Guatemala notes

We learn firsthand of the multinationals. Think Kraft, Wonder, Kentucky Fried. Monsanto invented 2–4 D, the pesticide that's killing the campesinos. The United Fruit Company has vast holdings in Guatemala. The stock market adds new meaning to the idea of a Banana Republic.

Then there's CIA intervention. With the help of the CIA (Operation PBSUCCESS), Guatemala fell back into the throes of dictatorship. And past direct military aid from the US, the UFC has kept them in power. The Bank of the Army is the largest bank in Guatemala.

The cutback began during the Carter era. Which changed the country's wealth.

An independent peace policy is not part of the US ballgame, like in Honduras. US support in the Petén jungle is anti-guerrilla. It has fallen to the role of the Armed Forces to resist the communist guerillas who have ties with Nicaragua and Cuba.

Prensa Libre, the anti-Nicaraguan columns, a conservative rag, and the FMLN in El Salvador, are enemies of the state. The elite class vs the farmers and the campesinos.

Missionaries in Oaxaca are converting the campesinos, in Antigua it's insidious. The evangelist take is all about hellfire and brimstone, domination, and Armageddon. Right wing religion is alive and well in Guatemala. Jehovah's Witnesses in Antigua, it's an imperialist takeover. The Catholic conservative liberal theology of upholding basic human rights has been completely subsumed. Washed in the blood of the lamb.

Evangelical protestants are extremely right wing. There is God, and there is politics. The premise of the evangelical movement: the Apocalypse is upon us. Ironically it really is upon us, thanks to the doings of Monsanto, the United Fruit Company and the Guatemalan Army fighting the campesinos.

Who gets saved, it comes down to individual initiative and free enterprise— it's a wide-open field to save all those souls and make some money on the side. It's all about money in the end. The primeval Mayan Lacondones are now the prime target of the Seventh Day Adventists. Just leave them alone. They don't need your religion.

Guatemala is the overseas empire for religious zealots. What's in it for them besides saving 7 million souls? Why are all these conservative Christian millionaires dying to save so many souls? Does it all come down to United Fruit stock? What is the position of United Fruit in the community? There is that evangelical savage attitude toward Indian communities. There are goon squads waiting to kill those who step out of line, or protest.

At Santa María de Jesús the missionaries were looking so superior, so smug, wearing those false pious faces. The evangelicals and the soldiers have teamed up against the Indios. They plan to break the resistance with religion and guns and bad rock and roll.

Tikal is a strategic hamlet, an outpost of soldiers, while the guerilla are back of the volcanoes in the highlands. Otto-Raúl González, the former communist Minister of Agricultural Reform was fighting for peasants' rights. Human rights. His law degree thesis was on the socioeconomic reality of indigenous peoples, and agrarian reform—placing the ownership of land back into the hands of those who work it, not UFC.

Peaceful peasant groups organized, and were killed. Robertija Nunchu's younger brother was lit on fire. The Guatemalan military has absolute government power to eradicate what it perceives as enemies of the state from every walk of life. And we put it there. Opponents of the state are disappeared.

At the ruins near the zócalo at Huehuetenango, the birthplace of the ancient ancestors, the campesinos gather. The children are not in school, they are selling their pulseras on the streets. There is not enough to eat. Visions of the future. The status symbol of who grows up to be soldiers, versus guerillas.

Soldiers of the Criollo-run Guatemalan Army, the Ladinos, carry the Uzis. The guerillas, the Indios, and the left-wing students, carry AKAs which is a Czech version based on Soviet AK-47s. I now know the difference between UZIs and AK-47s. This isn't going to end well.

We have entered the politically correct country, a dictatorship of US-owned bananas and coffee.