This winter I have been for the first time to Guatemala. The country is quite famous for its colourful traditional fabrics and the more infamous civil war that affected mainly the poor people - as usual I should say!- and most of all the Maya population. My mind always brings together colours with fun and playfulness maybe because the Italian religious colour of mourning is black and that of happy celebrations is white. All other colours are free of meaning, with specific superstitious exceptions of course!
So before going to Guatemala I did associate their colourful wear with a cheerful population… now I may say that I was wrong. 36 years of civil war - born from the well-known interlacing interests of economic and power of North and South America (Operation PB Success) - which has finished only in 1996, cannot leave smiling people on its way.
It has been the first time that I have seen a policeman with a tommy-gun inside a church while the Mass is being celebrated! Of course I couldn’t resist asking him to take a picture… I didn’t want to forget that and he accepted to model but outside the church!
Basically it’s not that Guatemalans are not polite or nice, not at all. It’s just that they don’t seem yet to have recover from their recent history and what it has brought in the present time, such as for example a perception of simple being at peace that you can feel while speaking with Tibetans who as well have been coming under so grave injustice - I met Tibetans in Nepal many years ago… maybe I will now have the possibility to meet more angry ones! - or that lighter smiling aptitude of Mexicans for everyday life, a country that still continues having so much poverty and heinous eruptions of violence.
Guatemala still remains a place to visit for hundred “touristic” reasons!
Having been there I think the first one is exactly that: with a respectful tourism you may bring money to help its development and in change you can receive a great lesson of XX century history from the best teacher I have ever met… LIFE!
