preparacciones (and other fake spanish)

hey! if you've got one of these blog thingies, lemme know. i've been kind of out of the internet loop for awhile.

i leave for guatemala in two weeks. my passport was supposed to come in the mail this week. i just checked my status on the passport homepage, and it said they didn't have my application on file. but, they cashed my checks. so, i'll be calling them tomorrow after i perform a ritualistic hex on my phone to bypass the long lines i've been assured i'll have to wait through in phone-hold-limbo.

in the meantime, i've been reading up on the country i'm headed to. i'm starting by reading a case study from a reader i have on latin america, politics of latin america: the power game, put out by the oxford press, that's really quite good. in addition, i'm reading a novel by miguel angel asturias, who won the nobel prize and has a national literary award named after him in guatemala, so i'm guessing he's a big deal of some kind. the book is men of maize and it is tragic and beautiful so far.

it's going to be very interesting going to guatemala. as recently as 1990, about 90% of the population was living below the poverty line. for reference, in the united states in 1990, the census reports that figure at 13.5% - still significantly larger than i'd suspect most people would guess.

the country's economic, social, and political history seems to be a case study of how the united states abused our power internationally, and is one strike among an uncountable collection against the sheer short-sighted paranoid and unbelievable foreign policy of the dulles brothers (more like DULLEST brothers! burn.). basically, we supported a dictatorial regime; when that regime was overthrown in favor of democratic elections in the fifties, the new guys in charge decided to take the land currently not in use by the businesses that owned them and redistribute it to the poor and indigenous communities that had been effectively exploited and robbed of their land since the colonial period 300 years before, thanks to the previous regimes selfish and corrupt business deals with folks like the united fruit company.

we decide that such a move is clearly communist and anti-capitalist (nevermind that, by providing people a sustainable means of living, the average guatemalan would have enjoyed an increase in expendable income, which would've been just about the most important aspect in any truly capitalist economy), and support a new dictator and military overthrow with a massive propaganda campaign and a bombing campaign. fast forward to the present, and we're pretty much directly responsible for generations of civil war, and more than 200,000 civilian casualties who suffered at the hands of the regime we supported - a regime that unabashedly tried to not only stop the guerilla resistance by slaughtering civilians, it also attempted to crush the entire mayan way of life (sound familiar?).

to our credit, i guess we did play a role in the relatively new peace accords between the warring factions.

men of maize, meanwhile, weaves in elements of guatemalan and mayan history into a story that could be placed into that category of "magical realism" - whatever that really means. i'm taking it 30 or 40 pages at a time, on account of the fact that for every page i read, i have to flip to the back of the book 2 or 3 times to understand a sentence with the "notes" section. as with all of my favorite latin american writers, asturias has a way of weaving page long sentences together that leave you breathless and don't even require re-reading to grasp - kind of like kerouac with all of the energy and none of the drugs.

adios mis encantos.
benjamin