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Expats and Their Guns

“Magnus crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets.” This isn’t a sentence I constructed, but rather a quote I promised friends I would use to begin my long-planned Guatemala novel. As experienced a writer as I am, it surprised me how difficult it was to start this newest novel when the first sentence wasn’t of my choosing. Makes me think of the old sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, who, legend has it, once sat in the front window of a Manhattan bookstore for a week and each day wrote a complete story whose opening sentence had been supplied by a fan. Yesterday, looking over my project, I reflected on the events leading to the utterance in question and realized the amazing fact isn’t that a friend crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets, but that it happened only once. After all, guns are not in short in supply in Guatemala. The place is almost an incarnation of the American old west—with cocaine instead of whisky.

The Guatemala tourist board would surely not want me to say so, but the reality is theirs is a dangerous country. About one in four of my friends was jacked, beaten, or kidnapped—at least once. A female friend was manually violated by the border police. “I’m not going to rape you,” he told her, as he shoved his fingers inside her. Even my adopted hometown—blissful Antigua—had its dangers. One acquaintance was attacked while riding his bicycle on the road to Cerro la Cruz. My pal Charlie had a gun pointed at him outside Monoloco. Yes, much of my crowd ended up in the crosshairs—except me. I don’t say that as a boast or to imply that I’m a tough guy, but to indicate that I have no basis upon which to judge my friends’ reliance upon firearms. I like to think that nothing could drive me to patronize the local gun dealer, but since I’ve never been attacked or victimized, I can’t really make that claim.

I do know this much, though. When you carry a gun around eventually the temptation to use it can prove irresistible. The night Magnus crashed his car there had been some drinking involved—always the case with us expats. In the picture at the top of this post Magnus is still relatively sober, but soon he and a friend were on the terrace shooting at bats. This has to be the definition of a fruitless endeavor, but the creatures had brazenly taken up residence in the eaves of the house and they had to be exterminated, pure and simple.

Nothing changes the mood of a party like gunshots. The guests would have bolted, but they were waiting for confirmation that panic was the best move. I got them calmed down, a few minutes later Magnus raced out the door on his ammo quest, and the party went on as before. The parties always went on. We learned the rest of the story the next day. Magnus had decided the one-way streets of Antigua were too much of a bother and driven the wrong way down 4th Calle, which is the main artery into town from the west. The police happened to be passing by and a chase ensued. Magnus lost control of his car, rammed a house, got out and took off on foot. He’d have been shot, I think, if he weren’t white. Nevertheless he went to jail for the night.


I think the first inkling I had that Guatemala has a love affair with the gun that rivals America’s was the first time Charlie and I escorted a departing friend to the airport. I noticed a lockbox at the entrance in which visitors are asked to voluntarily store their firearms while in the terminal. The first gun I actually saw was during a visit to the seaside town of Monterrico. We were hanging out at my favorite beach bar, El Animal Desconocido, and a gangster type rolled up, pulled out a chrome-plated .44 and fired off a clip. And while we’re going through the progression, the first gun victim I saw was in Zona Uno, Guatemala City—a fatal head shot.

Still, guns were not prevalent among my friends until crime skyrocketed after the election of Oscar Berger. Under his stewardship the country sank even deeper into poverty. Perhaps it was not his fault—Guatemala had been bullied into one of those disastrous free-trade agreements with the U.S. But setting aside the issue of blame for a moment, economic hardship undoubtedly made Guatemalans desperate. Workers became thieves, and foreigners became targets. My friend Brendan was pistolwhipped in a park at 7 pm. A group of friends were dragged into the woods and made hostages, while one girl was molested with a vibrator gunmen found in another girl’s bag. But the fun and games never stopped for us—we were partying at the end of the world.

In San Pedro men walked into a friend’s bar and robbed him at gunpoint. In Guatemala City a dozen men broke into a police impound in broad daylight and stole two tons of cocaine than had been confiscated in a raid the week before. It took them over an hour to load the drugs and nobody stopped them or bothered to call for help. Expats bought more guns. Carrying them created the illusion of safety. Firing them relieved the pressure of living in a place that was inching ever closer to hell.

Before I left the States, I would sometimes read about a terrorist bomb exploding in a nightclub in some warzone or other, and wonder why people were out socializing in the first place. It was beyond belief for me that people would go out drinking when bombs were bursting. Guatemala is no Gaza or Falluja—make no mistake about that—but I still learned the answer to my question. You never stop socializing because the interaction is an unquenchable human thirst. You’d swim a lake of flames for a good cocktail party. And you party until you're gotten by the bad guys or you get fed up and leave.

My friends got gotten and l got fed up. We scattered. We dispersed to San Francisco, Miami, London, Shanghai, Roatán, while others of us started traveling again and haven't stopped yet. Myself, I’m looking for another Antigua, but with fewer guns. That’s why I’m headed to San Sebastián. Of course, that’s in Basque territory, where an occasional bomb has been known to explode. But I hear the cocktail parties are tremendous.

Labels: firearms, guatemala, insane expats

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 10:42 AM