Death and the Idea of Mexico: Claudio Lomnitz (4)

Modern historians have a lot to thank Karl Marx for really. Not only did he provide them with not one, but two suggested explanations for the underlying course of history, but also — rather less obviously, because the impact has been felt across the political spectrum of academia — he popularised dialectical thinking, which suits the sort of commentator who likes to deal in coherent paradigms rather than potentially more disjointed facts and ideas.

So you might — as I did — come to Lomnitz's book expecting to find a comprehensive answer to the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?', but instead what you get is a response to two alternative and largely competing previous answers to that question.

Undergrad historians, typically one step removed from original research, learn this trick early on. So-and-so said this, but so-and-so said that, and so my own interpretation is either going to be a gutless hedge (aka "fence sitting") or an attempt to create some new and distinct synthetic third position using bits of both.

Faced with a dense literature on the Mexican death-obsession falling into two broad churches — that it descends from pre-Colombian roots in either ancient Mesoamerica or medieval Iberia — Lomnitz contends that it was in fact the cataclysmic meeting of these two cultures and the need to re-establish the hegemonic order after the holocaust which resulted in an apparently unique nationalisation of the death-cult in Mexico.

There is much that is compelling in Lomnitz's argument, but there are always going to be gaps when your answer to a specific question is essentially a response to earlier viewpoints. For instance, my friend Antonio in Brazil believes the candy skulls on sale at the start of November in Mexico must somehow descend from Aztec tzompantli (skull racks), for if there wasn't something very specific in the native culture squished by Cortés and co, why would Mexicans be any more death-obsessed than the rest of Latin America? Lomnitz's hegemonic whiplash argument can only provide the most indirect sort of parry to the thrust of Antonio's intuition.

And frankly, the greater issue for me is that I did not pick up this hefty volume in search of a sociological history of the Days of the Dead in Mexico. I really did want a comprehensive answer the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?' — one that delved a bit more into popular psychology and its localised peculiarities for this, at least as far as the topic of mortality is concerned, is my current topic of greatest interest.

Mexico Lindo y Querido?

"And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us."

This comparison, which concluded an article in today's Guardian by George Monbiot would have been more (though not completely) true of Guatemala, but this was the week when figures from across UK's media and entertainment sphere decided to offload years of pent-up, ill-informed impressions of our northern neighbour.

When Clarkson and co kicked things off on the 30th of January, Richard Hammond had a particularly hairy border crossing from the territory of acceptable British national stereotyping into the bandit country of xenophobic unpleasantness.

Cherished British comic and would-be Hollywood export Steve Coogan was as unimpressed by the BBC's subsequent qualified apology as most Mexicans, finding the smug Top Gear trio guilty of a form of international bullying: "With Top Gear, it is three middle-aged men laughing at poor Mexicans. rabe, groundbreaking stuff, eh?"

Hold on Steve. Hammond called them lazy, feckless and flatulent. Poor is surely one of your own.

Now, as George Monbiot sagely notes, national lucre isn't always divided up in a uniformly equable manner (viz. the USA), but if one uses the CIA's data for GDP per capita in 2010, one finds that overall Mexicans are better off than the citizens of several EU member nations including Bulgaria and Romania and one would-be EU-member, Turkey. More topically, Mexico's per capita GDP of $13,800 comes in at more than double that of 'poor' Egypt, $6,200.

In spite of the global downturn, so called 'Mexican flu' and all those decapitated bodies in Acapulco, Mexico's economy still grew at a rate of 5% last year, compared to zero or even negative growth in parts of 'new Europe'.

Mexican tourists are reportedly amongst the biggest spenders in London.

And let us not forget that the world's biggest pistudo, Carlos Slim, is a Mexican. Flatulent he might be, but lazy, feckless and most definitely poor, he is not. Could Señor Slim be one of these state-facilitated fat-cats to which Monbiot refers?

Mexico's political and economic arrangements should actually be quite hard to stereotype, given that they are at least partly the result of the first and most unusual of the twentieth century's great revolutions. But perhaps Monbiot was referring to the pre-revolutionary Mexico, as run by the authoritarian and elitist Porfirista regime?

Long before Hugo Chávez began refashioning autocracy for a democratic age, Mexico's upheaval was finally settled by the creation of a corporatist state, governed by a hegemonic political party — the PRI — which, needing to at least resemble something liberal and accountable — limited its leaders, who otherwise had the powers of absolute monarchs, to six year terms. "There isn't a unique model for democracy," as one of the last of the PRI presidentes, Carlos Salinas was to observe.

There was a long period of somewhat illusory consensus, brought to an abrupt end by the student massacres of 1968 and 1971. President Luis Echevarría ('70-'76) borrowed like crazy and would have ruined the country sooner than the eventual debt default of '82, had not a chingo of oil been discovered off the coast of Campeche. Then came the '85 quake and Zedillo's disastrous currency flotation of '94 after which the PRI's political monopoly finally crumbled. The advent of Vicente Fox appeared to signal an end to authoritarianism, but in fact presidential power devolved back, not to the people, but to local governors and alcaldes, more diffuse for sure, but still within the aegis of the state.

Nevertheless, Michael Reid at the Economist notes that "Mexico has changed radically. It is a much more democratic, pluralist and open society than it was under Salinas."

Yet in spite of this and in spite of the sustained economic growth of recent years, half a million Mexicans attempt to migrate into the US each year. Part of the problem is that manufacturing growth at the centre has come at the cost of rural impoverishment in the peripheries, and both have been accelerated by Mexico's membership of NAFTA. (Though without NAFTA, total exports would have been 50% lower and foreign direct investment 40% less, according to one study. Reid thinks the real problem has been a lack of EU-style regional development funds and proper sponsorship from el Norte.)

Today Mexico is no Scandinavian political paradise, but then if the late Stieg Larsson is to be believed, nor is Sweden. It's really no fairer to refer to it as an oligarchic kleptocracy than it would be to say the same of the USA.

It remains a 'low intensity' democracy, plagued by the impact of hot money and stop-start reform. Recently we've had a chuckle or two every time the Federal government's latest announcement touting its unprecedented motorway-building programme appears on ForoTV. "Now my avocados can travel further and further," says the farmer in the ad, leading us to such naughty thoughts as "not just avocados..."

The point is that anyone who has actually visited Mexico cannot help but be impressed by the infrastructure and will inevitably come away with the impression that this is far from being a monolithic two-tier society.

After the revolution Mexico, like many Latin American nations adopted expensive European-style social security systems without really endowing the state with the means to pay for them. They also tend to cover the middle classes and organised working classes better than they do the masses of rural poor.

Yet crucially, the rich of Mexico do seem to have a better understanding than their counterparts north of the border that they actually need their nation's poor people — and that they need them to be less poor, because poverty has been acting as a brake on Mexico's economic growth. Poverty-reduction remains one of the fundamental cross-party aims of the modern state, with education one of the key pillars of this policy.

Mexico currently trains more engineers each year than the USA, China or India.

Spot the ejote

Some snaps of the tradicional degustation menu at Casa Oaxaca, base of esteemed nuevo-mexicano chef Alejandro Ruiz Olmedo: six compact courses backed up with generous quantities of blue corn tostadas and pan de chapulín (grasshopper bread).

— Taquito de chapulines y guacamole (grasshoppers in little corn tacos, their salty edge burnished with avocado)

— Sopa de Guías con Chochoyotes (squash and greens soup with corn dumplings)

— Verde de Lengua (veal tongue in green mole)

— Amarillo de Venado (venison in yellow mole)

— Mole Negro con Guajolote (free range turkey in black mole)

— Nicuatole (classic Oaxacan corn pudding)

'Comida de menudeo' quipped V when I told her about the single French bean gracing the venison dish. I suppose you do have to be Japanese to get away with that sort of thing, but this really was the most delicious taster menu I'd tucked into since Kyoto.

In the clip below Chef Ruiz heads out to the abastos market in Oaxaca; you will get a sense why this city sports possibly the best regional cuisine in southern North America.

Death and the Idea of Mexico: Claudio Lomnitz (2)

"To all this the Indian responded: I know, father, that the dead do not eat meat, nor the bones. Instead, they place themselves above the food and suck out all its virtues and the substance that they need, and they leave behind what they don't need...And the servant of God responded that the intention of the faithful was not to feed the dead, but to give these alms to the ministers in the name of the dead, so that the priests would pray to God for their souls."

In the sixteenth century the Days of the Dead received far less public support than other Catholic festivals such as Corpus Christi — used as a public reaffirmation of the physical and spiritual conquest of New Spain.

On paper at least, the civic bias against All Souls' Day was rationalised by the friars as part of their cautious response to certain 'recalcitrant' tendencies within the native population. Specifically, the Aztecs had celebrated a two-part mortuary festival beginning in August (Miccailhuitontli and Xocotlhuetzi), which some felt offered a dangerous cultural bridge via which native idolatry might extend itself into the new order.

But perhaps the real reason the priests started to play down this festival is revealed by the excerpted quoted above from the account of Alonso de Espinoza's expedition to Oaxaca. Whereas in Spain all the food and other goodies presented as tribute was destined for the men of the cloth, the Indians obstinately persisted in the view that it was their ancestors who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of these ofrendas.

And it seems that unsupervised indigenous rituals typically involved a far greater quantity of food offerings than was the norm back in Spain, as well as a certain degree of unfettered banqueting: convites y borracheras.

Lomnitz also notes that in the early post-conquest period Indians were (rather conveniently) exempt from the obligations to fast, seek penance and abstain from work on the first two days of November. The tougher religious observance expected of the Spaniards was, he adds, "meant to serve both as an example of what being an old Christian was and as a legitimising device for the Spaniard's social superiority."

Death and the Idea of Mexico: Claudio Lomnitz (1)

The notion of Purgatory, adopted as official church doctrine in 1274, was arguably one of the great commercial innovations of the Middle Ages. It was Catholicism's iPod, turning a good business into a great one.

In the early days of Christian faith, bodies were typically buried outside city walls, and St Augustine observed that the prevalent mortuary ritual was rather short on religious significance. But somewhere between 1024 and 1033 Abbot Odilo of Cluny took an important step in the instigation of a proper Christian death cult when he invented the holiday of All Souls' Day, choosing November 2, the day after All Saints' Day.

As Lomnitz notes, "The relationship between the dead and the living is a key to social control and social reproduction in any society." With this new festival and the complex array of masses, prayers, acts of contrition and so-called 'suffrages' that the medieval church established as potential alleviation for the souls being blanched by purgatorial fire, the priesthood took on a formal new role as mediators between past and present members of the religious community.

Intercession was of course a whole new revenue stream based on monopolistic control of post-mortem suffering and control over 'the good death'. And bodies were now of course placed in burial grounds around the church, with more saintly relics stored within it. (Most notably within the altarpieces.)

Today when I hear that someone has gone round to our local church to pay for a mass for a departed loved-on, the compassion I undoubtedly feel is inevitably preceded by the less charitable thought 'what a dupe!'.

As a lapsed medieval historian I have to square this disdain with the comparative respect I have always had for medieval systems of belief. How can I justify this apparent double standard? Well, for a start, I base my opinion of my contemporaries on the extent to which they have had the opportunity to extract themselves from a culture founded to a large extent on ignorance.

Medieval people had many more unexplained things to cope with. They also had a number of consciously clever ways of operating their multifarious superstitions — so we see them manipulating magical sequences of numbers (or even colours) when deploying candles and spoken invocations. In contrast, many of the modern faithful barely seem to understand the theological underpinnings of the practices they so slavishly repeat.

And, as Lomnitz also points out, just about every schismatic movement that took shape after the launch of purgatory, strongly rejected the concept in its entirety, so there have always been plenty of people around capable of seeing it for the system of exploitation that it is.

"Sun, sea and severed heads"

It would be no small irony should this week's Cancún jolly organised by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change be comprehensively incinerated by a methane-related explosion.

Spontaneously-combusting resort hotels are just the latest challenge facing Mexico's tourism industry. "Sun, sea and severed heads: Mexico is not a holiday destination for the faint-hearted," wrote one of the Economist's notoriously un-bylined hacks this week.

Yet after the premature dubbing of swine flu as Mexican flu brought the 2009 season to an abrupt close, it would seem that visitor numbers have returned to the 2008 level of 22.6m, though this has been achieved in part by discounting (5% on average).

The Yucatán had the advantage of being quite a long drive from the most violent states (Guerrero for example has twenty times the number of murders) but much of the development along its coast over the past couple of decades has involves reclaiming swamp, hence the rather disconcerting new phenomenon of the exploding lobby.

Which is why I get pained looks from my father every time I mention taking a short trip over the border. As if living in Guatemala wasn't bad enough, he's now discovered that there really is a Guatepeor.

Of course the really bad stuff is mostly going closer to the northern border, Ciudad Juárez in particular. Last weekend saw the winding up of an exhibition at Shoreditch Town Hall entitled 400 Women, which was conceived in the following manner by Tamsyn Challenger, who went on to commission works from 175 fellow artists, men and women:

“This project began in 2005 when I was commissioned to make a feature for BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour. I travelled to Mexico and met with some of the families and was struck by their need to hand me postcards that had been generated as another aid to finding their loved ones. These images were black, white and pink and poorly produced but they started the concept in my mind and on the long flight home I had a half formed idea for what has become the project 400 Women. The concept relies heavily on a large-scale collaboration and, for me, each participating artist represents one of the murdered women, in some way invoking her, so that she can challenge humanity. Each image produced will stand as a statement against gender violence.”

Watching how The Review Show covered the exhibition's opening left me with mixed feelings. One doesn't have to be in the PR industry for very long to realise how different awareness is from comprehension.

Anyway, nobody is quite sure whether this rampant case of gynocide is an offshoot of the generally murderous conditions in the border city, or whether it reflects something more sinister, such as an entire masculine culture turned serial killer, or even sexual violence tourism. (Mexico welcomes 50m day trippers annually.)

Penguin has published a good backgrounder to the present turmoil in our northern neighbour: The Last Narco: Hunting El Chapo, The World's Most Wanted Drug Lord by Malcolm Beith, summarised nicely by Mark Ford in the LRB. (21/10/10)

Beith explains how America's regulation of the use of opiates from 1914 onwards didn't create tensions with Mexico until Nixon declared the first 'war on drugs'. Nixon told his chief-of-staff that the real problem was 'the blacks' at home — he just needed a system which took care of this without actually appearing to do so — so it wasn't until the arrival of Ronald Reagan that narcotics were formally recognised as a matter of national security and this onetime asunto of domestic law enforcement mutated into a key platform of US foreign policy.

During the late 80s Mexico's governing PRI led by American-educated Carlos Salinas fell under the spell of neoliberalism. And so, to some extent, did the then senior capo Gallardo, who broke up his plazas (routes pa'l norte), just as Salinas was breaking up public companies.

The lieutenants inheriting these delegated power structures were the original cartel bosses, and their lives became that much easier as Salinas deregulated the banks (making it easier to stash the loot) and the US administration tightened border controls, thereby improving the environment for organised smugglers.

Then Mexico joined NAFTA in '94, and the cartels started frantically buying up trucking companies and factories along the border, anticipating the good times to come. The immediate news for the agrarian economy was less positive however, as an influx of cheap American corn quickly deprived several million people of their livelihoods. New Presidente Vicente Fox duly suggested that Mexico's displaced peasants ought to welcome the opportunity to transform themselves into 'true businessmen', and of course, many did.

A consequence of the long-overdue conclusion of PRI rule at the start of the new century was that the old patronage relationships were immediately inverted. Police and politicos now largely worked for the traffickers, no longer vice versa.

In 2006 Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa was elected in circumstances not unlike those of the younger Bush, with (just over) half the population thinking 'what a swizz!' And there's nothing like a good war to take people's minds off legitimacy issues, is there?

Calderón had barely finished pinning the Presidential sash onto himself, when he dispatched 45,000 troops north of the capital, and wherever the army has turned up — even in those areas where the murder rate had been declining before 2006 — the violence has escalated dramatically. Close to 30,000 deaths were recorded for the first four years of Calderón's administration, though he has put it about that 90% of these were cartel members — a stat which, if unfudged, provides an indication of the enthusiasm with which his predecessor's call to private enterprise had been received.

Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields suggests that allowing the military to investigate its own abuses may have contributed to the levels of unsolved murder torture and rape in that most deadly place to live, where 'armed commandos' has become a catch-all phrase for them that done it. "If you see dust," Calderón nevertheless observed last August"it's because we are cleaning the house."

31 reporters have been killed or disappeared since 2006.

Sinaloa-raised El Chapo Guzmán is the classic would-be narco-emperor, turning the hostility of the Federal government into a force for consolidation (less than 15% of narcs arrested since the army arrived have been Guzmán's boys) and stepping into the space left by an uncaring formal economy, funding infrastructure projects like schools, hospitals and churches, even private homes. Business remains good. More contraband is making it over the border and last year the Mexican authorities seized less cocaine than it had back in 1991.

Meanwhile the Obama administration has offered to extend the Merida Initiative (a $1.6bn bribe set up in 2008), and continues to use misleading terminology such as 'insurgency' in reference to the highly profitable capitalist enterprises flourishing south of the border. Murder keeps the prices up, it seems. Over on the (apparently) legal wing of this boom trade, Mexico's financial institutions and America's arms dealers and military contractors also have little to complain about.

Happy Day of the Dead

Our early morning dose of polemical social and political commentary from across the northern border came with added skeletons this morning. Brozo and guests duly noted that today while some people se hacen los muertos, others se pasan de vivos. That almost every day in Mexico is now a day of the difuntos was one of several topical quips I could have predicted long in advance of the programme's airing.

All Saints Day in Guatemala involves a somewhat less multi-faceted evocation of mortality. The most camera-friendly of the local traditions takes place in Santiago Sacatepéquez, where little over a hundred years ago the inhabitants started sending up giant kites into the sky bearing messages for the departed. Kites, a Chinese invention, were introduced to Guatemala by the Franciscans.

I know this because this is also one of those mornings when Guatemala's most famed 'historiador' gets to show off his corpulent frame at the front of the newsroom. Thanks to Héctor Gaitán I am usually reluctant to tell my Chapin friends about my academic background, because here in Guatemala the historian is essentially a 'cuenta historias', a walking costal of anecdotal delights such as headless priests and pianos that play by themselves; the sort of person who, once driven away from respectable dinner tables, will seek employment in Antigua's parque central as a 'guide' — where he will proceed to latch onto gullible gringos ready to regard any old made up prattle as authoritative local tradition.

Bicentenary balacera

This morning V had been having revisionist thoughts about her favourite parking spot underneath the Tikal Futura.

It has always seemed the logical place to leave the car whenever we head over to Miraflores to catch a movie, but sight of a Land Rover "hecho colador" on the news bulletins last night has been somewhat discouraging.

As ever no-one is quite sure what went down in the hotel's basement just before midday yesterday, but the shoot-out appears to have kicked off when a major police surveillance operation "failed in the tactical aspect" according to local security analyst Mario Mérida.

The PNC were tracking one Mauro Salomón Ramírez Barrios and his bodyguards and must have got themselves made in the underground parqueo. The ensuing fifteen minute exchange of fire resulted in one dead cop and four captured narco-henchmen, but not it seems, the 35-year-old Ramírez Barrios himself.*

Police immediately suspected the detained goons of being secret Mexicans because they spoke funny and could not answer 'simple' questions like 'when is independence day in Guatemala?'.

Now bear in mind that Guatemala and Mexico celebrate their independence on the same date, September 15th, so we're dealing with some really dumb Mexicans because a) they could so easily have hazarded a guess and b) you'd think they might have spotted all the flags in the shop windows on the day they chose to shoot up the mall.

Pictures in the local newspapers (such as the one above) show members of a SWAT team pointing automatic weapons at shopworkers and customers spreadeagled on the floor in front of them with outstretched arms...a measure apparently designed to reduce panic and facilitate an orderly evacuation.

I had considered heading north across the border this week to experience the Mexican bicentenary first hand, but in the end decided to watch the mega-desfile at home on telly, having been put off by the flooding in Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca. I will instead head in the opposite direction for my forthcoming mini-break. (UPDATE: the highway up to Tapachula has now been completely sundered, which is probably why those Mexicans were stopping at Bullock's to get some fresh boxers!)

We turned on Foro TV around nine and caught the mid-section of a massive parade featuring elaborate andas, colourful costumes, an enormous inflatable Kukulkan and numerous elements evincing a healthy degree of national self-parody. (There were also some acrobatic displays in central paved area which were a bit too Cirque du Soleil for my liking.)

Meanwhile light effects were projected onto the cathedral, the best of which involved a series of off-set images of the same facade which made it appear that the whole building was dancing to a tropical beat.

The procession over, seven tons of gunpowder then exploded in the Zócalo, fortunately in the form of a spectacular fireworks display. A 20m high 'colossus' was then lifted into place. This weird plaster-based (?) statue supposedly represents a generic historical Mexican male, and by the time he had been set on his plinth, his sword had been broken and a big chunk had been knocked out of his left boot.

Just before 11pm local time the Mexican flag was delivered into the hands of Felipe Calderón by a truly impressive little squad of goose-stepping soldiers in nineteenth century uniforms and, having literally snatched it from them, he emerged with his family onto the balcony of the Presidential Palace and rang the bell above using a long tassled cord, which then swung back and slapped him on the right cheek.

The Presidente's wife was at his side on the as he thrice shouted "Viva Mexicoooo!" , encouraging the masses below to respond. Out of his direct line of vision, she herself managed one half-hearted "viva..." but at the second opportunity merely rolled her eyes a bit and then grimaced slightly when he repeated the exortation a third time.

The crowds across Mexico were massive, no doubt in part because the country's most senior prelate had declared it would be a sin of ommission for his countrymen not to festejar this landmark date. We'll have to wait another eleven years to see what Guatemala's own eminent theologians have to say on this matter.

*UPDATE: It now appears that this was at least a three-way pelea, as journalists believe that a group of sicarios was simultaneously trying to dispose of the San Marcos gang as the cops closed in. Some also speculate whether elements of the PNC were in fact batting for the other side in this encounter, as one of the injured policemen was found to be carrying a significant chunk of change in Dollars, Euros and Pesos, and unlike many of his colleagues who later arrived on scene, was well armed and armoured from the outset.

A report from forensics

While I was in the UK in January I had lunch with a geologist who did his best to persuade me that the notion that the dinosaurs were seriously compromised by a meteor strike is one of those paradigms which emerges and quickly ossifies into an orthodoxy which nobody (but him apparently) is willing to challenge. He'd been to the Yucatán on a field trip and reported finding no conclusive evidence of a large crater there either.

Well this week the consensus against his renegade opinion took a firmer hold on the subject when, at 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US, a panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, and concluded that the prime suspect has to remain a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on the Yucatán peninsula 65m years ago. You can read the BBC's report here...

Winter Olympics

It's another lovely cloudless morning here in Antigua, but the temperature has dipped noticeably, perhaps so that we might get ourselves more in the mood for watching coverage of Vancouver 2010 this afternoon.

No Central or South American nation has ever won a medal at the Winter Games, though you'd think the Argies were overdue one. Consequently, the interest on local terrestrial TV is rather more limited than say during the Mundial. (Come June we can expect the whole country to come to a virtual standstill for a month.)

We tracked the parade of nations on Saturday, hoping (against all hope) to spot a Guatemalan delegation. "No llegaron, ni para vender granizadas," noted V acerbically once we'd hit the Hs.

Mexico has sent a lone athlete however: Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe, at 51 the oldest competitor in Vancouver. He's the son of Prince Alfonso, legendary founder of the Marbella Club, and has been known to release pop albums in Mexico under the pseudonym of Andy Himalaya.

Although here representing Mexico, the blue-blooded alpine skier resides in Liechtenstein, a tiny place that doesn't seem to need his help in winning medals at the Winter Olympics. From the stats displayed by NBC I gathered that you could fit the entire populations of Liechtenstein, Monaco and Antigua Guatemala into Wembley Stadium and still have room left over for everyone who's read the novels of last year's Nobel prize-winner Herta Müller.

Poor Georgia. They've acquired the knack of earning themselves the greatest sympathy applause the last couple of times that the Olympians have paraded.

The Innuit put in an appearance too, along with other indigenous contingents which collectively danced a joyous welcome to the world around the strangely zombie-like totems pictured above. Oddly enough, in spite of choosing to live in the frozen northern wastes, the Innuit's greatest contribution to the Olympic movement would appear to have been the kayak, more likely to be seen in competition at the Summer Games, though I imagine you could get down a mountain quite fast in one.

While I enjoy the Downhill (though I don't know why. I think it has to do with childhood memories of Franz Klammer's wild rides) V enjoys the skating. China's married pair Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo deservedly claimed Gold in an event where the line between mediocrity and sublimity is starker than the scoring suggests.

I'll be in Vancouver for a couple of days in May, my maiden visit to Canada, by which time it will have warmed up a bit...one hopes.

This week we've also tuned into TV Globo's extensive coverage of the Rio Carnival. How can so much fun make such tedious viewing? It would be more entertaining to spend several hours watching English people tossing pancakes (...or cross country skiing for that matter.)

Anyway, a Lenten afternoon on the sofa beckons. Speaking of which, something I read earlier reminded me of the famous put-down delivered by the late, great Alan Clark, Minister in Thatcher's last government, who dismissed her nemesis Michael Heseltine as the sort of man who "bought his own furniture".

It is true that if there is one thing that is sadly lacking in La Antigua it's an IKEA superstore. But for anyone willing to venture into the badlands of Guatemala City there's plenty of mass-produced, but 'designer' furniture to be had at the likes of Sears and Siman.

A friend bought me a copy of Stuff White People Like for Christmas, the dead tree version of the hilarious blog by Christian Landers. It's had me chuckling self-consciously on numerous occasions over the past few days, not least with No54: Kitchen Gadgets. Plenty of those at Siman too. I'm glad it's over 30 minutes away really.

Snowmageddon

This is what it looked like a couple of days ago outside the home of our friends Betty and Scott, not far from Washington DC. Until today they hadn't managed to get out at all. Supplies of food were holding up, but the Zacapa Centenario was reportedly running low.*

In comparison my recent dip into the northern winter seems comparatively un-testing.

I'm certainly glad to be home now. Back in the UK I had been starting to feel a bit like a fish out of water — or perhaps like one of those parrots in Greenwich Park.

And on the several trips I made up to London I'd been beset by a sudden panic as I recognised the sense of heaviness brought on by the gravitational pull of the metropolis. For two years now I've wallowed in the very bearable lightness of being that comes with having escaped it, but I now realise that it only takes a ride or two on the tube before one's features start assuming the careworn grimace worn by the majority of one's fellow passengers down there.

Narrowly escaping 'snowmageddon' in New York, I flew down into the Yucatán and then bused myself into Chiapas. By this time the combined weight of my two cases (let alone the mochila with the tequila reposado and laptop in it and the plastic bag bearing the catalogue from the Van Gogh exhibition) was close to 65kg.

The big case had to be hoisted onto the roof of the shuttle in San Cristóbal using a heavy strap with a hook on the end of it. When the driver pulled up some 150m short of the Immigration building at the border I felt like a mula in all senses of the term.

Still, V was very pleased with most of the little luxuries I'd lugged from Heathrow to Huehuetenango, especially the edible ones. To celebrate we cooked ourselves something of a fusion dish last night: genuine Italian farfalle with tuna and peas, in a Indonesian shrimpy sambal sauce.

The Cuchumatanes are impressive and the road through them is much improved. Note to self: must return here with car, wife and dogs and explore a bit during the Guatemalan verano.

I'm beginning to think that as with the Cylons, there are only eight different types of traveller one is likely to meet on the shuttle between Antigua and San C de las C. How many times will I have to do this trip before I am confronted with my own facsimile?

A quick glance around the minibus revealed the middle-aged Mexican couple visiting Guatemala for the first time, the know-it-all European girl with blonde dreads and tats who's practically a resident now and would rather not mix with her fellow foreigners etc.** Different DNA for sure, but typologically almost identical.

One last observation about the state of the British economy as it pops a periscope up out of recession. No matter what it is you want to buy over there, they're determined to sell you something else with it.

A new pair of iPhone earbuds? Want insurance for them? A birthday card. How about some half price Cadbury's chocolate? A ticket to see Avatar? Have you tried the VIP seats?

Everyone's into upselling. There's hardly a product that doesn't come with a side-order of figurative fries. And it's not hard to see why, because it's a tried and tested way of spotting the people who think the bad times are over and don't mind being a bit discretionary with their income again.

* Their Chapin neighbours have been shoveling the white stuff out of their drive and into the main road in a manner not dissimilar to our own, whose technique for ridding themselves of piles of dust in front of their portones usually involves relocating said polvío to an area in front of someone else's house.

** In fact the unsmiling European blonde (they travel alone or in pairs) who acts as if Mexico is presenting itself to her as one big inconvenience, is also a rather common sight on the first class buses of OCC and ADO.

Firedance of the Day #2

Firedance of the Day #1

Calentandome los huesos

When I didn't even have to put on a jumper for New Year's Eve, it did cross my mind that we might be about to get lucky and have a mild January this year in Antigua. Normal service was quickly restored however.

Before setting off on this jaunt to the north I'd been mentally warming myself up by repeatedly viewing this video I shot at an unspoiled stretch beach on what V calls the Yuca-tanga; a location I was determined to revisit.

But this little clip was taken back in October when I was wandering around with a towel around my neck several hours after sundown in order to prevent all the mositure inside of me from leaking away. I'd been drinking litre bottles of water every hour. This time I seem to have built up a little collection of the things.

The beach was of course still there and still blindingly white, although there were a few more Septics wandering up and down it now that they have decided to be afraid of exploding transatlantic aeroplanes instead of lung-swamping flu bugs.

Yet when the sun dipped behind a cloud, it was all a bit brrrrrrr. Indeed, a cab driver informed me on my arrival that things had recently been even chillier, when the worst cold snap in 124 years passed over the peninsula.

Back home in Antigua V has declared herself officially emponchada. Guatemala is one of those countries (very much like my own) that seems unable to cope with any kind of extreme weather, be it a somewhat atypical wet season rainfall or a sudden surprising dip in the temperature.

Yesterday, after further snowfall in the UK, "the economy ground to a halt" according to the newspapers. Still the forecast predicts a slight thawing today and tomorrow and so I should be able to get around next week without one of those enormous quad snow bikes that the gringo on our street bizarrely brought down to Guatemala with him from Florida last year. Does he know something we don't?

Epic death squad fail

The mayor of Mexico's richest municipality has inadvertently revealed his powers of premonition by announcing the demise of the man who tried to assassinate him some three hours before the body was discovered:

"[Mauricio] Fernandez, the mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia...was applauded when he revealed that Hector 'Black' Saldaña, a cartel chief turned kidnapper, had been killed. The announcement, however, was premature – according to Mexico City prosecutors, Saldaña's blindfolded body was not found for another three hours, and was not identified until two days later."

Surfer has reminded me about the great old Ronny Barker sketch where he's playing a TV news anchorman in the USSR. Reporting that a leading comrade has been run over by a car, he then adds "ah no, sorry, that's next week's news."

Notes from abroad: Fire Dancers

The 'legendary fire dancers' at the Blue Parrot in Playa were a suitable subject for my first HD upload to YouTube.




Watch in full HD here!

Notes from abroad: San Cristóbal de las Casas

In some ways SC de LC is a poor man's version of both Oaxaca and Antigua. And yet, la neta is that this town possesses a number of things that we lack down here in Guatemala's former colonial capital.

Foremost amongst these is an excellent Lebanese restaurant, run by — yes — real Lebanese people.

In fact my waiter at Arez turned out to be a former resident of Baker Street and the chef had worked for seven years at Beirut Express, one of my favourite middle-eastern eateries on Edgeware Road. This was the last meal I had in Mexico and it was undoubtedly the most mouthwatering. (The rice dish was a particular treat.)

San Cristóbal certainly isn't the gastronomic hotspot that Oaxaca has become (or indeed Campeche), but there appear to be a number of enticing middle-ground dining options, combined with a lack of both waste-of-space pretentious nonsense (such as Nicolas) and the overly touristic presentation of comida nacional in Antigua.

This is surely a factor of the city's comparatively larger scale. Antigua might have better bars and nightspots, but it lacks the everyday live music scene and the sheer exuberance of the locally-resident merrymakers in San Cristóbal.

The latter city can also boast cheaper típicos, a very well-stocked and not too exhorbitant wine shop called Super Cava (and let us not forget Ron Fandango at $2 a litre), fully predestrianised shopping streets and a certain amount of authentic guerrilla chic (take it or leave it...).

A complete set of my snaps can be viewed here.

"Chucho Guizado" Huh?

...o pisado?



I love this guy. He's such a coche and his Spanish is sooo atrocious. (He has to be putting it on though, because he's married to a Mexican TV celeb.)

Mexican Wave 2.0?

Now that the first wave of fajita flu has turned out to be a bit of a damp squib they are prepping us for a bit of a late summer panic when a second wave might — just might — take hold.

Still no confirmed cases here in Guatemala, but 18 suspected ones have been thrown out. Anyway, it's harder to spook people in a land where nearly 20 people die each day from the violence virus.

Up in Mexico they've had to admit that many of the people they thought had died from influenza porcina did in fact expire as a result of something completely different. Meanwhile they've waved goodbye to their economy.

A better reason to be scared turned up in Guatemala this weekend...an earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale. It was certainly the strongest of the year so far and perhaps the most powerful I have experienced whilst sitting at my desk up in the studio. (3rd Floor)

We both felt a little seasick afterwards. Nothing fell off the shelves though and the quake was obviously not significant enough to make it onto CNN, the BBC or even the front page of today's El Periódico.

The Daily Mail is of course way too busy trying to generate panic amongst its high-minded readership, though unlike its conservative counterparts in the US, has yet to find a way to clearly link the deadly plague of microbes with that of migrant workers.

Masquerade

The Guardian has a fine selection of customised fajita flu face masks.