Last Monday's Story

I must preface this post with an apology. The news of Petén's outbreak of gang violence and the subsequent military state of siege is over a week old, and I've already explained most of what's been going on to some. The reason I've taken so long to write this is because I didn't want to write all of it. I went to Santa Elena last monday morning, wondering what was going on, and stumbled across a police raid. I stayed and took pictures. In light of all the uncertainty that came to light that afternoon, I decided that this was not the sort of story many of the people I care about back home would appreciate hearing. I did not (and still do not, don't worry) intend to go news-chasing with my camera, so I decided I would wait to tell this part of the story, until I understood better what the situation in Petén was. I didn't want to cause any more uncertainty and anxiety than I had to - there was enough of that going on around me in Flores.

[Military Presence in Petén]

But a week later, things have settled down. Like all problems of uncertainty, this one was put to rest by information. Here's the story.





Monday's paper said that 27 farm hands had been massacred on a farm called Los Cocos, north and east from the lake. That morning, before, during and after our weekly meeting, it was the talk of the office - until the talk of the office became the bomb that someone said went off somewhere in Santa Elena. Information filtered in in bits and pieces and was churned around amongst the staff, like an article in a blender, but no one could say what was happening.

At lunch, I took my camera and walked across the bridge to the Santa Elena shore. Flores had been completely normal, and I wanted to see if things were any different on the other side. There had been a bombing, some said - what was going on? The streets were busy as people went about their business. I stopped to chat with a parked tuctuc driver, to see if he knew what was going on. "Did you hear about the bomb?" "Yes, close to the bus station." "Would you take me there?" "Of course!". So I rode off to the bus station. I'll admit, I had in my mind an image of a street covered in the remains of a café, splintered chairs and table cloths strewn about - like I'd read about in Iraq, and Israel. The bus station had not been bombed though. I snapped a picture of the bustling station, and the young men standing in the shade, asking me where I wanted to go, and then crossed the road to follow what appeared to be the edge of a crowd.

[Everyone was filming] [Where there's a crowd, there are people to buy things]

Two blocks down a side street, past shops and houses, a crowd had gathered. Black Guatemalan police pickups crowded one side of the street, and I spotted a pair of soldiers looking over the roof of a car. I asked the people in the crowd what was happening, but no one knew. "Then why are you here?" "Because the police are here!". Half the crowd had their cell phones out, filming whatever was happening farther down the street. I could see black-uniformed cops and camouflaged soldiers entering a low, abandoned stretch of concrete cubicles (one of many ambitions construction projects abandoned after the building's concrete structure had been completed) along one side of the street. I heard the "pop" of a gunshot, and the whole crowd ahead of me reflexively flinched - and then craned their necks and inched forward. With a rumble, a green APC rolled up from a side street, pausing to idle in the middle of the street like a fat, menacing alligator, and then pushed its way through the courtyard gate of an apartment building up the street.

[Guatemalan Armadillo APC]

Soldiers sprinted across the street and formed up against the wall by the door, occasionally one leaned in a fired off a few shots. I put myself behind a concrete building, sat down and made myself a set of "don't get shot" rules.

1. Keep behind the soldiers and cops - even the ones relaxing back here, leaning against their truck and talking on their phones.
2. Stay behind solid objects (in order of preference: buildings, vehicles, crowds of fat people, crowds of skinny people).
3. Don't get surrounded by people - always be able to move without bumping into people or getting stuck in the middle of a crowd.
4. Leave before anything bad happens.

[This guy's ringtone is Britney Spears' Toxic - no joke]

I'd never been around live gunfire, except target shooting, and then the gun was in MY hands. I haven't even heard any of the occasional shots that go off in worcester. Any excitement was well tempered by surprise - I hadn't intended to stumble upon a situation like this, and the knowledge that several people I care about would be very annoyed with me if I got myself shot in the streets of Santa Elena. The presence of the crowd gave me confidence that I wasn't a complete idiot, being there. The police would doubtless have told them to move back if they were in immediate danger, and I was staying behind them.

The crowd had moved forward more than a block since the firing started. They flinched and jogged back a few steps when they heard a particularly loud or sharp crack of a shot, nervous and smiling at each other, but would return almost immediately. The bass "Knock Knock Knock" of the APC's .50cal machine gun from within the concrete walls was ignored. I stayed behind them, and hard things. One soldier, pointing his rifle over the roof of a car, watching the building down the street, jumped an insignificant sound, and the crowd gathered behind him giggled. I felt bad. We were over 400 yards from the building, but this man had a job to do, and it must have been hell to have an audience.

The firing was very sporadic and (though my personal experience with gunfire is limited to Die Hard and Shoot 'Em Up) seemed hesitant and uncertain. For all the people around me speculating at what the sort of gangfight bloodbath was occurring within the complex, this felt like a probe, not a battle. I bought a bottle of water from a lady who, noticing the crowd on her doorstep, was making a fair amount of money selling drinks from a cooler she had quickly dragged out. I asked what was happening, and what the story with the bomb was. Her son said the gang members inside had thrown a grenade out the window, which had injured a cop, before I got there.

I drank my water and watched. A quarter hour had gone by since the last shot. There were soldiers crouching in a ditch, watching the building, and a handful of men wearing berets were walking on the top of the building, poking at the water tank with their rifles. Periodically, one of the soldiers standing against the wall by the door would lean around and fire a shot. Suddenly there was a commotion behind me, and the press arrived. They charged down the street with as much intensity as any soldier, TV cameras mounted on their shoulders, and surrounded the officer in charge, only to push on forward minutes later. The APC rumbled out of the apartment complex, and one photographer ran and crouched behind its wheel, taking pictures through the open door. I took a picture of him, mainly as proof that I was being comparatively safe, hanging in the back with my zoom lens.

[Charge of the light camera brigade] [Pictured: photographers being less safe than I]

This, I decided, was the time to leave. I had seen enough new things for the day, and in compliance with rule 4, left before anything bad happened.

I caught a tuctuc back to Flores, and ate lunch at my usual crowded restaurant. When I returned to the office, it was closed - doors locked, lights off, completely empty. I had everyone wondering about the morning's events, but still working. I walked towards a main street, wondering if it would be as empty as the one I was on. The only person I saw was an old man on a bike, and he quickly peddled out of sight. I told myself that it was after lunch, and hot, legitimate reasons for the streets being empty, but I also noticed that I could here the same news program coming from the windows of five or six houses on the street. This had to be bigger than what I had seen.

I found Gabriel and our friends in our favorite Cafe. There had been rumors of a bomb threat against the municipal building just around the corner from ProPetén, so the office was closed. Everyone wasaround the TV, watching the scene I had left half an hour ago. The camouflaged APC rolled up and down the street before pushing its way back through the open courtyard doors. We spent the rest of the afternoon in Cafe Chilero, discussing what had happened, and what might happen next. Janette and Chapo, who run Chilero and live uphill from me in San Miguel, had thought enough about an incident like this to have an emergency plan. Half-joking, half serious, we made sure cars were filled with gas, we had enough toilet paper, we all knew that north to Mexico via Belize, or south to the highlands were viable escape routes, should things really go downhill in Petén. Things were very uncertain, and it was advised that we (with perhaps an emphasis on me) all stay in Flores and not go galavanting around Santa Elena.

Sitting in the café, drinking a smoothy and watching TV, I was more nervous than I had been at any point during the day. Plans were discussed based on the experience and knowledge of the locals around me. I have no doubt that I would have been more reluctant to explore Santa Elena "just to see what's going on" if I had their background knowledge. Yet none of them had any idea what was actually happening. We could make assumptions, but we could not know. Gabriel and I stayed at Terry's house that night, rather than travel in the dark.