The opposing faces of Guatemala. by keith mundy
ach December, hordes of devils come to Guatemala. Clad in fierce red, carrying pitchforks for stoking the fires of hell, sharp horns on their heads and evil grins on their faces, the devils appear everywhere on the main streets of Central America’s most populous nation. Fortunately, they are not alive, but effigies that are for sale. These eerie figures presage one of Latin America’s more bizarre festivals – and undoubtedly its hottest. In the first week of December, all over Guatemala, in villages, towns and cities, people clear out their rubbish and make piles of it in the street. Then on December 7th, they stick a devil on top and at precisely 6 o’clock in the evening they set fire to the garbage heap.
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As the old newspapers, worn-out furniture and other trash go up in flames, taking the devil with them, people set off firecrackers and indulge in general merriment, with marimba bands playing. Why? Well, you see, the devil lurks in all Guatemalan houses. Under beds, in closets and in garbage that has piled up all year. By clearing out all his possible hiding places and making a fire of the rubbish with him on top – presto! – Satan’s gone. Until the next year. It’s said the custom began in the old colonial capital of Antigua, which today has what many people regard as the most beautiful Fiesta del Quemado del Diablo, as the festival’s called in Spanish. The origins,
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gradually became a national festival, and a great day for naughty boys and pyromaniacs, much like Guy Fawkes’ Day Adorable Antigua in Britain. Today, Antigua’s In anticipation of the Catholic Quemado centres on the main feast of the Immaculate square where a devil effigy rises Conception on December 8th, three storeys tall, constructed honouring the Virgin Mary, of wood and stuffed with wealthier people adorn their house fronts with lanterns, whilst firecrackers and rubbish, which is doused with gasoline and the poor, unable to afford such set aflame at exactly 6pm, as lamps, instead pile rubbish in front of their houses and burn it. custom dictates. The setting is At Santo Domingo Monastery in wonderful, for this is by Antigua, an annual tradition had common consent the most impressive colonial city in been to burn a devil figure and Central America. set off firecrackers on the Day Founded in 1543, boasting of the Rosary in late October. After local priests began stressing a tremendous wealth of architectural riches, this was, in the Virgin’s triumph over evil, its heyday of the 17th and 18th the celebration was pushed centuries, one of the great cities back to December to precede of the Spanish empire, serving her Immaculate Conception as the administrative centre for feast. Over time the two things all of Central America and part coalesced into a distinct festival of Mexico. The remarkable with people burning the devil wealth of colonial buildings – to banish evil ahead of churches, convents, monasteries Mary’s big day. Spreading out from Antigua, and mansions – provides an idea of its former status. The great the Quemado del Diablo unsurprisingly, are Catholic and colonial.
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In anticipation of the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th, wealthier people adorn their house fronts with lanterns, whilst the poor, unable to afford such lamps, instead pile rubbish in front of their houses and burn it.
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volcano which looms above the city is a constant reminder of the geological instability that killed it as a place of power; in 1773 an earthquake devastated Antigua, and the Spanish authorities moved the capital to a location 40 kilometres to the east – Guatemala City. Superbly situated in a sweeping highland valley, Antigua’s cobbled streets and charming squares are ideal to explore on foot. Housing less than 40,000 people, having an unhurried ambience, a sociable bar scene and a wide choice of restaurants, Antigua has become Guatemala’s top tourist destination, a favoured hangout for travellers and affluent Guatemalans. A centre for learning Spanish, the town has language schools that attract students from all over the world. Located so close to the capital, it’s a favourite weekend escape for middle-class Guatemalans who come to eat, drink and enjoy themselves.
dates from late-colonial and early-independence days, but the district is now reviving as streets have been pedestrianised, buildings restored and new cafés and bars opened. With so many streets and so many Quemados, the city becomes one vast pall of smoke on that evening. Even worse, the junk tossed out by relatively affluent citizens is often toxic when burnt, containing many noxious substances. What started with a folklore cleansing ritual has now become an opportunity for people to light great pyres of household refuse, including mattresses, appliances, plastic goods and tyres. Small wonder, then, that many people are not keen on the Burning of the Devil. Even the government thinks it’s gotten out of hand, and the environment ministry has asked Guatemalans to dim their pyromania. Newspapers have grumbled that polluting the air is the opposite of purification – to little effect so far.
The Big Smoke The capital, Guatemala City, hosting four million inhabitants – about six times the number of the second biggest city, Villa Nueva – and growing fast, naturally has the most fires each December 7th. A maelstrom of industry and commerce that sprawls across a huge upland basin, surrounded by craggy hills and volcanic cones, this is Guatemala’s undisputed centre of politics, power and wealth. The capital has an intensity and vibrancy that are both its fascination and its horror, and for many visitors, dealing with it is an exercise in damage limitation, as they struggle through congested streets suffused with traffic fumes. For years urban decay has tainted the capital’s historic heart that
The Real Devils If only the custom dealt with the real devils, there would surely be no complaint from most Guatemalans. For in Guatemala true demons exist in considerable numbers and their deeds in the last four decades are shocking beyond belief. Human rights reports from the 1970s through to the present document savagery unparallelled in the Americas, most horrifically the systematic massacre of rural communities by the armed forces in the 1980s – part of a long civil war in which an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans lost their lives, the bulk of them indigenous people completely innocent of any offence. “Draining the sea to kill the fish”, the army cynically called it, the sea being a village, the fish
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Few countries have sights to match the dawn over volcano-ringed Lake Atitlan or the view of the pristine jungle from atop a great Mayan temple at Tikal. Few countries have such dazzling traditional peoples, such abundance of wildlife, or such a fine old town as Antigua.
being a few suspected guerrillas. The vast majority of Guatemalans would dearly love to be able to sweep these devils out of the country just as they brushed the folklore devils out of their houses. But the ingrained system of impunity for the powerful does not allow it. Even when the man regarded as the absolute Satan of human rights abuses, the former general and president Efrain Rios Montt, was finally put on trial this year [2013] for genocide committed under his rule in the early 1980s, and – by a miracle – convicted, a few days later a higher court voided the verdict on a technicality. The first former head of state to be prosecuted for genocide in his own country, the demon responsible for
killing tens of thousands of Guatemalans was free again. This is a country with two faces, a land of peerless beauty masking demonic brutality. Long after the civil war officially ended in 1996, the level of violence is still extreme and the judicial system is incapable of coping with it. Recent official records have showed 97 percent of murders of women going unpunished and 70 percent uninvestigated. A UN official once made the sardonic comment: “Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it”. The traveller, however, is rarely the target, and for many experienced wanderers – including the great travel writer Norman Lewis – this is the world’s most beautiful country. On his first visit in 1946, Lewis saw “a country of extreme, often unearthly beauty, lying in the shadows of 32 volcanoes, its towns rattled constantly by earthquakes like dice in a box, its villages peopled by a race who rarely smiled”. All that is equally true now. So let’s turn away from the devilry to the beauty of this land, of which there is so much. Few countries have sights to match the dawn over volcano-ringed Lake Atitlan or the view of the pristine jungle from atop a great Mayan temple at Tikal. Few countries have such dazzling traditional peoples, such abundance of wildlife, or such a fine old town as Antigua. A Land Apart In that isthmus which snakes from Mexico down to South America, the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Pacific Ocean on the other, Guatemala is the largest and most populous country. Amongst the region’s seven nations it is unique, with
extraordinary natural, historical and cultural appeal. Central Americans are generally of very mixed blood, blending Amerindian, European and African genes. Guatemala is different. It is the only country which has a high proportion of pure-blooded Amerindians – 40 percent – and the only one in which Amerindian culture continues in a largely traditional way. This is the legacy of the ancient Mayas, whose remarkable civilisation arose and flourished in what is now Guatemala and adjacent parts of Mexico.Their ceremonial cities were abandoned centuries ago, but Maya people continue to thrive in the highlands, where traditions and rituals, mingled with Catholic practices, endure to form the richest and most distinctive indigenous identity in the Americas. Witnessing the Friday market in the highland town of Solola rams this fact home. There, seated all across the formal gardens of the central square, pure Spanish colonial in style, are hundreds upon hundreds of Indians, their brilliant red woven clothing dazzling the eye, the mournful resignation of their expressions and postures demonstrating an ancient culture dominated yet largely unmoved by that imported one which has grown up amongst them over five centuries. Their strength is that of the Mayan civilisation whose descendants they are. Along with the Andean civilisations that climaxed with the Incas and the Mexican civilisations which culminated with the Aztecs, the Mayas were one of the New World’s most sophisticated peoples. Reaching its zenith around 700-900 AD, their urban civilisation collapsed due
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capital city’s elite. In those highlands lies Lake Atitlan, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Some 15 kilometres wide, this bowl of deep cool clear water is encircled by volcanoes that rise sombrely and symmetrically from its shores. The three largest cones stand sentry above the lakeside town of Santiago Atitlan, where the people, as in each part of the Indian highlands, wear clothes of a Indian Highlands distinctive pattern and cut. Visiting highland Guatemala Most striking are the men in today, you encounter a people their black-and-white striped characterised by a sweet pants of three-quarter length, melancholy. They are almost unfailingly polite but consistently a mark of the Tz’utujil Maya. From Panajachel on the sad. Though not averse to northern lake shore, the views fun, they typically possess a demeanour of withdrawn dignity. are magical. From dawn to dusk, Excellent craftsmen and women, the lake and its backdrop of volcanoes pass through varying and practising their age-old agriculture, they run an economy moods, first soft and misty, next warm and brilliant, that contrasts strikingly with then windy and cloud-decked, the country’s macro-economy until at sunset a Technicolor – the agribusiness of the large drama fills the skies. From the landowners and the industrial lakeside, cobbled streets rise and service economy run by the to climate change long before the Spanish conquest of the 1500s. Shorn of their temple cities and sunken back into a small-scale agricultural way of life, their prior experience of catastrophe enabled them to cope with the conquistadors much less traumatically than did the Aztecs or Incas, whose civilisations were overthrown at their height, making the fall so demoralising.
photo: ©corbis / proile
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gently through lush gardens, but things are far less tranquil than they were in the hippie days when this was a counterculture haven for gringos. Now a brash tourism reigns, with strings of cafés and craft shops catering to the palates of the white folks of the North. A bohemian element remains, but the village is having its Koh Samui moment, seguing from a budget traveller’s mecca to a resort for tour groups. Higher up in the hills is the Mayan heartland of the old Kaqchikel and K’iche kingdoms. Its main town, Chichicastenango – an important trading town long before the Spanish conquest – is a remarkable place in which colonial vestiges are outdone by a bustling market and bizarre religious customs. The Mayan descendants have never really accepted Catholicism, but adapted it to fit their ancestral religion. Eschewing pews, choir stalls, pulpits or high altars, the town’s principal church of Santo Tomas has a bare stone floor along the centre of which stands a series of low platforms, upon which the people place candles and floral offerings in worship of a hotch-potch of Christian saints and Mayan gods. A dense fog of incense shrouds the scene, its powerful scent joining the low chanting of worshippers. In the 1980s, a new parish priest fresh from Spain was sent to Santo Tomas. He saw what took place in his church and the same night threw every vestige of pagan worship out into the street. Upon word of this, an angry mob surged forth and the priest ran for his life. He did not return for six months, and then allowed all to continue as normal. (Discretion is wise for tourists too: take a picture inside the church and an enraged worshipper might smash
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In the 1980s a new parish priest was sent to Santo Tomas. When he saw what took place in his church he threw every vestige of pagan worship onto the street. Upon word of this, an angry mob surged forth and the priest ran for his life. He did not return for six months. 327
your camera.) This is a culture that is deeply enduring and self-protective, personified on the international stage by Rigoberta Menchú, the K’iche Maya activist for indigenous rights who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. This highland area was a major sufferer of the state’s violence in the civil war, in which Rigoberta herself lost her father, mother and brother. Whilst today’s Maya people have the highlands as their heartland, in ancient times the great Maya cities were far away in the forested lowlands. Northern Wilds Far in the north lies the lowland Peten region, about 70 percent of which is still covered by primary forest. Easily accessible only by air from the main population centre in the south, Flores is one of the few towns of any size, a remarkable settlement on an island in a lake, reached by a causeway. Dense with old
red-roofed buildings and narrow cobblestone streets, Flores is like nowhere else in Guatemala. Special as it is, it’s really just a staging post to the main attractions. Much of the forest is protected as the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest continuous tract of forest in the Americas after the Amazon jungle. Packed with ceiba, mahogany and sapo dilla trees, the forest has a canopy that towers 50 metres above the dense vegetation that cloaks its floor. Most of the reserve remains miraculously undisturbed, although recent oil finds and migrant settlers are putting strains on the Laguna del Tigre National Park. The Peten’s star attraction is the Tikal National Park, still an ecological paradise that protects an amazing biodiversity yet to be fully explored, where birds are extraordinarily varied and jaguars hunt in the night. Yet even that is not the main reason to come here. In the heart of this jungle lies one of the major sites
of Mayan civilisation, inhabited from the 6th century BC to the 10th century AD – Tikal. A millennium has passed since Tikal was a living city with possibly 90,000 inhabitants. Now, in the tourism age, many visitors reach it, but still they are far fewer than the original denizens. The limestone ruins of the city’s grand ceremonial centre – temples, plazas, palaces – were only dug out from centuries of overgrowth and partially restored in the 1960s. Wildlife has long regarded them as its home – howler monkeys, harpy eagles, white-nosed coatis, toucans, ocellated turkeys and many other species. Tikal’s temples, ziggurats of daunting steepness, only just hold their heads above the forest canopy. If you brave the vertiginous stairway to the top of the tallest temple, you are rewarded with 360-degree views of primary forest – no less majestic now as it was to its ancient Mayan inhabitants.