Guatemala Stories: The Winds of Socialism under the Ceiba Tree

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Guatemala 1988.


The Mitsubishi was shining iridescent gray and had smokey windows. It was parked across the narrow avenue outside the Colonial Hotel's heavy swinging wooden doors in downtown Guatemala City. With a courteous nod the driver opens the door ushers us inside the car. The seats are soft and the carpet lush and when the door slides shut its quiet, cocooned. Behind the windows, outside, the glint and flash of chrome and glass and gritty clouds of diesel smoke inky thick. And the crackling motor cycles and blue police jeeps and people streaming past the sun drenched fractured walls and shadowed corridors, merchants selling fruit and postcards and music washing past. And there's a truck passing loaded with fresh unfilled coffins simply carved with swirls and varnished shiny brown stacked in rows - I can see it through the smokey glass.


Traveling south towards the coast with Mario Solorzano Martinez, secretary of the Social Democratic Party of Guatemala. The winds of socialism rustling through the palms and banana trees. And the swirling dust makes strange shapes and dances in the sunlight on the path. A black cow with its skeleton poking under its scaly skin is slumped under the broken branches of a tropic tree, eyes like moons. The winds of socialism means nothing to the black cow who labors just as hard in any field. 


The man looks up as the winds of socialism whisk by, he straightens his back and leans and then leans back further and and lets his machete drop in the dust. In the square an ancient Ceiba tree with elephantine branches and deeply rooted in the ground. The banner hanging says:"Vote Asi Partido Socialista Democratico." And there's not a breath of wind. A silver painted piece of tin nailed and wired to a pole repeats the message with painted fist that clamps a painted rose. 


A man leaning his chin on his elbows, looks out the window. And the woman in the floral dress, her black hair curling down around her face, her bare shoulder resting in the frame of the door, one leg bent,  her arms folded across her chest. The boys mouth's and faces are streaked and stained with sugary soda and their shirts are torn and trousers fold across their skinny hips, bare feet shuffling through the fine dust. 


Three yellow light bulbs flash on, a holy trinity of light on the church roof. And then pale blue fluorescent lights flicker tracing the outline of the church facade, the heavy doors flung wide open, arching coconut palms silhouette against the pale gray sky. The black, pointed flight of the Zensontle bird pieces the veil. The amplified sound. The spitting, crackling rhetoric and a few villagers gathering. And young boys playing on their bikes and a woman with a child walking by. 






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