Belize gets Prince Harry...

....while we get Joe Biden.

It's endlessly fascinating how Belize, with its higher relative homicide rate, has not had any trouble passing itself off as a land of "music, fun and laughs" (even its ancient, human-sacrificing residents are getting the benefit of the doubt here)...whereas Guatemala is consistently reported as a land of violence and misery. Stereotyping ahoy?

The inverse loyalty scheme

Over the course of the past few years we have been repeatedly netflixed by the lady who runs the shop right in front of our house.

Each time we show any kind of propensity to repeat purchase specific items over the medium term, she raises the price of said items*, presumably for us only — so more or less the opposite approach to the coupon schemes run by the big UK chains like TESCO.

And whenever this happens I stop buying the item in question forthwith, as if to demonstrate that the apparent convenience offered by her tienda (if I tripped up on the cobbles outside my front door I'd probably end up at her counter) will not so easily translate into economic captivity.

Now I'm not a total codo — I can spot a value-added shopping experience when I see it (Waitrose over Tesco say) — it's just that I am not really seeing it here. And unlike our old friend in Federal lock-up, I don't have an inherent problem with differential pricing schemes, even 'gringo' prices (though V has actually had the worst experience of hikes), it's just that I don't care to be gamed in this way, and would have thought that our response might have put a stop to it by now.

We're down to a few items where the opportunity for opportunistic margin grabbing are limited; eggs for example. I stopped buying milk there last week when she upped the price by another Q0.50, thereby handing the Bodegona a 20% price advantage.

When it comes to the afternoon bread session, I try to intercept the van before it reaches the shop. Firstly, this permits me to ensure that all the pirujos, bolas, champurradas etc. that we buy are fresh, because the tienda-owner likes to pad out one's purchase with a few odds and ends left over from the morning, or even the previous afternoon. That's if she is willing to sell you any bread at all unless you have made a prior arrangement to reserve Qx from each delivery.** The bread that has not been firmly set aside will be sitting there in its basket, but she will be extraordinarily reluctant to part with it, perhaps because she will need it to add a few squishily stale rayaditas to tomorrows orders.

*In the case of red wine, she stopped stocking my preferred brand of Chilean plonk and instead started offering another label which costs Q15 more.

** This sort of lock-in might work for the majority of our neighbours — who are nothing if not slaves to routine — but our dietary habits and timetables are generally more flexible, so I want to be able to impulse purchase my bakery products.

Campero's image 'adjustment'

Severo is about right in this instance.

Having worked with companies like Shell that protect and venerate their brand/marque with a near religious devotion, this update from los Gutiérrez strikes me as reckless, whatever its relative merits aesthetically.

When you choose to revamp rather than refresh you are often showing premeditated disrespect for those customers who have, in some cases, a lifetime's worth of emotional investment in your brand.

It matters less for B2B firms, but leading consumer brands always try to make iterative changes where there is something in the design that signals backward compatibility. I'm not really seeing it here.

I note that their main corporate website has yet to make the leap, so either PC intends to roll out the new image regionally (something one of the world's leading brand owners like Shell is unlikely to contemplate), or they are being a bit chicken, and want to test the waters in Texas with a potentially more yufe-ful customer base before admitting to a brand desecration back home in the motherland.

Rise and shine

I recall now why we tend to avoid going out with the dogs first thing. One has to run the gauntlet of the 7am rush, which can be like playing some weird, live chapin version of Grand Theft Auto.

Outside the front door await the resident early-idling citizenry...consisting to a truly disheartening extent of hipocritas, egoistas, resentidos and free-floating chiribisqueros plus other assorted lifestyle bottom-feeders, and enriched at this hour by clusters of puddle-hopping estudiantes, blithely-urinating albañiles, pinches salariados, and cascades of bicicletistas imprudentes.

Then there's the paranoid poof with his can of Mace, who runs off screaming insults in the American vernacular every time he sees Jin and, if we're really unlucky, the knuckle-dragging brinconcito, who shuffles past gesturing at the ludicrously large gun that he carries under his sweatshirt.

Potentially even more hazardous are the extralegally-hooting madres de la alta suciedad, many still in their night clothes as they undertake their time-trial school runs, handling their vehicles as if any pedestrian in their path is to be swatted aside like a late-shift zancudo.

Better to stay indoors with our platanitos fritos and freshly-brewed coffee. After 11am, the only human obstacles are the shambling undead known locally as bolitos.

Bésame Mucho no1 - Live in the Parque Central

This famous little ditty was composed by a 15-year-old Mexican girl in 1931 when, so she said, she herself had yet to experience the pleasure of her first kiss.

Here's it is performed very capably by Maestro Hugo Cruz, the star musician of Cuban-emigre band Orquestra Casa Blanca in Antigua's Parque Central last Monday...Santiago day. Having positioned myself at the rear on the Cathedral steps, I had to run round to the front to capture the rest of Cruz's solo with its gypsy-inflected encore.

You could call this naïve...

Take a few moments to savour these hilariously blinkered, paternalistic remarks made by Carole Mallory on The Wrap this week on the topic of Arnie's love-child with Guatemalan home-help Patricia Baena.

"Baena is from Guatemala. Some years ago I lived in Guatemala while shooting a film in Antigua, its major city. The people were the most charming, compliant people I have ever met and largely Indians. You could call them naïve. Baena would have been in awe of her master and could have seen succumbing to his wishes as part of her duty. Clearly he was attracted to her enormous breasts and Guatamalan naiveté, seeing a live-in opportunity to turn her into his sex slave, satisfying his need to dominate women. A Guatemalan woman by nature would have respect for those in charge of the household, both Maria and Arnold.

"She would probably be in awe of Maria Shriver, seeing such respect as her duty. She might well have been torn and conflicted about where her true allegiance belonged. The fact that Arnold's advances —which could have been deemed rape — turned into an affair is understandable, given the power structure of the household. Arnold was her master. Many argue that this is like Thomas Jefferson having an affair with his slave. While Jefferson had six children with one of his slaves, let's rejoice that Arnold was caught after having only one child. Schwarzenegger is no Thomas Jefferson, an otherwise good politician who fathered illegitimate children with a woman who worked in his household."

This knee-jerk respect for the sophisticated foreign master doesn't exactly square with all those reports from the front-line of class conflict that we used to get from Don Marco, does it? Though he did seem to have a thing about breasts. Still, he always gave the impression that he was the mouse and the maids were the mishes.

Cuaresma under way...

The first Lenten procession of 2011 in these parts. This year I'm going to miss most of Cuaresma and all of Semana Santa, though I'm not really going to miss it, if you get my drift.

Haunting

Drivers familiar with the roads in the south west of France will have come across these grim sentinels. On many of these highways are an almost ever-present reminder of the location and severity of fatal accidents.

One wonders how crowded the roadsides around the capital here (say in Villa Canales) would be if Ex-Prez decided to erect a cardboard stiff to mark the passing of every bus driver taken out by the maras.

On last night's evening edition of Noti7 it was a full ten minutes before we got to a story that wasn't about armed attacks on Guatemala's buses. The last and perhaps the most appalling didn't even involve extortionists; instead it was what appeared to be a road rage incident on the Reforma in the capital's smartest district, Zona 9. After a brief altercation arising from razones viales, a man on a motorbike (I'm actually assuming it was a bloke) took out a pistol and fired into a yellow school bus packed with young students, wounding the driver twice in the abdomen.

Quaking

News coverage of this week's events in Christchurch, NZ has been fairly traumatising for us, especially for V, who lived through Guatemala's great quake of 1976; a 7.5 at a depth of 5km, which resulted in 23,000 deaths.

Earthquakes of 6.3 magnitude or thereabouts are quite a regular occurrence here; in some recent years we have experienced several in the same year. Much depends of course on the particular movement pattern of the tremor and from the footage we've seen from New Zealand, the Christchurch quake was doing some pretty scary things with liquid.

Still, one expects there to be some fall-out in the near future over building regulations there, because the two big office blocks to come down (and the hotel which is now listing) appear to have been too flimsy for a region with seismic tendencies.

Our house is comparatively tall and this scenario remains a nagging fear for us, even though we did what we could to strengthen walls and foundations during the construction phase.* We have agreed that we really ought to have our emergency maletas packed and ready near the easiest exit at all times. The first thing V suggested putting into hers was her iPod, and I had to point out that that would mean she couldn't use it all the other times that we weren't buried under a pile of cinder blocks.

* The foundations (cimientos and zapatas) go down to 1.5m and there are other anti-seismic features in the main walls, which have special foam joins designed to absorb and deflect some of the forces which could otherwise cause the whole structure to wobble as a whole. The rather worn copy of the blueprints above was the one used by the maestro de obras on site. Here's hoping that the house holds together a bit better than its plans!

Toughest Place To Be A....

Last night we watched the first episode of a new BBC three-parter in which various UK professionals are sent out to foreign locations designated as the toughest places to pursue their chosen careers.

Angie Dymott, the Welsh paramedic from Cardiff, handled herself very well during her posting at the Estación de Bomberos Voluntarios in Zona 11, especially as she had never seen a bullet wound before.

Aside from the usual cheap shots about corrupt cops and politicians and the now standard rather throw-away exposition of the relationship between Guatemala's recent past and present, this was a well-made programme. We particularly liked the way Angie got to stay with both the affluent volunteer in his walled 'compound' and the more humilde salaried bombero who resided in a small house with his large family in the pubelo of San Cristóbal.

Overlooking this location, which Dymott thought more typical of a quiet Guatemalan 'village' (in spite of the fact that it was patrolled at night by armed vigilantes) is Ciudad Peronia, where two rival maras, Los Metales and Los Caballos have supposedly reconciled. Even the bomberos seemed reluctant to accompany the Welsh paramedic on her fact-finding mission up the hill where she briefly spoke to an ex-gang leader who has now found God and drives a bus: perhaps not the best career choice for someone looking to get out of 'the life'. The interview was cut short when the gang's current intake passed in several vehicles revving their engines.

Archie, her first mentor, took his charge to the extraordinary Fraternidad Cristiana auditorium, which she clearly found moving. He's a full-time marketing executive who gives up some of his weekend to work with the Bomberos Voluntarios, and although his first dead body apparently gave him a sleepless night, his present attitude is clearly more desensitised. I quote my cousin Philip on this, as he was the one who flagged up to us the imminent broadcast of this documentary:

"She was totally shocked on the first shout when her mentor told her to forget it. He was handling it, breaking into smiles and grins, almost reveling in the power of life and death. No, there is nothing here to save, he's been shot five times, he's dead. She had to accept it and give up her conditioned response; we have to try something."

Next week it's the turn of bus driver Josh, who must be thanking his lucky stars that they sent the paramedic to Guatemala, while he got to go to tough it out on the streets of Manila.

Catfish (2010)...and narco-chuchos

"There is no secrecy on the Internet," says Cryptome co-founder John Young who, like the altogether more notorious Julian Assange, remains convinced that secrecy is democracy's nemesis.

Guatemala may have had just one paltry little Wikileak associated with it, but the year that's been did bring us those memorable moments of excitement and intrigue generated by the unmasking of local blogger 'Mark Francis' as Federal fugitive Jeff Cassman. (Many thanks to reader Begonia for this updated content.)

How could a husband and serial-father on the run for investment fraud have considered it a good idea to create such a high profile online identity for himself (albeit a bogus one), have bragged about his ability to secure falsified documents, have recruited mulas from back home to bring him and his family American goodies, and have gone out of his way to make his presence felt far and wide in Guatemala, not just amongst the ex-pats in Antigua, most of whom appear to have crossed his path at one time or another?

The Internet is a funny old thing; in order to get much of the upside you have to take on a considerable downside risk. And 'Mark', a regular at poker tables in smoke-filled rooms somewhere in Antigua (we don't have many basements here), had obviously decided he was going to be in the game.

2010 was remarkable in one respect, in that it saw the mass migration of Chapines from regionally-established social networks like Hi5 into the online phenomenon that is Facebook and its complex morass of privacy controls. One has to wonder whether Mark Zuckerberg could ever have foreseen the long-term impact of all these relatively unsophisticated users on his platform as he stitched up the code in his Harvard dorm room.

Just the other morning I was able to explore an entire red of Guatemala-based drug traffickers on Facebook. Cassman was hiding in plain sight, but this is something else. You might think that a fair analogy might be Johnny Jihad posing for his profile pic in a camisa bomba, or exchanging drole, nudge nudge wink wink wall comments about the uses of fertiliser with his mate Ahmed in Tower Hamlets.

Nevertheless, while your run-of-the-mill Islamist cell-member might not have a higher average IQ than the rank and file of Central America's narco-distribution gangs, he has several advantages when it comes to avoiding barefaced-but-unintentional Facebook visibility — that he's almost certainly a genuine no mates outsider like Zuckerberg, and that he has a conspicuous lack of interest in alcohol, slags and showing off in general.

The narco cell on the other hand might have a manipulative sociopath as its nucleus, but all around it gathers the glutinous mass of thick and lazy friends, family members and inveterate lameculos, and most significantly, the materialistic mitochondria of trophy girlfriends.

If you happen to know one of these busconas, chances are you are only a few clicks away from an entire network of shaven-headed twats with diamond earrings and snaps of their automatic weapons collections in their Facebook albums. ("Hasta el chucho se ve narco," said V memorably of one pic we came across.)

And of course no idea how to manage the social network's privacy settings — though one has to wonder if they really care, because their online behaviour invariably mimics the brashness of their offline presence. It was remarkably easy to plot out the political and economic connections enjoyed by these narcs, make an informed guess as to which local businesses had been compromised, identify in-group markers like tattoos and neckware, and establish that most of these dopes are Sinaloans living here in Guatemala with false identities...though many of these have the authentic ring of 'Ford Prefect' from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

If I could do all this with half an hour of idle time on my hands, just imagine what could be achieved by someone paid to act on the belief that the real problem here is the supply end of the equation, as opposed to the end-consumers and their deadly habit. Anyway, as Ken Whitehouse noted with some surprise in his piece about our erstwhile 'Banana Republican', "apparently, there are pretty good Internet connections in Antigua."

All this has been a rather extended preamble to Catfish, a movie which is ultimately about a woman who — to the untrained eye at least — might have come across as a complete saddo, but was actually a sophisticated implementer of online identity stratagems, looking to prey upon the superficially more hip denizens of a distant metropolis.

Now the first question one has to ask of this movie is just how genuine its own identity is. Before viewing it, I listened to Yaniv Schulman, 'the mark' in this tale, insisting earnestly to Jason Solomon on Film Weekly, that it was indeed all kosher and that his interfering brother Ariel had, without any foreknowledge of the eventual outcome, suddenly decided to pick up his camera to make a documentary about online relationships, having delved into Yaniv's correspondence with Megan and her mother.

For about two thirds of the movie I was genuinely prepared to believe him. Even now I would hesitate to suggest that the whole thing was a set-up, but there is definitely something fishy going on here. The temptation to blur the edges of documentary must have been huge: for how marvelously meta it must be to make a movie about questionable identities which itself sports an identity of some dubiousness, and whose 'star' bleats at one crucial moment, that he hadn't been taken in, he'd just failed to ask some rather obvious questions.

For all their insistence that everything happened in real time just as it has been presented to us, I would suggest that the Schulmans and their collaborator Henry Joost, really do want us to ask some pressing questions of their movie. For if the revealed circumstances behind the Facebook trail turn out to be so nuanced and moving by accident, surely their achievement could be considered diminished.

For us it was the husband and the poetic musings he made to camera — one of which was to give the movie its name — which proved to be the clincher.

Feliz año a todos, especially my new 'friends' the narco-chuchos.

Grade: A-

Despedida del año 2,010

The Muni et al. have helpfully provided this handy guide to the goings on here tomorrow afternoon.

No plea bargain for Mark

Regular reader 'Begonia' has tipped me off that our old friend 'Mark Francis' aka Jeff Cassman, has entered a plea of guilty with U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger, on the day that his trial for running a Ponzi scheme was due to start.

There were no conditions — in other words there was no plea bargain involved. Sentencing will take place on Monday March 28th.

Santa en Panorama

This being Santa's last visit before the 2011 election, he pulled out all the stops for his good friend Dr Vivar.

Food Porn (4)

Regular visitors will know that Monday is usually shark day in our household. It comes to us via one of those itinerant indigenes from Quiche with only the most basic grasp of Spanish.

I tried to make some vaguely British conversation about the chilly state of the morning weather with 'Pedro' today, and he nodded in nervous near-comprehension and muttered something like "si, much friiie".

Today we steamed the fish with lime leaves, yaki nori and herbs and then served it with chopped radishes and spaghetti doused in a mee goreng sauce, which I picked up in a packet in Singapore earlier in the year.

We've been eating a few too many radishes over the past few days in truth. And the sauce was just a bit too oily — yet should be easy enough to reproduce according to our own taste, galangals aside, as it is based on tomato, tamarind and chile.

Looking around for recipes online there really seems to be no definitive way to prepare this spicy noodle dish, common to both Malysia and Indonesia and quite similar to Japanese yakisoba.

At the end of last week we discovered an underexploited local plantation of lemongrass, which is bound to come in useful over the course of next year.

Guatemalan Architectural Innovations No7b : Siguen los chapuces

Aplastadita

They just keep coming today...

This one was all the rage back in the late 80s and we heard it performed live at the Manhattan, now, for better or worse, the front end of La Bodegona.

Somos Antologia...

It's obviously bad music day here on the Innerdiablog. This excruciating cover version was the opening gambit of Antigua regulars Antologia on Tuesday night, shortly after the bomberos had departed.

El Churrasquito del Diablo (2)

The Devil's final moments in Antigua last night. As the flames licked the frame of his bike and the air filled with the aroma of burning rubber, someone tossed a last paquetillo of explosives onto the bonfire, just before the bomberos moved in.

Let's call the whole thing off...

I might have inadvertently given the impression the other day that Chapines care little for matters of health and safety, so it's only fair that I should set this right by bringing it to your attention that Antigua's traditional (well, since 1999) Festival of the Calle del Arco on New Year's Eve has been called off today by its own organising committee — whose members have reportedly been collectively suffering sleepless nights over the idea that the ever growing number of participants in recent years points to the near inevitability of future fatal accidents.

During the other 364 days of the year the public issue which most seems to engage — literally keep awake — this august body of neighbours, is their own peace and quiet, but we'll just have to accept their word that they really are genuinely worried about the possibility of a Duisberg or Phnom Penh-style crush occurring on their turf, and not just narked off that their quaint little spectacle of frolicking inditos has been steadily overrun by rowdy elements from across the region and beyond.

By the way, what were those evangelical Jeremy Hunts doing at La Concepción tonight for the Burning of the Devil? Doesn't this tradition mark the commencement of the Feast of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception...an unequivocally Catholic tradition? Forgive us our trespasses indeed.