Guatemala's presidential commissioner on racism, Ricardo Cajas has had his own pop at Apocalypto now, claiming that Gibson's madly entertaining movie has hindered understanding of the Mayan people, setting it back 50 years.
A propos of this I recently watched (thanks to Scott) a "sensationalist" documentary movie about Guatemala's natives made back in 1934, which seriously questioned their commitment to personal hygiene and wrongly identified their ancestors as "the Toltecs". The film was titled The Menace of Guatemala and can be downloaded here.
Two other bits of Chapin news. Firstly it seems that the recent cash crisis has now evolved into a gathering credit card debt crisis, and secondly it is being reported that the US is getting ready to deport thousands of Guatemalans, some of which have lived up there in the north for over twenty years. (There are said to be some 200,000 outstanding asylum applications from Guatemalans dating back to the 1980s.)
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