In the past few decades, I’ve been inside a church maybe two dozen times, mostly for weddings and funerals, a few times to marvel at the soaring nave or the intricately carved chancel of a cathedral, and once or twice just to sit in silence and pray.

“Xavier,” I said. “I’m going to be Michael Xavier Tallon.”

He beamed with joy and effused about “Francis Xavier, that wonderful saint. Wonderful saint! The children loved him and he loved the little animals! Wonderful saint!”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea of whom he was speaking. I’d chosen the name Xavier for two reasons. First was my nascent political identification with civil rights warriors like Malcolm X.  Second, and probably more important,   was my teenage fascination with Professor Charles Xavier, mutant leader of The Uncanny X-Men.

That fairly well describes my level of commitment to a religious worldview which even as a teenager I wasn’t much inclined to support. It was all so limited and parochial, and the whole idea that most people in the world are damned for eternity just seemed foolish. Moreover, there were times, like when Father John asked our CCD class to write letters to his friend and colleague the exorcist, that it positively creeped me out. And, yes, this did happen, complete with EXORCISM and DEMONIC POSSESSION spelled out on the chalkboard to help us along. Twenty 5^th-graders in a room writing some version of “Dear Father Whatever-Your-Name-Was, I hope you had a really nice exorcism today. Your friend. A Very Frightened Child in Upstate New York.”

But a few of the parables did stick with me. Particularly one that Father John shared with us in a sermon. It was the story of the widow’s mite.

If you’re Christian, you’ll probably recall it, even if you can’t pull up the chapter and verse. It’s a story actually told by two of the Evangelists: (Mark 12:41-44, Luke 21:1-4). Jesus is at the temple, teaching his disciples, fielding questions from the assembled and checking out the rich guys dropping gold and silver into the treasury when an old woman arrives and places two small copper coins (mites, according to the King James Version) into the offertory. Presuming the ridicule to be cast upon her by the rich men, Jesus called his boys into a huddle and reminded them that, “this poor widow hath cast more than all which they have cast into the treasury, for all they cast was of their abundance, but she cast in all that she had . . .”

The old woman gave of her substance, not of her excess.

The central lesson that it is of greater moral worth to give in such a manner made sense to me from the first time I heard it. It’s part of the reason I taught high school in Brooklyn for 13 years, rather than pursuing a more lucrative career. It’s part of the reason a billionaire giving millions of dollars to charity doesn’t impress me very much. And along the way, I learned that this lesson has no cultural boundaries, most profoundly while sharing a meal several years ago with a Muslim friend in the middle of the holiest of Hindu cities on the Indian subcontinent.

And that’s a story worth telling.

By the time I reached Varanasi, and met my friend Pappu, I’d been traveling in India for about a month, though it was my first stop as a proper backpacker. The previous four weeks had been spent with an entourage assembled by the mother of one of my closest friends who had recently died. The family had lived in New Delhi when my friend John was a teenager and his father was the United States Ambassador to India. To say the least, it was an interesting way to travel through the subcontinent. Most nights we were either guests of the Maharaja of Jodhpur at one of his palaces, or out on an archeological mission for National Geographic Magazine or the Smithsonian Museum. Christmas Day was spent with a world renowned economist, the publisher of one of America’s great newspapers, family friends, and an old diplomat with whom I became very close over our few weeks together, Jagat Mehta.

No matter how long I live, I don’t expect that Christmas Day to be topped for sheer strangeness. At dawn we flew from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer in the far west of Rajasthan near the Pakistani border. Eighty-three-year-old Jagat and I were on camelback, riding out onto the dunes of the Thar Desert where we were to meet the rest of our party and a group of 200 tribal musicians who had been arranged to present a concert on our behalf near an oasis. Jagat, who had been the first man hired by the Foreign Ministry of a newly independent India back in 1948 — and had ultimately risen to become the Foreign Secretary — turned to me and said with his exacting, senatorial, High-Indian English accent, “Michael . . . Michael, old boy. Have you yet met the Dalai Lama?”

Every year I’d begin my classes the same way.

“First, I know with almost absolute certainty that by the end of the year, we’re gonna be friends.”

That would usually scramble a few heads in suspicion, or at least mild disbelief.

“I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’ve learned that with damn few exceptions — and none of you look like ‘exceptions’ to me — I like my students. And, from what I can tell, they think I’m all right, too. We’ll see, but I’ve got faith.”

I’d walk to the back of the room, trusting their heads would swivel, their bodies twist and their eyes follow. There I’d pause, and take a seat on the bank of radiators. I’d gesture for them to follow and then thumb their attention to Washington Cemetery, the graveyard that sat four stories below down on 20th Avenue in Brooklyn.

“The second thing I know is this: by the end of the semester, without exceptions, we’re all going to be five months closer to our graves. No matter how much longer we all have left on this planet, fifty years or only a few, that is undeniably true.”

It was my way of introducing them to “The Conversation.”

Predictably, the kids would buck. Telling teenagers that they’re going to die is not the normal way to begin a high school social studies class. Usually one of the kids would be brave enough to voice a complaint, and in Brooklyn that generally took the form of, “Yo, Mista, you nasty. Why you gotta be sayin’ that for?”

The response was prepared in advance.

“First lesson in economics, my dear. As supply decreases, value increases. The less you have of something, the more you want it. The fewer there are of something, the more precious that thing becomes. Everyone get out a pen.”

Kids would head back to their desks, bags would unzip and fresh three-ring binders would clatter open.

That would be a very good sign. They were engaged, on edge.

“How much did you pay for that pen in your hand? Write it down! A dollar? But what if your pen was the only pen in the world? What if all the presidents and all the poets needed that one pen! What would they pay you for it? What if there was only one pen in the whole world and you owned it? How much would it be worth then?”

“Yo, Mista, probably a lot, but people don’t write with pens no more. They use computers.”

The class would laugh, I’d roll with it. Good. They’re with me.

“Be that as it may, you get the point, yes? The shorter the supply, the greater the value. Simple economics. And it works with doughnuts or days on Earth just as well as it does with pens or peacocks. Every day, every moment you’re on this planet is more valuable than the last. Every single day. There’s no way around it. Life always becomes more valuable, unless you’ve figured out a way to live forever!”

I’d pause and then thumb back down to the graveyard below.

“Just ask them.”

If I’d timed it right, the last sentence would hang in the air as the bell rang. Then they’d gather their things and head out into the hallway wondering what the hell that was all about, and I’d smile, thinking that another strange and beautiful year was underway.

It is indescribably cool to hear tumblers click into place deep inside a 15-year-old’s brain. And no matter what you’ve heard, “kids today” are just fine. They could use a lot more support, but their brains are as thirsty as human brains have ever been. And if I’d learned anything in my years teaching, it was this: if you wish to engage students about something important — like ethics, morality, rage, mortality, resentment, betrayal, or hope — all that stuff that actually comprises human history, all you have to do is ask and then give a damn about their answers. They’ve got a lot to say if you are willing to listen.

As a teacher, I long thought that curriculum was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Education professionals who don’t understand that miss the central point of our profession. In my view, the main point of education — the important part that will stick with them for years and encourage them to continue seeking — is to engage kids in thought, engage them in The Conversation. It’s the same conversation that has been flowing through human history since we were bumping our heads on stalactites and cursing the appetites of saber-toothed tigers. It’s the discourse between Socrates and Plato. It’s the debate between Pilate and Christ. It’s the mutual ruminations of Jefferson and Madison as they wondered what to do about King George, and it’s the argument between Malcolm and Martin as they tried to forge a new world of justice and love. But it’s also the conversation that two serfs had after the king’s horse just knocked them off the path and into a pile of manure. It’s the one that two Brooklyn teenagers have after they’ve just been rousted from their favorite corner by some cops just for hanging out and looking young. It’s the vernacular of the town square — be it Tiananmen, Tahrir or in your hometown. It’s The Conversation to which I was first introduced by Bill Burns, my high school mentor and Shakespeare teacher, as he taught us about King Lear’s crisis on the moors or Prospero’s maturation through the storm. It’s The Conversation that I’ve been having with my father now for thirty years, since I was old enough to understand that the essence of citizenship is found in questioning how to build a better world, and then setting your soul to doing so every day. In the end, The Conversation is the one we share whenever we honestly discuss the world in which we live, and it is one in which kids are eager to participate; you’ve just got to know how to invite them in.

The Conversation is one of those things in life that makes the always-dwindling minutes worth spending. And in a school system fixated so intently upon easily-gamed test scores, it’s one of the many things we don’t do nearly well enough.

In my small way, I tried to fix that over the years by engaging in The Conversation with my kids whenever possible, and I’m remembering one such class now.

In the fall semester of 2001 I had a non-English-speaking American history class that met during fifth period. Non-English courses were stopgap measures the school used to shore up our beleaguered bilingual education program. Fifty-five languages were spoken at FDR High School when I taught there, and while we tried to provide bilingual support for all of our students who were transitioning to English, we just didn’t have the resources to serve them in all in their native tongues. So when space in classes given by our Russian, Urdu, Chinese, Spanish or Polish-speaking teachers ran out — or for students who spoke a language for which we couldn’t provide support — the school would create a non-English class.

As you can imagine, one class could have dozens of languages, none of which were understood by the teacher.

They were interesting courses. The teachers needed to be creative in approach, and moderate their expectations and methodologies to account for the difficulties of communication — but generally the kids were super polite and eager to engage. Professionally, I really liked teaching these kids.

In the fall of 2001 that fifth-period class was a perfect example. They were incredibly nice students. What was strange, however, was that nearly all of the students (28 out of 30 if my memory holds) were Muslim. That fact took on much greater meaning after the attack of September 11 of that year. Normally a non-English class would be fairly representative of the school’s immigrant population overall. It was unusual to have a majority Muslim class. It wasn’t a problem, but it was unusual.

The first day of class I’d introduced the “economics of existence” lesson, and by using some students in class to translate for others, the substance and the strangeness of the message got through. It also allowed me to identify who had stronger language skills and who would be in need of more attention. One of the kids I noted first was Eddie, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy. He was bigger, older and far more Americanized than the rest of the kids. He spoke English reasonably well, and I was pretty sure he’d be a good classroom ally. I liked him at first sight.

The class had its jokers and its geniuses. It had some girls who were more interested in putting on makeup than they were in mercantilism. And it had other girls who wouldn’t doff their hijab in public if their lives depended upon it. It had some boys who were more interested in the girls than anything else and it had others who were more interested in video games than girls. In the end it was a pretty normal Brooklyn class, if you overlooked the religious factor. And even given that they were almost all Muslim, they were still an incredibly diverse group. These kids came from every part of the Greater Middle East — their countries of origin stretching across Northern Africa all the way to Afghanistan. In class were Moroccans, Egyptians, Palestinians, Persians, Yemenis, and a whole bunch of kids from Pakistan and Bangladesh. And they generally got along pretty well.

Otto Perez Molina (Left) / Manuel Baldizon (Right)

By the time you read this article, Guatemalans will have elected one of the two men pictured here as their new president. In this trenchant political analysis Kevin Casas-Zamora lays bare the challenges that leader will subsequently face. This article, originally published by The Brookings Institute in September, asks the reader to consider just how dire the situation has become in this nation, and whether either candidate is even remotely up to the serious tasks at hand. La Cuadra is very thankful to both the author and the Brookings Institution for allowing us to republish Mr. Casas-Zamora’s work. We encourage all of our readers to stay current by visiting www.brookings.edu. The original story can be found here. 

Elections were held in Guatemala on September 11, 2011. As has become customary since the country’s return to democratic rule in 1986, no candidate was close to reaching 50% of the vote to win outright. A second round run-off  took place on November 6. Otto Pérez-Molina, leader of the Patriotic Party and a retired general, won the first round comfortably with 36% of the vote, and subsequently won the second round against Manuel Baldizón, a businessman, former member of Congress and standard bearer of the Renewed Democratic Liberty Party (LIDER) party.

The Crucible

Threatened by the pervasive presence of organized crime and the spillover effects of drug-related violence in Mexico, Guatemala is facing an existential crucible that may well have regional implications. The signs of Guatemala’s predicament are everywhere. They range from a homicide rate (52 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009) that counts among the world’s highest, to a proliferation of high profile murders that pose serious questions about the ability of the country’s law enforcement institutions to bring violence under control. The worst of the lot, by far, is the massacre of 27 peasants in the northern department of Petén by operatives of the Mexico-based Zetas drug trafficking organization (DTO) last May. This was an ominous sign of the country’s worst security threat: the state’s loss of effective control over vast swaths of the territory to criminal gangs. Some estimates put at 40% the proportion of national territory under the control of DTOs, notably the unforgiving forests of Petén, bordering Mexico and Belize.

Guatemala’s law enforcement apparatus is not merely ill-suited to the task of turning things around. In actual fact it is a major part of the problem. Aided by a long tradition of impunity — which the 36-year long civil war made worse — criminal syndicates have been able to penetrate police and judicial institutions to a degree probably unknown in the rest of Latin America, including Mexico and Colombia. Since 2008, the country has had five Ministers of the Interior and four Chief Police Officers, including several with alleged connections to criminal organizations. It is no mystery why, according to Latinobarometer 2010, a regional opinion poll, only 17% and 18% of the Guatemalan population claim to trust the judiciary and the police, respectively, the lowest figures in Central America by far. Haiti aside, no country in the Western Hemisphere has more severe problems to uphold the rule of law.

This state of affairs led the U.N. and the Guatemalan Government to establish in 2006 the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), with the aim of dismantling illegal groups operating within the country’s security institutions. Ominously, in June 2010, Carlos Castresana, the first head of CICIG, tendered his resignation, citing the government’s reluctance to clamp down on law enforcement corruption and its lack of support for the Commission’s investigations on organized crime. After four years, the Commission can point to real successes in solving high-profile criminal cases, much as its efforts have been frequently undermined by rulings by the local judiciary. Ostensible limitations notwithstanding, CICIG remains a carefully vetted unit in a country in which the penetration of law enforcement institutions by crime syndicates is rampant.

A Most Flawed Democracy

Against this backdrop the electoral process has provided no sign that Guatemala’s political system is up to the colossal tasks facing the country. The symptoms are myriad. The electoral process has rendered evident the frailty of the country’s party system, which, alongside Peru’s, is the most volatile in Latin America. Ever since the democratic transition, no incumbent party has been able to win reelection and most parties, in fact, have disappeared after a few years. Guatemala is, for all intents and purposes, a party-less democracy. Indeed, only an environment in which political structures are thin as a shadow could have engendered the ill-starred candidacy of First Lady Sandra Torres, which poisoned political debates for most of the campaign. Torres’ decision to divorce President Alvaro Colom overtly to circumvent the constitutional norm that barred her from running (“I’m divorcing my husband so I can marry my people,” she announced), would be more than enough to give politics a bad name in any country. By means of a Constitutional Court ruling, Guatemala’s legal system was able to put an end to this undignified soap opera, giving a hint in the process that the rule of law is not yet a lost cause in Guatemala. The legal system, however, proved incapable of protecting political institutions from other more ominous threats. That the assassination of at least 35 candidates and activists throughout the electoral process is generally considered a progress says plenty about the state of Guatemala’s democratic institutions. To this we have to add the blatant disregard of the main candidates for campaign finance rules that cap private donations, forbid foreign contributions and require parties to reveal their income sources. In a country where organized crime reigns virtually unfettered the complete opacity of campaign finance poses real dangers. That a consortium of local NGOs presented data suggesting that parties spent a minimum of $35 million during the first round compounds the legitimate concern for the integrity of the electoral process.

The Candidates

And then there is the deeply problematic choice yielded by the election. Following his narrow electoral defeat in 2007, Pérez-Molina has somewhat softened his “iron-fisted” approach to crime, though he still embraces an expansive military participation in law enforcement duties. His policy platform is vaporous, but at least pays lip service to the notion of a national fiscal pact to raise revenue. The latter is a need of the highest order in Guatemala, where tax revenue barely reaches 10% of GDP, one of the world’s lowest figures and one of the root causes of the state’s structural weakness. The fiscal pact is also the Holy Grail of Guatemalan politics, which for decades has lived under the shadow of an all-powerful and, in many ways, pre-modern oligarchy hell-bent on blocking any attempt to increase its tax burden. Interestingly, despite his military past and conservative disposition, Pérez-Molina is generally distrusted by the local oligarchy, which embraced him reluctantly as the best way to stop the First Lady, whom they loathed. In his demeanor and rhetoric, Pérez-Molina gives the impression of being his own man, at least with regards to Guatemala’s traditional oligarchy. That ought to count in his favor.

More sensitive are the questions about his military past. He was head of military intelligence and army field commander in an area that saw the most atrocious human rights abuses during Guatemala’s civil war. It is fair to say that hard evidence implicating Pérez-Molina in the latter has not been forthcoming and, hence, he is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. However, any dispassionate observer would have to agree that such a past hardly amounts to a reassuring resume for a presidential candidate in a country whose paramount challenge is about ending impunity and bolstering the rule of law. What is most remarkable is that voters do not seem to care about any of this. This is partly because a large percentage of the electorate has no direct recollection of the tragedy of the civil war, which ended fifteen years ago, and also, and more ominously, because Pérez-Molina’s military background is actually welcome as a guarantee of resolve by a desperate population. His eventual electoral success could be a harbinger of things to come in Latin America. In a region where today the Armed Forces are vastly more trusted than civilian institutions (in 2009 the Armed Forces were trusted by 45% of Latin Americans; political parties by 24%, according to Latinobarometer), military officers — both active and retired — may well decide in a few countries that it is time for them to fill the void of credibility and solutions left by widely discredited politicians. Coups may be out of fashion in the region, but a military hand at the helm may not be.

That someone like Pérez-Molina has come to be seen as the most sensible and predictable, even responsible, political option in Guatemala is disturbing. Because none of the adjectives above befits Manuel Baldizón. Only a populist buffoon of the worst kind would be ready to serve voters a political platform whose main courses consist of applying the death penalty across the board (broadcasting executions live, for good measure), denouncing international Human Rights treaties, guaranteeing 15 months of salary to all workers by decree, slashing income tax rates to 5% while eliminating all other taxes, and, in a dazzling display of sorcery, promising Guatemala’s qualification to the next World Cup. That this farrago was taken seriously by nearly one fourth of the voters is a reminder that unjust and violent democracies are doomed to walking on the edge of a cliff. This smacks of desperation. Above all, it is an indication that a significant share of the citizenship has given up on a rotten political status quo, which they deem unable to solve their problems.

 The Real Choice

And in this they may be onto something. The sad truth about Guatemala’s election is that its eventual result is highly unlikely to improve matters in the country. To put it shortly: the result is mostly irrelevant, except that some options can make things even worse than they are. Guatemala’s problems are deep and intractable as to appear way beyond the manifest abilities of the political leadership on offer. They are problems that concern the viability of the state, not the quality of any particular administration.

It is time to shed the pretence that Guatemala’s frail and corrupt institutions will be able to prevent the country from becoming a narco-state. In order to forestall this outcome, Guatemala needs not merely the abundant help but indeed the tutelage of the international community. U.N. involvement — so far limited to the investigation of a few high profile cases — must be expanded dramatically to encompass police and judicial powers, so that law enforcement institutions can be rebuilt wholesale. This means, in practice, that the Guatemalan government would have to consent to partly ceding essential attributes of sovereignty to some kind of U.N.-sanctioned body, to a much greater degree than allowed by CICIG’s current mandate and for a long, long time.

This is very unpleasant, not to mention riddled with risks. But it is no use assuming that Guatemala’s institutions in their current shape are up to the task or that ceding vital components of sovereignty is an affront to the country. Guatemala is already losing sovereignty every day, in every possible way, to some of the world’s most dangerous people. Guatemala’s next President will have to decide whether to relinquish vital prerogatives of the state to the international community in order to save his country, or to relinquish more territory to criminal gangs and doom his country to implosion.

Judging by the spectacle of the current electoral process, it would be delusional to expect from the leading presidential candidates the farsightedness and statesmanship that Guatemala sorely needs at this juncture. We can only hope. But we also need to start calling things for what they are and stop pretending that Guatemala is on the road to any kind of recovery.

Kevin Casas-Zamora is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy and interim director of the Latin America Initiative at The Brookings Institution. Most recently, Casas-Zamora served as Costa Rica’s vice president, as well as minister of national planning and economic policy. Casas-Zamora has authored several studies on political finance, elections, citizen security, and civil-military relations in Latin America. This article was originally published by Brookings in September (www.brookings.edu). It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

Earlier this spring news reached out from a mountain city in Pakistan

I put aside an essay I was writing and sat quietly on the couch, staring at my laptop, watching the news spread virally through the pages of my former students from Brooklyn, many of whom I’d been with on September 11, 2001. From most of them, now in their late 20s and still living in New York City, the news was perfunctorily given: a link to the New York Times or the Daily News websites, a one sentence observation of good riddance, a profile picture changed out for an image of Lower Manhattan or one of a cousin who was with Ladder 12 and never took a step backwards once he hit the doors of the South Tower.

It was a half an hour before the first, “Fuck, Yeah!” startled me off the Facebook news feed. It was then that I finally set the computer on the couch and turned on the television to see what it had to offer. Not much, as it happened. The information was the standard 24-hour-news-cycle of inaccurate conjecture and pauses for commercials as we awaited more of the same.

With no substantive information beyond the headline, the channel moved to their secondary default: a hastily organized panel discussion that tossed back and forth precious little insight about “to what audience” the president most had to speak that night.

Then a report broke from the site of the World Trade Center that the streets were filling with thousands of people, mostly young, mostly students, who began chanting “USA!, USA!” and breaking into song and celebration.

I found myself whispering to the television, “Please, stop.” The on-scene reporter was beaming as he waded into the crowd. My head fell into my hands as I remembered collapsing into the driver’s seat of my car after work on September 11, 2001. The windshield was covered in ash and I absentmindedly turned on the wipers. Then, like I’d been shot, I realized I was mechanically brushing away human remains. For the thousandth time that day, I felt my soul fall out of my body.

I looked up from the couch and the kids on my television screen were still gathering, chanting. I picked up the phone to call my two best friends in Guatemala, both expatriated New Yorkers. As it happens, one was in Honduras on a holiday; the other was in Mexico on business. I left messages that said, “I thought I’d call you just in case you didn’t know . . .” It seemed somehow more right for one of us to share that news with the others.

Then I turned back to the television as the reporter inveighed his audience to “remember the rage we felt” on September 11, 2001. And to now look at these young people singing and dancing. With two memes he’d created his own circular narrative that neatly packaged both beginning and ending — a story he had the honor of sharing with the audience from Ground Zero. He tossed back to the newsroom where the panel picked up his thread and speculated that, politically, “this was a great day for Obama,” and then countered itself by offering the more generous observation that this was a “great day for America.”

But I cannot see it as such. It was an ending. Maybe a coda. But it wasn’t a great day. Nothing associated with that much cruelty, not even the death of its proximate architect, could be considered great in the way it was being presented on television. Not by me. The narrative being sold on televisions and computer monitors around the world was an artifice, and I see a danger in allowing that first draft of history to harden into canon.

My memory of September 11, 2001 does not begin with rage; it is not how we responded.

For the great majority of us, rage came later and in the company of a confused host of other emotions. On September 11, New York City was defined by a dark, subterranean sadness: a rolling basso profundo suffusing the city. Above that, in the schools and offices of the five boroughs an impassioned fugue of shock, horror and fear passed between pairs and small gatherings.  All day long we spoke to one another, listened to one another and cared for one another. Around the city the names we used were specific to our clans, but we all participated in the same grand conversation — and in the same desperate cadence.

If you had listened in at the window of the FDR High School social studies office at some random moment during the day, you would have heard something very much like this:

“Fanny, how’s Victor? Did his unit get called in?”

“Calm down, baby. They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.”

“Have you seen Brendan? How’s Mallory?”

“Where’s Richie? Are his people okay?”

“Sue, can I use your phone? My father’s office is in the Empire State Building.”

“No. I haven’t heard anything from him, yet.”

“Danny’s office was where?!! Tell me when you reach him. I’ll use the phone later.”

“Alisa, did Sue get word from Danny?”

“How are Herb’s kids? Are they home from school?”

“Thank God.”

“Any word from Danny?”

Change the names and you would have heard that same conversation at windowsills from Gun Hill to Gramercy to Gravesend.

Next to an ancestor cross, where Ixil priests make regular offerings,

What they didn’t know is that their partners invested the funds in, not emigrants or projects, but a Mam Maya priest who promised riches from the volcanoes of Quezaltenango. At last report, this spellbinding practitioner of Mayan tradition was the object of an arrest warrant, a problem that was not interfering with his used-car business on the Mexican border. Back in Nebaj, the title to Alfonsa’s house fell into the hands of a bank, she was summoned to court, and she was about to lose her house when the bank agreed to refinance Q225,000 of the debt. She and her family will be able to keep their home as long as they make mortgage payments of Q3,000 a month. The only way they can generate Q36,000 (US$4,600) a year is in the U.S. labor market, to which end Alfonsa’s husband has joined their son in Houston, where the two are washing dishes in restaurants but having trouble finding enough hours. If they hang on in the United States, and if they remit faithfully, their house will be in the clear as early as 2024.

If you had told me this story a few years ago, I wouldn’t believe you. How can Guatemalans with household incomes of $1500 or so per year make $10,000 loans? How can they charge each other monthly interest rates of 10%, 15%, even 20%? Last but not least, how can their scramble to earn dollars in the U.S. make them poorer? These are not easy questions, but the answers lead back to two sacred cows in the current pantheon of wishful thinking: 1) microcredit and 2) unauthorized border-crossing in search of a better life.

Nebaj was hit hard in Guatemala’s civil war (it’s one of the towns for which genocide lawsuits have been filed), and it has received more aid projects than any other Mayan town. Yet no amount of aid will address a basic problem. Thanks to vaccination campaigns and potable water projects, most children are surviving to adulthood. Nebaj parents have been slow to reduce their pregnancies, women still average six children and the population is approaching five times what it was before the Spanish Conquest. The land base has become so fractured that most Nebajenses do not inherit enough land for subsistence farming. Local jobs pay four to eight dollars a day, which is enough to feed a family but not enough to pay for the consumer goods that Nebajenses now admire and want.

When I visited Nebaj for the first time in November 1982, it was a quiet, scared town occupied by the Guatemalan army as it chased Marxist guerrillas in the surrounding mountains. At one point much of the Mayan population, which is predominantly Ixil but includes a dynamic K’iche’ minority, seemed to support the Guerrilla Army of the Poor not just in Nebaj but in the neighboring municipios of Cotzal and Chajul. In retaliation, the Guatemalan army committed massacres and burned down the rural settlements. Thousands of people died, and more than a third of the population took refuge in born-again Protestant churches, whose members now provide a majority of the town’s leadership.

Since then the guerrillas have demobilized, the army has dwindled to a platoon, and Nebaj has become the most bustling town in the region. Thanks to the many aid projects, Ixils and their K’iche’ neighbors have replaced the domestic livestock they lost in the war. They are growing a wider repertoire of agricultural products. Shuttle looms bang out textiles. Ixils have taken over the local teaching profession, and thousands of Ixil youth have obtained secondary education. Ixils are in charge of the municipal government, dozens of Protestant congregations, and the Catholic parish. The streets are filled with pickups, motorcycles, and careening three-wheeled taxis. Teenage girls clump by in high heels gabbing on cell phones. A delegate from the European Union visited for the first time, saw all the three-story houses going up, and exclaimed: “This has got to be the drug trade!”

No, it is first of all the result of international projects, especially from the European Union, in an aid bonanza that began in the late 1980s and shows no sign of ending. The justification for the endless parade of new programs is that most of Nebaj’s population was displaced by the war. True, but equally devastated municipios have never been deluged with projects like the Nebajenses. What makes them such a magnet for international donors? Looking handsome, having a knack for getting on with foreigners, and living in a majestic mountain valley have not hurt, and so the Ixils have become calendar Mayas, in two senses. Their diviners still use the Mayan calendar, and the splendor of their traditional female dress gets them into calendars put out by aid organizations as symbolic capital for fundraising.

This is not to say that the Ixil-internationalist marriage is a happy one. What motivates the Ixils welcoming international organizations is their desire to superar (get ahead), not their loyalty to the picturesque traditions that foreigners so prize. While some families are plaintiffs in the genocide indictments against former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983), many more Ixils have voted for Ríos and his political party on repeated occasions. When Guatemalan voters turned against Ríos in the 2003 election, all three Ixil municipios elected mayors from his political party. Yet Nebaj is so attractive to international donors that they have chosen to overlook its political conservatism and born again religiosity.

Rodrigo Rosenberg

La Cuadra believes that many of our foreign-born readers have interest in trying to understand the often Byzantine channels through which power runs in Guatemala. And we also know from our experiences living here that gaining insight on the Guatemalan political landscape is difficult, to say the least. Fortunately, we know Paul Goepfert, a writer and thinker who has been observing the often parallel worlds of political power in Central America for the past thirty years. What he says isn’t always flattering to those in power, but it is always thoughtful.

Presented below is an article by Mr. Goepfert that casts an investigative eye into the “parallel powers” (legal and illegal, overt and covert) which define the nature of the Guatemalan state. And, as the author recently pointed out to us, “as we move into another Presidential election cycle with three of the top four candidates being legally barred from running by the Constitution, it’s probably worth taking a look back over the past two years to gain some perspective on how things really work in this country.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Guatemalans go to the polls in November of 2011 to elect the next government. We hope that Paul sticks with us for the coming issues to help keep our readers informed.

On May 10 2009 a prominent Guatemalan attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was gunned down in broad daylight while riding his bicycle down a busy, tree-lined boulevard in a wealthy residential district of Guatemala City. But this wasn’t just another killing in a homicide-plagued country. On May 11, 2009 Guatemalan television aired a pre-recorded video in which Mr. Rosenberg stated the following: “If you are viewing this video, it is because I have been assassinated by President Álvaro Colom.” Mr. Rosenberg then proceeded to accuse close associates of the President, including the President’s wife, Sandra Torres de Colom, of involvement not only in his murder but in the earlier murder of two of his clients, the prominent businessman Khahil Musa and his daughter Marjorie, purportedly over fears of revelations of corrupt drug-money laundering at the highest government levels in the semi-state bank, Banrural.

The immediate, explosive effect was the polarization of the nation into mass demonstrations in the capital for and against President Colom and his wife. The anti-Colom demonstrators, calling for his resignation, were mostly urban, educated professionals and university students, who had spontaneously organized themselves through the social networking systems of Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. The pro-Colom supporters were primarily rural people, bused in by the government from the countryside, areas where the Colom administration, through the offices of the First Lady, have spent significant state resources on direct aid programs, such as “Social Cohesion” and “My Family Progresses.” The Anti-Colom opposition has insisted that Torres de Colom has no constitutional mandate to be managing any government funds, and they have demanded a rendering of this spending to the congress. When the Colom administration refused, the opposition cried foul, claiming the Colom and his wife are using government funds to influence voters in support of Sandra de Colom’s expected presidential candidacy in 2012 — a candidacy that many Guatemalan jurists believe to be constitutionally prohibited in the first place. Meanwhile, the nation tottered over the abyss.

It would not be until January 12, 2010 when one man stepped forward to the microphone to cut the Gordian Knot of the case. That man was the head of the United Nations International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, (CICIG in its Spanish acronym), Dr. Carlos Castresana, Spanish judge and professor of international jurisprudence. With a plethora of forensic evidence, Dr. Castresana astonished an habitually incredulous nation by showing how Rosenberg had planned his own killing. A motive was not offered, but President Colom and his wife were off the hook.

The case brought CICIG to the attention of the entire country. In December of 2006 the Guatemalan government had signed an agreement with the Secretary General of the United Nations to allow the formation of this special commission against impunity in Guatemala. The Commission was solicited in order to investigate what in Guatemala are called “parallel powers,” clandestine criminal groups with tentacles into the security forces and the judicial system, linked to army counterinsurgent intelligence. These “parallel powers” had for years influenced the judicial system. The Commission’s job was not only to bust the “parallel powers” but also to crack its influence within the judicial system. Its mandate also included suggesting changes in existing laws or drafting new laws that might help eradicate the rampant criminality in the country. CICIG was unusual because it was mandated to work through the Attorney General’s staff in any prosecutorial case. As the The Journal of International Criminal Justice from Oxford University pointed out, this was a two-edged sword: on the one hand CICIG’s prosecutorial independence was limited by its partnership with a judicial system that it was mandated to reform, but on the other hand it was embedded in the system it needed to reform. But as Dr. Castresana has said in an interview with this writer, “None of the institutions here are completely corrupt. So it’s possible to find people in the police, in the prosecutor’s office, and in the judicial system who are ready to be converted into our partners.”

The average Guatemalan on the street, however, was not feeling the benefits. The only thing that the average citizen knew was that every day his or her life was ever more fatally precarious. Since the signing of the December 1996 Peace Accords, ending 36 years of internecine warfare between leftist guerrillas and the Guatemalan army, Guatemala had been descending into a maelstrom of civilian violence even surpassing, by many measures, the years of war.

The sociologist and one-time government peace negotiator Hector Rosada observed, “The peace is more violent than the war. The peace process never prepared us for the country we are now living in.”

Luis Linares of ASIES (The Association of Investigation and Social Studies) put it another way: “We are living in a psychosis. The citizen leaves home in the morning and doesn’t know if he will come home alive. This is a cost that we assume every day, but it is difficult to quantify.”

Nevertheless, some data do quantify this cost. From the year 2000 to the year 2009 homicides have risen from 2,904 per year to 6,451, yet in 2009 there were only 230 homicide prosecutions, or slightly more than 3.5 percent. In 2000 there were approximately 25.9 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants in Guatemala; in 2009 there were 48 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. By way of comparison, the rate in Costa Rica is four murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

On my first night in Guatemala,

I had hustled from La Aurora Airport in Guatemala City to Antigua without stopping in the sprawling capital. Most tourists use this colonial city, which at times seems to have been surrendered to ex-pats, as their base. Here you can drink good coffee and eat tofu and, surrounded by stucco and crumbling churches, feel as if you have arrived in a postcard of Central America.

A Guatemalan woman sat to my right on the end of the bar. She asked me where I was from. “New York,” I said in Spanish. She had family there, a sister, in Queens. I live in Brooklyn, I told her. Then using a saltshaker and a packet of sugar I showed her the lay of the land.

Across the bar, an attractive Guatemalan couple nuzzled over a sweet, well-iced slice of cake, their backs to a large flatscreen television. Flatscreens, I would learn, like fingerprint scanners and cell phones, were common in this country of high telecom investment. Someone commented that the television wasn’t on.

“It doesn’t work,” said the waitress behind the bar. They asked her why.

She smiled. “Because this is Guatemala.”

The people sipping coffee along the bar nodded. They all seemed to understand.

I came to Guatemala to leave New York. I wanted to put reporting aside, to take a break from conversations with strangers about life and death and social fabric for two weeks, and bury unfinished business beneath a new landscape, a new language, a good book. I could have gone anywhere, but my friend Nadia Sussman suggested I tag along while she visited old friends first in Antigua, then in a city called Quetzaltenango, also known by its K’iche’ Indian name, Xelajú.

Because my planning had consisted of little more than checking dates before I’d bought the ticket and slapped together my bag, I arrived with too few t-shirts and little context. I knew only vaguely of the 36-year civil war that involved the killing of 200,000, the widespread social inequalities and crime. I didn’t know of the distinguishingly high number of homicides, which, according the Economist Intelligence Unit, reached 6,200 in 2008 among a population of 13 million. I didn’t know of the rampant deforestation or the poorly planned water systems or the government corruption. I also didn’t check the weather.

In late May, as I was heading towards Guatemala the amoebic glob of Tropical Storm Agatha, the first of the 2010 season, began to congeal on satellite screens. First came the rain, uncharacteristically heavy for that time of year. On the morning of Saturday, May 29, the patter of water on tin roofs became a drone.

I was in Xela by then, a city of 300,000 in the western highlands. Information about the storm passed from house to house. There was word of rising water and people rowing out of their homes in the city’s low-lying Zone 2. News came in from the surrounding towns in the department of Quetzaltenango. Mudslides had devastated farms in Zunil, they said, burying the country’s onions and carrots under thick, wet volcanic soil. The road to la capital was impassable.

On Saturday afternoon I sat with Nadia and Sandra, our host, in the kitchen of the house that doubled as a comedor, the sort of ad-hoc restaurants common in Guatemalan neighborhoods. The young men who ate their three daily meals here leaned over their plates, chewing thick tortillas. One of the men, Bernabe, said he had heard from his family in Sololá. They were okay, but mudslides had crushed cinder block houses. Families had been evacuated to shelters, and there were fallecidos.