The writing is on the wall: Guatemalan politics

Some people may have forgotten that what recently happened to the president of Honduras almost happened to Alvaro Colom, the president of Guatemala, just a little while before. His party is the UNE, and he is generally thought of as a moderate leftist. It is important to remember that the rule of law is not very stable in Guatemala. There are "parallel powers"that constantly challenge the authority of an apparently democratic state. These parallel powers are mostly formerly semi-official armed groups, narco-trafficking organizations, and business-owning families.


These guys made it easy for us: they got a logo that plainly suggests their fascist tendencies. Arturo Perez-Molina, the leader of the PP, or Partido Patriota is a war criminal. The PP's slogan was changed to Mano Dura for the presidential elections last year. Weirdly, the guy who designed their campaign had just designed a campaign in Honduras, for another right-wing bully, that was called Pugno duro (hard fist). After the Pugno Duro campaign failed in Honduras, a wave of executions of bus drivers in the capital was used to try and destabilize the legitimate government. After the Mano Dura campaign failed in Guatemala, a wave of executions of bus drivers in the capital was used to try and destabilize the legitimate government. Sounds weird? When Alvaro Colom pointed it out publicly, the executions slowed way down, as if by magic... We may never know what really went on at the time, since Guatemala is one place where conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.


The FRG, or Frente Revolucionario Guatemalteco, is led by Rios Montt - Reagan's good buddy and an all-out genocidal maniac when he was dictator in the early eighties. His party distinguished himself by spitting on and insulting the Nobel Prize-winner Rigoberta Menchu inside the constitutional court! Wait! Isn't that bad enough? He actually didn't like it when the constitutional court ruled against his application for the presidency on the grounds that in Guatemala one can only be president for one term. His justification: he was never elected president; he was merely a dictator! So in 2003 he got a few battalions' worth of thugs together (not really thugs, in fact they were former paramilitaries), surrounded the constitutional court, and they changed their mind.


Is this depressing? Try watching your kids starve to death and join gangs. Try having your relatives abducted or executed, while the police cannot or will not do anything about it because they are too weak or are implicated in the first place. Guatemala is a relatively rich country, but it is on the verge of being a failed state. A Honduras-style coup is easily imagined there, and would instantly throw everything back a decade or so, to the times of the peace accords. The only people that wouldn't hurt would be the rich, and yet again the poor would pay. The revolutionary groups (the real revolutionary groups, not the FRG) don't have a clear leader. Even Rigoberta Menchu doesn't stand a very good chance at the polls.


Before any significant positive change is possible in Guatemala, the state needs to raise taxes (they are ridiculously low right now), and bring some of the GDP to the majority of Guatemalans whose only options are misery, emigration, and crime.

Maybe I just shouldn't post anything when there is not much to say...

I almost missed my weekly post deadline again! Of course, it'd be easier if I had bird pictures...

This has been a very slow week of reading, sleeping, watching TV in the condo (I have become strangely addicted to a show about a guy called Anthony Bourdain who travels all over the world and eats food), and going to school.

Last weekend was a drill weekend, so we organized a hike on the Herbert Glacier trail that would keep us out of reach of the officers. The forest there was very beautiful second growth, smothered in mosses and lichens.

So drill was not very eventful for me, but for Jad it was quite an exciting affair. Apparently, some overpaid, overzealous paperwork clerk up in Anchorage kicked him out of the National Guard without so much as a warning to Jad, or to anyone in the chain of command! Jad joined the Army National Guard without going to basic training because he had been in the US Navy before, and because he had trained with the US Marine Corps, he was deemed OK to join the National guard without going through the Army transition course. So he went through infantry school, warrior leader’s course, and a year in the Middle East without any problem, and now this dim-witted office-dwelling invertebrate tells him he can’t be in the army because he doesn’t have the transition course! This, in my professional opinion, should have been transition enough:

And of course, whenever it isn’t snowing, I can always count on politicians to provide an easy target for my impotent anger. This morning on the radio, McCain was talking about lifting a fuel tax in the summer, and now I’m hearing about more tax breaks for auto makers, airlines and “alternative energy producers” (corn growers, I bet). So this must be the new conservative motto:

“Inflation and debt: two easy ways to make environmental destruction more affordable for everyone!”

Temperatures and mood are up throughout the Juneau area

After a brief and depressing snowfall, Juneau has been blessed with warm weather, rain, and even some sun! Spring is on its way, and soon I will be learning about botany! Last Saturday I went for a hike with Mac up Perseverance trail behind downtown Juneau. In spite of deep snow, we saw a red-breasted sapsucker Sphyrapicus ruber (a migratory species here), alders in bloom, porcupine tracks everywhere, and American dippers Cinclus mexicanus singing in the creek:

I got to do an afternoon of shrimp identification this past week with an invertebrate zoology class; I learned a lot and even identified three or four shrimp myself, but I forgot to take pictures again. I saw two hoary redpolls up close this past week, and didn't have my camera with me of course! However, I took some pictures of ferns on two of my walks.

This one is a small Asplenium viride:

And this is the very common “licorice fern,” Polypodium vulgare or P. glycirrhyza:

Finally, this is a neat Cryptogramma acrostichoides (or C. Crispa var. acrostichoides) I found on our latest hike. The brown leaves in the back are fertile fronds:

And I thought that with almost all news in Alaska politics being bad news (FBI raiding the offices of our elected representatives, etc.), I’d point out that our governor is pregnant! She’s actually quite popular in Alaska (even here in Juneau where she was feared as a proponent of the capital move), and there have been rumors going around that she’ll run with McCain. All right, let’s not get carried away here; she’s got very little experience even for a state politician, and McCain is in his 70’s so his VP should be a credible statesperson.

Crossbills and crooks

School has been very interesting, with diverse topics in every class. I am currently studying Heidegger, mangrove swamps, the Great Depression, military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay, and other things I never knew anything about.

This has been another week of staying indoors, but it is getting warmer again – the last snowfall is gradually melting away again, and next week, Insh’Allah, I should be able to bicycle. A rather bird-poor week, obviously, although a flock of white-winged crossbills Loxia leucoptera did hang out in front of the “dark hole of despair” condo:

This year is full of potential for voters to influence the future. Alaska representative Don Young (R) is being investigated for fraud, and has spent nearly a million dollars of his campaign funds on lawyers to fight off corruption charges. Don Young ranks especially high on my list of despicable people (he told me in a Sitka public meeting that the Alaska rainforest grows back in less than 100 years, and that less than 1% of the Tongass had been logged!), so if you are registered to vote in Alaska, you should check this guy out before letting Don Young continue his 35-year crusade to destroy the environment in Alaska! According to the AP, when Don Young was asked about his spending of campaign money on legal fees, he said this:

“Everybody wants change, what is change?”

Notes from the dark hole of despair

It is now raining, which is slowly turning the city into a patchwork of slush, ice and bare ground. Everyday there is a little bit more bare ground, but still not enough road is clear to go bicycling without studded tires (of course, as Tom justly pointed out, I am just weak; this crazy woman has no problem with a little ice and snow).

I have largely been an indoor creature lately, studying, vegetating in Jad’s condo, going to downtown bars (quite an adventuresome thing to do, at times), etc. I did restart running (I had been injured since October), but that is also indoors at this time and rather slow. With some luck, I might be able to go to the National Guard marathon trials in May. I even took up indoor birdwatching, looking at passing eagles, siskins, redpolls, chestnut-backed chickadees, Steller’s jays, magpies, and even a heron, through windows at the condo and the university. I took this picture of a Steller’s jay from the condo:

In the same mood of winter depression, we are now calling Jad’s condo “the dark hole of despair”. It really isn’t so bad, but I like it because I had been reading a lot of Kierkegaard when Ian came up with the name.

A few days ago, I did briefly go outside. Ian and I went out to the range to shoot a flak jacket (it stopped a .40 cal round – not bad), and start a fire by rubbing stick together. We had seen a guy do it on television (I know…) and it looked rather feasible, so we went out there and tried. It was simply impossible to find anything dry. Even the relatively dry wood we extracted from the rotting core of living trees (through opening between the roots) turned out to be too wet. Also, the bow just didn’t seem to work; it kept flipping the stick into Ian’s face or slipping and achieving nothing. We gave up.

A good thing that I did was vote in the primary elections for the first time. Primaries are complicated, and usually Alaska only has a symbolic role to play, but this year every state counts. In the American system, registering for a party is free and non-committing, and registered voters basically get to vote twice: one for nomination and once for president. Because we already know with 90% certainty that all Alaska votes will result in one Republican vote in the presidential elections, the primary votes are more important than the presidential votes – especially for Juneau democrats, because of the way that delegate numbers are assigned. So I registered, and went to vote at the primaries. The primaries were a crazy affair, with 1200 registered democrats showing up in spite of a cold, windy day with two feet of snow on the ground. Obama, the candidate I had turned up to vote for, got almost three-quarters of the democratic vote in Juneau (same as the state overall of 74%). That means there were about 900 of us there to vote for him. Polls for the primaries are an old-fashioned, simple, and emotional affair compared to the presidential elections.

Democracy at its best…

10.000.000.000 dollars for education in the Middle East!

The stultifyingly boring mission for which our group of motivated volunteers was pulled back out of Iraq has one upside: more time for reading. In this photo, my friend Jad is reading a book on WWII. He has been devouring magazines, and prowling my shelves for books that aren't in French or Spanish, or about birds. In just a few days I finished Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, read half of a book on prehistory which turned out to be of little interest to me, and I am working on Mario Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los Perros, which is a very difficult read for me because it is filled with Peruvian slang. All the while, I have been reading the newspaper every day, The Economist every week, and various online newspapers and blogs. I haven't read that much since I worked for a polling company on suburban buses in France almost ten years ago.

I came across an interesting article on the BBC's Spanish news website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_6673000/6673535.stm). Apparently, the Sheikh of Dubai announced at the World Economic Forum that he is giving 10 billion dollars for education in the Middle East. I was expecting to find this news on the New York Times' website, but even after searching UAE news within the Middle East section all I got was a depressing scoreboard of suicide bombings and deaths in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. The deed was not even mentioned in an article on the World Economic Forum in the Kuwait Times!

Apparently, only 40% of Arab women can read and write, Turkey publishes more books than the entire Arab world combined (thanks to Ataturk), and fewer patents and research papers come out of all Arab universities each year than out of a single company like Hewlett-Packard for example. As for the books that are published in this part of the world, the majority of them are mostly religious books that extoll stasis over progress. In my admittedly limited experience in the Middle East, I have come across many things that are simply wrong - pervasive racism, religious intolerance, illegitimate leaders, etc... Most of them are better addressed by schoolteachers and books than paratroopers and bombs. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al Makhtoum of the Emirate of Dubai is doing the right thing here, and he should be praised far and wide for it. At the very least, he should get more press coverage than suicide bombers.

I made only one really good bird observation lately: a very tame flock of black-crowned finch larks Eremopterix nigriceps landed right next to me when my camera was packed away for the move. I think they are fairly unusual around here.