burning bush in guate city
from La Sur: Politics and Culture in Mexico and Central America
Trip Date: Mar 11 '07
Location: Guatemala City, Guatemala
“someone in the crowd discovered eggs and soon everyone was pelting the cops with them.” ~snip~
but the biggest surprise of movement was the rest of the crowd, the bulk of the protestors that did not groove on the violence. they left. i don't mean "the walked away in disgust from the violence." i mean several hundred people turned and literally ran, full speed, no looking back, out every side street available to them. i have never seen such a large mass of people move so quickly. what was perhaps a two thousand person strong protest transformed within seconds to a group of maybe 100 protestors, with perhaps another hundred watching safely from a more removed distance. my guess is that the cops here are reknowned for their violence, and with the memory of the civil war only a decade past, most people had no interest in getting their heads busted in.
what followed was about two hours of low-intensity violence, perpetrated by the protestors against the cops, with almost no reaction at all from the police line. as barricades were pulled down a new lines of human cops would go up in the same place, but no excursions were made to capture anyone. stun guns were brandished but not used. someone in the crowd discovered eggs and soon everyone was pelting the cops with them. others were pulling up cobblestones and breaking up chunks of sidewalk to throw at cops. mostly the police were impervious to this but i did see one cop take a fist side rock in the side of his face. more barricades were thrown, received, and pulled behind the cop line. the guys on the bullhorn had more level heads, and i heard numerous pleas in spanish to "please not incited the violence," and "there are women and children present, please do not incite the police."
jack-booted state
View more photos no-one throwing objects was older than 20 or 25 or so. a surprising number of them were as young as 12. all but one was male. most wore bandanas on their faces. all in all, they reminded me more than anything of the black block crowd in our own protests, only with less inhibitions against violence against persons. very very quickly the protest turned from "people versus bush," to "young punks versus the cops". personally i did not see the point to this shift, as the punks had completely alienated their own support base, and while the cops were not our friends, they were certainly not the main enemies here. not that that ever stops the black block in our own movements, of course.
surprising too was this smaller crowd's reaction to us, the gringo protestors. my friend "d", up on a lamp post, called down in her broken english for some eggs to throw. this was greeted by jeers from the crowd, who shouted slogans (in spanish) at us, like "spanish only!" and "gringos go home!" and "que? que? que? que?", an imitation of gringos who say "what?" all the time when trying to understand español. the next round of egg-throwing included us as targets, and direct hit to my shoulder luckily bounced off and did not break. other less-accurate shots just left me splattered. apparently this small group of punk-ass kids doesn't need any allies at all, not local, not international, and they by themselves are going to take on the cops, win, and change the social structure of their country. good for them. good luck.
still, there was one great highlight for me here. someone had the bright idea of creating a george w. bush piñata. they tied it to a string on the end of a stick, lit the toes on fire, and then dangled the smoldering contraption of the head of the cops. like cats with a shiny toy the cops could not help but bat at the thing with their batons, and for about 15 seconds i was laughing my ass off at the site of a half-dozen cops beating the crap out of the image of george w. bush. how totally ironic! apparently the irony was not lost of the cop commander either, and the second time it was dangled the troops on the line were ordered to leave it alone. when it dropped too low one of them finally captured it and took the protestor's toy away. bummer.
(snip/...)
http://realtravel.com/guatemala_city-journals-j3967370.html
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