Pipe Dreams

UNICEF has lately described the situation in Sudan as “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history”.

Over 5.6m people have been displaced as a result of the ongoing spat between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. But the eyes of the performatively-caring world are apparently glued elsewhere.

That situation has a concentrated cluster of antecedents. During the course of the twentieth century millions of people were displaced by wars, famine, revolutions and so on. The two global wars and the conclusion of European colonial adventures resulted in multiple border changes which left vast multitudes standing without a seat, so to speak.

Of all of these, the one that continues to haunt the conscience of the world is ‘Palestine’. There are very specific reasons for this and Israelis certainly cannot be blamed for all of them.

Over in Florida there are thousands of Cubans and their descendants who wish for nothing else than to turn the clock back, for a glorious ‘homecoming’ in which they are restored to their ancestral lands, Havana mansions etc. The Global Left has no interest whatsoever in their pipe dream, because they persist in their obstinate support for the island’s repressive, calamity-inducing dictatorship.

At the end of WWII there were many native German-speakers living to the east of what is now Germany. They had been there for generations, but the end of the Third Reich meant that they had to up sticks and shift to the west where they were reabsorbed into the Germany of today. This process is precisely what has not happened with the Palestinians.

Remember, historically there were few Arabs in the Levant. They came en masse as conquerors behind their Caliph and with a truly fanatical belief in their own worldview. They built their prestige religious centre smack on top of the ruins of the temple where the indigenous people has worshiped in Jerusalem, in a move that the Spanish would soon after imitate in the New World.  Now they are effectively trying to guilt trip the West into thinking that the state of Israel is one of its own colonial impositions, and that any Jews demanding access to the Temple Mount are guilty of causing abominable offence.

Queen Rania berates us for our leaders’ attitude towards the inhabitants of Gaza, but the dirty secret of the Arab world is how they shut the door back in the 1940s and have kept it shut, and the Kingdom Jordan has been one of the worst offenders in this respect, even though Egypt's position has crept into the international consciousness during the past week or so. The Arab states have allowed this situation to fester and one might conclude that this was the plan all along.

The Global Left has always supported the cause of the Palestinians and this is not a bad thing per se as long as recognition is given to the fundamental constraints which operate on the situation, beyond any supposed Israeli malice, and as long as this support is not consciously or even unconsciously feeding the cycle of reciprocal violence.

The acute problem today is that a significant sub-set of this ideological movement are moving very blithely into “be careful what you wish for" territory. Do the fellow travellers of rampant political, expansionist Islam really understand the implications of that “from the river to the sea” chant?

Israel is a broadly prosperous, peaceful and liberal state that provides a national identity for 7m Jews and 2m Arabs. If this were somehow swept aside in a genocidal orgy, giving rise to an fundamentalist state backed by Iran right on the shores of the Med, there is nobody living today in a pluralist European society that could genuinely feel safe.

Gaza is not Palestine and Hamas is not Gaza, but each time it is Hamas that opens up the wound with its rockets and then cynically hides beneath the citizens above who once voted them in, but have been denied the opportunity to vote them out. The people of Gaza very specifically lack the right to protest that many outside Gaza have been exercising since the Hamas pogrom on October 7. 

Some of the nonsense I've been hearing recently reminds me of stern lectures I used to receive from bleeding-heart lefties in the eighties who were in complete denial about those 'resistance' fighters of the Republican movement in Ulster. Women and children were being slaughtered indiscriminately, but this did not fit the narrative. Nor did the fact that the IRA explicitly functioned as a terrorist organisation set up like a thuggish criminal gang which preyed on vulnerable members of the wider community even as it supposedly took on the British. 

"Free Ulster" they said, as if that would result in anything other than a bloodbath until some of the fundamentals were resolved. 

As elements of the Global Left shifts from wishful thinking in the Middle East to frankly genocidal thinking, they have to know that there can be no peaceful solution whilst the likes of Hamas remain as a force in the region.

Peaceful coexistence is not, by definition, what the protagonists of Jihad are after.

Collateral

During the course of their most well-remembered battle for self-preservation, western liberal societies committed acts which I have always considered to be atrocities, even though the question of whether they were avoidable or excusable is surely more nuanced...Dresden, Hiroshima etc.

It always used to bother me that my parents and many of their generation took a rather absolute line on this. The enemy was evil, representing a clear existential threat and compassion for their citizen victims was to be muted at best.

Cross-generational family arguments ensued.

And now that generation has largely passed, I still think it is wrong to withhold one's empathy for the civilian victims of conflict, no matter how fundamental it seems, yet I remain very wary of the "both sides" equivocation, which was used to very ill effect here in Central America during the era of civil wars.

In the case of the Japanese empire one can detect clear precursors of the fallacious notion that it's not brutal imperialist conquest if it is not Europeans doing it.

This has been adopted very successfully by the Arabs, in particular because the Europeans themselves have been encouraged to internalise  this myopic historical perspective.

A new existential threat faces generations of westerners with no direct household memory of amoral totalitarianism. Like my parents and their friends they are, sadly, going to have to learn to calibrate their sympathies for those caught up behind the aegis of the wicked, unholy holiness of demented ideology.

 

 

Shahada

 

 

 

Did I find it helpful? Yes, and terrifying.

The expansionist intolerance of political Islam is infiltrating the conscience of our pluralistic yet increasingly self-doubting societies in a truly alarming fashion.

Even in cities like London and New York, which have had direct experiences of the most indiscriminate forms of the violence perpetrated by this toxic ideology, many citizens are now permitting it to piggyback on a combination of their sometimes dilated and distorted sense of compassion, a dangerously unacknowledged antisemitic drift, and occasionally just rudimentary moral and cultural cowardice.

"Free Palestine" was a banner that murderous Marxist extremists could freely operate behind in the 1970s, and it could prove even handier now for inverted "anti-colonial" Arab colonisers and their co-religionists.

The useful idiots of the Metropolitan Police have now removed their supine apology for Jihadism on the streets of London.

 

Revolution Rebooted

Guatemalans have lately taken to the streets, not to perpetrate a new revolution but to defend the gains they are still owed from that original one in 1944.

At stake, their sovereign right to pick their leaders via suffrage, seemingly threatened imminently by a cabal of public officials and their faciliators.

In demonstrating their resistance to perceived abuses of power, chapines have had to traverse a narrow path, eschewing violence, and even though they are protecting a democratic decision already ‘banked’, there’s a need to avoid overtly partisan politics in this protest.

Such is the history of this country that many disadvantaged sectors have only a restricted range of options for resistance, and the favoured tactic thus far has been the roadblock.

Yesterday, a report was rapidly replicating online of the foreign-born owner of a micro-brewery at the edge of town — Cervecería 14 — who had purportedly confronted demonstrators aggressively, referring to them as “imbeciles”.

One can chuckle at this archetypal PR kamikaze attack, but it’s illustrative of some wider points. In the free world, of which this nation aspires to be a part, complete with a transparent, mature democracy, everyone is entitled to an opinion. I have friends here who oppose the blockades, largely because of the economic stranglehold they impose, and they should feel free to voice such views.

Yet the situation is both delicate and historically complex, and thus related interventions probably need to be shorn of all malice and fallacy, even if such speech is implicitly permitted up in el Norte.

Having experienced the Estallido Social in Chile up close, I can point to how there was some frenetic violence “on both sides” (there's that newly-modish term again) and extensive damage to private property, along with an us-n-them vibe which informed a gathering radicalisation of the revolt and expanding social confrontation.

This is NOT what most reasonable people wish to see happen here, and individuals with rather narrow vested interests, especially foreigners, would be best advised to respect the struggle undertaken by a majority of the people of this country and to share some of the sacrifices apparently required.

It's hard to pinpoint a contemporary example from around Latin America suggesting that tyranny is good for business in the long term anyway.

I am fairly certain the speaker above is María Mercedes Coroy, the actress known for Ixcanul, La Llorona and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (@mariamercedescoroy)

 

Although born in Tapachula, shew grew up on the flank of Agua in Santa María de Jesús. The traje típico seen here could be the clincher.

More than anything, what has distinguished the popular uprising of 2023 in Guatemala compared to say 1944 or indeed 2015, is the way that the national conscience has been nurtured and conveyed by the nation’s ancestral communities.

The Maya have a long history of near unconquerability. Before those earliest Spanish expeditions from Cuba reached what is now Veracruz, they were beaten off at several locations along the opposite coast of the Yucatán and Mayan resistance to the Conquest would persist in several forms into the Modern era, most notably the Caste Wars, ending 1915.

Hotbed

Our extraordinarily sharp new lawyer shares a surname, probably coincidentally, with one of our longest-term neighbours, Claudia. 

It sounds unswervingly French, but a claim could be made for its Englishness; Norman-Englishness at least. 

It is very similar in sound and formulation to the surname of a consistently high-achieving Canadian-British family whose notable members include Marcel, Louis, Paul and Justin.

It might be translated as meaning ‘compost’, but I have suggested a more appropriate alternative as the title of this post. 

Anyway, at the end of last week we ran into Claudia close to the nearby parque and she showed us some recent pics of one of her offspring, now residing full time in St Albans, England.

To do this she made use of a recent model Samsung smartphone and this sent me into a bit of a revery about how the world has changed so much in just a pair of generations, really. 

My father visited both North and South America as a young man, but by BOAT.  

When I first came to Central America in the 80s, communications with the outside world were hard to come by. Guatel…enough said.

When the Loma Prieto earthquake occurred in California in 1989 (yesterday was the 34th anniversary), we all gathered in the one bar in town that had a TV with cable: Mistral. 

Sometimes when I remember this it is a flat-screen telly, but of course it cannot have been. 

All the gringos then in Antigua (like, all six of them) were gathered there, eyes glued.  

A couple of years later, although I was starting to make a few tentative steps online with a WWW-less Internet and CompuServe, in my professional life in London I was tied to the dreaded fax machine and even Telex. 

As a kid I was privileged enough to have had family holidays around Europe and then as a teen I undertook a series of railway odysseys around the same continent, repeatedly dipping behind the Iron Curtain, but so-called long haul travel remained expensive and still open only to a relatively affluent elite. 

Some months before I first came here a friend sent me a postcard from Honduras and this seemed to have reached my pigeonhole at Girton from one of the most remote and exotic locations (!), and at the time I was sitting several afternoons a week in one of the isolated upper levels of the Cambridge University Library, reading up on the Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia and dreaming of unlikely expeditions to places like Tashkent, today altogether more readily accessible. 

And so to Claudia and her smartphone. She belongs to the generation of V's oldest brother Felipe. They grew up together as children, and she still lives right on the edge of what was V's father's substantial original plot in El Panorama. 

She seemingly hasn't moved much in her life, at least not permanently, for she has travelled in way her own grandparents might have marveled at, but the world around her has changed significantly and her real time access to those changes and ability to navigate them with ease is very apparent. 

One more sign of change over a comparatively short period of time. When V and I were first 'dating' I was under orders to return her to the family home by around 8pm at the latest every evening. 

This mostly involved a last ditch taxi dash from what is now 'La Calzada', then a mostly deserted avenue after dusk, but sometimes we would have enough spare time to walk. And between her finger-tapping father and the Ramada hotel (now the Soleil) at the edge of the Calle Sucia, there was absolutely NOTHING, not a single structure, street lamp etc, just unnerving darkness and a road edged by dirt or mud right the way through. 

Taxis sometimes seemed genuinely reluctant to do the journey. Rather like the Isle of Dogs in the period just before we set up home there. 

Bolas de Nieve

As I prepare the early drafts of my little book on four decades of life and experiences in Central America, I realised this week that there's going to have to be a stand-alone chapter on some of the strange, often counter-intuitive notions one often comes across around here. 

Even supposedly erudite, educated people occasionally give voice to them. 

The most recent example — we can dub it The Snowball Effect — is the conviction that when someone is recorded doing something overtly anti-social or otherwise reprehensible in public — be it racist, homophobic or gender abuse or perhaps even cruelty to innocents or animals — it is the person who does the recording and makes it available to the media, old or new, who is thereafter morally responsible for any viral re-transmission of the content, plus all of the consequences thereof, and not in fact the subject of the media or report. 

The good citizen is thus a bad citizen, a snowball-pusher worthy of  censure, loss of reputation, employment opportunities and so on, regardless how deplorable the originating words or actions of the person who had stepped out of line in the open air. 

There are plenty of other examples of such arrevesado thinking, but these will probably have to await publication, to see if they in turn might be bolas of the aforementioned sort.

Girton turns 150

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the foundation of Girton, the first institution in the United Kingdom to offer university-level education for women. 

 

The Old Wing was commenced in 1873. Three generations of the Waterhouse family, starting with Alfred, would complete the principal buildings on the site.

I am not sure how completely true it could be, but during my undergrad years at the college there was an 'urban myth' circulating those seemingly endless corridors that the Neo-Gothic/Tudor structure in red brick and terracotta was deliberately laid down so that it might be repurposed as a lunatic asylum in case the new-fangled idea of female higher education didn't take off. One section of the college has rather tellingly retained the name 'Hospital Wing'.

A more detailed narrative of the foundation can be found here.

Our eminent founder, Emily Llewelyn Davies raised £2,000, including £50 from George Eliot, for her 'college for women'.

The first five students arrived at Benslow House in Hitchin for the Michaelmas Term of 1869, but in 1872 a new permanent site for up to 50 was acquired. "That infidel place" was soon being lampooned by Punch magazine and sent up in music hall ditties.

In 1998 V and I attended a special March Ball at Girton dubbed Semicentium which marked 50 years since the first proper degrees were issued to members, a slightly bittersweet anniversary as this was also a recognition that by 1948 Cambridge had fallen behind Oxford in respect of gender equality. (My Aunt had been an undergraduate at Girton just before this milestone date and so left without her BA and its free upgrade.)

Men were first admitted in 1976.

All the toilets, baths and showers are gender-neutral, at least they were in my day.

 

Los Genios

An often irreverent, fictionalised account of the stalled friendship between the two Nobel-winning contributors to the 💥 era. 

It begins (and ends, though I am not quite there yet) with the most famous morongazo in the history of Latin American literature.

This pair of ‘genios’ had been drawing apart prior to the terminal incident, largely because Gabo refused to sign up to a complaint against Castro’s persecution of a Cuban poet, which the likes of Rulfo, Cortázar, Fuentes, and Sontag had been happy to put their names to. (Even those notoriously slippery characters, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, had scribbled their signatures at the base of the letter.)

V has read Jaime Bayly's first novel, No Se Lo Digas A Nadie. Not really my cup of 🫖 I then determined. 

The Peruvian writer and commentator is one of those people who seems to do the opposite of growing on one over time. His increasingly whingey, monotonous monologues are the audio component to the mediocre public intellectual persona that this region may or may not deserve. And when he starts off about 'Shaky', he very quickly descends to performative self-parody. 

Westminster school seemed to produce his like almost on a production line. One would run into them out in London and one's first thought would be "oh, here we go..."

Occasionally, passages of this prose adhere to the pattern of Bayly’s public persona: unnecessary repetition and too many words overall to drive the narrative forward. 

That said, this is fun in spite of a core inbalance. With Vargas Llosa his observations have more of a fly on the wall quality. When it comes to Gabo there’s a lot many probably already knew, if not me specifically. 

For instance, that Gabo used to don the blue overalls of a mechanic before sitting down to write El Otoño del Patriarca in his Barcelona study on the calle Osio número 50, where he had set up a high end hi-fi-system and his ‘fabulosa’ collection of records. 

For me it was fascinating that the jovial tropical author was producing serious novels at this time, and that the rather more ‘square’ writer from gloomy Lima was dedicating himself wholeheartedly to rumbunctious comedy.

@lupulodraftbar 

A phase shift is now required...

The pro-democracy protests in Guatemala have arrived at what one might characterise as a critical juncture. 

 

This morning a reduced total of 14 bloqueos were reported in the national press. Yesterday we saw how these attempts to force the removal of key figures in the MP and wider justice system have resulted in the first concrete examples of lethal force being used against peaceful demonstrators.

With just under 90 days remaining until the handover of executive power, those who fear for their fundamental constitutional rights can probably perceive that they need to adapt their package of tactics. 

It is becoming increasingly obvious that, in the absence of any change of heart from the Fiscal General that the economic stranglehold approach will start to deliver rather mixed results. And possibly even more lethal force. 

Right now, what is required is a flexible shift to a more variegated range of pressures, whilst at the same time maintaining broadly an identical perceived extent of popular engagement and mobilisation. 

History can provide numerous instructive examples of how this might be achieved. 

It will also warn, especially here, how an undesirable descent into civil war could also occur.

 

Influencers

I listened to an influencer this morning somewhat ironically pronouncing that Miguelito is a "cero a la izquierda", a sugar baby, one of a multitude of Miguelitos and Miguelitas around the country, all of whom are nobodies and thus a distraction from the 'real problem' and its rather less amarillismo-adapted protagonists.

This argument makes very little sense, historically.

Individuals entrenched on the sidelines of great authoritarian power, be they Marie Antoinette or Rasputin, have always tended to be significant influencers.

And sugar babies are not all alike, some are facilitators as well as mere receivers. Pablo Escobar made use of a plethora of younger lovers, many of them basically children who ultimately had no national impact, but his girlfriend in the Colombian media was a different matter.

It is not delusional at all for the masses to focus their ire on these figures. The dynamic of both the French and Russian revolutions was profoundly affected by how people felt about the Queen and the Mad Monk.

And it is very hard to focus one's energies in resistance on faceless actors.

The key caras in this current popular uprising have been those of Porras and Curruchiche, and I have mentioned before how this creates a rather helpful narrow focus, preventing the movement from being hijacked by radical social and political propositions. The flipside of this is that if Porras were gone tomorrow, nothing essential would have changed.

Anyway, the underlying dynamic of the protests in Guatemala may not be the same after yesterday's ruckus, and in that alone we can say Miguelito's arrogance in showing up in the middle of Antigua on a Saturday, will have its due significance over the course of this 'interregnum'.

But, potatoes...

This afternoon I ran into one of our friends in the aldea as she returned from an exploratory expedition into La Antigua, not long after I had done. She duly reported that she had decided to head into town in order to discover if it was Antigua that was encerrada...or herself! 

Like me she had found the streets of the casco pleasingly quiet and the Bodgegona open and largely patronised by groups of enthusiastic young 'gringos'.

It's all a bit like the pandemic, but without the sense of dread.

If you wanted to fill a bag full of tomatoes yourself, you'd be paying around Q10 per lb, but a pre-bagged set of 3lbs works out at around Q6.5 per lb. Compared to the market after several deluges, this is not yet 'end of days'.

But, potatoes.

All things told, we can now survive for a few weeks, if not the full 95 days of transition. We also have enough chiribiscos should the gas become scarce.

Let's hope pet food doesn't become an issue, as we have a particular vulnerability in that area.

Impasse

Tonight’s televised huffing and puffing by the President has done little to demystify one of the key enigmas of this induced crisis — is Giammattei pursuing a set of concrete, achievable, anti-democratic goals through surrogates in the MP i.e. is his hand on the rudder of the pirate ship, or is he himself the surrogate, a flailing figurehead with a cutlass to his throat? 

Beats me. 

He can ask whether it’s possible to stage a golpe against a man with only a mandate and a nail-biting 96 day wait ahead of him, and we can respond “how can it be reasonable for a man with almost no skin left in the democratic game, even the simulated democratic game, to undermine the peaceful transition?” 

Donald Trump did at least seem to have a political future worth fighting dirty for.

The suspected coup attempt is anyway not against a single individual or party, but against the sovereignty of the people.

These will be a long three months indeed if the outgoing President continues to avoid mention of the theft of the electoral actas. Blaming the people and foreigners for this literal impasse is not going to unblock the country.

Four years ago in Chile…

As civic resistance to the implied procedural threat to democracy here reaches a new and disturbing phase — the airport has run out of fuel, I have run out of red wine — I’d like to share a few observations on how this so far compares to my experience of the #EstallidoSocial in Chile back in 2019. 

By the time I arrived in Santiago a fair number of demonstrators had died. What had started as a protest against a hike of public transport fares in the capital had turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis and the government had deployed the carabineros — a paramilitary police force with an essentially fascist ethos and a plethora of heavily armoured vehicles. 

Any businesses not openly supporting the revolt were being ransacked as enraged crowds periodically flowed through the downtown areas. 

These were not peaceful demonstrations. An Uber I was travelling in was hit by a brick. Aside from the people killed by real bullets, the rubber projectiles were causing horrific ocular injuries.

And yet there was a fairly well-demarcated war zone centred on Baquedano metro station, which along with its immediate neighbours was shut. One could pass beneath the mayhem, almost as if a small area of central London had been designated as a permanent yet limited theatre of riot and repression, beyond which life was carrying on broadly as usual.

Valparaiso, on the other hand, had turned almost wholly post-apocalyptic. Aside from all the visible damage to property, the streets were sticky with the residue from gas canisters and I was genuinely shocked to observe how elderly residents just trying to stock up with basic provisions were coughing and spluttering. 

The popular movement appeared to stand its ground and achieve its immediate goal, a constituent assembly tasked with devising a new constitution, but then the cracks appeared. 

Narrow objectives had mutated into an unfocused and ultimately incompatible multitude, and after a left-wing drafted constitution was rejected in a referendum, a similar fate now seems to await a right-wing devised alternative.

Meanwhile, here in Guatemala 2023, after just six days of Paro Nacional Indefinido the country is already on the brink of an economic crisis and the Constitutional Court has greenlighted a more aggressive response to the blockades — but so far only an Opus Dei priest with a crib in Cayalá has taken up the invitation. 

Consuelo Porras seemingly lacks the resources and budget to suppress more than 80 choke points nationally (or overcome a case of 70% paralysis, as someone put it today), but some sort of incremental use of violence is surely to be expected. 

How will chapines respond to this?
 

So far the protests have keep up their narrow focus on Porras and her FECI clique. I would suggest that this is important, as wider support for the blockades, both domestically and abroad, depends on this remaining a preemptive counter-strike against a technical coup and not an umbrella movement attracting all sorts of radical nutjobs, which is essentially what happened in Chile. 

Yet it has its inherent limitations too, because Porras could go and the fundamental problem would remain. Indeed right now the ‘Pacto’ may be considering throwing grandma under a bus, as this might temporarily take the sting out of the situation, but would not necessarily clear the path for an uninterrupted transition.

Cadena Nacional

Dr G was back on all channels this evening, just like the good old days…except all attempts to appear folksy and reassuring have been abandoned. 

What a bizarre rant that was; rather stressful to watch, all told. 

Giammattei was like one of those older, isolated residents in the block who’s been drooling into his pillow all week as he imagines how he’s going to address the building committee about that light bulb problem on the sixth floor, but when the moment finally comes, finds himself on the crest of a breathless verbal tsunami. 

“You cannot carry out a coup against someone who’s not in power”, was the stand-out executive soundbite.

Did we get any sense that he understands that he has a moral duty as President to prevent the Attorney General from acting like a rogue fourth branch within the state? 

No, we did not. 

Now he can stand back and watch things get markedly worse.

De-legitimised

Until the 20th century revolutions were never the direct result of action by revolutionaries. Ancien Regimes just ceased to function as advertised and then bled out in terms of legitimacy. 

Even later there remained underlying triggers, usually a combination of severe economic crises with foreign policy pressure, which provided radicals with their moment. 

I suspect that future historians of the genre will have reason to be extremely intrigued by what has happened, by what is about to happen, in Guatemala in 2023. 

The people have elected a President whose proposed plan for government would be difficult to describe as radical. There is certainly no call for a significant redistribution of wealth and power. 

Movimiento Semilla’s previous candidate for the top job, Thelma Aldana, was long considered conservative, but like Arévalo, her central political goal became one of restricting the impact of corrupt actors in and around government. 

Yet the response of the mafias that prey on the state here to the popular choice of administration has been so shameless that it now threatens to undermine the very fabric of constitutional order in this country. 

Since the first round results it has been clear that the Ministerio Público was inclined to discredit itself beyond hope of repair. But as of today, the Constitutional Court seems to have embarked on a parallel course. 

We are reaching a point where the everyday credibility of the existing structure of law and governance might completely evaporate, and under the most minimal of pressure from unusual agitation. 

Arévalo’s father began a process of reform which came unstuck under his successor, because it chose to cross a line that social democratic Costa Rica stopped just shy of — stepping on the toes of Eisenhower’s government, specifically the Dulles brothers with their interest in bananas. 

Arbenz’s not especially radical proposal to repurpose fallow land then held by United Fruit led to his downfall and that of Guatemala’s first stab at a democratic state run broadly in the interests of the majority. 

The second stab is at a crucial juncture. This Arévalo is making his stand on the hill of clean politics. The mafias know that uncorrupted government is possibly the most radical threat they could face, and that once they are squeezed out, it will be so much harder to force their way back in. 

One might dream up all kinds of radical, populist nonsense and head to the polls, but it is the simple, easy-to-comprehend platform of Movimiento Semilla that appears most threatening to the forces of indecency. 

The worrying thing is that they seem intent on bringing down the house around them as they fall.

Lessons

It's an oft repeated truism that we constantly run the risk of ignoring the lessons of history. Yet what exactly are these lessons?

Perhaps the one we ignore most of all is that all of the ideas that we use to understand our own world are over-simplistic. Almost as soon as historians take them and use them to analyse what happened in the past they discover that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, inadequate.

Take European society in the post-feudal era. It's rather easy to blame capitalism for some of the damaging social changes leading to both mass paupersisation and political turmoil in the nineteenth century, and by capitalism we tend to mean ethically-challenged rich people. And it is true that many landlords seized on the opportunity to assert private ownership on land that had previously been held communally or at least within a system of reciprocal rights, yet it is also true that in some regions it was the peasants themselves who drove this march towards a 'liberal' market economy against the conservative resistance of the landowners.

Another lesson of history, sadly, is that as a society we usually decide whether our ideas are good or bad based on their consequences.

Puberty blockers may be either harmless or harmful, but there is almost no point in people who believe the latter sacrificing themselves to the baying mob until enough time has elapsed for us all to see how much suffering they may have caused. It's like pissing into the wind. Human beings so rarely change course based on reason alone before the disincentives kick in properly.

 

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

 

This Dracula is not quite the sinister charmer played by the likes of Gary Oldman and Claes Bang, but a bit more like the alien on the Nostromo. 

The movie is a sort of spin-off aspiring to be a reboot, carved from an (up to now) under-exapnded part of Stoker's tale*, the Count's less than luxurious ride to the shores of Blighty on an ill-fated vessel called the Demeter. 

I can say I rather enjoyed it with the caveat that I am almost as much a sucker for any story set on a tall ship as I am those based within large old hotels. 

The ship's course seems to be straightforward: Black Sea port, across the Med, up through the Bay of Biscay, into the channel and then a hard left into the Thames. But the script keeps throwing out navigational corkers like "we've passed the Straights of Dover and are still four days from London" and it's anyone's guess how the Demeter eventually ends up on the rocks at Whitby, though I think I once read somewhere that the Yorkshire town and its ruined Abbey inspired Stoker to write Dracula. 

 

* The chapter entitled The Captain's Log.

Flip to the Obverse

The most important concepts in our collective discourse have an innate tendency to pile on the pounds, poor things. 

​Take Freedom, for example. Thomas Hobbes would have taken a matter of moments to inform you as to whether you possessed it or not. These days he'd be scratching his head along with the rest of us. 

Over the course of four centuries it has become increasingly difficult for educated, reasoned people to find themselves on the same page on this matter, and sometimes they disagree even as to the text everyone ought to be referring to. 

This cultural bulking up has notably accelerated in my lifetime, affecting a whole load of key terms — Racism, Refugee, Genocide, Misogyny etc. etc. — all of which have become, as well as engorged, rather slippery and context-driven. 

This sudden velocity of expansion can be explained in part by the way these rousing concepts have been adopted by specific governmental and non-governmental bodies and other organised groups of activists. 

Freedom was always everyone's problem (at least as the latter grouping was then defined), but these others were nichier concerns, yet not without the aspiration to be so much grander and collective in their impact. 

Today there is hardly an interest group which refuses to imagine that its problem is very much everyone's problem. 

And once you have salaried individuals whose careers depend on their specific area of interest achieving maximum reach the goalposts start to move all over the place. 

Here in Guatemala there is one such term one could write an entire book about, and such a tome would be duty bound to outline its often  unanticipated effects on the nation’s recent history: IMPUNIDAD (Impunity). 

As I suggest, this is a very complex issue, but I will outline what I think is the correct basic outline. As Guatemala moved into the new millennium and attempted to put the years of civil strife behind it, the term was largely deployed in order to refer to atrocities committed prior to 1996 and the alarming possibility that those who had committed them might never face justice. 

There were then two specific cases which permitted a kind of mission creep into the postwar era: that of the murder of Bishop Gerardi (for daring to publicise details of the role of the state in human rights abuses) and that of former dictator Ríos Montt, who had retained a high profile into the new democratic period. 

Just as the army was losing its privileged position alongside the executive, the office of Fiscal General was provided with some extra bite in order to pursue cases against those who might otherwise be permanently guilty of impunity. This seemed like a good idea at the time.

Yet the remit started to swell in the manner characterised above. Maybe it would be wrong to describe this as a consequence of over-feeding, yet the range of items in the diet definitively expanded and the targets of prosecutors (particularly under CICIG) were increasingly those whose impunity had more to do with on-going circumvention of the law in the present time than past offences under the military regimes — though it helped that there was considerable overlap at first. 

What then happened should come as a warning to all those conceptual guardians who have overseen significant bloating under their watches.  Impunity here suddenly switched to signify its own antonym* and the Guatemalan body entrusted with fighting it — FECI — has spent the last few months being the very paragon of carte blanche constitutional abuse. 

This flip to the obverse is surely not limited to Guatemala and this one concept. For example, many self-styled anti-racists in western discourse are increasingly finding it hard not to sound like common or garden racists.

Sin Pelos En La Lengua

Fernando del Rincón, like many Guatemalans, seems to revel in enunciating the surname of Rafael Curruchiche. (It’s a skill that CNN’s automatic subtitling system still needs to get the hang of.)

It would seem that, sin pelos en la lengua, it is easier to pronounce ‘judicialización’, a Spanish word I have decided to abbreviate to ‘judi’ in everyday speech, for my own sanity.

I’m not sure that ‘judi’ entirely encapsulates the nature of the problem faced by chapines today, or indeed its peculiar local roots.

At first I wanted to throw out something along the lines that its all rather like the situation would be in the UK if Suella Braverman were acting as if she were the real PM and as if she could not be removed under any circumstances — and then I realised I might need a better counterfactual analogy. 

 

Perhaps, it’s as if the deep state has risen from the depths and is operating on the surface with its gun like a German U-boat.

Consuelo Porras does seem to have become the de facto ruler of Guatemala, albeit as the puppet of altogether shadier figures, and as Dr G shifts into lame duck transition mode, it’s a situation that can seemingly only deteriorate…if millions of Guatemalans allow it to.

I may be wrong about this, but I suspect the post-war settlement in this country may be playing an important role in the way this is all playing out. For most of Guatemala’s history after independence the real power in the land was always the army. (Bernardo Arévalo has literally written the book on this phenomenon.)

Back in the 90s we used to take delivery in London of a glossy current affairs magazine called Crónica. In those days it was clear that the state within the state was personified by the Defence Secretary, also the de facto generalissimo.

Given the limited resources at the disposal of the elected executive, this was often more like the inner state that provided an often smothering external wrapper for the constitutional institutions.

In that era I always had a clear idea of the name and physical appearance of each incumbent Defence Secretary. I can’t say I have kept this up lately, and this has to be partly a consequence of the manner in which the military and its influence was deliberately shrunk by the peace accords of 1996.

I would therefore argue that this may have permitted the potential monopoly of weaponised, repressive power to shift across to the office of state currently occupied by Consuelo Porras. Her anti-democratic actions need to be cloaked in the codified mechanisms of that aforementioned barely pronounceable word, but in effect owe their exuberant shamelessness to a longer tradition of autocratic distortions to the rule of law in Guatemala.

 

Not so insólito after all.

 

What the millennials who aspire to transform this nation need to remember (history or indeed noted national literature can help with this) is that they are comparatively fortunate compared to previous generations. Not long before I first came here those named on the attorney general’s abortive amparo would likely have simply disappeared.

Arbitrariness has taken significant steps backwards since those dark times and the contemporary pattern seems to involve discreet initial stages of coaccion and coercion, with persecution less likely to involve blunt cruelty.

 

 

Spring is in the air...

Back in '88 I was supervised for a term on the subject of the history of revolutions at King's College by a long-haired post-grad whose name it really pains me to have since forgotten.

Decades later I understand that I am at least as interested in the apparently lesser phenomenon of the 'Spring", those moments of mass popular engagement with political change which, by and large, end up being smothered by an unstoppable reactionary wave.

If I were a young historian at Cambridge today, I'd practically kill to be taught by the current Regius Professor, Christopher Clark, whose most recent book charts the history of the pan-continental mass movements we tend to refer to as '1848'.

Clark asserts that the revolutionary springs of 1848 did not end in failure as many other historians have suggested, but then in Sleepwalkers, he said the Germans didn't start WWI. (In fairness, he pretty much convinced me on the latter point, though I might have been predisposed to suspect the French and the Russians before even starting that book.)

Mass popular protest usually commences after a single instance of perceived injustice. In Chile in 2019 it was a change to the pricing of public transport with respect to one demographic, in USA and its cultural clients it was the racist murder of George Floyd the following year.

The people on the street are never really 'the people'. The momentum in the crowd comes from an uneasy alliance between bourgeois liberals (such as myself) and radicals from the disenfranchised and marginalised groups. The connection between them most often a cadre of middle class poseurs.

In essence this is a heady mix of people with realistic and unrealistic objectives. There are those seeking redress for a specific set of grievances and those whose purview encompasses pretty much all available grievances; an aggressive completism that is often hard to distinguish from nihilism.

The movement starts to falter at the point that the realists get spooked by the often loopy and violent approach of their fellow travellers, and this then permits 'los mismos de siempre' to rapidly re-consolidate.

The Spring that Guatemala is experiencing right now is fascinating on many levels, not least because it seems to have arrived with some powerful antibodies which may help it to dodge the familiar pathological outcome.

Firstly, the primary goal, an eradication of corruption, is either realistic or unrealistic depending on which side of the bed one got out of. That ambiguity will remain unifying for a considerable time, I surmise.

And crucially, it does not propose any fundamental change to the constitutional order (as in Chile). The social order seems fairly safe in the short term as well.

Through the persona of Tio Bernie, this primavera is as much backwards-looking as forwards-looking, a deliberate re-staging of the mid twentieth century social democratic aspiration which was effectively stolen after ten years by the gringos. (No prizes for guessing why Izabal sided with Sandra.)

It's like The Return of the King, the concluding part of a trilogy which began in 1944, re-appeared with renewed fury in 2015 and has apparently now seen off the resurgence of its orky antagonists.

I use that term resurgence with caution because the action of the corrupt elite in Guatemala throughout this election year have, to an almost ludicrous extent, contributed to the outcome on August 20.

 

 

 

 

Miaooooow

In a matter of hours the Lionesses will be released into a Sydney arena where the poor Christians of Castile await.

And so let this be another one of those periodic opportunities to remind everyone of a few facts about this, the Royal Banner of England, aka the heraldic arms of the Plantagenet family, at least before they decided that the whole of France probably also belonged to them. 

Technically the felines doing their passing, guarding thing here are leopards not lions. (I know they do look much like lions, but this is one of those courtesy (courtly?) semantic impositions like referring to a person with a penis as a woman.

Also technically, only one of them is properly English. (I'm hoping it's the little girl at the bottom.)

The marque is property of King Charles III. The English FA use it only under special dispensation from the Crown. 

And it looks like the Crown can't be bovved to schlep to Australia on this occasion.

 

 

Purge-atory

La Ley Seca is upon us.

As part of Guatemala's supposedly benign twist on The Purge, we are all expected to be on the spinach smoothies for the next 42 hours.

And when the virtual sirens sound again on Monday morning, this land may feel like a very different place.

OK, Sandra Torres will have lost again, possibly by as much as 30%, and be crying foul, so in that sense, same old, same old. (One wonders if the hair dye will slither down her cheeks as it did with Giuliani.) 

 

But there will be palpable change in the air. A change that will nevertheless fall short of its full potential until Movimiento Semilla is more than a rickety raft in a sea of sharks. 

The potential margin of victory and widespread popular merriment may end up masking the extent of the challenge that will remain. 

This movement has demonstrated what a new kind of politics here might look like, but in the longer term there needs to be more than one exponent of it, more that one party committed to basic decency. 

 

There will be significant obstacles ahead, not least in the form of existing constitutional constraints.

Anyway, I've been on the wagon for over a month now, but my bunker is now nicely stocked up for the weekend...and beyond, into the brave new world.