to make an irregular soccer ball. An older man leading a mule loaded with carefully stacked fire wood saunterd past. It was after six in the morning and the temperature was warm already warm.

On the outskirts of Flores, the tiny island township in Lake Peten Itza, they’d passed the gray concrete walls of a military compound. Soldiers peered out from the guard boxes mounted on the tops of the walls.  The driver had explained that behind the wall the kaibili were trained  - special forces soldiers from the Guatemalan army. Trainees had to spend a month alone the jungles of Peten province fending for themselves. If they survived they became kaibibli. To celebrate they’d be welcomed back to the barracks where they’d eat a dog, cooked over an open fire. The concrete wall seemed to go on for ever and the drive turned to say the base would soon be expanded. 

Oil had been discovered in Peten. It’s a vast sparsely populated jungle that stretches northwards towards Belize and Mexico’s Yucatan. There is little farmland except near the Caribbean coast. There banana dynasties stretch for miles.

Once again they had eaten dinner at the Jaguar Inn. The archeologists and anthropologists from various universities were once again sitting at the large table in a back corner of the restaurant. 

Perhaps it was more a hut than restaurant for the windows were framed with unfinished timbers and mosquito wire was stretched across them. The floor was concrete which had been unevenly laid so the tables were never level and wobbled when you sat to eat. 

As well as choosing the same table, the researchers always sat in the same places. An older man with white hair and scruffy beard seemed always to be absorbed in a book and he bent over it squinting inches from the pages in the dim light. As more of them arrived for dinner, one by one they opened the door of an industrial size refrigerator to take beers and mineral water, popping the tops as they walked back to the table. 

After dinner they walked across the grass airstrip through the soft tropic night the moon throwing deep shadows across their path.  The hotel generator thumped quietly in the distance and a few blue lights shone dimly through the trees around the bungalows. The sweet wound of marimba floated nearby and she pushed her hand inside the back of his pants and underneath his leather belt and he swung his arm across her shoulders and they walked like that toward the sound of the marimba.

They found a café, a simple affair with the shutters thrown open and a kerosene lantern burning on a table where local people sat sipping beers and listening to the music.  They stopped in the shadows before they reached the café and looked. 

The musicians were all bent over their marimbas engrossed, head bobbing, arms flashing as they beat out the tune together. A waitress walked onto the set and swept past the musicians and cleaned the dishes of the red and white checked table cloth, re laid the table, turned and headed back to the kitchen.

A little boy in torn baggy trousers and no shirt and no shoes, began dancing and moved closer to the fire that burned in a cut-off fifty-five gallon drum where the food was being cooked on a grill. He turned and swayed and the red coals bathed is smooth bare back with warmth and his skin shone. He danced and swirled and the marimba sounded even more sweet as he turned again and his dance was so pure, like the star filled sky or a swallow flashing in the rain and then he disappeared around a corner into the darkened kitchen. That child would never know what joy he shared that night, the gift he gave in an image like a dream. 

The sweet marimba played on late into the night, the players remembering tune after tune and even when the generator died and darkness descended and the night seemed to move in closer around them and suddenly the air was alive with the cacophony of insects sounds and the occasional screech of a howler monkey, the marimba kept on. And it carried them into their dreams as they lay in the tent with the smell of the extinguished candle and all those insects and animals singing their symphony of the night. 

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Fernando Gonazles Davison

Fernando Gonazles Davison met us at the Hotel Colonial in Guatemala City to talk about a Guatemalan literature of terror.  He suggested we find a private place to speak since he did not want to be seen talking to a journalist so I invited him to our room. We sat on beds opposite one another and he spoke in a quite voice. He had the gentle appearance of a family doctor but an air of tragedy about him and. But I detected a suppressed rage when he talked about the horror’s he’s seen and written about. He was a writer and poet and taught at Guatemala’s San Carlos University. He also did research for the Swiss Embassy, a relatively save vocation in a violent city where its said that one phrase outside the law could cost your life. 

Rafaga (Gust of wind/burst of machine gun/burst of fire

Prelude:

When a smile no longer smiles

When pleasure is a bruised colored rose and purple

Then don’t inquire further. 

When an organ plays only as a stem snaps

Then you too kneel down.

When nobody wants to listen or to speak

Don’t hide your voice.

Prologue

Onto what land can I build a home

When it is sulphur my feet step upon

And a pavement abyss is all I can see

And omens becomes puffs of smoke in the wind

Onto what land can I build a house

When the dust burns my anguished fingers 

And the wineskin contains a buzzard’s trap.

Onto what land can I build a home

When women burn up in early widowhood

And their smiles only echo the past. 

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The Hotel Santo Tomas is in the small Guatemalan town of Chichicastenango in the highland province of Quiche. It used to be a private residence on a rich hacienda. The walls are whitewashed and there are crossed swords and thick wood beams and a cleric’s purple vestment in a gilded frame on the wall.

In the old stone courtyard which is draped with greenery an old Mayan man plays a marimba while other old Mayan men in traditional woven jackets, brilliant red and embroided, tend the tables.

In the shade of the hotel entrance, Mayan women with their children squat on the cools tiles ringing small brass bells. Some are begging. Some are selling weaving that vibrate with life unfolding before my eyes. I walk down the steps into the dusty street, to the market. 

In the past twenty years there have been more than 100,000 political killings and many thousands of disappeared. The young Mayan girls singing on the steps of the old white church that overlooks the market, wear huipils dense with color, woven in their village homes and each could tell a story of relatives and friends who have disappeared and died. 

At one end of the market place is the Church of Santo Tomas. Inside worshipers mix ancient tradition with modern day catholic faith. The smell of copal incense – an aromatic tree resins burns ceremonially and the smoke wafts through the village square. The rituals continue from the front steps, into the church itself and people sit on the floor is small groups mumbling prayers in local dialects, around dripping candles and flower strewn alters.  

In the market place I can still see the women on the church steps listening to a local preacher. Christian fundamentalists have a strong foothold and competes with Catholicism and animism.  And in the white sunlight, a small boy stands holding an empty glass and a man scrapes ice shavings of a large block of ice as blue as the sea. He scraps and the wooden table sways and the moisture dampens the brown jute bag wrapped around he ice. He slides the shavings into the boy’s glass and then thick crimson syrup that seeps through the frost and some trickles across the boy’s brown  dirty fingers.

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