It started out with a trip north to the town of Nebaj, a traditional Maya town ravaged by mass killings by the US-supported military in the 1980s. In the colorful graveyards you could find entire families that had been wiped out on a single day, at least in 1982 when citizens accused of aiding the guerrillas were hacked down with machetes in front of the entire village.
We stayed at a rickety establishment called "Popi's Hostel"; when we asked the owner if he was Popi, he replied that we could call him Doug. He gave a vague outline of his life trajectory which had taken him from the States through Belize, El Salvador, and some other Central American republics before landing him in Guatemala-- it was only later that we learned that he had been a mercenary in various guerrilla wars before settling into the quiet life he now leads. Whatever his political leanings, the pasta dinner and apple pie a la mode marked a good send-off from (relative) civilization.
It was then up the steep (and muddy) trails north of town. We had a somewhat inauspicious beginning, as our sneakers soon became soaked and laden with mud and then we were confronted by a descending villager demanding quetzals (money) and/or food, with the explanation that "the gods were looking down on us." When we explained that we had neither (as we were going to eat with a family that evening), and wished him "buena suerte" (good luck), he merely answered "no hay"(there isn't any). Fortunately, this was the only real "accosting" (of this type, at least) that we encountered for the rest of the trip.
Soon after, we paused in a meadow to go over the history-- and effects-- of the civil war on the region. As the role of "civil patrols" was being explained, a local farmer walked up the path and proceeded to talk about the 14 years (?) he had been conscripted to walk the surrounding hills searching for guerrillas, all the while having to neglect his farm and family. Between the guerrillas and civil patrollers, there is virtually no fauna left in the surrounding woods.
Interestingly enough, we noticed at least one wall in Nebaj promoting the candidacy of Rios Montt for "presidente," despite the fact that he had been the dictator who presided over many of the worst years and had formed these very (un)civil patrols. The affects of time and/or ignorance are strong here; Montt was elected to Congress in September, and the front-runner and expected victor, Otto Perez Molina, of the "Patriotista" party, was also a military leader during that time whose campaign slogan is "Mano Dura" (Strong Hand), accompanied by a picture of a clenched fist.
Then it was down into the town of Acoma, which had been re-constructed in the 1980s and populated with 2 different ethnic groups (at least one of whom had been removed from their own village), both as a means of keeping an eye on them and showing the outside world the "benevolence" of the ruling regime.
We then stopped at a cheese "factory" on the outskirts of town, run by a 3rd generation Italian family. We had some fresh lemonade while looking across the surrounding valley. The cheese, along with tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and carrots (?), were to make up the sandwiches that constituted lunch for the next 3 days-- the
combination of aging on both us and the cheese made for better and better lunch breaks each day.
Then it was up and on through another more remote town, where the children emerged from the cornfields to line the side of the trail and watch the hunch-backed/packed gringos march through town. Amidst the waving and holas, one little girl reached out to touch our hand. We resisted the urge to say that we came as liberators, not colonizers.
We spent the night in a tiny mountainside hamlet that had once been a main (undeveloped) base of the guerrillas-- as we trudged higher and higher, it was easy to see why they had been hard to find.
[in the interest of time/space/attention spans, we will pause here and attempt to conflate and fast-forward through the ensuing days]
