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Getting Medieval in Guate

My former home country of Guatemala has been popping up in the news quite a bit lately, for all the wrong reasons. First there was the giant sinkhole that swallowed half a dozen houses, quickly followed by last week’s 6.8 magnitude temblor. But those were just warm-up acts for the astonishing headliner. In the frontier town of Camotan this week, a mob numbering 2,000 people attacked three women on suspicion they had killed a young girl and stolen her organs to sell them. The missing girl—nine-year-old Mishel Diaz—disappeared from her home and was discovered a day later, mutilated and abandoned near a little-traveled dirt track. Reports said her arm was cut off, her eyes gouged out, and the skin on her chest removed in what looked like an attempt to steal her heart and kidneys.

In short order an angry mob, comprised of what witnesses say was the entire population of Camotan, went house-to-house looking for the three women they believed were last seen with the girl. When the crowd found 24-year-old Marciana Recinos, who was one of the suspects, they bludgeoned her to death in the central plaza using rocks, sticks, and plain old fists. Police rescued the other two women but only after the mob pulled a Mr. Blonde on one—dousing her with gasoline à la Reservoir Dogs and setting her on fire. The other woman, pictured below in a posed police photo (a uniquely Guatemalan tool for dispensing info to the local press) is currently safe in jail.

As bizarre as this story probably sounds to people who have never visited Guatemala, the fear among residents of their children being stolen and harvested for organs runs deep, particularly among rural Mayans. The fear has taken on the character of folklore, with most swearing it has happened to the daughter or son of a friend. I heard the stories firsthand, but in reality there is no substantiated proof of organ harvesting there.

But the danger from incensed mobs was well known among us expats, and we never shot photos of children without explicit permission from the parents (good manners in any case, but a potential life saver under those circumstances). My friends who visited, all of whom were first timers to the country, sometimes snapped photos of children and I always warned them to be careful—usually while distancing myself from the scene. In 2000, a Japanese woman was beaten to death for photographing a child in the town of Todos Santos, and her Guatemalan driver was burned to death as her presumed accomplice. I walked into the aftermath of a mob killing myself in 2004, and I also saw police photographs of mob victims, including one of a man who had been hacked to death with machetes and his head doused with gasoline and burned down to a blackened skull.

News reports on the latest incident all say that distrust of the police is a factor in vigilante killings. That’s true—local police are considered corrupt, and the general feeling among the Maya is that inviting them into their communities is to court disaster. They are not unique in this belief. In poor communities the world over—including in the United States—police are believed to hinder rather than dispense justice. In Guatemala, rural townsfolk prefer to handle arrest, judgment, and sentencing all at once. But in the case of little Mishel Diaz, her death seems far too clumsy to be a bona fide attempt at organ harvesting. There’s no word yet on post-mortem findings, but what seems equally plausible is sexual assault followed by mutilation as an attempt to disguise the true nature of the crime.

Usually when newsworthy events occur in Guatemala, I can find out details that didn’t appear in the press simply by e-mailing my old circle of friends. But cases like this are different. The Maya are a closed circle all their own, a mystery even to other Guatemalans, and police are not motivated to investigate when the people involved seem satisfied with the outcome. I doubt the truth will ever be known.

Labels: camotan, guatemala, travel

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 11:20 PM