Mary Jo McConahay's GlobeWatch

Wheels of Justice Slow, But Inevitable

2012-01-26T12:02:00.000-08:00

He presided over the deaths of thousands of unarmed Maya, but ten years ago I wrote, "It is far from certain whether Rios Montt will ever face charges in court." U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan said the Guatemalan dictator got "a bum rap," honoring him as an ally. Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seemed untouchable.

Exhumation. Xococ. A massacre during the rule of Rios Montt.
Photo: Mary Jo McConahay

This morning I am watching live streaming* from a Guatemala City courtroom where a prosecutor formally reads an astounding litany of villages and Maya names, citing the way each person lost his or her life, "by firearm," "by explosion," and more. Rios Montt is on trial.

Rios Montt's predecessor Romeo Lucas Garcia, who also presided over massacres, died in 2006. Two weeks ago, when Rios left his seat in Congress, he lost immunity against prosecution.

This is how justice begins, with courage and patience. Ten years back:

Maya Indians bring charges against two former dictators

Mary Jo McConahay, Chronicle Foreign Service

Thursday, June 14, 2001

(06-14) 04:00 PST Guatemala City -- Guatemalan Indian peasants have broken new ground in the global movement to prosecute perpetrators of mass violence by charging two former dictators with genocide.
On Tuesday, a judge ordered investigations into criminal charges against ex- President Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and his successor, Efrain Rios Montt, who today is the country's Bible-quoting, ironfisted political headman.
It is the first time Guatemalan courts have agreed to investigate former dictators for atrocities committed during 36 years of civil war. The war, which pitted leftist, largely Indian guerrilla groups against government forces, ended in peace accords in 1996. Some 200,000 Guatemalans died, more than 80 percent of them unarmed Maya, including women and children.
Maya Indians charge the former dictators of using their positions to wage a "calculated war" against them. And they are doing it not in an international tribunal, but at home, in a court system where judges are regularly threatened and lawyers are killed.
The legal action is the result of a three-year investigation into 1,200 killings committed by the military during Guatemala's bloody civil war. Some 600 villages were the scenes of massacres carried out as part of a scorched- earth policy by the army, which claimed that the villagers were providing support for leftist guerrillas. Lucas Garcia was president from 1978 to 1982, before being deposed in a military coup by Rios Montt.

'Wanted' posters

Last week, many Guatemalan newspapers displayed front-page photos of a "Wanted" poster of Rios Montt after he was charged with a more specific genocide complaint on behalf of massacre victims in 11 Maya villages.
Maya survivors say his regime made no distinction between combatants and civilians during the conflict. Rios Montt "saw the indigenous communities as subversive and sympathizing with communism. That is why he ordered our annihilation," says one of the charges filed last week.
The Guatemalan legal proceedings are a new turn in the process to bring human rights abusers to justice, which began with the 1998 arrest in London of former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Legal cases based on the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity are proliferating: Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre was indicted last year in Senegal; El Salvadoran officers have been charged with the killings of four U.S. churchwomen in a Florida court; and four Rwandans were found guilty in Belgium last week, the first case in which a civilian jury convicted offenders for war crimes in another country.
By bringing human rights cases into their own nation's courts, the Maya are showing considerable courage, says Amy Ross, a professor of international justice at the University of Georgia.
The survivors are basing their criminal complaints on the 1948 Genocide Convention, which grew out of the desire to prevent atrocities such as the slaughter of millions of Jews during World War II but "has never really been used," said Ross.

Not just a theory

The complaint against Rios Montt "pushes forward international law, using it to go to accountability for massive violence. For (the Maya) it is not just a theory," she added.
A U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission held the Guatemalan army responsible for 85 percent of all human rights violations during the civil war.
By declaring state authorities responsible for "acts of genocide" -- for which there is no immunity from prosecution under a Guatemalan amnesty law passed in 1997 -- the commission opened the door for charges against high- ranking office-holders.
In the past, Rios Montt has claimed no knowledge of atrocities committed during his 18 months as chief of state, even though army publications have admitted that 440 villages were "eliminated" in the name of counterinsurgency.
In fact, military officials have long insisted that those killed were leftist guerrillas who died in battle.
"The Guatemalan army never fought against its own people," former Defense Minister Juan de Dios Estrada said recently. "How would it be possible to be genocide since most of the army was made up of indigenous?"
In the highlands -- home to most Maya, about 70 percent of Guatemala's 11 million inhabitants -- there is no doubt about the raging violence that forced at least 1 million people to flee their homes.

Witness to killings

In the mountain village of Santa Anita Las Canoas, Luis Curruchich, one of those named in the Rios Montt case, spoke of the day in 1982 when the army surrounded the town and began shooting as families fled. Curruchich's 25-year- old wife, Transita, was killed, his infant girl disappeared, and neighbors saw soldiers carry off his other two young daughters.
At Choatalum, a survivor still looks wide-eyed at the memory of being forced to stand "for days" in a waist-high pool of water at an army base as others undergoing similar torture finally slipped under and drowned.
The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology team, which is currently exhuming mass graves at the rate of three or four per month, also has little doubt about the scale of the violence.
Stefan Schmitt, a founding member of the team, spoke of a massacre at Plan de Sanchez, also named in the Rios Montt case, where at least 82 died in 1982.
Investigators usually estimate the number of victims by counting the number of long bones, such as a right femur. But at Plan de Sanchez, about 30 miles north of Guatemala City, some 60 soldiers and paramilitary troops threw grenades and then burned down a house where they had gathered townspeople, so remains were fragmented.
"We had to make three piles for the upper, middle and lower sections of the long bones, and determine our count that way for most," said Schmitt, who works for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "On the outskirts, where girls had been raped, then killed one by one, remains were more intact."
It is far from certain whether Lucas Garcia or Rios Montt will ever face charges in court. If convicted, they could face 30 years in prison.

Officers sentenced

Last week, a Guatemalan court did sentence two army officers to 30 years in prison for the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998, a first crack in the wall of impunity that has long surrounding officials. Just this week, Jose Eduardo Cojulun, the judge who recently convicted three soldiers of killing Gerardi, said he has been receiving death threats.
Gerardi, who headed the Roman Catholic human rights office, was bludgeoned to death two days after he released the church's "Never Again" report on wartime abuses, which blamed the military for 90 percent of human rights violations.
But the charge of genocide requires proving an intent to destroy a group, a much more complicated matter.
And there are two more weighty obstacles, say observers in Guatemala City. Lucas Garcia, who lives in Venezuela, is reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's disease and has not made any public statement for several years.
And Rios Montt is the founder of the ruling political party of President Alfonso Portillo, who is not considered to be a strong political figure. As a result, some observers believe the elected head of Guatemala's legislature may simply ignore the criminal complaint.
But simply bringing the case to trial is significant, human rights activists say.

Mary Jo McConahay is an editor at Pacific News Service and has reported from Central America for more than 15 years.

*Two sites for streaming Rios Montt trial:

paraqueseconozca.blogspot.com

ON MY BOOK NO LONGER MINE

2012-01-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

I just read a jewel of a review for Maya Roads, one of very few published each year by this exciting magazine (and a great read for men, too). What's curious is that while writing Roads, it never occurred to me it might some day be included in the genre of "Adventure." Am I ecstatic my book reaches an audience of sports people, risk takers, and extreme travelers? Of course I am! Just as I'm thrilled it's hit #1 in Kindle Travel Literature, and relatively stratospheric levels in Kindle History and Kindle General Non-Fiction, even though in all those months (OK, years) of writing and revisions, often late into the night, my dream was to see the increasing pages someday published between physical covers, on physical shelves, in physical hands. I've never used the comparison between publishing a book and giving birth to a baby, which might be another blog another day (just as whether the woman I am in Maya Roads is an adventurer is another kind of subject). Yet in recent months I've seen the book that once was mine alone come to walk on its own legs, take on a life of its own, become different things to different people. I couldn't wish for more.

Beginning 2012

2012-01-09T21:17:00.000-08:00

At lunch today in the cafe of my favorite Guatemala City bookstore, Sophos, I looked up to see Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu standing near my table. She wore a shiny blue huipil -- an Indian blouse -- and traditional long skirt. Her round face seemed to be puzzling over a menu, as if deciding what to order when she sat down.
I took the opportunity to step over and greet her.

I've interviewed Rigoberta before and since the grand Prize, and although I'm sure she has little recollection of my own face, she gave me a friendly embrace and graciously accepted the card I gave her announcing my new book, Maya Roads. (It's not disrespectful here, but quite customary, to refer to personages like Menchu by first name.) Soon another woman entered and swept Rigoberta away.

As I sat across the open air cafe from the two, sipping the last of my hot lemon tea, my mind went back to the first time I met Rigoberta Menchu, in 1982, in the living room of a San Francisco priest where she had come to tell her story. She was about twenty-two then, and her now-famous book, I, Rigoberta Menchu had not yet appeared. That evening, of course, was memorable, an account of violence and mayhem wrought on indigenous families like her own by a brutal army. Rigoberta seemed timid at that time, and even today can appear shy in public. I take it as a lovely coincidence, a good omen for the new year, that Jessica O'Dwyer, author of the brave and intimate adoption memoir, Mamalita, today posted an interview with me in which I happened to have described the day Rigoberta learned she had won the Prize. You can see it here: http://www.mamalitathebook.com/

From "Rolf Potts Vagabonding"

2011-09-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

Rolf Potts, blogger, teacher and author of

Marco Polo Didn't Go There

has put one writer on the hot seat every month since 2001.

Now it's my turn.

Mary Jo McConahay

www.mayaroads.com
mayaroads@gmail.com

Mary Jo McConahay was born in Chicago and moved with her family to California, where she came of age in an era when On the Road was a bible for young people. She traveled in Mexico and Central America before moving to the Middle East to work as a reporter on the English-language Arab News. In the 1980s she became a correspondent for Pacific News Service in San Francisco, covering the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the U.S. invasion of Panama. She lived in Guatemala in the 1990s, where she began work on her travel memoir, Maya Roads: One Woman's Journey Among the People of the Rainforest.

How did you get started traveling?

When I was a child, our parents took my five siblings and me all over the American West every summer vacation, sleeping in tents, eating over campfires, awed by the beauty of canyons, desert and mountains. Traveling became an assumption, a need.

How did you get started writing?

I always wrote, encouraged by my parents and the nuns at school, from the grammar school paper beginning in sixth grade, to high school paper and yearbook. When I spent a year abroad during college, I took along my portable typewriter (typewriter!) as I traveled through Europe and wrote stories about what I saw, pretending I was on deadlines. I never sent them anywhere, but I still have some.

What do you consider your first "break" as a writer?

I was struggling along writing and taking pictures in Mexico for a small travel magazine, being paid in chits for hotel rooms and restaurants. I heard that many Americans were jailed in Mexico City for running drugs, mostly real amateurs with a dream of fast money -- grandmothers, students, young couples looking for a stake. I visited the prisons for weeks doing interviews, and the story ran in Rolling Stone. That opened doors, which opened others.

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

When I'm lonely, I wonder what I am doing far from home, missing people I love. Most of the time, however, the biggest challenge is honing in on the story is out of a wealth of possibilities, choosing one place and not another. Even the most easy-going travel writer inevitably faces the reality that time and money are limited. Will readers be more interested in colonial Merida or off-the-path ancient Maya sites? The buzz of Sao Paolo or small Germanic towns farther south in Brazil? If I follow my own personal curiosity, it usually works out well.

What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?

Over-research! I love the history of places, their literature, what they meant in other people's lives. The trick is to absorb all this and let it inform the writing of a particular story, not to get sidetracked. Otherwise, the story never ends. There will always be another to write.

What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint? Editors? Finances? Promotion?

I had no idea what "promotion" meant before writing Maya Roads. Now that the book is out, good reviews are really helping, but unless you are a household name, I've found the book author must do 95 per cent of the legwork to grow and nurse her networks, make initial contacts with booksellers and other venue managers for events, pursue the thousand and one avenues to getting her book out there. (This is even with responsive publisher's associates who follow up and send press releases.) If you had told me six months ago I would be the one to create my book's website, I would not have believed you. I've had to stretch and learn new skills, but that's the business end of what I love doing so it's learn -- or else.

Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?

I worked as a model and a flight attendant to help pay for college. But soon after I promised myself I'd live -- even meagerly -- from writing, no matter what kind. I wrote a lot "on spec" at first, and created student orientation booklets in Mexico in exchange for language school lessons. Selling travel photographs helped. Finally I began to work as a journalist, including free-lance for Time, Newsweek, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and more than two dozen other periodicals. Most of that time the work was as a foreign correspondent, which fed my desire to travel.

What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

I admire Pico Iyer for his intelligence, and Bruce Chatwin for his use of language. I love reading novels set in places I want to visit; recently it's been Jorge Amado's Pen, Sword and Camisole and Michael Sledge's The More I Owe You, about Brazil, and The Price of Escape by David Unger, set on Guatemala's Caribbean coast. At school I studied eighteenth century English literature, and acquired a taste for classic old travel writing. TheTravels of John Mandeville, who lived in the fourteenth century, is delicious reading even though it might be partly imagination, like the dragons and sea creatures drawn on ancient parchment maps. No one writes about Arabia like the great explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who describes some places gone forever, like the southern Iraq of The Marsh Arabs. On the other hand, John L. Stephens' several travel volumes on the Yucatan, Chiapas and Central America, still best-sellers even though published in the middle 19th century, can almost be taken along as guidebooks in some places, so little has changed. I found myself re-reading them as I wrote Maya Roads.

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

Before boarding the plane, make sure you have a stash that will support you if you make no money from travel writing for a year. Otherwise there can be a strong temptation to take a non-writing job just to survive. I've seen that situation unravel the dream for more than one person.

Be prepared: Learn as much of the language as possible of the lands where you want to go. Make contacts with half a dozen travel publication editors before leaving, with a prospective story idea if possible, and re-contact them again as soon as you're on your feet abroad. Keep your name in front of them, even if they pass on the first stories. It will happen!

Writers are expected to take photos, which fortunately is easier than ever. It's still important to develop the eye, however, which can be practiced before leaving, too.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

I'd say the biggest reward comes in small, transcendent moments rather than finally standing before the post card-like image of a world-famous castle or waterfall. In Brazil the American poet Elizabeth Bishop asks herself in "Questions of Travel," if she should have stayed at home, whether it was right to pursue a life determined "to see the sun the other way around." Then she lists what she sees and hears -- small moments that describe the place, that she might see or hear nowhere else: a line of stunning trees blooming pink; a fat brown bird singing above a broken gas pump in a bamboo church; two "disparate" notes of clacking wooden clogs which "in another country" would be quality-tested and each sound the same. I love this poem. That's how I feel, that noticing the small elements which characterize a place is a practice for the mind and the imagination, a reward any writer might value.

Read about Rolf's book: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel

This Agent Extracts Really Complete Answers

2011-08-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Night Thoughts about Books and Publishing

By Andy Ross

http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com

Mary Jo McConahay Talks About Maya Roads and the People of the Central American Rainforest

Today I am going to interview Mary Jo McConahay, author of Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. The book was published this month by Chicago Review Press and has been receiving rave reviews. Don George of National Geographic Traveler said in his review: “Every once in a while I stumble upon a book that is so beautifully written and infused with so much intelligence and heart that it leaves an indelible mark on me. Mary Jo McConahay’s Maya Roads is such a book. In its hungry passion and wide-eyed wonder, it’s an extraordinary literary journey and a moving testament to a region and a life.”

Mary Jo has led an extraordinary life. She was a correspondent in Latin America during the Eighties and covered the insurgent wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All of her work, but particularly Maya Roads, is imbued with her love of the region and its people and a fierce and courageous commitment to social justice.
Andy: Mary Jo, will you describe for us in your own words Maya Roads?
Mary Jo: Maya Roads is my story of falling in love with the rainforest and things Maya as a young woman, then returning to them after a career as a war correspondent, seeing the world of ancient and modern Maya in Central America through my own new lens of experience, investigating their recent history of violence, but never losing my wonder at their world view, customs and resilience as a people, and new discoveries about their beginnings.
Andy: What led you to write this book?
Mary Jo: I had been “saving string” on the Maya for years, reading and writing, listening, travelling to their places, much as anyone might do with the object of an obsession. But as a freelance journalist I felt I never had the time to put it all together in a book. One day I woke up and said, “When exactly do you think you will start this book?” Hemingway said if you answer the phone you can stay in journalism forever. I stopped answering the phone. Fortunately, it worked out.
Andy: What strikes me most about this book and what differentiates it from so many other “travel books” is that it really has a political bite to it. Tell us a little about this.
Mary Jo: I am a journalist by profession, and where others may see politics I see history. The reader can’t be expected to understand the context of the violence in some chapters without knowing about key events, such as the 1954 C.I.A.-organized coup that overthrew a democratically elected president in Guatemala and began a 30-year nightmare reign of the military. The reader won’t truly understand the significance of the revolt of thousands of Maya peasant farmers in 1994 — Zapatistas — without some account of decades of official Mexican corruption. We can’t speak honestly about the current drug networks operating in Maya geography without saying they exist to serve the United States market. I don’t consider writing about such facts politics, but as providing the whole picture.
Andy: But what is even more remarkable is that the book is never preachy and and your observations about the exploitation of the Maya is always told along with your amazement at the beauty of the land and your love and fascination with the sadly disappearing indigenous culture.
Mary Jo: Should the indigenous culture truly disappear it would be a tragedy, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. Now that certain dangers of the civil war are over, some Maya in Guatemala are more open about their identity. In Mexico, there is pride among many indigenous, Maya and not, in the Zapatista uprising and the way some communities are progressing independently of the government. When I interviewed Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a K’iche Maya, on the day she won the prize in 1992, she told me there was no reason why Maya could not enjoy the good things of modern life, even participate in scientific and technological advancement, and still maintain their ancestral culture. “Look at the Jewish people,” she said.
Andy: Do you think there is a possibility of a “happy ending” to your story?
Mary Jo:The Maya view of time is cyclical, not a straight line as we might think of it. Thus there is no “ending,” happy or not, to the greater Maya story, but moments of transition and change. What is clear is that the Maya have survived not only the decimation of the European conquerors, but centuries of racism and violence, and in Guatemala, recent incidents of genocide perpetrated by their government, which was supported by ours. Today the Maya have recovered their pre-conquest numbers. They participate in political life and go to university. In southern Mexico, indigenous Zapatista revolutionary communities are raising a generation of literate young for the first time in history. This is all “happy” stuff, but an ending it is not.

Andy: Are there any works of travel journalism that have particularly influenced you? Any that have as much focus on social issues the way Maya Roads does?
Mary Jo: I think it was a certain era of travel writing, rather than any particular book, that put me on the track. In college I studied English Literature with a focus on the Eighteenth Century, which among other things was the period of trade and empire expansion. Readers were fascinated by descriptions of new lands and cross-cultural encounters, and in the best work, led to examine who they were in relation to other people and landscapes. Think Johnson and Boswell, Captain Cook, educated women on the Grand Tour. So from the beginning, I never considered travel writing a secondary genre. I believe in what I call deep travel, knowing as much as possible about the people I’ll be among, especially their recent history. To me it makes for a richer experience, a way to make connections with other ways of life.

From A Cool New Expat Site: What's Up El Salvador?

2011-08-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Most people would tell you that the Maya civilization ended more than a thousand years ago.

Mary Jo McConahay can tell you from first hand experience that is not true. The Maya people live on and in some places thrive.

http://www.whatsupelsalvador.com/2011/08/maya-roads-one-womans-journey-among-the-people-of-the-rainforest-book-review/

Living in Central America we can tell from first hand experience that there is a large population of indigenous peoples of Maya, Nahuatl and other groups. Sometimes they are easily recognized by their colorful traditional dress. Other times they look and speak exactly like all the other Central Americans.

Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest is a brand new book by journalist, Central American expat and Bay Area native Mary Jo McConahay.

In Maya Roads, Mary Jo McConahay draws upon her three decades of traveling and living in Central America’s remote landscapes to create a unique and mesmerizing chronicle of the people, politics, archaeology, and species of the Central American rainforest, the cradle of Maya civilization. Captivated by the magnificence and mystery of the jungle, Mary brings to life the intense beauty, the fantastic locales, the ancient ruins, and the horrific violence. She witnesses archaeological discoveries, the transformation of the Lacandon people, the Zapatista indigenous uprising in Mexico, increased drug trafficking, and assists in the uncovering of a war crime. Over the decades, McConahay has witnessed great changes in the region, and this is a unique tale of a woman’s adventure and the adaptation and resolve of a people.

What’s Up El Salvador was lucky enough to grab a few minutes of Mary Jo’s valuable time to provide an interview with her about her new book which just became available on August 1st. The Maya Roads book is interesting to us as we are former Bay Area natives and now we are living as Central American expats. It tells the true stories of a great and amazing people while highlighting the problems and solutions of foreign and local policy in the region.

Her book was recently chosen by National Geographic Traveler as the book of the month.

Below is the interview:

Whats Up El Salvador (WUES) asks: Your book seems to be a unique intersection of hard journalism, personal journey, and love of the Mayan people. What were the three most intriguing things you learned about the Mayan people in this journey?

Mary Jo McConahay: Far from being a people who disappeared when their great city-states fell by the year 900, the Maya live and thrive today. They have regained their pre-conquest numbers. The natural respect and deep love that exists for Mother Earth in the Maya cosmology may be the key worldview for a moment when we face irreversible destruction of the natural world, and thus, ourselves.

(WUES) asks: If you could only get one key message of this book, across to your readers what would it be?

Mary Jo McConahay: Instead of thinking in terms of message, I prefer wanting the reader to feel the experience of a world of a struggling, resistant people living in a stunning and precious corner of the earth, which must survive.

Mary Jo McConahay, author of Maya Roads

(WUES) asks: Who was the person you met in writing this book who had the single greatest impact on you?

Mary Jo McConahay: I remember each person in this book vividly, and each for a different reason. The person I know best is the Maya priest I call Ramona, because I’ve known her longest, and she has always opened doors on Maya life to me, as a friend.

(WUES) asks: Your book has some political overtones in a sense in dealing with the affects of US “influence” throughout Central America. How do you see the US’s involvement changing in the region over the next decade?

Mary Jo McConahay: My writing about U.S. involvement in Central America and Mexico is not political but historical. You cannot understand the last thirty years in the region without an awareness of events that have shaped its politics and development. Che Guevara lived in Guatemala during the Guatemalan Spring (1944-1954) with its flowering of culture and literacy, and saw the democratically elected administration of Pres. Jacobo Arbenz overthrown by a C.I.A.-orchestrated coup. The lesson he learned is that a government or movement truly intolerable to Washington will come under attack from the United States in one way or another. The most recent example is the Honduran coup only two years ago. Nothing has changed in the big picture to alter this relationship between the United States and the countries to its south.

(WUES) asks: What do you hope that this book brings about? (political change in Central America, the US, economic changes?)

Mary Jo McConahay: As a journalist I do not think in terms of promoting change, but reporting the story. My job is to provide information, and readers decide how they will use it.

Personal Questions:

(WUES) asks: How do you feel that your unique combination of living both in the Bay Area and in Central America has helped to shape you?

Mary Jo McConahay: The Bay Area historically has been one of the most connected and alert U.S. populations with regard to Central America, so I have been able to go beyond the basics in my reporting and know there is an audience for it. I know journalists who feel they are shouting in a desert because they get no feedback or reaction when they write about Mexico or Central America. I never had to worry about that when writing for Bay Area readers.

(WUES) asks: How did both living this story and then writing it improve you personally?

Mary Jo McConahay: I don’t believe living this story and writing it made me a better or worse person. However, as with any such intense travel experience, what I have seen has given me a degree of understanding about the lives of some fellow human beings I would not have otherwise known. And I think that’s always a good thing.

(WUES) asks: What are the challenges of living as an expat women in Central America for you?

Mary Jo McConahay: I’ve lived as an expat in Saudi Arabia and Europe, too, and it’s not much different from living as an expat anywhere. Life improves to the degree you know the local language, have local friends, and throw yourself into a place’s history and culture. Otherwise, why are you there?

(WUES) asks: You brought your daughter to live in Central America at a young age. Many of our readers (and us!) are living or are considering living in Central America with our young children. What are the three key pieces of wisdom you would offer us?

Mary Jo McConahay: I don’t know about wisdom, but here are a few things I’d tell a friend moving to Central America:
Relax about school. Don’t give in to constant comparing “where she is” with kids of the same age in the States. It comes out the same in the end, or the child who went to school abroad may even get a better education.

Don’t speak Spanish to your child unless you’re a native speaker. She will be immersed in Spanish everywhere, especially at a local school, but probably nowhere else will she learn to use proper native English except at home. It’s eventually a real gift to the child to be truly bilingual, and bicultural.

In Latin America gender expectations — and what you want in regard to them for your boy or girl — can be really different from those in the United States. Ojo

WUES asks: The book takes place mostly in Guatemala and Mexico, what are your thoughts on the indigenous of El Salvador?

Mary Jo McConahay: I’d really like some day to write about the indigenous of El Salvador. They do not wear the traje or openly express their culture in the way Guatemalan indigenous do — the Salvadoran Matanza of 1932 took care of that. But the glimpse of ceremony and other events I experienced in corners near Izalco during the war intrigued me, although there was no opportunity then to follow up. The intrigue remains.

Support Mary (and What’s Up El Salvador!) and buy this book right now. This is a great book that will open your eyes and your heart. Send one to a friend who you know would benefit from learning about this amazing region and these brilliant people. It also makes an inspired gift- And Christmas is right around the corner!

What Is It About An Island?

2011-06-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

Florianopolis, Ilha de Santa Catarina, Brazil

     Santa Catarina Island is not in the balmy South Pacific, nor does it figure in popular dreams of escape and isolation. Its city, Florianopolis holds some 400,000, and while the south is wilder and less populated -- there’s a Shipwreck Point - the north is as overdeveloped as some of southern Spain.
     None of it mattered when I reached Floripa, as the whole place is called for short, after weeks inland. I walked the shore feeling elated. It seemed even the air was easier to breathe. On one side of the corniche, apartment buildings rose like a sparkling sea wall, much as they do in Rio. Sitting on shore facing the waves, however, the vista is endless, natural. You might imagine the water mutating in color as it spread south: deep blue here, breaking with white froth that bubbles and disappears; then hundreds of miles out, rolling with the grey of cold steel as the temperature drops; hosting ice blocks even farther south until the surface waters stop moving altogether, having become the frozen blue white of the Antarctic.
     I’m surprised when the breeze comes up and blows warm, because I’ve imagined myself down to the edge of the South Pole. Near me a young man leans back on his elbows, ear buds in place, fingers tapping sand. A woman in white stares out to sea. Three lone boats, wood by the look of them, rock in the swell near a pier.

     My body clock, wound tight for so long, unwinds to the rhythm of the waves, floats on the blue. What is it about an island that can make a person feel like who she is, stripped of roles, unhurried? If you allow islands to be simple, they are, just land, sea. Road signs here have it right: arrows pointing to bridges to the mainland carry only one word, “Continente,” encompassing all the complexity that awaits elsewhere.

At night, the lights of the island are framed by the blackness of the sea. I think of the writer and pioneer pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who once landed regularly at the Florianopolis field when flying between France and points in Latin America, in the 1920s and 1930s, when guiding lights were fewer. I think of the U.S. Navy pilots and seamen based here during World War II, sometimes patrolling to rescue survivors of German U-boat hits. I wonder what it must have been like with the island in blackout for a thousand nights, after Brazil sided with the allies in 1942 and nervously expected retribution, perhaps aimed at the port, the most important between Rio de Janiero and Buenos Aires.

Lights outline the spans of the suspension bridge to the mainland now, making the structure look more delicate and ethereal than you know it must be. Tomorrow it will lead back to the continent.

with two whale crania and rib section found on beach (not by me)

In Brazil, the Shape of Things

2011-06-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Curitiba, Brazil

Oscar Neimeyer’s Museum of the Eye is the only piece of architecture that has ever made me cry, merely from the sight of it. Maybe it was the sudden rush of beauty coming up against the sadness of a recent personal disappointment. Or maybe the reaction was travel fatigue. Perhaps it was the thought the magnificent eye brought to me, of a dynamic, beloved woman who went blind -- damn macular degeneration -- at just about the age Neimeyer was when he designed the building, ninety-five.

I was already in that altered state that comes with an hour of walking, the last of it bypassing the busy center on a leafy path along the river. Then a few minutes climbing, navigating the pavement outside sober government buildings and there it was, iconic and powerful, absolutely unique in the world, drawing you in and seeing inside you at the same time, not unlike the look of a lover.

“It’s a bunch of concrete and steel,” I said to myself when I felt the tears coming. Too late.

I posted pictures, but they aren't worth a thousand words. Architecture is an art form that has to be experienced in the free air, that works -- or doesn’t -- among surrounding forms, whether a canyon (think Mary Jane Colter) or growing things or other buildings. Maybe that’s why we’re more aware of architecture when we travel, because we’re seeing not only a new building, but a new world surrounding it.

Brazil is a good place for the awareness to grow, because it’s so big, with corners possessing such varied history that the eye stays sharp, surprised and refreshed every few hundred miles.

Here is Salvador, Bahia, where Columbus first landed, where Portuguese and Dutch provided elegance and design rooted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European continent, and indigenous tropical life provided the color that still reigns.

And this is the building style of southern Brazil, settled by the first German pioneers about the same time our own eastern seaboard colonies were becoming the United States

Here is another corner of Curitiba, which is also a southern city. Not far from the Eye, the hill was built up at the end of the 19th century when Art Nouveau captured the fancy. Aubrey Beardsley might have felt right at home.

In Sao Paulo, where I began this current journey, I took my coffee every morning on the first floor of the Edificio Copan, another Niemeyer building.

Its image is famous, often representing to the world the globe’s southernmost hypercity, where it can seem all twenty million residents are on the street at once, hurrying each to tasks and appointments. Yet against all evidence to the contrary, the sinuous shape says here in the city there can be beauty and calm. To me that is what a striking building can do, create its own space that talks right back to the beholder.

(The official name of the building described at the beginning of this post is Museu Oscar Niemeyer, which houses permanent and rotating collections of mostly-Brazilian art. Brazilians I have talked to, however, call it for its most impressive feature, O Museu do Ohlo, the Museum of the Eye.)

In a Small Place, the Excitement of Old Newsprint, Fading Photos

2011-06-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

Joinville, Brazil

In a Small Place, the Excitement of Crumbling Newsprint, Old Tools, Fading Photos

When I was a child my grandfather and I sat in the kitchen after grandmother went to bed, a certain book between us on the table. My grandfather opened the tooled leather covers from time to time as he told stories of family, old Indiana, the Civil War. A McConahay had purchased the book blank some two hundred years ago, and successive generations filled it in with the barest bones of passing lives: births, deaths, marriages, the buying of land and the price of flour on the Kentucky frontier. A prayer for a daughter. One song.

Years after my grandfather died I had to travel to the Indiana State Historical Society, to which he had bequeathed it, to see the book again. I’ll never forget coming to a sober waiting room, donning white cloth gloves, trading my pen for a pencil, and waiting for the book to be carried in by a gentleman, also wearing white gloves. The pages from the kitchen table had become more than a family record; now it is a piece of history in the care of guardians, shared with anyone who wants or needs to know what is written there, which is ok with me.

Since then I have trekked to such local archives to find substance and atmosphere for stories and documentary films. I love the smell of the places, slightly musty, sometimes feeling lonely, other times with an air of busy research.

One family's donation, from pictures of Hitler, to the razing of Hamburg by Allied bombs.

Original residents made all their tools of production and transportation with their own hands.

The German-language Joinville paper, still printed in Gothic lettering in the 1940s

From the Joinville Portuguese-language newspaper. Equal time for each side.

I regard anyone met in such places as an ally, someone who shares fascination -- and this can be quirky -- with the life written all over newspapers whose pages need to be turned with two hands, lest they tear. In the Joinville (pronounced: Jo-en-vee-lay) archives today, I realized the young man and woman who had been bringing me material were looking over my shoulder at photos that ran in the local newspaper in the run-up to World War II, the Graf zeppelin floating above an avenue of palms, a German pilot with the palm tree and swastika emblem of the African front painted on the body of his plane.

“Beautiful,” said the young man.

He didn’t mean the subject matter. He meant the fact that these concrete artifacts, undeniable building blocks of history, part of Joinville’s past, are in existence, telling their stories. Founded by Germans in the mid-19^th century, whose children continued to speak the home language and re-create a rich culture on Brazilian soil, it’s a miracle such history in Joinville remains at all. When the peripatetic war-time dictator Gertulio Vargas, once “neutral” and arguably pro-Nazi, sniffed which way the wind eventually was to blow he ordered soldiers to carry out a “nationalization” campaign, burning anything not written or printed in Portuguese, taking over arts and social societies that had long knitted the community together, breaking down doors and destroying family treasures reflecting the pioneer ancestors’ homeland.

Locals have extra motivation for saving ephemeral material and documenting their common family tree, the same way we might document ours: Who else would care to do it? I spent an early day of this research journey (on South America during WWII) in the archives of one of the planet’s biggest cities, Sao Paolo (pop: 20 million), where the staff was attentive and helpful. Small collections like Joinville’s (pop: 40,000) can be especially rich, however, treasuring tools particular to their ways of life, telling the story of a nation or an epoch from the ground on which it was lived by real people. I always make them my first stop.

First Impressions -- Sampa

2011-05-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem fair to judge one of the biggest cities on the planet from a mere three hours walking its streets. Tired and jet lagged, at that. But first impressions are about impressions, not fairness.

Sao Paulo, familiarly known (although I've been here less than a day), as Sampa:

First, it's tough to breathe, and I don't think it's only because I'm asthmatic. Gray air from the moving rivers of cars and trucks. At least today.

Second, I don't think I'll have to go to the favelas to see the rich-poor divide, again one of the biggest on the planet, and growing as Brazil itself grows in wealth. Near streets with shop windows sparkling with clothing and lingerie, for instance, by global designers at jaw-dropping prices, are other streets where life looks very tough. On those you don't walk at night, even at dusk, I am advised, for fear of being mugged. Having forgotten it's approaching mid-winter here, caught by the short day, I found myself on a couple of those very no-go streets briefly, suddenly almost alone. Sampenos know where to walk, when.

Which brings me to the Third first impression: Residents of this town may be among the kindest, most outgoing and patient I've met. Busy as everyone is, from airport arrival to now, I never had to lift my own suitcase, never lost someone's attention with my truly rotten Portuguese. Every one of the several individuals I asked for directions insisted on walking part or all the way with me to make sure I understood.

Oh, and the streets are peppered with art movie houses and live theatre.

Can't wait for tomorrow.

Here's the Q&A from Crimebuster

2011-04-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here is the conversation from the screening on the posting below.

You won't hear the questions, but the answers can be interesting...

Crimebuster: A Son's Search for His Father

2011-04-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

Crimebuster screened at a 1940s-era New Rheem theatre in Northern California over the weekend, which fit perfectly with many scenes of the story of Louis B. Dematteis, district attorney and superior court judge, and father of internationally famous photojournalist Lou Dematteis. Lou -- on the right -- produced and directed, I co-produced and co-directed, and Rich Giacchino, left, was one of our fine editors.
(For the audio of the Q&A, see the posting above.)
Handsome attendees with Italian roots

Dematteis, despite danger to himself, cleaned up the county. A good lawman served to help, Hal Moore, father of Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel Corporation. I interviewed Gordon, who looks just like his father, the deputy sheriff.

I also was honored to interview Sandra Day O'Connor, not to mention spend two hours travel time talking to her informally the day of the interview. Dematteis gave the former Supreme Court Justice her first job as a lawyer when no one else would hire her because she was a woman.

Left: Giacchino, moi, Beau Behan, Program Director of the California Independent Film Festival, where Crimebuster recently played to a full house, and Lou Dematteis.

The New Rheem Theatre was the scene of the Crimebuster screening, with one of the best question and answer sessions afterward we have ever had. Of course, the conversation after a film is only as good as the audience -- and the filmmakers -- but it has me thinking: I wouldn't mind "conversation screenings" of major features where the audience might participate in reaction to what it has just seen, and conversation further afield, just as at documentary screenings, with the filmmakers or others. I wouldn't mind paying extra for a "conversation screening," either.
I also loved the theatre, a throwback in design, wonderfully refreshed, to the 1930s and 40s when people went regularly to the movies. It was a communitarian, social event, far from the isolation of Netflix and Facebook. Movie goers then expected a glamorous, gilded place to spend the evening. Who knew such a place existed in almost-rural Moraga?

Sandy Close Receives George Polk Award Today

2011-04-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

A Hug from Here to Sandy

Today friend and editor Sandy Close receives the coveted George Polk Lifetime Career Award, placing her in company of some of the most illustrious and hard-working journalists in recent history. I will not be present at the event at Long Island University in New York, but I know the tenor of what she will say, because it is what she says at such moments, like the time she called to Central America to let me in on the extraordinary news (Pacific News Service was a small operation!) that she would be receiving the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship: "It's shared, Mary Jo. It's not for me, it's for all of us."

Yesterday she sent an emergency message asking me to courier overnight postcards of my upcoming book to her hotel so she could distribute them at the event, and to colleagues at a Pacific News Service New York reunion. Imagine. And I don't even work there anymore!

Do we always share a point of view? No.

What is true however, as the call for the postcards shows, is that Sandy is self-effacing, loyal and collaborative, qualities that in addition to her remarkably keen sense of the news landscape mark her as deserving of recognition. "We look for the chicken's eye view," she said years ago when she proposed I come on board. It meant the ramifications of policy on the ground, through the eyes and in the lives of ordinary people, were as important in reporting for PNS as an awareness of policy and how leaders think. It also meant looking for how trends at the grassroots, among ethnic communities, shapes who we are as a changing nation. As Pacific News Service became New America Media, those POVs remain firm.

So congratulations, Sandy, and a big hug from home base, in San Francisco. Here is what the George Polk award says:

Sandy Close is executive director of New America Media, an alternative news source that supports thousands of ethnic media outlets. For 37 years, Ms. Close has guided the pioneering efforts of New America Media, formerly known as the Pacific News Service. She has mentored many journalists who now work in the mainstream press, including A.C. Thompson, one of this year’s winners of the Polk Award for Television Reporting. In 1995, Ms. Close received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award" fellowship; and in 1997, she co-produced the Academy Award-winning short documentary, “Breathing Lessons.” Perhaps her proudest moment in journalism came in 2007, when she organized the Chauncey Bailey Project, a team of reporters whose investigative work led Oakland police to arrest those responsible for killing Mr. Bailey, who was a Polk Award-winning journalist.

Before the Maya

2011-04-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

THERE WERE THE OLMEC

The steamy east coast of Mexico is producing discoveries that are beginning to chip away at what we don't know about the mysterious Olmec civilization. If they are famous at all, the Olmec are known for producing giant stone portraits in the round, beginning more than three thousand years ago in the regions of Veracruz and Tabasco. The imposing heads can weigh up to twenty-four tons. To see them up close is to marvel at their individuality, and wonder how a people without the wheel managed to accomplish the task of their creation.

Those who have long claimed the Olmec were the mother civilization of Middle America, giving birth to the much-better documented Maya, have more and more to offer as suggestive evidence.

When I think of Maya civilization certain images come to mind: the mighty jaguar; the Hero Twins whose valor and cleverness are central to the creation story in the Maya bible called the Popol Vuh; cranial deformation for beauty and status; the Maya calendar, still in use today and the Maya counting system expressed in bars and dots.

The Olmec pieces from Mexico briefly in the United States now mirror these images, produced many years before that great Maya civilization appeared on the scene. At the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where I visited recently as a member of the Bay Area Travel Writers
(allowing me to take these pictures inside the exhibit) colossal masterworks and fine smaller pieces are on display until May 8. Have a look at the young twins on the left, and the larger royal twins on the right, and tell me if the Popol Vuh doesn't come to mind. You haven't read it? You must. The translation by poet Dennis Tedlock is my favorite.

In the same way, the bars and dots clearly seen here are like the Maya counting system, where the bar represents the number five, and the dot, one. The figures under the ball player's raised hand on the round stone on the right (an altar?) might easily become, over the centuries, glyphs for three of the twenty "day signs" that mark a Maya month.

The deformed heads, a sign of high status, are prominent in Olmec sculpture, as are jaguar faces on human bodies.

On occasion a pre-Columbian site will display both Olmec and Maya characteristics. Last year I saw this at Tabalik Abaj in Guatemala near the border with Mexico, a site inhabited for more than two thousand years, from about 1000 B.C. until the great Maya collapse in about 900 A.D. There are Olmec sculptures, and Maya features, a place where you can feel one civilization blending into another.

If you want to see how some of these huge pieces were moved from their homes on the Mexican coast to foggy San Francisco (very carefully), go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacma/sets/72157624945753603/show/

Libya: Call a Spade a Spade

2011-03-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Regime Change: In Libya, Call a Spade a Spade

By Mary Jo McConahay

New America Media, Mar. 19, 2011. http://newamericamedia.org/

No one expects hypocrisy to be absent from foreign policy. What is hienous and tragic is to lie to ourselves about it, or accept the lie given to us. To say intervention in Libya is anything but militarized regime change keeps the door open for the U.S. Big Stick that has cost countless lives the world over in the last century, and robs us of moral authority every place we bring it down hard.

In Libya the major world powers led by the United States are triggering a downward spiral to more human suffering and death for their own geo-political and economic ends. In recent years Muammar el-Qaddafi has been our darling, a presumed bulwark against Al-Qaeda in Africa, just as Saddam Hussein was our champion in the Iran-Iraq war, both Qaddafi and Hussein beneficiaries of our largesse. Recognizing national sovereignty -- better said: eyes closed -- we let them use money and materiel we gave them as they wished, including against their own people.

Then, we changed our minds about them. Decided they must go.

Forty-six peaceful demonstrators, including a fourteen-year old boy and a journalist, were killed March 18 in Sana'a, Yemen's magical-looking capital, adding to the deaths of non-violent resisters at the hands of a dictator in power as long as Qaddafi. Why not intervene in Yemen as in Libya?

What began in quiet Bahrain a few weeks ago as joyful but serious civic marches for wider rights by Shiite and Sunni citizens has become a nightmare. Even government killings of unarmed demonstrators were not enough to quell growing resistance, so Saudi Arabia's brother monarchy sent over a thousand troops in blatant occupation of the tiny island. Why tolerate state murder and foreign occupation? Why not intervene in Bahrain as in Libya?

It is another lie to say the world wants this, and the United States is merely one nation in an alliance of humanitarian warriors. Neither India, China nor Russia, representing far more of the world's population than France, England and the United States, would commit itself to voting "Yes" in the United Nations Security Council on the Libya operation, abstaining instead. Likewise, Germany would not say yes. Also abstaining: Brazil, the largest country on the South American continent.

To recognize that Libya's rebels risk their lives by fighting the overwhelming might of the state is one thing. To militarize the crisis further with the might of major powers is another.

Accepting Washington's line that our actions are based on something they are not is to enable a foreign policy, in our name, based on fatal prevarication. This might be a good time to stop.

Journalist Mary Jo McConahay reported from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Her new book, Maya Roads: One Woman's Journey Among the People of the Rainforest, comes out this summer from Chicago Review Press. (Photo: Patrick Baz/AFP. Identified as rebel jet about to crash)

The Send-Off

2011-03-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

   Three hundred souls in a second-floor church under shafts of shifting colored lights from stained glass windows. Underneath on the first floor lunch being served to those who had no place else to eat, several of whom knew John and cared for him and climbed the two flights when their bellies were full. Outside it was the coldest day of the year in the Mission District that was Ross's half-home, the other half being the heart of Mexico City where everybody knew el viejo. Sadness was so deep there was more laughter than tears, stories of the man's brashness, his in-your-face insistence on the truth as he saw it, no quarter given to the hypocrite, no matter rank or station. Of the young Beat days. How he went to Mexico too but stayed when the others left. There were things you'd forgotten: how John was the first man in the country to go to jail (almost two years) for refusing the Vietnam draft. Things you didn't know: John had two grown kids, son and daughter, estranged for years then grown close explaining their love with the intimacy and soaring that showed those apples didn't fall far from the tree.
   And there were things you thought about that you wondered whether other people knew: that John had a son who was not there, who died as an infant because a doctor couldn't be found in the Indian village where early early early death was unremarkable, except of course to those who loved the small, fresh dead, over which a father could cry in a cafe in Palenque sixty years after the fact.
   No hymns, but good music, Spanish and English. And the flock getting to its feet and standing many with right arms raised in a fist everybody singing the walls of that church ringing with the Internationale. His request.
   Afterward a jazz procession through the streets of the Mission with the band leading the way and staying to play outside the Cafe La Boheme as mourners and the curious and street people packed the place to listen to each other's poetry, no-host bar, catering on unsteady paper plates by the cafe.
   Next door at the Nicaraguan Salvadoran hole in the wall with great pupusas a bunch of us sat around telling John stories and one of his basketball buddies remembered John took buses in Peru and described the rolled-up pant legs of the young hired men, his fellow passengers, suppurating sores redness and rashes on their legs where they smashed the coca leaves, the lowest human rung on the drug commerce ladder that led to dorm rooms and swank parties in the United States. "Think about that the next time you cop some blow," was the last line of the story he wrote. Imagine. What a great journalist he was. Chicken's eye view, all right, two feet from the ground, voicing for those without one, noticing, writing every day of his life.

And blogs (God how he'd hate the word) are supposed to be short mine I know are more slog but I can't leave it without giving you Kevin's poem he wrote the day after John died in his house because if you read this far you will want to read it.

Dawn without john

There is no long hand attached to that sassafras cane

There is no bulging yellow eyeball behind that magnifying glass reading la jornada

That toothless mouth is not sucking on a joint.

There is no black pen cradled in the other hand ready to write

That fine fine brain can´t remember the history of mexico

Those new York ears can´t hear Coltrane or parker

My youngest daughter gabriela won´t be receiving a birthday present from her beloved godfather or dogfather as he liked to say.

And zoe won´t be skyping with her abuelo tonight.

The apple trees are still blooming

The sun rose again and the moon is full

Our neighbor is threshing his harvest of wheat

And the roosters are crowing

48 hours ago I held you in my arms as you struggled and fought:

And then for the first time in your life you surrendered, gave in,

And took your last breath with the rising sun.

24 hours ago as the day dawned we cried and arminda and the saxophone of Oscar el vampiro; street musician from mexico city; wailed over your cold lifeless body ,and in one last act of defiance, Oscar and I smoked a joint of the humboldt grass you smuggled into mexico , making it doubly illegal and especially irreverent, blew the smoke over you, and stuck the roach in your mouth.

Before you were baked we placed a pen in your hand

Compadre, I saw that smile on your face as you went up in flames with a joint in your mouth and a pen in your hand.

It took two hours to turn you into ashes.

This dawn I am alone with those ashes, the flowers, the candles and Coltrane.

The beret, the magnifying glass, the leather vest, the keffiyeh , and the sassafras cane

are all wondering?

WILL THERE BE ANOTHER JOHN ROSS ?

Kevin Quigley Santiago Tzipijo jan 19 2011

The Good Thing About Getting My Clothes Cut Off

2011-02-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Chronicle

Feb. 21, 2011

Leah Garchik

GIANTS RESCUE PACKAGE FOR LOYAL FAN

Journalist Mary Jo McConahay fell down a flight of concrete steps a few

weeks ago, breaking a variety of bones. Her husband called 9-1-1 and she

was whisked away to San Francisco General, where medical workers began

cutting her clothes off. "Mary Jo stopped them with a plea to not cut the

Giants World Series Champs logo on the T-shirt she was wearing," e-mails

her friend, Dan Hubig. She figured if the shirt had to be cut, at least

she could save the logo and sew it onto another shirt.

Someone who knew about this story - McConahay is not sure who it was -

was impressed with her team loyalty and apparently contacted the Giants.

And, "a few days later," reports Hubig, "a package filled with Giants

memorabilia was delivered ... including the wonderful Lincecum bobble-

head doll. Now that's how to build local support!" The package had a get-

well note on behalf of all the Giants and a "nice old-fashioned hat," said

McConahay, but no T-shirt. "That's OK," she said, "because I've got the

old logo."

(And in further reward for that loyalty, here's a plug for McConahay's

forthcoming book: "Maya Roads" will be out in August.)

John Ross Rebel Journalist 1938-2011

2011-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

JOHN ROSS 1938-2011

Journalist, investigative poet, and social activist John Ross died peacefully today at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico, where he had lived on and off for the past fifty years. He was 72. The cause was liver cancer.

A young generation Beat poet and the national award-winning author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, and nine chapbooks of poetry, Ross received the American Book Award (1995) for Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, and the coveted Upton Sinclair Award (2005) for Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left. The first journalist to bring news of the indigenous Mexican Zapatista revolution to English-speaking readers, Ross was widely regarded as a “voice for those without a voice,” who stood with the poor and oppressed in his brilliantly stylized writing, suffering beatings and arrests during many nonviolent protests.

An iconoclast who took every chance to afflict the comfortable and educate the public, Ross turned down honors from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009, which had praised him for telling “stories nobody else could or would tell,” and as an organizer for tenants’ rights. In the chamber, Ross recalled an appearance before the Board forty years before when he was dragged from the same room for disturbing the peace. He blamed an “attack” by the San Francisco Police Department for the loss of his left eye. Ross told the Board, “Death was on our plate” when he went to Baghdad as a human shield during U.S. bombing, and again, when he was beaten by Israeli settlers alongside Palestinian olive farmers.

“Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence,” he said. “Pardon me for having lived it so fully.”

Born in New York City, Ross grew up amidst the pre-Civil Rights era folk and jazz scene, influenced at an early age by the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach and legendary sports figures like the Harlem Globetrotters. He is survived by his sister, artist Susan Gardner; his children, Dante Ross and Carla Ross-Allen; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen’.

In addition to his popular accounts of Mexican life and politics, chronicled in the series “Mexico Barbaro” and “Blindman’s Buff,,” John Ross reported for the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly, Noticias Aliadas, La Jornada, Sierra Magazine and many other print and radio organizations. In 2010, under treatment for liver cancer, he toured nationally with El Monstruo: True Tales of Dread & Redemption in Mexico City, already a cult classic, using a hand-held magnifying glass to read his words before packed audiences.

One of the earliest resisters to the Vietnam War, Ross spent two and a half years as a prisoner of conscience in a federal penitentiary for refusing the draft. On release, he recounts in a poem, when a prison authority walked him to the door,

Ross he told me with a look of disgust

written all over his smarmy mush,

you never learned

how to be a prisoner.

Memorial services in San Francisco, Mexico City, Humboldt County and New York City will be announced at a later date.

---Elizabeth Bell, Sandina Robbins, Mary Jo McConahay

---Photo by Marcia Perskie

For John Ross by John Ross

2011-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

   Three a.m.

  They said I should not come to the lake. He won't recognize you, they said.

  From the bookshelf, I take down not Murder by Capitalism, or the classic Mexico reporting books, but poetry chapbooks he has given me over the years. I look at Against Amnesia, and open it at random -- I swear -- to this page.

POEM ON HIS BIRTHDAY

It was twice my 30th year to heaven
and the bonfires of the critics
were already crackling
with the remaindered corpses of my life work.
There will be no memoirs.
I am trying to forget
all that I have been forced to remember
and remember only what
I have forgotten in the falling:
the small hands of my children
tucked inside mine,
who took the final shot
in the NBA western finals 1975-76,
the tears of joy I shed after Magic
hit 42 to win the 1980-81 championship,
the soft curdled breath of my lovers
while they slept...

How on earth have I reached this great age
without a season's ticket to my name?
Fact: me and my old friend QR Hand
have been watching b-ball together
for the past 1,657 years.
Methuselah only watched for 900.
Fact: in this blizzard of centuries,
we have grown older
than Satchel Page, George Blanda,
Robert Parrish, Phil Nikro, Archie Moore
and Jersey Joe Walcott laid out end to end.

Once upon a time,
when I was just an angel child
lo these many light years ago,
I took Baby Dodds' drumsticks
to my lips and kissed them on the tips,
the ones that back up Louie Armstrong
and the Hot Five all the way to the Royal Garden,
the south side of Chicago, 1919.
Now I've grown quite as old
as those sticks -- but you know,
the drummer has never stopped flailing,
the tenor player has never stopped wailing,
the freedom songs of Trane, Miles, Monk and Bird
have never prophesied more

When I was a young fool of a buck
and what I said was what I did
they locked me up in jail because
the Vietnamitas
were not my enemies.
The deeper they buried me
in that terminal penitentiary,
the freer I became
and the day the prison gates flew open,
the P.O. walked me to the door.
Ross he told me with a look of disgust
written all over his smarmy mush,
you never learned
how to be a prisoner.

Put that on my tombstone, chump!
chisel it in deep in the block and stack it up in
the Trinidad town cemetery
right next to my old comrade
"Murdered By Capitalism"
E.B. Schnaubelt.
It's the epitaph I signed on for --
but one caution, compañeros,
don't put me down under that stone,
oh no, better you should bury my bones
far away in an unmarked hole
because I always need to stay
at least two addresses
ahead of the government.

************************************
   santa cruz calif/april/1998

Brad Will -- Why? Who? When?

2010-11-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

Four years ago last week journalist and activist Brad Will was killed while covering anti-government demonstrations. The case remains unsolved today: http://cpj.org/blog/2010/11/four-years-on-brad-wills-mother-says-no-movement-i.php
Here is my report at the time, including words of Will written in the days before he died.

Journalist's Death Bringing Oaxaca to World's Eyes

New America Media, News Analysis, Mary Jo McConahay, Posted: Oct 30, 2006

Ten days before he was killed on Oct. 27, journalist Brad Will posted a news report on the Internet called "Death in Oaxaca," about a 41-year-old man shot as he manned a barricade with his family and neighbors, much as thousands of Oaxacans have been doing for five months. Will, 36, from New York, had "not seen too many bodies in my life -- eats you up," he wrote in his dispatch to Indymedia. (http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/10/77343.shtml)

The Oaxacan man Brad Will wrote about was "one more death -- one more martyr in a dirty war -- one more time to cry and hurt." Will himself was shot with a camera in his hand. Photos taken by others show him thin and glassy-eyed, lying on a sidewalk stripped of his shirt as two others try to help, bullet holes ringed with red blood on his solar plexus, as if targeted by a sharpshooter.

The Oaxaca stand-off has been a hidden story, largely ignored by the U.S. press. What has been silenced with the death of an independent reporter like Will, unfunded by any large organization, was one of the few voices that has tried to tell the story to the world. Teachers began the strike in May by requesting a salary raise and peacefully occupying the city center. In the following weeks Gov. Ulises Ruiz ordered the teachers forcibly removed, which drew other demonstrators to join the occupation and eventually paralyzed the city. Paramilitary and off-duty officers have shot at the demonstrators -- at least 13 deaths, including Will's have been counted. Residents called for the resignation of Ruiz, an iron-fisted governor blamed for the deaths, and for a corrupt administration. The strikers insisted on non-violence. Now President Vicente Fox, with just one more month in office, has sent in federal troops to re-take the city.

The conflict in Oaxaca is part of a larger movement of demands for wider democracy in Mexico, often spearheaded by indigenous groups, the most well-known of which is the Zapatista movement in the Lacandon jungles and other areas of Chiapas, south of Oaxaca. Of some 500 Oaxaca municipalities, more than 400 are overwhelmingly Indian; among the 70,000 teachers affected by the strike, many of the activists are bilingual indigenous teachers. While teachers voted last week to return to work, others have vowed to continue to paralyze the city until demands are met. Now that Fox has sent in federal riot police with automatic weapons and military helicopters in the wake of Will's and two other deaths, it's not clear which direction the Oaxaca story will take, but it's clear it will not disappear.

The Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan Peoples, known by its Spanish acronym APPO, a collection of activist groups, has said it will maintain the occupation. Monitoring its radio station Asamblea Popular de Oaxaca (www.asambleapopulardeoaxaca.com) as federal troops came to the city, a listener could hear a town at war, and the sounds of resistance. Light small fires to make smoke and obscure the vision of helicopters, announcers advised, give blood, and bring food to strategic points. There were warnings about neighborhoods being searched ("Police in ski masks dressed in grey are going house to house in Colonia Aleman"), and reports of federal troops' movements at various sectors. There were also constant calls to remain peaceful, to avoid anyone who suggested violent reaction, to avoid provocations that might call down reaction from troops and police. Sugar and sand might be thrown in front of vehicles, an announcer suggested, to slow their progress.

"It is clear that this is more than a strike, more than expulsion of a governor, more than a blockade, more than a coalition of fragments -- it is a genuine peoples revolt," wrote Brad Will in the days before he died. "After decades of...rule by bribe, fraud and the bullet the people are tired -- you cannot mistake the whisper of the Lacandon jungle in the streets -- in every street corner deciding together to hold -- you see it in their faces -- indigenous, women, children -- so brave -- watchful at night -- proud and resolute."

Small demonstrations are taking place in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, deploring the Oaxaca deaths and Fox's decision to send federal police and soldiers to Oaxaca. The Spanish language daily La Opinion said 70 persons from the Oaxacan community demonstrated in front of the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, and quoted Odilia Romero, a representative of the Binational Indigenous Organizations Front, made up largely of Oaxacans in Southern California and the agricultural Central Valley. "There is no need to repress the people of Oaxaca, who are a peaceful people," Romero told La Opinion. Strikers have blamed Gov. Ruiz for acts of violence before and since the strike began. Ruiz is a member of the PRI, the party which has governed Oaxaca for 70 years. "If he stays the repression is going to be stronger against those who are against him," Romero said.

The Fox administration began with hope, because he was the first to break the 70-year stranglehold of the powerful PRI party on Mexico's presidency, and because President Bush gave strong signals then about immigration reform, which would benefit Mexicans. Fox is leaving with no immigration reform in the north and a fence going up on the U.S. border; and in the south, a former tourist mecca occupied by federal troops holding off a disgruntled population. It has taken the death of an American to shine a light on the struggle in Oaxaca, where demands for "direct democracy," more autonomous rule that answers local needs without corruption, are not likely to go away. "What can you say about this movement -- this revolutionary moment," Brad Will asked in his last dispatch. "You know it is building, growing, shaping."

poster: Arnoldo, Caracol de La Mission, 2006

In Peten, Interesting Times

2010-10-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

From ReVista, Harvard's Review of Latin America, Fall 2010-Winter 2011

May you live in interesting times.
--Chinese curse

In Petén, Interesting Times

The Vast, Breathing Rainforest is Changing

BY MARY JO MCCONAHAY

I first came to Petén in the 1970s, reading a found paperback of The Exorcist to pass a long, dreary bus rideon pocked roads from Belize. Stepping off at Tikal, breathing the jungle air, I immediately felt the rainforest’s richness, its promise of discoveries to come. Later, the night called mysteriously with cries of birds and unseen animals. “There is no place like this on earth,” I thought. Archaeologists and workmen outnumbered tourists like me, who had come to see remains of ancient Maya civilization.

The Petén of those days is gone. Since the 1990s I have reported on the region, drawn by its persistent frontier character, the beauty of still-extant jungle, and most recently, the sensation of being a witness to history in a key corner of the continent. Petén is the center of the largest tropical lowland forest north of the Amazon, a continental lung stretching from Mexican Chiapas to western Belize. It is one of the earth’s remaining safeguards against radical temperature variation. What becomes of its verdant carpet, the concentration of trees that absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide, links Petén directly to global concern about climate change.

When I arrived more than 30 years ago, tomb-robbing and animal poaching worried Petén. Today it faces challenges so much more fundamental, that failing to meet them means Petén is likely to disappear in the near future as the unique jungle outland of Guatemalan history.

Since 1998, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Petén’s geography and lack of law enforcement has made it a key transit corridor in the international drug trade. Always a pioneer destination, so many peasant farmers continue to arrive, pushed out by Guatemala’s dramatic imbalance in land ownership elsewhere, that forest goes up in smoke at an increasing rate and precious species, some unique to Petén, face extinction. Ranchers destroy forest for pasture. In addition, likely unintended consequences of proposed tourist megaprojects disenfranchise the community and threaten to further upset ecological balance. Official corruption and traditional impunity mean more of Petén each year is sold to highest bidders or crooks who trade in serious threats. Drug-trafficking families are rooted in patches of land they call their own. Petén is presenting a challenge to governability and rule of law.

The spirit of the 1996 Peace Accords that ended the 36-year civil war remains less than fully implemented nationwide. In Petén, the failure takes a special character. Entire communities claim violations of the right—guaranteed in the Accords—to consult on government-granted projects that affect their lives and livelihoods. One example is the recent extension of the Perenco Oil Company concessions in the Laguna del Tigre area. Another is President Álvaro Colom’s multi-million dollar mega-tourism project, Cuatro Balam, involving the region’s biggest private companies, but lacking local input, according toPeténeros.

For all its strategic importance and place in the Guatemalan imagination, the Petén region has been the most hidden in the country’s history. Petén covers a full third of national territory, 23,000 sq. miles, but for the first century and a half of independence, it was the Wild North, the ultimate unknown. Roadless tropical forest infested with deadly vipers, ruled by the kingly jaguar. Better to stay home.

Novels by Virgilio Macal Rodriguez, for instance, still taught in Guatemalan schools, portray the northern jungles as lands of mystery and raging beauty, their inhabitants wise with forest knowledge and instinct, but not always trustworthy. As a young boy, Guatemalan-born writer Victor Perera recalled seeing Lacandón Maya, who once lived from Petén to Chiapas, exhibited in a cage at a fair in the capital. Later, Perera wrote of their hardy culture and developed cosmovision.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Petén’s military governors regarded the Petén’s largely unpopulated tracts as an ideal social safety valve. Landless peasants nationwide had been left with little hope after the 1954 U.S.-orchestrated coup against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz; the end of the “Ten Years of Spring” had also reversed land reform. Encouraged by the military, peasant farmers in cooperatives, or individually, moved to the North, where they were given titles to parcels but little or no support. Nevertheless, along the Pasión and Usumacinta Rivers, and inland at places like Dos Erres, some cooperatives and communities grew and thrived, despite the jungle soil’s shortcomings for agriculture.

Not incidentally, the existence of population along rivers marking the border was intended to act as a weight against Mexico’s hydropower plans, including a dam that could flood Guatemalan land. In the 1960s, Guatemala City also distributed concessions for oil production to foreign companies under a post-coup petroleum law. The recognition of Petén as a land rich in natural resources, besides hardwoods, had begun.

Tropical rainforests cover only five percent of the earth, but nurture half of all animal and plant species. Petén is home to endangered species, some found nowhere else. When Vinicio Cerezo took office in 1987, heading the first civilian government in a generation, he wanted to be seen as the “green President.” National and international NGOs arrived to help save the rainforest. In 1989, the Law of Protected Areas aimed to prevent timber companies, cattle ranchers and farmers from destroying trees. The following year‘s creation of the four million acre Maya Biosphere Reserve aimed to protect jungle, stop new settlements and provide development assistance to already-resident communities, giving them a stake in conservation. A new entity, the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), was created to keep watch over Guatemala’s reserve of global genetic patrimony.

Those were heady days. International journalists, including myself, reported on a new kind of no-go territory, at least for migrants. The northernmost third of the Petén became devoted to parks, biotopes and multiple-use zones. We watched an influx of environmentalists, scholars and scientists. I visited communities where artisan families, supported in business methods by outsiders, learned to live for a year from products of a single tree, instead of slashing and burning dozens to plant corn. I met women trained to use solar ovens and easily made, low-smoke stoves that replaced open cook-fires, saving not only the forest, but the women’s eyesight as well. In multiple-use zones, communities received concessions for sustainable forestry projects.

In the wake of all the investment and hopes, Petén’s 21st century began with the unexpected—the bolder presence of a global drug trade feeding the U.S. market. Petén has also become clearly marked by the inevitable consequence of Guatemala’s own irrepressible history of violence, and historic imbalance in land ownership: struggles for land are taking place, mostly on the part of poor farm families.

Recently, talking informally with a CONAP official, I mentioned a 1990s visit I had made to the Biosphere’s Laguna del Tigre National Park. The park is among the most important sweet wetlands in Central America, a paradise for bird watching and home to puma, jaguar, and a scarlet macaw sanctuary. I recalled that I had a peaceful run-in at the time with a coyotesecretly crossing an Asian client into Mexico, and also that someone had just burned down a CONAP guard station. The official laughed bitterly.

“I wish those were the problems we had today,” he said.

A visit to Laguna del Tigre revealed what he meant. Entering the park area by car, I saw no forest in two hours of driving, only tree stumps sticking up from the ground like amputated thumbs. Stunningly healthy-looking Brahman cattle roamed, eating spiky pasture grass. A new CONAP building, a handsome one-story cabin-like structure, stood whole, but empty.

In Laguna del Tigre, ranchers abound, and drug families use the cattle spreads as a screen for runways to transport drugs. The small planes may be damaged on landing or simply abandoned once a drop is made, leading Drug Enforcement Agency Operations Chief Michael Brun to characterize northern Guatemala as “an aircraft graveyard.” A vast majority of the cocaine destined for the United States now transits Central America, reports a 2010 U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute monograph. In a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the Committee on International Relations, Rep. Robert Menendez (D. NJ) asked, “ What will happen to the people of Guatemala if 75 percent of the cocaine arriving in the United States continues to pass through Guatemala?” Between 2006, when that hearing took place, and 2008, reports the Army institute monograph, cocaine transit through Guatemala jumped 47 percent.

The CONAP administrator said one drug lord offered him a deal: goons would police the rainforest against destruction, if CONAP would ignore drug drops. “I told him no,” said the official, shrugging his shoulders ruefully.

CONAP, unarmed, has little effective authority and often not even enough gas for its vehicles, although it does manage to capture ill-gotten timber, often from trucks. Police authority remains unrespected. To hunt down a farmer suspected of cutting trees, for instance, it is the army that goes in, accompanied by CONAP and police. The sense of 1980s-style militarization returns. Drug traffickers appear to remain unaffected.

When I arrived to live in Guatemala in 1989, many new acquaintances told me the political violence of the 1980s unfolded in the capital and the highlands, and in the Ixcán, not Petén, honestly seeming to believe it was so. This was prior to the appearance of comprehensive reports such as the Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI), and the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission (CEH). Traveling in the north, however, I soon realized the war hit communities once invited to make a new life on the land. Hundreds had died, the majority at army hands. The region’s displaced, and many others uprooted when hundreds of villages disappeared elsewhere in the country, sought survival in Petén’s remote jungle, where they have lived as farmers, some for more than twenty years, without electricity or medical clinics. In 1990, eleven “illegal” communities existed in Laguna del Tigre. Today they number thirty-seven, with a total population of about 45,000.

Even Peténeros with legal land titles do not always rest easy. Parcel holders outside the protected areas, in a block of communities south of Las Pozas, battled the bureaucracy’s famous trámites (paperwork) for twelve years until receiving proper documentation for their land. Now many say they are under pressure to sell, including threats of violence. The sold land becomes part of the growing African palm oil industry, held by private companies.

Petén is not only Guatemala’s largest department, but also the fastest growing in terms of population, from just 25,000 in the 1960s to an estimated 614,000 residents today. The Cuatro Balam initiative, announced with much fanfare in 2008, plans to meet job and development needs for Peténeros by expanding tourism, granting rights to private companies for business in the rainforest area, and aiming to bring up to a million tourists to Petén each year. (Tikal, the best-known ancient Petén Maya site, currently draws between 140,000 and 180,000 visitors yearly.) Cuatro Balam plans include a university specializing in environment studies, a belt of hotels and resorts, and an agricultural sector to keep farmers out of the core area.

Critics say such development by private companies will destroy much of what is left of the Petén rainforest. Local residents complain they are not consulted about plans that may change their lives considerably. It remains a question whether Peténeros, traditionally farmers, cattlemen and others who work with the land and forest, will easily become a tourism workforce, or even be interested in the jobs.

Cuatro Balam is set to be anchored by the sprawling El Mirador archaeological site, with the Maya world’s largest pyramid, Danta, and many smaller sites. Deep in thick rainforest seven miles south of the Mexican border, El Mirador is reached by three-day trek from the nearest town, or by helicopter. By 2023, however, Cuatro Balam expects to run a train at ten miles per hour on jungle tracks, with noise “imperceptible,” to El Mirador, Piedras Negras, Tikal and Uaxactun. Critics suggest tracks may interrupt some animal trails, maintenance access roads will destroy more forest, and question to whom the train’s noise will be “imperceptible.”

Details are hard to pin down. “There is much yet to get concrete,” said Alexander Urizar, director of the Institute of Anthropology and History. “The vision of the Maya Biosphere was protection. Cuatro Balam is a way to conserve it, to make sure people know about it, and make sure it generates resources.”

The Global Heritage Fund has named the Mirador project area as one of the most important endangered world cultural heritage sites. It is indisputably the country’s highest profile archeological enterprise. An executive director of the foundation that sponsors the Project is actor and director Mel Gibson, who produced the 2006 film, Apocalypto, controversial among Maya scholars. Archaeologist Richard Hansen, the project director who has worked in Mirador for thirty years, emphasizes the need to preserve Mirador’s rainforest environment, not simply structures. He has said he envisions a five-star eco-lodge developed by Guatemalan entrepreneurs as an example of the kind of tourism that could draw in funds to help preserve the Biosphere.

“This is the last gasp,” Hansen told the Guatemala magazine, The Revue, in June. “If we fail, we lose the whole basin. I want to preserve it for the future.”

Cuatro Balam itself, however, can arguably be seen as a development project and investment opportunity rather than a conservation effort. The idea behind it is that poor countries cannot afford to rope off sensitive land, that it must produce some economic gain for a nation and its people. Colom has emphasized partnership with private enterprise; already supporting the El Mirador “centerpiece” are major partners such as Wal-Mart Central America, construction material giant Cementos Progreso and several banks, with the Inter-American Development Bank matching private funds.

Residents of Laguna del Tigre worry. “Cuatro Balam is the biggest monster,” said one long-time area farmer. He was attending a meeting with 25 men and women in La Libertad, to discuss challenges to their vulnerable situation. “What they want is to eliminate our communities, but we will defend life.”

A government video describing Cuatro Balam in the year 2023 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt3EPvuk8Qk), calls its land “free of invaders,” operating under the “rule of law.”

On the feast of St. Amelia, patron of one Laguna del Tigre community, a Catholic priest baptized babies, asked a blessing for wild forest animals, and addressed the congregation’s concerns in a homily. “First before all is the human being,” he said, “and then companies. We can join with other groups in the monte to make our situation known.”

Petén will continue to be a promised land for Guatemalans looking for work and land. It will be a proving ground for commitment to the Peace Accords, a test of will and capacity to fight drug traffic and corruption. Guatemalan and international visitors, meanwhile, will come as I once did, for the love of sites of ancient Maya civilization, the adventure found on Petén’s rivers and in its wildlands, and the chance to know Central America’s own enchanting rainforest, vast stretches of jungle that exist much as they did at the time of creation.

Franz Schurmann and the Shaman

2010-08-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Franz Schurmann and the Shaman

Everything written about the learnedness and perspicacity of our late friend and colleague, Franz Schurmann, founder of Pacific News Service, is absolutely true. What I also valued in Franz is that he believed in magic.

Several years ago on a reporting trip to Central America, Franz visited our family in Antigua, Guatemala, where we lived for ten years. In desultory after-dinner conversation, I mentioned the name of a comadrona, or midwife, whom I sometimes visited at the foot of a volcano called Fire, Fuego. Then in her 70s, Basilia had delivered a large percentage of her village’s inhabitants, and she was generous about sharing talk of customs, herbal cures, the recent past. Sometimes she allowed me to watch as a client came with a query, existential or quotidian, and Basilia twirled an old pair of scissors in a shallow basket, divining an answer. Since the age of fifteen, villagers said, she had exhibited a special don, an inborn gift, not only a midwife’s, but a shaman’s skill.

The conversation with Franz at our table moved on, until we finally rose and walked across the courtyard to the door.

“Good night, Franz. See you tomorrow.”

“My mother is not well,” he said.

“Oh.” I felt taken aback by news that seemed to come from nowhere. “I’m sorry.”

“The woman, in the village,” he said. A long moment later, I realized he referred to the Maya Indian, Basilia.

“Could we go to her?”

This was not Franz’s renowned and insatiable curiosity talking, but the voice of a son, well into middle age, asking on behalf of an elderly mother. Franz intuited Basilia might have special strength, or the ear of the gods. Or represent one more way of sending positive mojo to his mom. What he did not think was that the idea was ridiculous, or unworthy of him.

Basilia had no telephone. When she opened the split-log door to her yard next day, however, she appeared unsurprised. Franz didn’t need me to translate; Spanish was one of the dozen languages he spoke. We followed the thin woman across the dirt yard, chickens running underfoot. She removed an apron and flung it across a line, becoming a figure that might have stepped out of a scene a thousand years old. She wore a square huipil blouse, handwoven with chevrons and circles in bold purples and reds, long indigo skirt and caites, rude sandals.

Inside a windowless shack, Basilia swept back a wisp of gray hair and set to “the work.” Franz handed over white votive candles we had bought on the way into town, and tiny incense cones. Basilia lit all, and as we stood, prayed in her native K’akchikel Maya language, gesturing in communication with figures of saints and holy pictures on a makeshift altar.

“Not yet,” she said to Franz when she finished. The candles had melted too quickly. We would have to return for another session in order for “the work” to be effective, she said.

On the next visit, Basilia broke an egg into a glass of water to read the ways its white fell and streamed. This procedure produced no alarming news, but the candles – again, they burned too fast. My cynical side suspected my dear friend, the shaman, of requiring more certitude than usual about Franz’s case, because of course, each time we came I brought a gift of food, and Franz pressed money into her hand. But Franz said he bore no suspicion, and agreed to a third meeting, which Basilia said should do the trick.

In three days time we were to travel to the shrine of Maximon, a kind of counter-saint revered by ordinary people but unsanctioned by any church. Maximon was big league, where Basilia seemed to think she could do “the work” best. This was joy to Franz’ ears, an adventure, a journey under the surface of things few travelers come to make. It was the kind of journey Franz liked best.

Nevertheless, we worried that even a trip to Maximon could be sabotaged by quickly melting candles, wax that did not aguanta, bear up. Once begun, no one wanted to leave the enterprise unfinished. But in a couple of days, Franz would have a plane to catch.

“Freeze them,” said my husband.

“What?” I couldn’t follow.

“Of course,” said Franz, without hesitation. “We freeze the candles, and they’ll take long to melt.”

Franz was not above assisting the supernatural.

Inside the shrine of Maximon, smoke filled the air from hundreds of candles set up before the icon, a top-hatted, life-size figure seated in a stiff-backed chair, smoking a huge cigar, bottles of moonshine at his feet. On a big metal table, the candles glowed in colors reflecting the intentions of believers: yellow on behalf of children, for instance, red for love. A hand-written sign forbade black candles, warning against the desire to wish someone bad luck. Black candles outnumbered the others.

Basilia had worn her good, bright huipil. She spoke to the wooden Maximon, throwing cane liquor on him from a bottle. Franz handed her the candles; she took her time lighting the wicks, eying their flames. Franz stood nearby, watching his shaman, observing the others. The smoke finally got to my asthmatic lungs, and I headed for fresh air.

When they emerged from the shrine, Franz and Basilia were talking animatedly. “How did it go?” I asked.

“Bueno,” said Basilia. “Good.”

Franz squinted in the sun, but he was smiling, extending his arm to help the shaman down the steps.

Bothering with the Commotion -- A Polish Wedding

2010-08-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

My cousin wears white, even though she and Piotr had been married in a civil ceremony six months ago. “Here I am a bride almost 50 years old,” she says in the vestibule, as if suddenly embarrassed to cause everyone the trouble of attending a formal wedding.

But this is her first marriage, she sparkles, and I tell her that is all that matters. The bridegroom, a widower with three daughters, looks respectably nervous. He allows his girls, dressed as bridesmaids, to fuss over his collar, and place a pink rose in his suit jacket pocket..

Inside the church on Chicago’s North Side, women compare amber. “Mexican?” asks the mother of the bride, raising a young girl’s hand to examine a bracelet. “Polska,” says the girl, as others approve. We finger our necklaces. “ Polska, polska,” we say, Poland being the only legitimate provenance of the genuine article.

The organ fills the church with a hymn. I hear a woman’s voice in the pew behind us whisper to a neighbor, “I don’t see why they bother with all this commotion, since they’re already married.” I know the person behind the voice. She is not Polish.

The wedding procession slowly descends the aisle of the century-old church, walking through variegated light from stained glass windows. During the Catholic Mass, the priest takes one end of the narrow white stole he wears about his neck, and wraps it around the joined hands of the couple, who face each other to repeat the words of promise. I would like to tell you what else the clergyman said that brought tears, and a couple of rounds of laughter, to the church, but my Polish is so poor I just didn’t get it.

Hours later, in a neighborhood ballroom, guests shimmer in cocktail dress under crystal chandeliers. Older relatives pour shots for all from vodka bottles on white-clothed tables. I know the homes in Poland from which some here come. Small, fourth floor walk-ups in Soviet-era apartment blocks. Farm houses where bags of wheat lie stored in the attic, and in the cellar, potatoes. Celebrations like this must ooze glamour and joy.

And food. Thick, fresh mushroom soup, slaw and chopped beets with more horseradish than an ordinary mortal might consume in a year. Jacketed waiters bring oval main dishes of hearty winter food -- never mind that it’s August. We pass them around, commenting aloud on which aunt or grandmother had made a special version of just such a dish: pork with baked apples; garlic mashed potatoes surrounded by slices lightly fried; tender veal; steamed carrots and cauliflower, pirogy stuffed with potato; steak rolls on barley. We toast with the shots, and drink clear rose, or spumante.

After the couple’s first waltz, dancing swings into high gear. The singers turn everything into Polish, including Lady Gaga. Babies are passed to others as parents hit the floor. The noise is deafening, so men and women in their 80s and 90s answer questions never asked, conversing pleasantly as ice cream in glass bowls appears at each place. Meanwhile, a train of waiters is wending its way to a serve-yourself section, carrying a dozen more kinds of desserts, like apricot and raspberry kolatchkis, cheesecake, huge chocolate truffle drops, dark and white.

The atmosphere of a Polish wedding, whether here in Chicago or in Krakow, is a mix of stories told by the old, and memories in the making by the young. It was at such a wedding that my grandfather taught me to polka, and to waltz. I remember the thrill as if it were yesterday.

At my cousin’s wedding, while most adults sat about recovering from dessert, children filled the dance floor and the bridal couple wandered the tables greeting guests. Meanwhile, waiters carried in more and different foods for the vodka-drinkers and anyone else to pick up at will: salmon; egg halves with caviar, black and red; crakowski; ham; salmon roe; polish sausage. We left before midnight because my daughter had an early flight. The Slavic tunes were just beginning.

There was no easy way to reach the bride and groom, so I waved goodbye across the room to my cousin in her white satin dress. Malagoshia and Piotr waved back, looking tired but ecstatic. The memorable day, I supposed, was the reason a civil ceremony had not been enough, and they had bothered with all the commotion.

It's the Sauce

2010-08-08T18:10:00.000-07:00

Hello--Thanks for coming back.

I know I said GlobeWatch would return in June,

and apologize for being a little late.
But the book is finished!

Meanwhile, I'm thrilled to be back at the blog.

---Mary Jo

It’s the Sauce

The great rainforest land once called Gran Peten has never been known as a gourmet’s paradise. Whatever might be plucked from trees, or shot with gun or bow, is what landed on plates from southern Mexico’s Chiapas state, across Guatemala’s northern Peten to Belize. Beans and rice might accompany deer, rodent or bird, but roughly the same kind of meals appeared on the menus of indigenous Maya, and after the sixteenth century, of Europeans who came to stay. Things haven’t changed much.

The first petenero food I tasted was tepesquintle, a 40-lb rat that roams the jungle at night. It didn’t taste like chicken. It wasn’t gamey or beefy. It tasted like nothing I had experienced before, rich without being heavy, meaty but light. I ate under the unblinking stares of various antlered heads, hanging on the walls of a traveler’s restaurant that also served armadillo. The cook told me she used the same sauce for both dishes. When I asked for the recipe, she straightened her spotted apron, placed hands on hips and recited the ingredients. Like the best international chefs, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say how much of each.
Tepesquintle Rodent Sauce

Thyme, laurel, cumin, black pepper, garlic, green (or red) pepper, tomato, onion, V-8 juice, white wine, cinnamon, honey, consommé, saborin (like Accent). For armadillo sauce, replace the wine with vinegar.
A few days later, I attended a gathering of twenty-five peasant farmers attempting to discover if oil operations caused their allergies and stunted harvests. Metallic odors from a refinery wafted among the benches and blackboards of the open-air meeting place. When the pleasing aroma of black beans and garlic became stronger than the smell of gas, we knew it was time for lunch.

At an outside sink we washed our hands using a gourd to pour water. We grabbed plastic bowls. In a cooking shed a woman and her young daughter scooped out poor but hearty fare from metal pots, putting all into the single bowls: rice, beans, and whole potatoes fried in batter, swimming in a soupy sauce of herbs, tomato and onion. We grabbed hot tortillas, the only utensils. Honestly, it tasted great.

Breakfast was always bread and coffee, dinner always rice and beans. The midday meal, however, was a series of tours de force, including one I never thought I would eat: beans, rice, and spaghetti in a tomato sauce, fresh of course, thickened with flour, tarted up with half-inch slices of hot dogs.

In San Cristobal, the small and elegant colonial capital of Chiapas, sauces graced small and elegant meals, sometimes enjoyed at sidewalk tables on a cobblestone promenade. In fact, the meals were peasants’ food, glorified with sauce.

Like squash flowers on a bed of sharp cheese, drizzled, or puddled, with liquefied black corn fungus.

Or molletes, refried beans spread on bread cut in triangles, or on halves of a bolillo (a kind of dinner roll) topped with melted cheese (manchego is good), and finely-chopped tomato, spooned on to taste.

For breakfast, there might be cactus leaves (nopales) drained of their sticky juice, boiled and scrambled with eggs, or covered with Oaxaca cheese and green chile sauce.

Too tired at night to think about sauces, I would simply ask for that wonderful stand-by made of day-old tortillas torn and sautéd with onion, chopped tomato and consommé, and topped with sliced avocado. The best of all fast food: sopa de tortilla.
And what about red meat?
On a Sunday morning I drove on a bumpy oil company road into a rainforest area which was turning into cattle grazing land. Some of the land belonged to drug lords using “ranches” as a screen for airstrips. Some was in use by landless campesinos trying to scratch out a living.
I went to Mass in a small church in a forest settlement where the congregation was celebrating its local patron saint. Afterward, we all gathered at outdoor tables to feast upon beef from a cow killed the night before. The smell of the grilling meat was heavenly, but pieces were tough to eat, especially without knife or fork. Some of us picked off bits and put them on plates for the elderly with few teeth. For my own portion, I tore at each hunk, masticating until my jaw hurt.
“They must have picked the oldest cow in the pasture,” said one campesino.
I recognized the problem immediately. No sauce.

Coming up...

2010-03-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

Hello, and thanks for visiting.
I am on a book deadline, for the manuscript of my travel and history narrative, Maya Roads, which will be published next year by Chicago Review Press. That's why my blog site has comments and stories few and far between, until June.
Hope to see you then.

"THEY'VE KILLED ELLACURIA"

2009-11-16T16:06:00.001-08:00

"En el continente latinoamericano se dan ríos de esperanza". (Ignacio Ellacuría)

Jesuit Massacre Still Haunts Salvadorans After 20 Years

New America Media, Commentary, Mary Jo McConahay, Posted: Nov 16, 2009

Editor’s Note: Today marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter -– a turning point in El Salvador’s civil war. Former NAM contributing editor Mary Jo McConahay, who has been a reporter for many years in Latin America, was the first reporter on the scene.

SAN SALVADOR -- Twenty years ago, three colleagues and I were the first reporters on the scene of the murders here of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, a turning point in the civil war that cost 75,000 other Salvadoran lives. As gatherings the world over commemorate the special anniversary, I remember details of that morning I do not want to forget.

“They’ve killed Ellacuria,” said the young priest in the hotel parking lot.

He had rushed over to tell reporters, he said, and we were the first he met.

We reserved belief. The death of Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of San Salvador’s Jesuit university and a world-renowned theologian, had been announced more than once during the civil war. We jumped into a jeep anyway.

At the university side gate, we knocked on a black iron door. From across the street, a soldier in a guardhouse kept watch. Guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had been trying for six days to take over the capital. The army was fighting back with all the U.S.-supplied arms and aircraft it had. At this hour of morning, just after curfew lifted, you didn’t know what lay behind any closed door.

Inside, on the grass, we saw four bundles covered with white sheets stained with what looked like blood.

“Come with me,” said José María Tojeira, the Jesuits’ Central America provincial. My colleagues, radio reporters, were already striding with their mics toward two clerics, one elderly and one very young, who stood gazing at the bundles. I followed Tojeira.

“Come, look,” he said as we stepped inside the residence.

A man lay lifeless in the hall. A priest, I supposed, but not Ellacuria. A smear of crimson streaked the floor. Tojeira stood by an open door to one of the rooms. He didn’t speak, but tilted his head for me to look inside. A narrow room with a small bed and books, one fallen on the floor, next to a man’s body, some blood. Not like knife wounds, likely bullets. I wrote in my reporter’s notebook furiously, sloppily, tethering myself to the pages. Each time, Tojeira waited.

“Now we will go,” he said.

Instead of returning to the garden, however, we descended a short flight of outdoor steps. A door stood ajar. I asked myself what more might be possible.

The body of a woman lay over that of a girl. The woman’s remains faced the door, as if she had stood in front of the girl at the last moment. I could hardly breathe. My own daughter was three at the time.

By the time Tojeira and I ascended to the garden once more, news photographers had arrived.

“Father, you have to take the covers off the bodies,” I said.

Tojeira looked alarmed for a moment, then decisive.

“Promise me that these pictures, all this, will reach the Jesuits, will be known,” he said.

I felt a jolt. Tojeira’s words told me he was uncertain whether he would live through the day. Jesuits, most notably Ellacuria, had had the ear of both sides in the civil war, from President Alfredo Cristiani of the right-wing ARENA party, to leftist FMLN commanders. The scholar-priests pushed for a negotiated, non-military solution. To radical rightists, this was intolerable. A call for “Death to Jesuits” had surfaced, along with threats to others in the atmosphere of war.

I knew the photographers. I promised Tojeira. The sheets came off.

There was Ellacuria, still in his bathrobe, looking up, as if he had faced his killer. There was Ignacio Martin-Baro, the psychologist I had first met in San Francisco years before, when he explained to me how difficult it was to treat traumatic stress while people were drowning in war. Segundo Montes lay there, the sociologist to whom we always went for facts about the exodus that was making Los Angeles the second largest El Salvadoran city. He had tracked the uprooting carefully, sadly, holding back anger -– it seemed to me -– when he had described how the war was separating families, and emptied old towns.

I did not know the other priests who died that day, Amando López, Joaquín López y López and Juan Ramón Moreno. I did not know (but felt I did) the cook and her daughter, Julia Elba Ramos and Celina Ramos. When I visited the place of the murders recently, I saw that the roses Julia’s husband planted in the days after the massacre had grown to dominate the garden. Ellacuria’s brown bathrobe hung behind glass in the nearby museum.

An engineering student named Martin sat in the little room I had last seen disheveled and smelling of death, with the bodies of the two women on the floor. Young Martin was describing to visitors the history of that day, allowing them to choose which of two photo albums they wanted to see, one that was more “difficult” to pore through, and one that was “softer.” How in God’s name, I wondered, might there be a “soft” version of the images I saw?

I did not feel like speaking, but carried away something I heard Martin say. He was only a toddler on that day 20 years ago, but as he learned how the men worked to end the war, minister among the suffering, and how they died, he decided to join others volunteering for the “museum.”

“We cannot allow forgetting,” he said.

Journalist Mary Jo McConahay’s “Maya Roads, Travels through Space and Time in the American Rainforest,” will appear in 2011, from Chicago Review Press.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES OF THE MAYA CALENAR

2009-11-15T18:43:00.000-08:00

FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

November 13, 2009
Opinion

Indigenous spiritual guides see a lesson for humanity in the din over 2012.

By Mary Jo McConahay

Writing From Guatemala City - The world may not end two years from now, despite Internet predictions and this week's blockbuster disaster movie, "2012." On screen, the final day in the 5,126-year Maya calendar brings global destruction, and Los Angeles slides inexorably into the sea.

Here in the cradle of Maya civilization, however, shaman/priest Calixta Gabriel said Mother Earth -- Madre Tierra -- would suffer "hunger, wind and thunder," but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.

This is relatively good news coming from an ajq'ij, a "calendar keeper" or spiritual guide among the indigenous Maya people, whose traditions and astronomy-based cosmology originated more than 2,000 years ago. Maya today number about 7 million in Central America and Mexico. One million Maya live in the United States. Their Long Count calendar, which began Aug. 11, 3114 BC, ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

During Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996, the Maya were suspected of supporting insurgents, and they were "disappeared" by the thousands. Their religion, which had survived the Spanish conquestwith influences from Catholicism, was practiced discreetly, far from non-Maya eyes. Gabriel, 52, fled into exile in California after death squads murdered three brothers in the 1980s, returning as the war ended to her "gift" as a shaman through study with elders.

Now some Maya priests have moved their rituals from caves and remote mountain locations to public areas, including temple ruins frequented by tourists. Calendar keepers perform ceremonies using fire, pine incense, colored candles, chocolate and other elements, petitioning for a community good, such as rain, or protection. The religion matches certain days with certain spirits, and interpreting time and the calendar in daily life is the main responsibility of a Maya priest.

More than a thousand years ago, astronomer priests determined Long Count dates of kingly reigns, inscribed on Maya monuments along with dates of royal births and deaths. Kings and queens had priestly duties by virtue of their position, and might sacrifice their own blood to communicate with the gods. Today, believers ask the shaman/priests to determine the propitious day to marry or travel, or to bless efforts. The signing of the 1996 peace accords was preceded by a Maya ceremony at the ancient site of Kaminaljuyu in Guatemala City and public prayers at the National Palace.

For these purposes, Maya priests use a 260-day calendar called the Short Count. The Long Count tracks Maya millenniums, centuries, years, months and days, starting with the supposed date of Maya creation and extending thousands of years into the future. A third way of reckoning approximates the 365-day calendar.

Some Maya spiritual guides say they have been consulting among themselves on the significance of 2012, traveling informally by foot and bus, including to Mexico. (There is no pope or central doctrinal authority to whom ajq'ijab look for counsel, although some elders command particular respect.)

Some experts on the Maya believe Dec. 21, 2012, merits no great attention, pointing out that only one inconclusive mention of the date appears among thousands of deciphered Maya texts. It's simply the end of an era -- of about 5,000 years -- with another one beginning the next day.

"The scale of Maya time-reckoning dwarfs anything in our own cosmology by many orders of magnitude," wrote epigrapher David Stuart on his blog devoted to ancient Maya script.

Gabriel said she was cautious about magnifying the 2012 date's significance in a way that may be misunderstood. "We do not want to commit the error that some Christians made at the turn of the millennium," she said, referencing much-hyped doomsday predictions about the year 2000, which passed quietly. Nevertheless, she said, we live in "a time of transition" between epochs, when men and women will realize -- or not -- how to pull back from "destroying" the Earth with pollution and by cutting down forests.

"Conditions could be severe," she said. "It depends on our answer. The universe responds according to the treatment it is given."

Another ajq'ij, Gregorio Chayax, 70, wears a baseball cap, T-shirt and pants rolled above rubber sandals. He serves as a spiritual guide among the towering temples of Tikal, the most visited Maya site in the Guatemalan Petén rain forest. (Tikal has a cameo in "2012.")

Chayax has already seen his familiar world disappear, well before 2012. He is one of only eight remaining speakers of Petén's once predominant Itza Maya tongue, according to the Guatemalan Academy of Maya Languages.

From 1991 to 2001, about 815,000 acres of protected Petén rain forest were lost to unlawful settlers, drug traffickers and cattle ranchers. Since then, the rate of loss has accelerated, according to Edin Lopez, technical director of the government's National Council of Protected Areas in Petén. "We are not going to speak badly of cows," Chayax said. "But the ranchers have no heart."

Chayax suggested that a transition between eras, signaled by the end of the Long Count calendar, started more than 20 years ago and would continue for at least another 20. "We are going to suffer more heat than now," he said. "We are out of balance. We have become excessive in what we demand."

Yet he said the actions of men and women might head off deterioration of life on Earth.

"Roots are still there, if we know how to find them, and make them live again," he said.

Mary Jo McConahay's "Maya Roads, Travels through Space and Time in the American Rainforest," will be published in 2011.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

El Salvador Through a Tourist's Eyes

2009-10-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

We Were Wrong to Try and Kill You

2009-10-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Journalist Vets in El Salvador crossed the Torola River on a bridge this time, a much different experience from crossing in the 1980s. Once, Jon Lee Anderson’s orange car filled with water in the middle of the shallow river, and with Jon and Nancy McGirr, I waded to the far ( ERP guerrilla-held) shore. Army mortars began to fall behind us, then eerily stopped. We tried to make our way back across, but came under a rain of bullets from them mid-river. Never made it that day.

"You were wrong to try to cross the river," said the Salvadoran commander in San Miguel. But he made an admission too. "And we were wrong to try and kill you."

So this would be Nancy and my first experience of Perquin. I’d call it Kafka-esque.The museum is not to be missed. Here is an ex-combatant in front of the remains of the plane in which Domingo Monterroso was cradling what he thought was the Radio Venceremos transmitter. Just as we pulled up a tour bus carrying about 40 middle-age Salvadorans was leaving after their visit. We skipped the guerrilla camp. Guides, wounded ex-combatants, said they get an average of 60-70 visitors a day.

For the Women's National Book Association-One Way to Find an Agent

2009-10-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

By Mary Jo McConahay

“Only connect,” counsels E.M. Forster. I had begun to think the British novelist invented the phrase for would-be authors, and their would-be agents. My book project had moved along considerably in 18 months, but where did one go from here?

As I wrote, researched, and rewrote, I made sure I also was “putting myself out there” at literary events, just as the manuals advise. I met one or two agents, amenable but failing to connect to me or to my work, and I, unable to connect with them. I even bid at a benefit auction, for lunch and pitch time with an agent whose name you would know; as other bidders peeled off, I got scared, but raised the prize $10.00 each time against those who remained. The poor agent would be my captive audience; I would order something that didn’t stick in my teeth; after a last glass of Napa Merlot, I would walk out past the kind of dustless palms that grow only in restaurants, a represented author. When the bidding reached $700.00, I quit.

No one had ever told me getting an agent might be the hard part.

Now a chance was coming to talk not just to one agent, but a dozen, each pledged to give me three full minutes of attention. The process, unfamiliar to me, had a name I kept referring to mistakenly as “Kiss and Tell.” By the time I reached the Women’s National Book Association venue, I knew to call it, “Speed Dating.”

Last March I joined a hundred other men and women from the WNBA San Francisco Chapter at Sinbad’s Restaurant for its annual Meet the Agents event. From the windows, views of the Bay were the blue of dreams, and expansive enough to calm the most nervous. I won’t say I wasn’t a little jittery as I looked around the room, at the agents waiting at their little tables, and before each, folks like me lined up in orderly queues.

From the WNBA website, I had taken down the agents’ names days before, and researched them as thoroughly as I might have fact-checked a sentence in my book. One specialized in novels – not my genre – but had once written about geography similar to that in my book, so she ranked on my list anyway. Another had represented a National Book Award nominee, that again, was fiction, but rooted in the country I described, so I considered that a bridge. With one agent I could see no point of contact at all, except that his last name was Polish, like my mother’s; I decided I was not above using any contact point, real, or a stretch, with anyone behind a table, and would talk to him, too.

There was one particular agent I hoped would love me, or at least be drawn to my project, because I really liked his life story (you can find anything on Google), and non-fiction specialty. Others I would have been perfectly happy with. Only one fell into my category of any port in a storm, but if she liked my project, I would admit to having misjudged. You’ll notice the hubris with which I walked into that room, and stood in the lines: as if any of the men or women there would take me as a client, I who had a good writing record, but new in the book publishing world. However, without possessing, or pretending to posses, the confidence that I would “only connect” with someone, I would never have had the nerve to subject myself to the strange, but unexpectedly enjoyable, process.

By the end of the morning, I had talked to every agent, some of the WNBA officers, and many other writers, and learned something from each one. As I find the opening lines of a chapter to be, the first was the hardest.

“Have you got something I can read?”

No hello. I handed over Chapter 1.

“What is this supposed to mean? ‘Surf line.’ What is that?”

Damn, I knew I should have cut it.

First lesson: Follow your gut.

His voice was loud. I felt like disappearing into to the Ladies’ Room. He continued to read silently.

“Good,” he said, and gave me his card, without ceremony.

When I stood to leave, he did too, and put an avuncular arm around me.

“Send it, please.”

Second lesson: Hang in there.

Others, much more talkative, invited me to send a chapter and outline, or the entire ms. when finished, or simply and graciously said I might be a better fit with someone else. I drank three cups of (free) coffee. Had many laughs with fellow authors. Discovered I could encapsulate my project in a 30-second sound bite; explain why Rysard Kapuscinski and Joan Didion are my models; compare my project to a bestseller, while making it different enough to pique interest; and of course, describe my platform, how I might help “sell” the book. In fact, the hours were so learning-intensive and fun, that something in me will miss the experience at the next Meet the Agent event, while I’ll continue to recommend it to anyone who asks.

Because, Dear Reader, I called an agent I met, to whom I felt connected, and within a few days we were literary representative, and client. This week, some six months later, I sign the publisher’s contract.

Mary Jo McConahay’s Maya Roads: Travels Through Time and Space in the American Rainforest, will be published by Chicago Review Press. Her agent is Andy Ross. www.maryjomcconahay.com

CASA CREMA, HOUSE OF HORRORS. OR NOT.

2009-09-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

GUATEMALA CITY

I used to feel chills when I drove by the Casa Crema, the massive “Cream-Colored House" once home to the Defense Minister and his powerful offices. The Casa Crema was a house of horrors during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time when students, intellectuals, labor leaders and anyone else presumed sympathetic to the armed left, were murdered by government death squads. Or kidnapped and tortured first, before disappearing forever. Some suffered in the Casa Crema.

A few days ago, searching for the offices of the Academy of Maya Languages, I found myself walking in the direction of the Casa Crema. It is not cream-colored at all, but battleship gray, covering a city block, walls crenellated, with the tiny rectangular windows from which men with guns can shoot, if necessary.

How ironic, I thought, for the Maya Academy offices to be near a place that once served a military that killed tens of thousands of unarmed Maya Indians.

In fact, the Academy of Maya Languages, and a Maya television station, now occupy the Casa Crema itself.

“I bet you thought you were going to be kidnapped, joked a young Maya woman inside, commenting on the building her offices have occupied for 5 years.

The Academy of Maya Languages, established to preserve the country’s 22 indigenous tongues, is part of the Ministry of Culture and Education; a former president gave the Maya the Casa Crema to use. The Defense Ministry has long since moved elsewhere.

The young woman sold me some books. She looked in her late 20s, a child during the heat of the war, which ended in 1996 . She wore the heavy woven blouse, woven belt, and long blue skirt of the Kanjobal Maya. And the black, pointed-toe high heels of a fashionable woman in the capital.

“Can a Maya remain Maya, living in a big city, speaking Spanish, far from her mountain home?” I asked.”

“I can,” said the young woman . “Because I know who I am inside.”

In the office of the director, a Pokomam Maya, it was clear that part of the Casa Crema, at least, once had been something like a home. A fireplace framed in dark wood. Stained glass windows with images of medieval ladies and hunting hounds. On the director’s desk burned incense, its scent filling the room.

All the way back to Antigua, I wondered if there were enough incense in the world to purify the Casa Crema. I wondered why the Academy accepted being housed there. The government hardly backs Maya insistence on a “multilingual, multicultural” nation; I wondered whether it pulled a cynical trick by making the Academy -- dependent for funds on the state -- an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Or whether it didn’t matter at all, to anyone who knew who she was inside.

FEARSOME MAYHEM: A WEEK OF ORGANIZED CRIME IN GUATEMALA

2009-09-13T00:36:00.000-07:00

In Guatemala again for the first time in 8 months, I sense the grip organized crime has on streets and minds. It seems the violence of the 30-year civil war didn’t disappear with the 1996 peace accords, but metamorphosed into a far more ambiguous, fearsome mayhem.
The sides in this war are unlikely to meet at a table.
The week began with what one daily headlined, “A Diabolical Tidal Wave:“ In coordinated attacks, in various public corners of the capital, hitmen murdered the director of one prison, sub-director of another, and on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, two prison guards transferring a prisoner from one site to another. Passers-by were killed too, or wounded in the sprays of gunfire, some from AK47s.
A few days later, outside the home of the country’s Chief Prosecutor of Organized Crime Rony Lopez, a police agent protecting Lopez’ family challenged two men, who answered with 9mm bullets. The agent died on the spot, and the killers escaped.
U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland and Carlos Castresana, head of the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity, appeared with a drawn-looking Lopez to show support. But the prosecutors and prison-keepers of Guatemala must know the crime lords have them in their sights.
The crime web catches ordinary Guatemalans too, notably through extortion. Bus company owners are expected to pay monthly to keep their drivers from being murdered; over 80 were killed last year, and the killing continues. Passengers are at risk. Drivers’ murders can take place by automatic weapons fire from a car running alongside the bus, or even a grenade.
Many extortion rings are run from prisons by cel phone. A good friend explained how it worked at their house: a call comes once and tells you where to leave money. If you don’t, another call comes, advising “we know” where children go to school. My friend’s large family now lives without a telephone at home out of terror of another call.
Reactions to the atmosphere of precarious living range from the poignant to draconian. At a conference given by photographer Jean-Marie Simon this week in the capital, the packed room intently watched troubling wartime slides from her classic book, Guatemala, Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. Afterward, queries about the cycle of violence showed frustration, as if some questioners were asking themselves, “What can we do?”
Former President Alvaro Arzu, now the mayor of this city, the biggest in Central America, believes he has an answer. Democracy is not it.
“Behind a mask of tolerance and freedom of opinion,” Arzu said in a speech Sept. 10, are values in today’s society -- such as democracy -- considered unquestionable, just as ideas about religion were in the Middle Ages. He suggested a “civic military” model of education to regenerate the country’s institutions.

Coming...

2009-06-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Marketing Memory -- Latin American Studies Conference in Rio

Rio LASA Windup -- Don't Move All Meetings to the USA! And, The Obama Effect

Killing Kodachrome

Expanding Genocide’s Definition at LASA

2009-06-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

Only seeing Rio from the bus so far: Latin American Studies Association meetings, Rio de Janiero, Brazil......

+++++

Parsing Political Violence

There is more reason every day to study the paroxysms of violence that shook Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Latin American countries in the late 20th century. Knowing in depth what happened can mean they may never happen again. But examination also determines whether they fall into the category of genocide, what journalist and academic Samantha Power calls, “The Problem from Hell.”

The problem defining genocide comes first. Panelists discussing Institutional Memory -- that of political parties, the military, etc -- ended up grappling with what genocide is, and which killing events might fall into it, for much of their lively session. In particular: should the definition of victims be expanded to include members of a political affiliation?

It’s well known that genocide includes targeted killing of individuals because they belong to a particular group -- religious, racial, ethnic, national. What is less well known, as Pablo Policzer of the University of Calgary, pointed out, is that the first several drafts of the 1946 U.N. Genocide Convention included the political category, making it a crime of genocide to kill someone for his affiliation with a particular political group. Only at the last moment, because the Soviet Union and Iran threatened not to sign the convention if that group were left in, was it removed.

Some panelists said only the most numerically massive and egregious killings ought to be included in genocide's definition, like the WWII Holocaust, Cambodia, or the slaughter of Armenians; others stood for the original, wider definition including political groups, which might bring in Chile, for instance.

Against the wider definition is the argument that political affiliation is a choice one makes, less basic to identity than one’s ethnicity or religion. The counterargument is that a person’s choice of political affiliation is far more fundamental to who one is than even the other protected categories: Ethnic identities may be constructed; religious affiliation may be changed. By political affiliation we are not talking here about U.S. citizens choosing between the parties of Democrats and Republicans, who have more in common than they do separating them; instead we are talking about political world views, dictated by a person's birth or experience to become as intrinsically part of his being as his blood type.

Any of the already recognized categories of victims of genocide include identities that are not necessarily objective, but can be created or defined by the perpetrators of the genocide themselves. That is true too of political grouping -- consider the Guatemalan military policy of eliminating entire indigenous villages because of its belief the Maya were natural “allies” of insurgents. It was the military’s own definition of who the enemy was, its assumption of alliance with a political group, without regard to the stand of individuals.

Beyond scholars, lawyers and judges are wrestling with definitions of crimes against humanity and genocide to an increasing degree each year. Defining genocide is not an exercise like determining the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin. It has real world consequences for justice: crime juridically defined as genocide becomes a crime against humanity, which makes perpetrators liable under international law.

At least one panelist was convinced by colleagues’ arguments at LASA, he said, so that by the session’s end he said he believed the political affiliation category ought to be included when considering the crime of genocide.

A Back Story (Maya Poetry panel)

2009-06-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

The PUC campus where LASA is being held in Rio has its own rainforest....

Guatemala’s own Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for Literature rolled into one, the Miguel Angel Asturias prize, named after the country’s Nobel novelist (and father of guerrilla chief Gaspar Ilom), was presented to Humberto Ak’abal in 2004. He declined to accept it This shocked the country’s intellectual elite.

As a young writer, Asturias had opined on the majority Maya as a lesser kind of people, with passions and proclivities that signalled they were inferior to Guatemalans of European roots. His Social Problem of the Indian encouraged racism, Ak'abal said.

As I've said, I've known Humberto for years. In January, in Antigua, he told me he couldn't accept an honor named after Asturias. Humberto is gentle, peaceable; internationally and at home, he has accepted honors as a way of bringing light to Maya history, aesthetic, and living conditions. But even illiterate (but not uneducated) Maya know about this writing of Asturias, and there was no way he could accept, because he answered to his community.

“I am one of my people,” he said.

Arturo Arias has received the Miguel Asturias prize.

Coming: Marketing Memory, and Was there Genocide in Latin America or Not?

It's pouring like crazy in Copacabana as I write…

Whose Literature is it Anyway?

2009-06-13T17:09:00.000-07:00

The take-away from a panel on Literature and the Left and Right turns in Latin America was that testimony is out; gone are the articulate first-person narratives of key figures that made us understand in an intimate way moments in the national liberation movements. I think of Omar Cabezas in Nicaragua, unforgettable Mario Payeras in Guatemala, Nidia Diaz, Ana Maria Guadalupe, and the story of Radio Venceremos in El Salvador.

“The testimonial mode is out, and the neo-liberalism T.V. mode is in, “ said Marc Zimmerman. That must be at least partly true, given the appearance of some of Brazil’s famous telenovelas which include memory of the military dictatorship and torture as themes amid romance and usual format (more about memory marketing later).

Literature in Latin America has long been associated with political and social commitment, represented by the left. But as the very clear and funny Ileana Rodriguez showed in words and pictures, the return of the left in Nicaragua, for instance, can too easily be seen as a joke, with Ortega the punch line. Alliances between writers and “revolutionaries” cannot now be assumed. No more Gabo-Fidel.

When Mario Benedetti died recently, it felt as if an era were passing. At the panel it was easy to understand why when Jon P. Beasley-Murray, younger and more brusque than Zimmerman, said when he heard the Benedetti news his reaction was surprise. “I thought he was already dead,” he said. Tellingly, Beasley-Murray’s presentation was titled, “Literature at the Margins.”
Does commitment and engagement for revolutionary change disappear for the writer now that the shooting wars are over? If the left is in electoral power here and there (Let’s leave aside “what the Left is” for the moment), does that mean the writer no longer feels a compulsion to expose hypocrisy and the human condition?

And testimony is some of the most riveting literature on earth -- just ask the protagonist of the haunting Senselessness by Honduran novelist (in exile) Horacio Castellanos Moya. Or ask the tens of thousands of students first exposed to the realities of Central America in I, Rigoberta Menchu. It’s not a fashion genre.

A lot of us have stayed up nights reading truth reports (or our own interviews) from Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, as unable to put down the troubling stories as we would be unable to close a page-turner of a novel. The fact that they are first person and non-fiction grabs us in a way all its own. Now that fear is dispersing in certain corners like fog in the sunlight, it’s arguable new and even more crystal testimony is forthcoming, written by witnesses themselves, or with collaborator writers cursed with commitment.

The LASA “Left Turns” panel might have been happening on a different planet from another on modern Quechua and Maya poetry. I cannot speak to Quechua, but two of the most prominent Guatemalan Maya poets, the Kakchiquel Calixta Gabriel Xiquin, from Poaquil, Chimaltenango, and Humberto Ak’abal, who is Ki'che from Momostenango, have been my friends for more than 20 years; their poetry, and their lives, have been and continue to be testimonial, committed, and engaged. Panel chair and novelist Arturo Arias, a former LASA president, recognized their “revolutionary” work, and that of memoirist Victor Montejo, Jacalteco Maya. One presenter from the United States delivered an entire paper on Calixta’s poetry.

When talking about “the literature of Latin America” it’s just dangerous and embarrassing to open the umbrella only half way.

Let Loose at LASA

2009-06-13T01:14:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a death squads comparison workshop…
Good to meet old friends-- David Holiday now in D.C.; Martha Doggett, whom I hadn’t seen since visiting her office high up in the secretariat at the U.N. 4 years ago.
Like minds end up in the same rooms here at the Pontifical University, which is good because otherwise people would be hard to find among 5500 attendees at more than 1240 panels over the four days of the conference.
Peter Kornbluh and colleagues from the National Security Archive presented fascinating panel on how uncovered documents pursue and nail dictators and other rights violators in Chile, Peru and Mexico. Never underestimate that good, old-fashioned virtual paper trail.
Unfortunately, Kate Doyle unable to appear, but word is the Guatemala genocide case is proceeding apace. Perhaps most hands-on useful of all was Emilene Martinez-Morales’ explanation about how access to information with regard to human rights is now mandated and available by request to govt. files in Peru, Guatemala, Uruguay , and perhaps soon, if legislation passes, in Argentina. And in Mexico now at www.info.mex.org.mx
Mexico takes 12 days to reply; a Freedom of Information Act request to Washington takes an average of 2 years.
Look on the Archive’s website for more, but if needed, emilene’s mail is emilene@gwu.edu

Bye Bye Bahia -- for now

2009-06-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

I must stop writing about Bahia now because a couple of days have passed and we are already at the Latin American Studies Association meetings in Rio. I’ll return in memory from time to time, to Bahia at night, the folk dance company (a name that falls far short of doing justice to the troupe), and the food, the food. Meanwhile, here is a picture of our last evening in Bahia, on the corner of the street near the Guest House. Maria Angelica was always a wonderful little traveler as a child; now all grown up she’s the best traveling companion a mother could want.

Pelourinho Bahia

2009-06-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Spent the day with a native guide of Bahia named Wilson, who wears his long hair in about a thousand tiny braids and taught himself four languages besides Portuguese. we went to the oldest part of the old city, a warren called Pelourinho. Pelo, as it’s called for short, has its own reputation for quick heists and muggings, so you don’t wear earrings, other jewelry, don’t show cameras etc.

Yet Wilson showed examples of ecclesial beauty in a place I would never have expected to see them. Florence, Taxco, Seville, yes. But not Pelo, which now I have to add to my list of places to find great church art.

Asian -- mostly Chinese --artisans from Portuguese colonies built a Jesuit church using the blue of Ming dynasty pottery for the Madonna’s robes, with its touch of teal instead of the traditional clear blue, and her usually-flowing mantle draped instead across her waist, obi-style.

Staring into the baroque carved golden curls and swirls that covered the walls reminded me of the kid’s game of looking into drawings of clouds and answering, “Who do you see there?” Once your eyes became adjusted , you see Chinese masks everywhere.

Niches in the Jesuit church were roofed with what looked like Asian warrior helmets -- think Genghis Khan. Parallel to an altar column, if you looked closely, a dragon climbed from floor to ceiling. Unless I’m mistaken, it breathed fire.

The Franciscan golden church was built by black African slaves, not paid workers like the Asians. They created a stunning jewel box: seriously, imagine every inch of every surface, ceiling and walls, niches and chapels, covered in gold. Yet the effect was not cold, not gaudy.
But neither did the blizzard of gold feel like it would lead a church-goer to greater understanding or devotion; that is, to me it impressed without inspiring. Wilson pointed out acts of resistance on the part of the enslaved artisans: male cherubs with saucy expressions whose penises ---- before they were discovered by an abashed cleric -- stood large and erect.

In the cloister, 4 walls are covered in tiles in dutch blue and white, telling legends. I’ve never been in one like this. Walls not of paintings or carvings or marble or sandstone but tile, remarkably preserved in spite of Bahia heat and moisture. I felt like Alice in Wonderland after having the Eat Me cookie (small), sitting on a Delft platter.

Inside the church, a large, covered entrance, where the tiles were perfectly preserved, they looked fine as a teacup.

When we left the church I told Wilson how fabulous it all was, and he said the beauty of Bahia is ‘passing us on all sides.’ Blue eyes, green eyes, although three quarters of Salvador’s population are descendants of African blacks. But his dark skin is red toned “from the Indians,” his hair black and tightly curled, and his lips “not thick but narrow like the Europeans in my ancestry.” This is Bahia’s true beauty, “its best gift,” he said.

Barra Bahia--Nearly All Sins

2009-06-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

A few blocks from the guest house here in the sector of Salvador called Barra, an old Portuguese fort is pounded by spray from breaking sea waves on one side, while on the other, the sound of gently lapping water rises from All Saints Bay, one of the biggest in the world. As daughter Maria Angelica likes to say [www.bahiaelasa2009.blogspot.com], before there was Brazil, there was Bahia.

The Portuguese (1549) landed with everything they needed to set up a New World colony: 400 soldiers, 400 settlers, priests, prostitutes, and city plans for Salvador, which would be the new country’s capital for the next 300 years. They even brought paving stones in the holds of the ships, and in one case dismantled an entire Portuguese church, numbered its stones, and reconstructed it in the middle of the fortified town they built here on a hill. ( Today that church is the plainest-looking.)

The worship houses didn’t keep Salvador from getting a raunchy rep, and the Bay getting another name: “The Bay of All Saints and of Nearly All Sins.”

SALVADOR BAHIA, FINALLY

2009-06-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

Bahia heat and humidity turns to rain, which makes it easy, even magical, to go in and out of sleep all day, recovering. At 7 pm, Russell the innkeeper shakes up the first caipirinha of the evening, and we talk on the front porch. It’s cane liquor--40 proof--lime wedges, sugar and ice.

It’s so good I can even have the economy conversation.

Brazilians have only been buying homes using mortgages for 4 years, he says, so the crunch from a housing bubble affects them less than Americans. Two years ago, Russell sold his software company and opened a small guest house three minutes walk from the beach. “I know, everyone’s dream,” he says. “But you have to see me at the computer at 6:00 a.m. dealing with bureaucracy as a small business, and see what a dream it is.”

Russell wears shorts and flip-flops downstairs to work, laughs and talks with guests animatedly about the beauties of Bahia, has a lovely family and a charmer of a dog named Snoopy. Looks like a dream to me.

Bahia on My Mind

2009-06-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

Stayed up too late last night, juggling packing with watching Flying Down to Rio. Now there was elegance -- Dolores del Rio. With Fred Astaire playing accordion, and young Ginger Rogers in a transparent black gauze dress -- guess the film code hadn’t started yet They had a better time of it: my trip was 26 hours through 4 airports. When I bought the ticket I thought the price was great; now I know why.

Coming up

2009-06-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

Hello
This is a continuation of my electronic GlobeWatch column once posted on Pacific News Service/New America Media. In June I'll be posting from Brazil. Please return and join me.
Mary Jo