Relative homicide rates

This year Guatemala had, with the exception of Mexico, a lower relative homicide rate than all its neighbours. Yes, that includes Belize. Honduras, meanwhile, is practically off the scale.

Yet when it comes to media stories about the wave of 'drug-related' violence that threatens to overwhelm civil society south of the border, Mexico and Guatemala are invariably the usual suspects. I don't seem to recall reading any articles in the past 12 months describing the ecotourism destination next door as "ungovernable", with the implication that it is rapidly degenerating into some sort of failed state".

It is also interesting to note that Colombia, which has done a sterling job of PRing its recovery from the maelstrom of lethal violence that swept across it in the 80s (and markets itself to foreigners with the strapline "The only danger is that you want to stay"), is still essentially as dangerous as South Africa.

Granada Photo Essay

Granada looks a bit like Antigua would if the Consejo didn't exist, or was that much more pelaverguista in its manner of protecting the place.*

Often referred to as Nicaragua's 'colonial gem', much of the significant architecture dates from the immediately post-colonial period when Granada was vying with Leon for supremacy in this land. (Managua, midway between the two, ended up as the compromise option.)

In spite of the volcano looming ominously over one flank of the city, there's a Neo-Classical order to the Parque Central and its environs which will remind some visitors of Xela as much as Antigua.

Meanwhile, the early twentieth-century cathedral had me thinking of Brazil and its neighbour in size and status, the mold-spattered La Merced, has an Italianate feel to it.

Beyond the core things get a little crumblier, many houses topped by tejas that haven't been changed in many a season. Overall the weather is more tropical than we are used to here, and I suspect the more steeply angled rooves and the use of cane in the patio terracing reflects the feverishness of the climate.

It was in La Merced that the American filibuster William Walker had himself inaugurated as President of Nicaragua in July 1856. After a year of 'Americanisation' (via fiscal 'reform', the reintroduction of slavery, and the imposition of English as the official language) Walker was driven from the city by a combined Guatemalan and Salvadoranean force, but not before burning the place to the ground. He was thus the human equivalent of Antigua's great quake, freezing the city's development at a certain moment in time.

Sometimes referred to as 'The Great Sultan', this particular Granada — set just back from the northwestern shore of Lake Nicaragua — was named after the Andalucian hometown of its founder, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, (Not the failed Conquistador of the Yucatán.) I spotted several attempts around town to echo the mesmirising architecture of the Alhambra and its gardens, specifically the wooden arches within the Hotel Darío (named after Nicaragua's most venerated poet) and the long fountain trough in a gallery opposite.

*Hence the garishly-painted shop fronts and the carefree juxtaposition of native Spanish and later Neo-Classical motifs.

San José, Costa Rica

The unusally — for CA at least — distended belly of Costa Rica's almost comfortable middle class is very apparent in this pleasant capital city. At its upper end, San José is sophisticated without being especially cosmopolitan, which is in a sense, the opposite of the situation here in Antigua.

'Chepe' is in fact roughly Oaxaca-sized and can easily be explored on foot, unlike Guatemala City, where more pressing dangers than blisters take shape the moment one strays a KM or so in any given direction. And the main commercial artery — the Avenida Central — and the two blocks running parallel to it, seemed to bustle until several hours after dark, unlike Arzú's hailmary regeneration of the area around the Paseo de la Sexta in Guate, which tellingly features large plackards admonishing those who would seek to preemptively re-scummify the zone, and which still empties out rapidly every evening as citizens scuttle off at sundown, as if there were a snoozing vampire in every sótano.

The largest, most serious bookshop on the Avenida Central was stocked a full set of Bolaño novels, which predominated over lesser collections from the literary nobelity (e.g. Saramago, Gabo and Vargas Llosa), but alas not Paolo bloody-Coehlo.

This street is as good a place as any to indulge in some Tica-spotting. It struck me that there are three basic types on display:

1) The professionals: from basic presentable to seriously elegant — an appropriately dominant female type in a nation now led by one of their number
2) The lookers, from eye-catchingly fair to jaw-droppingly gorgeous
3) The eaters, from low centre of gravity to roly poly - possibly the largest group in terms of membership as well as urban footprint.

All seem to favour the kind of overtight denim legware that was even more fashionable up here in Guatemala in the 80s. All, but especially the type 2s, are likely to be seen wandering around town carrying a baby like a sack of potatoes. (I've never been a big fan of strollers in shopping centres, but this struck me as odd.)

San José does appear to have an unfortunate appeal for the Clete Purcell-type of tourist, and one couldn't help but notice the bars around town where the walls are covered with photos of bearded men in loud shirts holding large fish. Many are probably after the big catch up here on the high plain too, but should any of the Tica-types categorised above appear unusually available in that sense, they are a) most likely not Costa Rican and b) even more likely not female.

I once heard some young American tourists reviewing Antigua's market as they exited it as "a maze full of Walmart shit". Well, San José's version is an appropriately more urbane environment, with comparatively spacious walkways leading to a central core of cleanish-looking eateries known locally as sodas, with an interesting emphasis on medicinal herbs in some of the outer lanes. Tipico-wise, there's nothing much worth acquiring here.

And the truth is, once you've taken in the Teatro Nacional and a couple of the museums, what's left isn't really that much more interesting than Tapachula, and its central civic life around the Parque Central is considerably seedier. Cross several of the even-numbered avenidas to the south of it, and the pavements start to crumble and the clapboard properties which abound here look a lot more Belize City than Guatemala City.

It's just as pricey as Guate. It's not ridiculously expensive but you often sense that you're not quite getting your money's worth, and that with this kind of underlying backwater ambience, things really ought to be considerably cheaper. (This problem is not as pronounced as it is in say Scotland however.)

As for the grub, more on that later...

Crossings

Should I one day be sufficiently rich and bored, I might attempt to put together a pictorial guide to the architecture of Central American border posts.

An unlikely set of circumstances...so in the meantime I'll throw this out as a project idea to one of the few clubs or societies I have ever belonged to, voluntarily: the Wogs and Trogs.*

A mate of mine once got funding via that organisation for a trek which would result in a comprehensive guide to the Panamerican Highway from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego. There did seem to be no limit then to the kind of student jaunt that philanthropists would pay for.

That particular expedition, which I believe stalled during the scoping phase, was essentially a road trip with a complicated amphibious challenge in its mid section: the Darién Gap.

On my own recent cross-border(s) expedition I woke up one morning to discover that my blog had been eliminado. Suspicious activity had been detected on my Gmail account, so Google shut it down, and as the rigmarole of reactivation involved automated SMS messages that I wasn't able to receive in time before my browser session timed out, I decided to let it be until I got back.

In fact I was somewhat tempted to make a clean break, but seven years of inner diablog were always going to be a little hard to walk away from.

*The Cambridge University Explorers and Travellers Club

Confucius say confusing things

Miss Panama sows further confucianism:



and Señorita Antioquia clarifies the transmission of the porcina:



Coming soon... Sarah Palin on Oprah.

Shifting tides of homicidal violence

The chart above shows the number of homicides per 100 inhabitants across Central America. (Gracias a The Black Box). Costa Rica has seen the largest increase relatively, more than doubling over the past 16 years, with 40% of victims in their twenties.

Etymologist's Atlas

This is one of a series of maps published in Der Spiegel showing 'natural' place names.

Personally I'd have translated Honduras as 'Depths' and El Salvador as 'The Saviour'.

As for 'Guatemala', there are some doubts as to its origin. You can choose between two indigenous words Quauhtemellan ('land of the eagle') and Uhatzmalha (`mountain where water gushes').

Yucatán or "I don't understand you" is apparently what the Maya said to the Spaniards who asked them "what land is this?". (You can see why they thought this was real information, as in Spain the generic term is more usually "Eeeeh?")

Proud Products

Marie Sharp's habanero sauces are to be found on most of the restaurant tables in Belize. 

The best of them however is a rarer delight which usually has to be tracked down in the Chinese supermarkets. This is the 'Green Habanero' sauce whose principal added ingredient is the nopal (from the prickly pear). 

Even V, usually no fan of hot sauces, can't get enough of this gourmet delight. These little bottles, along with larger ones filled with Duurly's Parrot, are one of the main reasons my bag feels rather heavy each time I leave Belize. 

Quote of the Day

"The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America. Like other articles of trade, they are regulated by the quantity in the market, and the demand; but, not being staple articles, like cotton and indigo, they were held at fancy prices, and at the time were dull of sale. I paid fifty dollars for Copan. There was never any difficulty about price. I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would probably have considered me something worse."
John Lloyd Stephens on acquiring the ruins of Copan in 1839

Got the 'ump

"At eleven o'clock we came in sight of Puenta Gorda, a settlement of Carib Indians, about a hundred and fifty miles down the coast , and the first place at which I had directed the Captain to stop. As we approached we saw an opening on the water's edge, with a range of low houses, reminding me of a clearing in our forests at home. It was but a speck on the great line of coast; on both sides were primeval trees. Behind towered an extraordinary mountain, apparently broken in two, like the back of a two-humped camel..."
John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841).

A settlement of Carib Indians....

That these people are what we know today as Garifuna is made clear later when Stephens recounts a meeting with an extremely old lady in Punta Gorda who hailed originally, he notes, from the island of St Vincent.

However, at no point does Stephens suggest that these people might have mixed their blood with former African slaves or even that they bore any resemblance to the creoles and mulattoes he had come across on his previous stop in Belize City. This is interesting, because these days the differences between the Garifuna and the creoles in the rest of the country would appear to be largely cultural - any indigenous ancestry is pretty hard to pick out.

Just after I made my own recent stop in Punta Gorda I was reading Peter Chapman's Jungle Capitalists and it became clear that the United Fruit Company under Minor Keith had imported thousands of Jamaican labourers to precisely this area of the Bay of Amatique.

Therefore, it might well be the case that the communities living along this stretch of coastline today have more Jamaican blood than anything else, but have managed to retain more of the cultural inheritance of the Black Caribs of St Vincent. This makes sense- come to think of it - because, as Garifuna mythology relates, the original African element to their heritage derived from a single slave ship which floundered off the coast of St Vincent.

Jungle Capitalists (2)

Chapman characterises United Fruit as a precursor of the modern multi-national, setting against its multifarious abuses its equally numerous acts of 'social responsibility', a layer of corporate activity it might even be said to have invented. (The company built an excellent hospital at Quiriguá, where it also funded the excavation of the Maya ruins.)

While there is a degree of truth in this, my own perspective on el pulpo is closer to that of García Márquez when he referred in his autobiography to the "absolute empire" of UFC - the late nineteenth century Americas were self-consciously post-colonial, so entities such as this were the only way that the great new power was going to be able to participate in the frantic imperialism of the period. (Something similar was achieved by the British in Argentina which joined our own empire at the same time in all but name.) 

Chapman also notes that UFC was one of the ways that American capitalism could experiment with its purer 'liberal' form long before the advent of Reagan and Thatcher. Back home in the democratic West welfare systems were taking shape, but down in bananaland, United Fruit maintained its own labour laws, generally paying its workers in scrip which could only be spent in company stores.

Yet the power of United Fruit proved to be, in Chapman's words, "a huge confidence trick", seemingly built on smoke and mirrors, and it evaporated all very suddenly - a tendency we can observe today with other systems built on unadulterated economic liberlism! 

Men like Keith and Zemurray could well have aspired, deep down, to bring material and cultural progress to Central America, but they were also highly opportunistic capitalists, who insinuated their organisations into countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica by invitation, because they had at their disposal the resources for rapid modernisation that were largely absent in these nations. The very nature of this relationship encouraged them to behave in a similar fashion to filibusters like William Walker. 

When necessary United Fruit destroyed its own crops to keep prices up and always held kept vast quantities of land un-cultivated, as a hedge against future adversities, such as the ever-present danger of disease. When the inevitable happened and their banana trees perished, they even went about dismantling the infrastructure they had constructed, ripping up railway track and chucking it into the sea.

Few of the railroads that UFC managed across the region are in use today, and as Chapman puts it. today "Central America follows broadly the US public transport model whereby the better-off travel by air and the poorer by bus, if at all."

Placencia

Has boomed quite a bit since I was last here in September '89.

As on Caye Caulker the fatties on golf carts have established themselves (plus a few yachts) and the population - once only a couple of hundred and most clearly related to each other in some way - has expanded five times or more, without it seems an entirely proportionate increase in the overall touristic opportunity...but maybe I'm saying this because we're in the off-season right now.

Something also seems to have happened to the beach. Tulum it never was, but di scene isn't all that clean and a good deal of di sand seems to have been lost to di starmy wedder. (Later on I will try to dig up some of my pics from '89 to show the Before and After states.)

Needless to say, turtle is also off the menu these days. Still, the causeways, talkative parrots and the dazzling night skies all remain.

Back in the 80s the dirt road linking this little settlement at the tip of a long sandy spit to the main highway from Dandriga had only recently been etsablished. Someone then dished me the almost certainly apocryphal story that the population of Placencia were all descended from a crew of Portuguese pirates that had got jiggy with the local Garifuna. The incidence of dreadlocked men and women with beautiful dark-honey skins and green eyes gave some credence to this tale, but sadly the current batch of locals don't look much different from the bulk of Belizeans.

1988 and all that

Delving under the bed for stuff to clear out in advance of my forthcoming migration, I came across a travel journal from March 1988: my first visit to Central America.

I chuckled at my rattled account of a first local bus ride in Mexico: "Horrific". The irony is of course that even back then public transport in Mexico was comparatively safe and civilised. Events in Guatemala last weekend however show just how unpleasant it can get.

Still, in spite of all the rookie rants about developing world conditions, my own words from two decades ago still manage to convey the sense of wonder at the human and geographical adventure, something which has never really left me and has somehow always compromised my subjective quality of life back here in London.

Panamá-á

Has featured regularly in the British papers this week, and the story of forgetful canoeist Mr Darwin has now found its way back to the Central American media.



Aside from that little number, the most southerly stop on the isthmus also makes me think of retired local musician El General, these days widely considered the father of reggaetón:



I wanted to post El Huehuecho which ends with a little Christmas ditty, but unfortunately couldn't find it on YouTube. Anyway, here's another:

The Greaseball Rally

The Inter-American Development Bank sponsors an annual race called the Greaseball Challenge in which cars modified to run on biofuels set off southwards from Washington DC in the general direction of Costa Rica. I wonder how many make it all the way to San José? It probably helps that the vehicles are supposed to be a bit beaten up to start with.

The rules are clear about pit stops:

"Greaseballers will source their fuel from a number of greasestops on the road: biodiesel producers, diners, fast-food outlets, supermarkets, factories, and farms. The possibilities are endless, and rather daunting. It’s a challenge."

Here's an interview with one of this year's partcipants, Suzanne Ward.

There's a movie in here somewhere...

Costa Rica joins CAFTA

All of the countries that signed on to the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have over the course of the last year, surrendered their favorable trade balances with the US (according to a report from the Red Regional de Monitoreo de los Impactos del TLC en Centroamerica.)

A steady influx of American agricultural goods over the past twelve months has created a condition whereby, as less competitive local producers go under, the whole region is losing its ability to feed itself and is further endangering its food security by becoming increasingly dependent on these imports. The report further suggests that the emergence of the biofuels industry could potentially amplify the negative effects because corn is the major dietary staple. (This part of the Red's 's case doesn't ring that true however, as they do have a lot of sugar cane. Why would they use corn like the dumb gringos?)

Anyway, none of this has discouraged Costa Rica from voting this weekend to join CAFTA. It was a close one though, with 52% in favour.

"Not choirboys"

Ross Kemp went to El Salvador to investigate the Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13. He describes El the country as the "most dangerous" in Central America, though I do believe that statistically-speaking, Guatemala still deserves that particular accolade.

It was very brave of him to go into that MS-13 prison where, it was said, someone had thoughtfully provided the misunderstood homies with the severed head of a rival gang member to play football with!

The programme suggests that the big boys are allowing the indigent clicas to soak up the blame for the cocaine traffic through El Salvador. "In other words," suggests Kemp, "the biggest gang in the country is the government".

"After the revolution..." Which one was that Ross?



Full video here.