Guatemala Prepares for Bush Visit
Sun Mar 11, 2007 at 09:14:41 AM PDT
El Señor Presidente George W. Bush will be arriving here in Guatemala this evening and stay through late Monday. I've had fun watching my beloved, adopted country prepare for his visit. The newspapers are at their finest, running stories laced with subtle Guatemalan irony about preparations by the Secret Service, the hurried staffing of a village clinic by U.S. military personnel for Bush's photo-op tour, and prominently featuring an unusually large number of news articles about the deportation of Guatemalans from the United States. The public seems to be generally interested in the visit, at least as far as trying to figure out what thouroughfares will be closed on Monday and whether it will be possible to get to work, but let's face it, it's hardly a visit by the Pope. We pull out all the stops for that.
Let me start by sharing a rare photo I found some years ago, taken by a photographer from a now-defunct Guatemalan newspaper and never, to my knowledge, published. The picture is of then-Vice President Richard Nixon, who visited Guatemala in February 1955, shortly after the coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz. This is the kind of photo-op Bush should avoid. It neatly sums up U.S.-Latin American relations, at least as Latin Americans view them, in the simple image of Uncle Sam having his shoes shined by a barefoot, Guatemalan boy. (Enjoy the picture, Kossacks. This is the first time it's been seen by the public.)
The historical context of Bush's visit is impossible to avoid, just one of the many layers of nuance that envelop this trip. While Guatemalans are keenly aware of it, visiting U.S. dignataries are remarkably tone deaf. I remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visiting Guatemala and appearing at the door of her aircraft clad in Banana Republic khakis. A Guatemalan cartoonist lampooned the moment with Albright dressed exactly as she was, descending the steps of the airplane and shouting out something like, "Hello, farmhands! How's everything going on my ranch?" Guatemalans roared with laughter, and the U.S. ambassador was reportedly, quite rightly, furious.
But, on to the preparations in Santa Cruz Balanyá, the village Bush will apparently visit. According to this morning's Prensa Libre, the Secret Service is having some problem blending in with the generally shorter populace:
The little town of Santa Cruz Balanyá and the Iximché ruins in Chimaltenango have been taken over, since yesterday, by men more than six feet tall, wearing sun glasses, baseball caps and jeans, who affect the appearance of tourists, although their inspection work gives them away as U.S. Secret Service agents.
[snip]
What the inhabitants of Balanyá can't understand is why so many people are running around their town. "It's peaceful here; nobody's going to do anything to Mr. Bush; I don't know why there's so much surveillance," Juana [a villager] said as she watched twenty Secret Service agents from the U.S. mulling about the town's central park as if they were tourists.
Most of them are Puerto Rican, and affably greet passersby when they cross the recently painted streets of Balanyá.
The National Peace Fund has provided resources to paint houses in streets the U.S. leader will pass. Even the metal sheets that protect the gardens have been painted.
If painting houses doesn't conjure up images of Catherine II touring the Crimea in 1787, the installation of a medical clinic staffed by U.S. military personnel in the village's school might. During its first day of operations (yesterday), it attended to the medical needs of an astounding number of villagers (620). According to the newspaper, its family planning workshops were especially popular among women seeking means of birth control. The clinic will continue operating for several days after Bush visits on Monday. (This is how the news is presented in Guatemala, where any outright suggestion of Potemkinism would ruin the fun and deflate the irony we all enjoy exploring on our own. Americans frequently confuse technological backwardness with a lack of sophistication, a grievous error in Latin America.)
Against this backdrop and within this historical context, what are the chances of a successful trip, that might mend some of the fences long left untended in Latin America? Approximately zero. The stage is set. Guatemalans have zero expectations that anything substantial, like immigration reform in the U.S., will be discussed and are instead prepared for a spectacle filled with the irony and delicious humor of two cultures clashing in a time-honored manner, where only one of those cultures is even remotely aware of the clash. It will be Richard Nixon seated on a park bench having his shoes shined and Madeleine Albright emerging from her airplane dressed in khakis all over again, and it will all be enormously funny if you're disposed to laugh about it.
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