What day is it, anyway? My inactive blog

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I checked my comments section and there were over 1000 slices of spam in there. Captcha screens have been added to user registration and comment submission screens, for obvious reasons.

Verbs

Here´s a page from my verb book. Drill, drill, drill.

Tostadas

I´m eating the heck out of tostadas. I get beautiful fresh tomatos in the market for about 20 cents a pound, with which I´ve been making bowls and bowls of fresh salsa. Smear some refries on the tostada, add shredded cabbage and radish, top it off with fresh made salsa, squeeze a lime wedge over the top and off you go.

Produce is incredibly fresh here, and very reasonably priced. I go up to the market almost every day to buy my fresh goods. There isn´t one ¨market,¨ but dozens, sometimes hundreds of venders selling produce, meat, bread, tortillas. Basically all the perishable goods. For packaged items, like hot sauce or canned beans there are little tiendas all over the place. The market is for the fresh stuff.

The Fabulous Tuktuk

When I first came to San Pedro in 2002, many of the streets were unpaved, there were no cell phones, no ATM´s, and no tuk tuks. Now we have all of the above, and the tuk tuks are in reckless abundance. A tuk tuk is a three wheeled contraption designed and built, I believe, in India. For a little town like this, where most of the streets are too narrow for cars, tuk tuks are wildly popular. They swarm about town at all hours, sometimes driven by kids who might be 12 years old. No one owns a tuk tuk, they´re like a taxi. 5 Quetzals for anywhere in town, 10 Q to get to San Juan. They´re made for the driver up front, and two people in back, so here in Guatemala, they put three or four people in back and one more up front with the driver. The truism with transport here is that there´s always room for one more. I´m sure they´re super efficient with gas, and even overloaded they seem to be able to make it up the incredibly steep hills in San Pedro. I´m surprised we don´t have more of them in urban areas in the states.

Sunset and Pants

Parque Central

Here´s the obligatory shot of the catholic church in the middle of San Pedro. It´s kind of hard to tell from the picture, but the town just recently finished a top notch renovation of the park. New benches, nice grass, paving stones. It´s a nice place to just kick back and do some people watching.

If you look at the statue, you can see that there´s a fountain, too. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the folks here are crazy for fireworks. Right after they opened the new park, they had a procession of the virgin or something. Of course, truckloads (literally) of firecrackers were required, and since the fountain was dry, it seemed, to someone, like a good place to store some. A stray rocket got into the pile of fireworks in the fountain and mayhem ensued. No one was hurt, but the new fountain was broken. They fixed it quickly.

La Zona Viva y La Ley Seca

This corner is known as the zona viva. It´s right by the dock where the lanchas come from Panachel, there are lots of hotels and gift shops, restaurants and bars here. Sometimes you can hear trance music thumping until 3 a.m. It´s the most touristy part of town, and the opposite side of town from where I peacefully dwell. No coincidence there.

San Pedro La Laguna has a long and somewhat sordid history as a partying mecca for international travellers. Back when I was here in 2003, it was known as Little Amsterdam, if that means anything. Well, things were getting out of hand, and it all came to a head about a year ago when the town elected a conservative, evangalical christian mayor. They decided (with some justification) that things needed to be toned down a little bit.

As of two days ago, they applied what is called la ley seca, which means dry law, which means that all businesses need to be closed at 11 p.m., rather than 1 p.m. as had been the history. The local business owners are enraged. They think (again with some justification) that the law will drive tourists away. The fact is that many of the tourists here are European, and they are much more inclined to not even go out to the bars until ten or eleven, then party hard until the wee hours. The business owners lawyered up and fought a court battle last year in which they apparently won against la ley seca. But the city went ahead and published the law anyway. Gotta love Guatemala. The business owners are in the process of lawyering up again, and one thing practically everyone knows is that the kooky mayor will not be reelected in the elections this fall.

At least it´s the PNC, Policia National Civil, who appear to be enforcing the law. They arrive at the restaurants and bars shortly after 11 and politely tell the owners that they have to close. Last year, the mayor´s gang, known as cocotes, would don their cowboy hats (the international sign of an asshole) and their machetes, and wander through town as vigalantes. They had a couple of the local cops in tow. One night, they arrested over 50 tourists for not having their passports on them. Embassies got involved. The mayor´s little gang of bible thumping, machete weilding vigalantes were told that they would be heavily fined if they ever tried their shenanigins again.

While I´m not too much for legislated morality, I have to admit, quietly, that I kind of like la ley seca. Don´t tell that to the business owners I know. I like to go out and tip a few beers in the evening, but it was always a quandry when the real mobs of people, thus the fun, didn´t show up until 10 or 11. This way everyone can have their fun and be back in bed by midnight.

More San Pedro Street Scenes

Update on the Zetas

original article here

Narco gangs have opened a new front in South America's expanding drug war by seizing control of parts of northern Guatemala, prompting the government to suspend civil liberties and declare a state of siege in the area.

Hundreds of soldiers have reinforced police units in an offensive against a Mexican cartel known as the Zetas which is said to have overrun Alta Verapaz province.

The mayhem has deepened alarm that Mexico's drug war has spilled across southern neighbours and corrupted state institutions that are proving no match for well-funded, ruthless crime syndicates.

"It's very worrying to see this moving down from Mexico to weaker neighbours. Their institutions are being infiltrated by organised crime," said Silke Pfeiffer, acting Latin America programme director for the International Crisis Group thinktank.

Guatemala declared a month-long state of siege in Alta Verapaz on 19 December after gunmen with assault rifles, grenades and armoured vehicles started openly cruising cities such as Coban.

The move, permitted under Guatemalan law when the "security of the state is in danger", let soldiers ban guns and public gatherings, censor local media and search and detain suspects without warrants.

Security forces detained 21 suspects and seized small planes and 150 weapons, including grenade launchers, in what authorities called a major blow to the Zetas, considered one of Mexico's bloodiest narco organisations.

"These individuals were not just preparing to confront the security forces, they were preparing to take control of the country," Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom, told reporters. Drug gangs were "invading" central America to move contraband from Colombia to Mexico and the US, he said.

The Zetas struck back last week by forcing three radio stations – on pain of arson and the massacre of employees and their families – to broadcast a threat of full-scale insurgency if the government did not back down.

"War will start in this country, in shopping malls, schools and police stations," it said. The message also claimed the Zetas funded Colom's 2007 election with an $11m donation and demanded he respect a purported deal to let them operate in peace.

The message provided no proof and the president, who denies corruption, said he would keep hitting the Zetas. "Their threats are not going to intimidate me," he said at a public event.

The US state department warned last October that Mexico's four-year assault on drug cartels was pushing traffickers south where law enforcement was weaker.

Guatemala's civil war ended in 1996 but rampant crime has kept killings above wartime levels. A homicide rate of 53 people per 100,000 is about double Mexico's. Human rights groups say 95% of murders go unpunished, not least because corrupt serving and former security force members are behind many of them.

The Zetas, founded by Mexican army deserters, expanded into Guatemala in force after killing a local drug boss, Juan Jose "Juancho" Leon, in 2008. They reportedly recruited Guatemalan soldiers, including US-trained special forces known as Kabilas, with a reputation for savagery. Impoverished indigenous civilians also reportedly signed up.

Local gangs known as "maras" battle, and sometimes ally with, narco cartels. They also run extortion rackets, targeting businesses, taxis and buses. A bomb on a bus in Guatemala City on Tuesday killed five people, including two children.

Analysts say the perception of chaos could benefit the rightwing candidacy of Otto Perez Molina, a retired army general, in August's presidential election. The former head of military intelligence is tainted by human rights abuses under his watch but his promise of a "mano dura" (firm hand) against crime resonated in the 2007 election, when he came second, and could yet put him into the presidential palace.

San Pedro Streets

Today I took a walk over to San Juan, one of the neighboring villages. It´s a nice town, all laid out on a grid, with wide streets and mostly single story buildings. It made me realize why I love San Pedro so much. Here in San Pedro, the whole town is built on steep hills, the roads are an absolute maze of paths and trails, many only six feet wide. Even after all this time I sometimes have a hard time finding my way around. San Pedro feels more like a pueblo, in the southwest sense of the word, with multi story buildings nearly touching, each other, all accessed by roads and paths that seem to curve and intersect at almost random angles.

The stairway to the left is the entrance to my hotel as seem from the street. You´d never guess that up the stairs and to the left, first path to the right, you´d come upon a nice, four story hotel.