Vagabond Journey travel newsletter 002

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Vagabond Journey Travel Newsletter 002

The second Vagabond Journey Newsletter from Copan Ruinas, Honduras has now been sent out to those who have subscribed to it. It contains links to the most pertinent posts on Song of the Open Road, links to photographs from Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, and the archaeology excavation at Copan, an interview with a Guatemalan refugee who is now a university professor in Costa Rica, and a descriptive guide to Playa Gorgona in Panama.

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Vagabond Travel Newsletter 002 - In Central America!	Wade VagabondJourney.com
	Mar 20, 2008 17:55 PST

Vagabond Journey Travel Newsletter 002- March 19, 2008

From Wade of Vagabond Journey.com and Song of the Open Road Travel Blog
http://www.VagabondJourney.com http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue
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Contents:
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Recent Travel Summary/ Next move
Photographs
Guidebooks: To use or not to use- Travel Tip #8
How to Turn a Plastic Bag into a Cup- Travel Tip #9
Interview with Guatemalan Civil War Refugee
Place Sketch- Playa Gorgona, Panama
Sponsor a vagabond for a day

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Recent Travel Summary:
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Upstate New York, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras

After leaving my family in the fields and orchards of Upstate New York
in the good ol USA, I hoped a $140 flight to San Jose, Costa Rica. Mira
had some obligations to fill in this land of waving palms, hot sun, and
expensive everything so I took this down-time as a good opportunity to
write another article for Café Abroad Magazine and completely renovate
the Vagabond Journey.com website. It is now up and running. Well, up and
running after I banged my poor head up against a wall for the past few
months. I have now decided on the format and layout of the site, as well
as its organizational scheme. I like to keep things simple. I do not
want to make a site with a page layout that I, myself, cannot even
figure out how to navigate.

Please read my new article for Café Abroad at:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/guatemala-1980.html

Visit the new Vagabond Journey site at:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com

Costa Rica travel blog posts:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/search/label/Costa%20Rica

From Costa Rica I traveled down to Panama City. Awesome place. I ran
through Panama in only five days, but it was more than worth the expense
in getting there. Found cheap rooms, cheap food, looked at the canal,
walked through ancient ruins, and ate a lot of pizza. The canal turned
out to be far too guarded to allow for a swim though, and I found that
those who try get yelled at by security guards. What? Did they really
think that I was going to steal the Panama Canal?

Who knows?

But what I do know is that Panama is fun. The people there seem to be
more Caribbean than Latino and it seems as if they just like sitting
around laughing the day away. A good place to travel through. Would love
to return.

Panama travel blog posts:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/search/label/Panama

From Panama I returned to Costa Rica for two days of lowly website
maintenance before carrying on through Nicaragua to northern Honduras.
Here I found the nice little village of Copan Ruinas and work on an
amazing archaeology site.

Honduras travel blog posts:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/search/label/Honduras

I am now working on the Copan archaeology site in Honduras, and it is
really amazing. Read more about it at:

http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/search/label/Archaeology

Next move:

I think that I will stay on this archaeology project until the end of
this month and then begin moving north again. Guatemala should be my
first stop, and Mira is looking to begin another anthropology project
there. I just want to hang out.

I think my next two months of traveling will look something like this:

Guatemala, Mexico- Chiapas, Yucatan, USA, England, Vagabond Journey
Around the World

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Photographs:
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Photos from Costa Rica:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/search/label/Costa-Rica

Photos from Panama:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/search/label/Panama

Photos from Nicaragua:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/search/label/Nicaragua

Photos from Honduras:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/search/label/Honduras

Photos of Archaeology:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/search/label/Archaeology

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Travel Guidebooks: To Use or Not to Use- Travel Tip #8
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http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/2008/03/travel-guidebooks-to-use-or-not-to-use.html

Guidebooks, guidebooks, guidebooks, a big question. Should a traveler
use them? Are they really helpful? Are they worth their weight and cost?
Is traveling more enjoyable without them? Can I travel without one?

Go here to read more of this essay on travel guidebooks:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/2008/03/travel-guidebooks-to-use-or-not-to-use.html

Be sure to leave comments about your thoughts

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Turn a Plastic Bag into a Cup- Travel Tip #9
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http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/2008/03/travel-tip-9-turn-plastic-bag-into-cup.html

Have you found yourself at a water source with the desire to carry water
with you but without anything to carry it in? Are you at a stream in
the middle of the woods with a water filter but without a receptacle to
filter to? Do you need something to do with all of those plastic
shopping bags that you have forced upon you every time you buy
something? Or maybe you just need a stinking cup?

If so, then this travel tip is for you. How to turn a plastic bag into a
cup- Honduras style

Read this Travel Tip at,
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/2008/03/travel-tip-9-turn-plastic-bag-into-cup.html

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Interview on the Guatemalan Civil War:
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This is an interview with a Guatemalan Refugee in Costa Rica about the
36 year civil war that raged through Guatemala from the early sixties
into the nineties. Throughout the interview I refer to her as La
Profesora, as she requested that I do not disclose her real identity.

What year did you come to Costa Rica and leave Guatemala?

I left Guatemala in 1980. Which was a very difficult year for the
university. The years before there was a lot of repression from the
government as they tried to institute a counter insurgency program that
they had for Guatemala. They had been trying to destroy the popular
movement through killing union leaders, campesino leaders, and also slum
dweller leaders, but they hadn’t hit the university yet. In that year
[1980] they hit the university. Every day you would just come to school
and it would be just like, “Who did they . . . kill today.”

And you were a student?

Yes, I was a student at that time. We had an organization that was
really interested in dealing with social issues. But at that point in
Guatemala, dealing with social issues would immediately get you labeled
as a communist. Unfortunately, Guatemala and all of Central America got
stuck in the middle of the cold war. Because whatever the concerns were
and the need for social change were real- and it’s still real. Wealth
distribution is amazingly unfair, and that comes way back from colonial
times. So the needs were there and people wanted change, but anything
that sounded like change or challenged the status quo was immediately
labeled as communist. And the moment you were labeled communist it meant
that you could get killed, and so what. You know, it was as easy as
that. Sometimes they would say, “They shot somebody,” and the reaction
of the population itself was “who knows what that person was in, what
exactly they were doing.”
They would say, “Oh, he was messing around being a communist and he got
shot, what else did he expect.” So it was really complex at that point,
and a lot of people were labeled as communist, and organizations and
efforts. So at that point, in 1980, just in that year, they killed
about 13,000 students and faculty. So anybody that has a progressive
perspective, or had any kind of social concern, or was involved in any
kind of movement [pause] lots of people were killed. People that were in
my organization, we worked with kids a lot, and also with farmers, some
of them were disappeared. They just dragged them out of a bus, a public
bus.

Have you seen this personally?

I never saw this personally. But it happened a lot and it was a fear
that we all had. That it could happen to us at any time. There was this
guy that studied architecture, and they just dragged him out of his
house. You know, it was night time, they opened his door with an ax and
just dragged him out in front of his family. There were also two guys on
a public bus, and they just dragged them out and they were heard from
never again. Guatemala at this point has more than 40,000 disappeared,
and that was the way they disappeared. A van would pass by and you could
be walking down the street and they would drag you into the back.

It was terror, no kidding. You felt that at anytime you could be killed.
You would go to bed and say, “My God, are they going to drag me out of
here, my home.”

It was a nerve war across the culture?

Absolutely. Because what was the price of being caught? Torture,
absolute torture. You know what they would do with some of the students
that they captured? They would go and throw their corpses on the campus,
completely tortured, as a way of terror. They were saying, “This is what
is going to happen to you.”

That was the worse part. Because Guatemala did not have political
prisoners. El Salvador had political prisoners, Nicaragua did too, and
they were other countries that were at war at that point (not amongst
each other but with internal conflict).

It was nerve racking. It was to the point that a lot of people had to
leave the country.

Did the nerve war, the propaganda by torture and murder, did that put a
stop to all of the social programs in Guatemala that were not government
sanctioned?

Well, what it did is that it stopped a lot, because people did not want
to get involved in anything that could be labeled [as communist]. Even
though it did not have that philosophy [of communism] and the idea was
not very radical for most organizations, but any NGO would be seen as
possibly suspect.

You have to remember that the whole guerrilla movement was really active
at that point. Guatemala has 22 departments or states, out of which the
guerrilla movement had presence in about 19. So even though not
everywhere was as     Sometimes it would just be like urban warfare, and
a bomb would explode here and pamphlets would appear here or there. It
was not necessarily like in El Salvador where the guerrillas did take
over complete populations and held them.

What were the Communist ties of the guerrillas? Were there real ties to
Cuba or was that mostly just propaganda?

I think that there are a lot of different perspectives. Like the
Guatemala Communist Party, they definitely since they were born, were
born into that philosophy. Many of the leaders did have a Marxist/
Leninist perspective in terms of understanding society as something that
can change and that people can change it. But within each organization
there were a lot of different perspectives: social democrats that were
not really as radical and other sectors that really wanted complete
change. We are talking about the guerrilla organizations here, but the
population in general just wanted change. 95% of the guerrilla movement
was composed by indigenous people, and out of those 95% of indigenous
people very few even knew what Marxism was. They just knew they needed
change. They lived in huts, you know, and they were just out in the
mountains with very small plots of land. They can barely grow anything
anymore, the land is exhausted, they have had it for generations and
generations, for about 200 years. So when we talk about land
redistribution- and that’s the plan- and health care and education,
people are there. Because their kids die of diarrhea and diseases that
can be controlled. And because you want your kids to study, you just
want equality as indigenous people.

It also seems as if the people in the countryside had to choose one side
or the other- between the government militias or the guerrillas?

You are totally right. Absolutely. I would say that the army itself,
with its strategy, forced a lot of people into the guerrilla movement,
and the same happened in El Salvador. There was just this repression,
and people just had no option. Because they had the whole territory
marked with pins, with red pins. All of the communities and small
villages that had that red pin disappeared. More than 440 villages were
just wiped out of the planet. They just burned them. And there are
terrible testimonies of the massacres that this implies, because when
you go and you burn down a village, you kill most of the population. And
the rest you force to join your militia. What are you going to do at
that point?

How did they decide on these villages to destroy?

Because they were where the guerrillas had the most support. It was in
Quiche . . . In the highlands, where there were a lot of mountains and a
lot of forests still, not now anymore unfortunately, but there was still
at that point. So the guerrillas moved a lot, and the guerrillas did
have the support of a lot of the people too. So they were plying the
philosophy that came with the whole U.S. counter insurgency project in
Vietnam. It was like what Mao-Tse-Tung had said:

“The masses of the people are like water to the fish.”

So the whole counter insurgency project was to take away the water and
isolate the fish And the way of taking away that water was to go to
anywhere they knew there was a guerrilla movement or consolidation. They
would go and try to wipe the population out and that is where the model
villages happened. You destroy the village and then you move them
somewhere else. So they have model villages that are totally
militarized. You know with control, because in indigenous communities
there are houses spread all over. So they put them all together in a
town that is square with military posts on each side, and to go in and
out you had to have a card. If the military found you out up in the
mountains and you didn’t have that card with a permit that said you
could be out there they would shoot you. So the whole area was
militarized. It was war.

Seriously, war against a people without an army.

The thing is that the guerrillas wanted to be the peoples army, and were
the peoples army.

[skipped section on specifics of different guerrilla organizations]
Did these actions of the government military in the countryside force
attacks on Guatemala City?

In many ways it did. This was also part of the strategy, because that
[Guatemala City] was the heart. But the mass movement was more through
mass organizations in the cities were through student organizations,
slum dwellers organizations, and teachers organizations, and unions
also, so it had a different expression. I would say that it was this
mixture of some people who started the revolution from a Marxist
perspective, from people that were just dreaming of change, of
redistribution of wealth, to people that got caught. It got to the point
where you just had to be either- or, so it was a really complex process.

How were you effected personally? Or your family?

My family wasn’t effected directly. It was more my husband’s family,
because they killed his brother trying to find him. So it was a really
hard blow because it also had a lot of guilt in it. You know, it was
like, “Why didn’t they kill me, why did they have to kill him?” And so
that was when we left the country, and we decided to come here to Costa
Rica. His family was devastated, because out of four children, they had
one dead and one gone. So suddenly, it was a hard blow.

Why were they after your husband?

He was working at a student organization, and as I was telling you at
the beginning, anything that was different, anything that had any
expression of organizing was targeted. At the point when the university
was targeted they just went after everybody that they found involved in
anything.

And your husband was a student as well?

Yeah.

Was it difficult to come to Costa Rica? Did you come as a refugee?

Yeah, we came as refugees with the high commission of the United Nations
for Refugees. Yeah, at that time in Costa Rica there were thousands of
refugees coming, very few from Guatemala because it meant a PLANE ride.
But about 300,000 Guatemalans fled towards Mexico, they walked all the
way to the border, and so that is why they had a huge belt of refugee
camps in Southern Mexico. There were a couple hundred [Guatemalan
refugees] here in Costa Rica, some in the States. And there were also
thousands of Nicaraguans all moving because there were conflicts in
Nicaragua, thousands of El Salvadorians. So the high commission of the
United Nations for Refugees was very active here at this point boarding
all these incoming refugees. So it was a conflict because Costa Rica was
receiving so many people that they were very torn, they didn’t want any
more foreigners, and the foreigners didn’t really want to be here. They
were forced out.

There was no place else to go?

Yeah, it is not like you don’t want to be with your family or anything,
so it was a very complicated method for them.

Now that the Civil War has been all over for around 10 years, what are
your thoughts and feelings on Guatemala? Do you ever go back? Do you
ever return? Or is it kind of like a hard lump in your heart?

It’s been a long process. It was almost twenty years before I did go,
for twenty years I didn’t go back. I saw my family just a couple of
times when they came here to visit. When I did decide to go back, I have
been going back now for almost ten years [pause] it has been a long
process to re-heal Guatemala. Because Guatemala is a beautiful place,
people are really beautiful and sweet that I am rediscovering. Wow,
people smile a lot, they are willing to help, they are a really nice
group of people.

But the conflicts are there, you know, because the causes that brought
people to participate in a war are still there. The peace agreements
were signed but one of the main things that were not achieved was
legality and democracy at an electoral level. On one hand they have been
holding elections there since ‘85, whereas before, since ‘58, the
military always had these crude elections, they always had this big
fraud. So in that since its been positive. People have very little trust
in political parties. It is interesting, because the left in the last
elections in November were totally divided. There were so many different
perspectives, and they were only able to get 3.5% of the vote Now that
says a lot That says that people don’t want war, they don’t want
anything radical. You know, even Rigoberta Menchú Tum, she got about
2.8% of the vote. So she is more of an important figure outside of
Guatemala, because of sexism and racism, and you know, fear of her
political background.

So the people just want stability?

They don’t want war Right now, they don’t know what to do with
delinquency, with the gangs. They have taken over complete areas, where
they go to your house and if you don’t give them the money you have to
give them every week they will kill you and every member of your family.
They have already killed complete families. Just to say, “This is what
is going to happen to you, to anyone.” It is such a violent society.

So the nerve war continues?

It does continue. People rush home, buses get constantly attacked. You
get on a public bus, and you have all those people there that you can
rob. You just go in with a couple machine guns, you know, you can get
the bus fares, and you get everybody’s things. So that’s a huge problem.
We’ve even had strikes of bus companies that said, “We are not going to
go there anymore, to that area,” after they have had some of the drivers
killed because they weren’t willing to give the money or they resisted,
or the guy just said, “[gunshot noise].”

What was the Civil War like when you were a child? Was it different?

I was born two years after the US sponsored invasion in‘54. I was born
in ‘56. The first guerrilla movements started in Guatemala around ‘63.
It was interesting, you know, because it was a crescendo. Even though
you were a child you would see the military in the street, and curfew. I
still recall us rushing back home in my dad’s car because curfew was
just about to start, and the tension of that, and seeing the military
cars patrolling. So you knew that something was going on, even though
you had no idea exactly what it was.

And these were your first impressions of the world?

It’s intense. Or when the army made searches in different neighborhoods.
It was intense just to have them come into your house and search and
open drawers and search all over.

What did your parents tell you was going on?

It was more saying like: “It’s a war. A war, and they are looking for
guerrillas.”

Interview with La Professora by Wade P. Shepard of Vagabond Journey.com
February 11, 2008
Heredia, Costa Rica

To read the article that arose from this interview go to Guatemala 1980,
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/guatemala-1980.html

Photos from Guatemala Civil War:
http://www.travelerphotographs.blogspot.com/2008/02/guatemala-civil-war-photographs.html

If you reproduce anything from this newsletter please attach the
following author bio and the functional links. Thank you.
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Wade P. Shepard has been on a continuous vagabond journey around the
world for more than eight years- over thirty countries on five
continents. He has wandered into the outback of Mongolia, lived in a
monastery in Tibet, ate a puppy in China, danced with mystics in India,
thought he was a gardener in Ireland, braved the souqs of North Africa,
and got really lost in Patagonia. Throughout all of this, he has been
working diligently on his travel blog, Song of the Open Road, at:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue and his website Vagabond Journey, at:
http://www.VagabondJourney.com, as well as pawning off various travel
articles to unsuspecting magazines for food.
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Place Sketch: Playa Gorgona, Panama:
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Playa Gorgona is a beach town two hours outside of Panama City, Panama.
It is marred with shocking white high-rises, ritzy white-man bars, and
goony security guards ever casting suspicious glares at the lowly
vagabond. Why then, would I recommend such a place? Because below every
high-rise is a hovel, behind every immaculate restaurant is a dollar
eatery, and just to the east of the Playa Gorgona white-man beach is a
local village full of laughing, dancing Panamanians. This is the real
spirit of Panama. The local half of Playa Gorgona is a good place to
stay for a couple of nights. But don’t think that you will get any sleep
though, as the local people like loud music and partying down all the
night long. Good feel in this town.

How to get to Playa Gorgona from Panama City:

Take a micro-bus that is going towards Chale from the Albrook Bus
Terminal, which is the main bus station. The drivers will drop you off
at the turn-off for Playa Gorgona. This should cost $2 for the hour and
a half ride. From here you can take another micro-bus to the beach for
fifty cents, or walk the 5km.

Places to sleep in Playa Gorgona:

When you get to beach you can bed down in the Virgen del Carmen Hotel
for $12 for a double or stay on the beach. Go down to the far end if you
choose to camp and keep hidden.

Read more and look at photos of the Virgen del Carmen Hotel:
http://www.vagabondfieldnotes.com/2008/03/playa-gorgona-hotel-virgen-del-carmen.html

Thank you for reading.

Walk Slow,

Wade

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