This wasn't my first trip to the country. About ten years ago, we traveled there while the civil war was still going on. That time, it was different. No 'Net cafes or VoIP phones like there are today, so when you were there, you were there and only there. Our travel companions back then were two indigenous people, one who spoke Kakchikel, one who spoke Kanjobal, both of whom had lost friends and family members in the massacres. The military's anti-insurgency policy went like this: if we can't figure out which one of you is a guerilla, we kill all of you, and then we kill a few extra to make sure everyone gets the point. She told us about brothers shot in the eyes and neighbors tortured with electrical wires. He told us about highland villages whose only living residents were women and children. That time, we traveled everywhere by chicken bus, and some times the buses were stopped by armed soldiers, who ordered everyone off, searched us all, and let almost all of us back on. You never knew what was happening with the ones who didn't get back on, you just got back on.
So this time, there was no active war, but there wasn't an absence of war, either. There are still nearly as many ammo shops along the roads to Guatemala City as there are tamale vendors. And just about every building that contains anything worth stealing has an armed guard. The McDonalds. The gas station. Some of the little shops in Antigua that sell jade or tipica, handicrafts, to white tourists. For each one, there is a man in a uniform holding a semiautomatic rifle. Rios Montt — el general as he's known — the dictator under whose command the worst of the massacres took place, just ended a failed presidential campaign. He lost the 2003 elections, but his mug is still plastered all over telephone poles, rocks, vacant walls, all over the country. There are a lot of guns, and a lot of Jesus. Evangelical churches in hastily-constructed cinder-block buildings outnumber both the ammo shops and the tamale vendors.
When I stepped on board flight 889 from LAX to Guatemala this time, I knew it would be different, but I didn't know how. Almost midnight. Most passengers were guatemaltecos weighed down with bags full of things from America to bring home to families. We waited, passengers filed on with bursting suitcases. Flight attendants wheeled on a brown-skinned woman in a wheelchair whose body was limp, eyes dim and half-closed. They pushed her into place, strapped her down, we waited again. I dozed off, and woke up minutes later as attendants rushed back to her seat with oxygen and first aid kits. They called for paramedics. They called for doctors. No one could feel her pulse. The paramedics arrived, huddled for a while, then confirmed she was gone. One of the female flight attendants started crying. The woman in the wheelchair had terminal cancer, she said. "It's always like this on 889. They always want to return home to die."
At left, snapshot of a life-sized icon in a Catholic church in Antigua, Guatemala. I snapped it last week, on Ash Wednesday. She's about 300 years old. Click thumbnail for full-size image.
