burning bush in guate city

i finally succumbed. yes, i know it happens to everyone. and yes we all think we are special and somehow immune. but i too finally found myself hopeless sick, persistently flatulent, and making a dozen trips during the night to squirt fluids out one end of my body or the other. oh, the horrors!

on the bright side medical care here, when you can find it at all, is significantly more easier to navigate. my first stop was a local labritorio. i didn't even need a doctor's visit, i just needed to walk into the corner lab that operates out of what appears to be a large closet on one corner near the park. i tell the lady behind the glass that i need to be check for parasites. she hands me a cup with a lid and sends me to the toilet. i seem to have no problem at all squirting fluids out my butt on demand, so i can quickly fill the cup and hand it back to the nice lady. 30 quezales ($4) and an hour later, i learned that i have no parasites, but i do have a lot of bacteria and mucus. yay!

someone in the crowd discovered eggs and soon everyone was pelting the cops with them.

the trip to the farmacia is equally easy, although like any other produce not produced locally, the medications are a lot more expensive. on the up side you can get almost anything here without a prescription. valium? $3, or $1 for the generic one. viagra? that will be right up. antibiotics and antiamoebics, clearly labeled "by doctor's prescription only" in english? four hundred quezales please, about fifty dollars. one week of the pills and i am a happy camper again.

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guatemala city

so i am happy again by the time i reach guate, as the locals here call guatemala city. big, noisy, dirty, and exciting, it reminded me of some of the grittier parts of LA, a resemblance that must go both ways as something like 60% of all guatemalans living outside of their country are living and working in LA. the bus dropped me off somewhere random in the night, and the locals were horrified to see a gringo walking around in the dark in this district. i felt their concern was overblown, but i later learned my local friend's father has been robbed in that district no less than three times, so maybe i should be a little more cautious after all.

because i was sick i was a few days behind my schedule, but i was still in time to attend what i came here for: george w. bush's guatemalan visit, and the protest that i knew would come with that visit. indeed great parts of the the city center had already been shut down in advance of his majesty's appearance. access to the central park and historic old town was very limited. i quickly found a quaintly decrepit old hotel nearby and crashed for the night.

the day breaks

the next day i walked the entire peremeter of the closed zone, and found it was not entirely closed after all. one side from the west had access and i was able to slide in, get breakfast at a comidor (a kind of little cafè) inside, and watch the troops and minions from both countries scurry around in preparation.

around 11:30 all the shops were closed down and the stragglers hustled out of the area by local cops. i was dressed nicely and had a camera and some rather large balls, and so i was able to pull off a "i'm a journalist" attitude and slip through the net. i was able to stay behind the lines and photograph the protest that then appeared for several hours. my friends i was to meet that day were not so lucky and could not penetrate the security, probably because they looked like the scruffy anarchist clowns they are (with red noses, no less). eventually i grew bored and lonely and since no conflict was imminent i left the cordon and went outside to follow the protest to a new location around the corner, and in view of the hotel bush was staying at.

the protest itself was similar at first to protests anywhere. one one side riot cops in body armor and clear shields. on the other side lots of shouting, some guys on bullhorns, some banners flying, and vendors selling merchandise. i bought a fuera bush, fuera anti-immigrantes ("out with bush, out with anti-immigrants") headband for a quezal.

but suddenly things took a new turn. some of the more young, confrontational, and testostorone-challenged members of the protest pulled down some segments of the metal barricades. ok, that's fine. but then they got a "great" idea; a barricade section, if so easily removed, could just as easily be returned. so four of them picked up a section and launched into the row of cops.

the responses to this were immediate and sometimes surprising. the cop's reaction was one surprise: nothing happened. in the usa assaulting a cop is something akin to an assault on god, apple pie, and motherhood at the same time, and the cops go nuts to arrest the perp. not here. no one moved on the that side. on the other side there was a lot of movement. the aggressive crowd moved, for one. backwards. fast. for a group that had the balls to throw a barricade, they really did not have the balls to stick around. in england where i saw similar aggressive confrontation with cops, the punks stood their ground. not so here.

but the biggest surprise of movement was the rest of the crowd, the bulk of the protestors that did not groove on the violence. they left. i don't mean "the walked away in disgust from the violence." i mean several hundred people turned and literally ran, full speed, no looking back, out every side street available to them. i have never seen such a large mass of people move so quickly. what was perhaps a two thousand person strong protest transformed within seconds to a group of maybe 100 protestors, with perhaps another hundred watching safely from a more removed distance. my guess is that the cops here are reknowned for their violence, and with the memory of the civil war only a decade past, most people had no interest in getting their heads busted in.

what followed was about two hours of low-intensity violence, perpetrated by the protestors against the cops, with almost no reaction at all from the police line. as barricades were pulled down a new lines of human cops would go up in the same place, but no excursions were made to capture anyone. stun guns were brandished but not used. someone in the crowd discovered eggs and soon everyone was pelting the cops with them. others were pulling up cobblestones and breaking up chunks of sidewalk to throw at cops. mostly the police were impervious to this but i did see one cop take a fist side rock in the side of his face. more barricades were thrown, received, and pulled behind the cop line. the guys on the bullhorn had more level heads, and i heard numerous pleas in spanish to "please not incited the violence," and "there are women and children present, please do not incite the police."

no-one throwing objects was older than 20 or 25 or so. a surprising number of them were as young as 12. all but one was male. most wore bandanas on their faces. all in all, they reminded me more than anything of the black block crowd in our own protests, only with less inhibitions against violence against persons. very very quickly the protest turned from "people versus bush," to "young punks versus the cops". personally i did not see the point to this shift, as the punks had completely alienated their own support base, and while the cops were not our friends, they were certainly not the main enemies here. not that that ever stops the black block in our own movements, of course.

surprising too was this smaller crowd's reaction to us, the gringo protestors. my friend "d", up on a lamp post, called down in her broken english for some eggs to throw. this was greeted by jeers from the crowd, who shouted slogans (in spanish) at us, like "spanish only!" and "gringos go home!" and "que? que? que? que?", an imitation of gringos who say "what?" all the time when trying to understand español. the next round of egg-throwing included us as targets, and direct hit to my shoulder luckily bounced off and did not break. other less-accurate shots just left me splattered. apparently this small group of punk-ass kids doesn't need any allies at all, not local, not international, and they by themselves are going to take on the cops, win, and change the social structure of their country. good for them. good luck.

still, there was one great highlight for me here. someone had the bright idea of creating a george w. bush piñata. they tied it to a string on the end of a stick, lit the toes on fire, and then dangled the smoldering contraption of the head of the cops. like cats with a shiny toy the cops could not help but bat at the thing with their batons, and for about 15 seconds i was laughing my ass off at the site of a half-dozen cops beating the crap out of the image of george w. bush. how totally ironic! apparently the irony was not lost of the cop commander either, and the second time it was dangled the troops on the line were ordered to leave it alone. when it dropped too low one of them finally captured it and took the protestor's toy away. bummer.

emboldened by the lack of cop reaction, one kid decided to escalate the scene. using a can of raid and a cigarette lighter, an impromptu flame thrower was created, and the four foot flame brandished at the police line. at about this time i began to check my own escape routes. the raid flame thrower trick was played a couple of times without reaction from the cops, and so the kid came up with a new trick: the raid molotov cocktail. pulling the tab out of the top, the jet was ignited and the entire can thrown into the mass of cops.

ok, that's a bit too far, i am thinking. and i guess the cops were thinking this too, because the second line of the cops, the ones in reserve, suddenly pulled their tear-gas guns and let fly a mightily volley of canisters. whoom! whoom! whoom! and hiss goes the clouds of smoke. again, the protestors, now down to make 40 or so hard-cores, had no desire and now no support to stand their ground, and the entire street emptied in seconds as the kids ran in every direction, cops advancing in unison behind them.

the slower-moving audience members were the ones to suffer here.

on the side streets i encountered a couple of older ladies with tears and snot running down their faces. for about two blocks in any direction i could see passers-by and workers with eyes red and running.

the protestors regrouped a block away, all two-dozen of them now. but the protest was essentially over and there was no new confrontation.

one of my friends lost his clown nose in the ruckus, and i volunteered to head back to retrieve it. since i was dressed nice and still had the camera i was not concerned with my own safety at all. i think in general the guatemalan cops have a larger respect for the media, or at least they were order to have such a respect this time, and i was able to walk right through their line at this time.

in fact the line was so porous, nothing stood between me and bush's motorcade at this point. i had no reason not to walk right up to the few secret service officers i could see loitering near the cars and suvs. but at this point i was bored and disgusted with the entire operation. i retrieved the errant clown nose, and made my way through the sea of cops back to my friends. the protest was over.