Day 3 May 25
The Market


The market is the town's social center. The Sacapulas market, like most Maya markets, is a delightful chaos of colors, sounds, and smells. Here vendors and prospective buyers can chat to their heart's content amidst piles of fruit, vegetables, clothes, handicrafts, and industrial items such as soap and knives. But talk is not always idle. The saavy shopper is expected to bargain-- indeed, do so persistently --before making his purchase. (I suspect that this is because of a "no returns, no exchange" policy.)

We seem to be the only tourists around. The townsfolk regard us with much curiosity. In Sacapulas, we enter into a very relaxed, almost idyllic pace of life. It is a place where conversation is done in soft tones, without any hint of aggressiveness. On the streets, people unfailingly greet each other with the ubiquitous Buenas (good morning, afternoon, or evening).

The only exceptions are the rifle-toting soldiers, who often avoid our gaze. Most of them are Indian youths who were probably rounded up by the army during fiestas and forced to undergo military training. Although they leave us alone, I cannot forget that their forbidding garrison was the first thing we saw of the town upon entering it. Besides, it was in the nearby village of Nebaj that one of the worst massacres of Maya civilians by the army took place not too long ago.

The "training"-- more precisely, brainwashing --these soliders get transforms most of them into macho brutes who feel only murderous contempt for both the "communist" left and the "stupid Indians". Thousands of indigenas had already died in the ongoing civil war, many of them in senseless massacres perpetrated by the U.S.-trained army. In Guatemala, home to the quetzal and the jaguar, incomparable beauty coexisted with the most extreme poverty, cruelty and violence.



Madjid and I walk around to observe the commerce and banter of the brightly-costumed Sacapulas regulars. At a cobbler's stall, Alvaro has his sandals repaired for almost free. However, we had gone to the market for another reason. We had to find a chicken to "repay" our generous hosts in kind. But in the whole marketplace, there is only one chicken, and, its vendor says, it is already sold!

That night, we will have literally a taste of things to come: the first of many dinners consisting solely of beans, tortillas, and (when lucky) eggs.






The view of the Cuchumatanes mountains near Sacapulas was breathtaking. But Teresa and Alvaro (at right), engaged in lively conversation, did not seem to notice.

"Bring a camera and lots of film," was Roberto's sagely advice to us before the trip. Knowing next to nothing about photography, I hastily bought a Canon Snappy Q, a basic 35 mm automatic, that produced the simple, sometimes unsatisfactory, pictures that appear in this site. The five rolls of film I brought along would do little justice to Guatemala's countless scenic wonders.

Acting from experience, Alvaro carried a bulky leather case that housed a complicated-looking apparatus, complete with a formidable array of lenses of varying focal length. He would eventually make slides, perhaps for a photo exhibit, he told me. As for myself, I was just thinking of keeping my pictures in a private album-- until the Internet came and changed all that.

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Into Guatemala 1989. © 1999 J. L. Pe