Mayan Mischief: Travels in Central America

Life in the former colonies

‘You know that I have ruled for 20 years and from them I have only obtained a few certain results: (i) America is ungovernable for us. (ii) Whoever serves a revolution ploughs in the sea. (iii) The only thing one can do in America is to emigrate. (iv) This country will infallibly fall into the hands of the unbridled multitude, only to then pass on to almost imperceptible tyrants, of all colours and races. (v) Devoured by all crimes and extinguished by ferocity, the Europeans will not deign to conquer us. (vi) If it were possible for a part of the world to return to primitive chaos, this would be the final period of America.’

—Simón Bolívar, the repentant liberator, 1830

Central America is anomalous: the Andean countries excepted, it is the poorest, most backward portion of the Spanish Main, with untold thousands living — existing, rather — on a diet of beans and generously salted tortillas, savagely ensconced in the Mayan hovels of their fathers. Malnutrition exists in what is here termed ‘the interior’, which refers to anything beyond the confines of the capital; it permanently stunts the children of a nation that is far from the world’s most gifted.

Yet these are countries where UN agencies, USAID, Oxfam et al prop up a vast network of scroungers, local and foreign alike, who conspire to render any productive enterprise impossible. Agro-industrialists must contend with an Indian mass subjected to non-stop agitprop at NGO workers’ hands; mining is more or less banned, except in Nicaragua, which is notable for exporting more gold than it extracts, presumably passing off Venezuelan bullion as its own. In Guatemala, when making the smallest of purchases — yes, even a Toblerone — the average citizen is invited to proffer their tax ID; when dealing with the productive classes, the impetuous taxman will track day to day expenditure to measure against stated income, always on the prowl for underreported quetzals.

The aloof government sporadically surfaces to enforce odd, noxious regulations. We often bemoan the Western European ‘nanny state’, but the Central American state is much more regulated and arbitrary; complete tyranny is avoided only due to its absence and incompetence. These inconveniences ought to be made up by colonial comforts: cheap maids, a tacit respect for the European man, and an instant upgrade in social status — from promising (but still inconsequential) graduate at home to local notable in Central America. In my mind, neither this nor my expat package make up for the troubles of living here: the perennial unease and fear of being robbed; the vague sensation that the great mass, generally pleasant and welcoming but always seeking advantage, belong to another species of man; and frankly, the need to accept inferior goods and services at prices that are often higher than in Europe and comparable to America.

The reader will forgive the long introduction, which will, I hope, set the scene. For his sake and my own, I have organised this piece into a set of vignettes dealing mostly with the facets of Guatemalan life and occasionally discussing the other Central American countries I’ve visited.

Politics

There are three sources of division in Guatemalan politics: the internal armed conflict (‘civil war’ is a taboo term), a recent change of guard facilitated by corruption, and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

The civil war pitted revolutionary guerrillas and Indians against ladinos, as normal Spanish-speaking Guatemalans are known, and the economic elite. The former were fond of bombs and accidentally blew up the Spanish embassy in 1980, incinerating themselves in the process. Older upper-middle class Guatemalans were raised during the war and will often break into stories of that time they had to be pulled out of school after a terrorist attack, how their classmate’s father was kidnapped by the guerrillas, and so on. I know several landed patricians whose relatives were killed by their farm workers. One of my friends is the grandson of a general. The sole survivor of an Indian guerrilla attack, he still suffers from survivor’s guilt and is inflamed by the most comically exaggerated racism I’ve observed. Thus, the fundamental left-right division is based on one’s view of the war.

Creole elites have ruled this country through its various political dispensations. They declared independence without firing a single shot, or in the words of the Guatemalan national anthem, ‘managed without a bloody clash to place you on a throne of love’. This they did after Iturbide, a royalist, declared Mexico’s independence and offered Ferdinand VII, the worst king in Spanish history, the title of emperor. Initially divided amongst liberals and conservatives, the former orientated towards America and the latter towards Spain, they arrived at an elite consensus after the 1871 Liberal Revolution, modernising the country and embracing an agro-export model that served them well. Top-down attempts at civilising and Westernising the Indian mass failed, but the sturdy Mayan trickled into the cities nonetheless.

This balance of power held until recently. For quite some time, the captains of industry and their families have largely withdrawn from politics. Álvaro Arzú was the aristocracy’s last president; Óscar Berger, the ‘businessmen’s president’, was a dead cat bounce. Despite not holding power directly, the owners of the country calculated that they’d retain informal power by bankrolling the politicians. This was an unwise move: the politicians, even the ostensibly right-wing ones, have put the state at their service. Corruption made them rich. They no longer need the patricians’ money.

Yet this new political ‘caste’ is still tied to the business elite, forming a single group in the popular imagination. The recent election of Bernardo Arévalo, a left-wing patrician, diplomat, and son of a former president, was not a turn to the left, but a protest vote against the ‘caste’, which is undoubtedly self-serving, corrupt and incompetent.

Lastly, CICIG provides the most recent point of contention. It was a UN-appointed court theoretically meant to target corrupt politicians. It did some of that, but it was quickly taken over by Latin American leftists, notably current Colombian defence minister Iván Velásquez. My girlfriend tells me that when friends of hers failed to appear at school, it was often because their father had been arrested with a CICIG-issued warrant. This came as a shock to the elite: the same businessmen who fancied themselves owners of the country now spent years in remand, with some dying in preventive detention after being denied cancer treatment. President Jimmy Morales, an upstart conservative who curried favour with the elite, denounced the agreement with the UN and shuttered CICIG, which by then had pending cases against more or less all notable right-wing elites, some of them undoubtedly murky figures.

Elites and Race

I apologise for my dry primer on the politics of a banana republic. The subsequent sections should be more amusing.

Latin America retains a Victorian class system, Guatemala doubly so. It is Victorian, rather than Dharmic, because it is theoretically possible to climb the ranks; money can even wash away Indian blood, so long as it is not too much. Class divisions are only semi-racial: whites exist and come in two varieties, true white and Latin American off-white, with the latter type being much more common.

True whites accept the off-whites if they’ve had money for several generations, but a certain racial anxiety is palpable. Girls will whinge about having insufficiently aquiline, European noses. Tanned, blue-eyed boomers will rage if their 23&me results come back with any amount of Indian blood, saying they are certain of their pure, undiluted Spanish stock. An analyst at work once claimed to be of recent Belgian descent; her Ancestry test, she said, came back with only 3.4% Mayan, which she held as a badge of honour. Looking at her was sufficient to prove she was lying, and at any rate, Ancestry does not provide decimals. I, an inveterate autist, did her genealogy and found that her last Belgian ancestor was born in 1840.

The owners of the country have a succession problem. Most of their children, some of them my friends, are incorrigible and will bankrupt their great-grandfathers’ empires. The 10,000 or so Guatemalans that actually matter are likely within one degree of separation from me, so I won’t say more. My friends should give up women and drink, though.

The Poor

The great unwashed both resent and admire the local whites. This was on display in October, when protests and roadblocks by Indian groups and student radicals paralysed the country for a fortnight. My parish priest, an Opus Dei member, politely asked the demonstrators to let him pass; when they declined and said religion is the opium of the people, he rammed into them and was promptly arrested. The Church sent him back to Spain as things cooled off, but he was soon back and celebrating Mass.

In any case, the distaste for each other is mutual. My girlfriend’s parents will leave a restaurant if they aren’t pleased by the phenotypes on display. My girlfriend, the kindest and least racist member of the family, refers to people with visible indigenous features as having ‘Mayan arts and crafts faces’. She was also visibly perturbed by this year’s Eurovision.

Nannies are a good example of poor Guatemalans’ bipolarity. They are capable of great affection for the children they’ve basically raised, yet they are the first suspects when something goes missing around the house.

Whites may be envied or treated with suspicion, but marrying a white, or at least whiter, partner is known as ‘improving the race’. I once went out for drinks with my colleagues, including a competent, upwardly mobile Mayan. He was fascinated by the presence of a local white girl and drunkenly told her he never expected to share a table with her; over the course of the night, he took to calling her ‘Nordic elf’, to which she reacted with an uncomfortable smile. He then asked her if she’d ever consider dating a person like him. ‘Of course’, she replied, glaring at me as if hoping to be saved from the situation.

My Indian maid is a lovely woman from a random village whose name I do not wish to remember. She’s told me several times before, but the syllables are too odd to stick in my head. I still struggle to believe that her native language is not Spanish, but a Mayan dialect. Five-hundred years after Cortés and Alvarado, Indians’ lives are largely unchanged but for a thin veneer of Catholicism and the promise of a comfortable life as lumpenproles in the United States.

My maid’s greatest wish is to save up for a house back home. Whenever I speak, she responds with ‘mande’, something like ‘at your orders’, which has an archaic ring to it. She frequently complains about her son, who started university (courtesy of a relative in California), only to then drop out. I pay her a bit over $300 per month and occasionally give her bits of cash when she whinges about some calamity in the family; she’s also fond of pretending to be ill, forcing me to pay for her ‘medicines’. I bought a cable subscription at her request, and it is satisfying to think that I’ve somehow contributed to this poor woman’s happiness by allowing her to watch telenovelas, drink my Coke Zero, and feast on the ham in my fridge.

In general, I perceive a shift against the white upper-middle class; that is, those who are Opus Dei members (very common), carry notable surnames, send their children to private school, run middling family-owned firms, and perhaps supplement their incomes with land rents. This sub-elite are not socially differentiated from the true owners of the country: they marry each other and attend the same schools, but making money seems to have become more difficult. The winds of change don’t favour them, and remittances from the diaspora in America have made the poor richer. The old bourgeoisie also compete with parvenu types: drug kingpins and politicians (these two are often the same person). Gone are the days of European immigrants quickly amassing a small fortune.  

Elite Education

Elitism is inevitably enmeshed with racism. Merit-based bursaries and scholarships do not exist in Guatemala; one must be poor to qualify. Thus, when criticising the cleanliness of the university toilets, one of my girlfriend’s friends could only say, ‘It smells of scholarship recipients’. A great deal of laughter followed.

Francisco Marroquín University (UFM) is the most prestigious in the country. It competes with the Opus Dei-run University of the Isthmus (UNIS) for the elite’s children. One cannot be a self-respecting member of the upper-middle class without sending one’s son to either UNIS or UFM, lest he be bullied for being poor or thick.

UFM’s philosophy is a sort of libertarianism, hence its notoriety in some American circles. Some lecturers describe themselves as anarcho-capitalists. This tendency is comprehensible only in light of their upbringing: for their entire lives, the state has been absent, returning from its perpetual holiday only to terrorise or tax them. Guatemala has all the negative characteristics of overbearing Oriental despotism, yet it lacks even a night-watchman state.

Well-to-do Guatemalans’ credentialism is still incomprehensible to me. It seems one is not fully human until in possession of a master’s degree. This has several negative consequences. Education is the best excuse to move abroad, often to Spain, inevitably leading to breakups and the embrace of the European student’s dolce vita. Those who remain in Guatemala keep the same girlfriend for ten years and live a sort of extended adolescence, since it is socially unacceptable to marry before wrapping up one’s education, which often comes late. Mindlessly reproducing is what the poor do, you see.

Passports

European passports are another class signifier. Lacking one, or several, subtracts points on the upper-middle class scale; people will go to great lengths to find the birth certificate of an Italian great-great-grandfather. My girlfriend’s father was recently horrified to find a mestizo renewing his passport at the Spanish embassy; he reminded me of Twitter mutuals saying ‘it’s over’. He is a citizen of another, more northerly European country and noted, approvingly, that all applicants at that country’s embassy were gente conocida (‘known people’), a sort of euphemism for whites from ‘good families’, as one often hears here.

Boomers rarely take advantage of their other nationalities. EU passports facilitate travel and allow them to skip the queue on holidays, but they are too accustomed to Guatemala — to the maids, country clubs, and the church societies, complete with their matching ties for school reunions. At most, they will fantasise about retiring to Spain. Their children, however, dream of Madrid; the renegade daughters with pink hair become graphic designers in Germany, apparently unbothered by the demotion in social rank.

The easy access to Europe leads to a bizarre situation where the American-born children of Indian peasants are often richer than the scions of the elite who move to Madrid. I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised at much of the elite’s distaste for life in the States. In Latin America, anti-Americanism has for decades been the preserve of the left. This appears to be changing.

Entertainment and Food

Guatemala is a dangerous country. My girlfriend’s family thinks I’m mad for using Uber; I could be kidnapped. The capital’s central square, which hosts the cathedral and the national palace, is located in a ‘red zone’. I went there once and was accosted by Honduran migrants who said, as if to reassure me, that I should thank them for not mugging me.

Extortions are common. One day, you answer a call and the person says, ‘Hello, John, we know you live at X. Your daughter, Mary, goes to Y every Tuesday and Thursday at 11:30 am. Pay us Z and we will not bother you. Have a good day!’

Amidst these conditions, all entertainment is necessarily private and enclosed. Guatemalans don’t go to the park; they go to sprawling shopping centres with parks and fountains. The restaurants are passable, some even good. Curiously, wealthy Guatemalans prefer foreign fare — even at home — and have failed to produce haute cuisine versions of their dishes, which they associate with Mayans. This is perhaps the greatest difference between them and their Mexican counterparts, who are fond of wagyu tacos and fusion cuisine.

Restaurants aren’t particularly cheap and command quasi-European prices for a slightly inferior product. The same holds true at supermarkets: one must often accept the inferior local product, although for certain items an imported option is offered at a significant markup. Some substitutes, like Nicaraguan instead of American beef, are perfectly acceptable, but overall, the country is much more expensive than Southeast Asia. I suspect this is due to its proximity to America and the fact that it is drowning in remittance money ($20 billion last year), propping up the quetzal. El Salvador, which is dollarised, is similar; its largest nightclub, Superb, can cost as much as a night out in London.

I do not understand how anyone survives on local salaries. I particularly pity the upper-middle class, whose incomes are eaten up by school fees and all the expenses required to maintain a safe, separate existence in this country.

Petty Tyranny and Bureaucracy

Lower class resentment is most visible when such individuals are placed in positions of power. My building’s doorman, for example, falls short of outright rudeness, but will regularly refuse to hold things for me in the lobby, or will berate me for forgetting my keycard. After-work drinks — very common, since awful infrastructure leaves Guatemala City with Karachi-level traffic — will result in the office’s security team threatening to bar employees from entering the building to retrieve their cars.

Their respect for the rules is variable. Most of the time, security guards mill about and don’t care if the metal detector beeps as one passes, but when they identify an opportunity to ruin fifteen minutes of someone’s day, they will never fail to seize it.

Similar inconveniences occur at banks and government agencies. Long waits are commonplace. Expect to sign a billion forms, only to be told you must come back another day with a document that was conspicuously absent from the list of requirements you had earlier been sent. An example serves to illustrate my frustration: Guatemalan customs once charged me $40 in tariffs for a packet of documents my parents couriered through FedEx. I have since found that ordering anything from abroad is amazingly painful.

Closing

I am not the typical expat. My surname, courtesy of my Continental father, is misspelt by everyone in this country, but my mother is a Creole from another Latin American republic. I arrived armed with Spanish and a keen cultural awareness that made me only semi-foreign; I have been readily accepted by the national haute bourgeoisie, who have adopted me and gifted me one of their daughters. Yet I will soon leave without illusions as to the third world. Poverty, as it turns out, is not ennobling. The unseemly aspects of life here have much more to do with low-IQ degeneracy than San Francisco pride parades.

I’ve lived here long enough to write much more, but this piece is already too long, and any episode I recount will make me seem bitter. I am not and do not regret my time here, although it’s time to quit whilst I’m ahead. Life here is inconvenient and dangerous, but in an odd way, it is exceptionally easy to ignore the grime and revel in the comfort of Guatemala’s private paradises.