The months in Central America, from the highlands of the Zapatista state

Today we crossed the Guatemalan-Mexican border and are now in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a city and a municipality in the highlands of a Mexican state called Chiapas. So we arrived to the northernmost latino country in the hemisphere, before we continue to Los Angeles - a city stolen from Mexico, but that's another story.

As the bulk of our traveling lies behind us and we're able to look at the Central American part in retrospective, we're talking quite a lot about how did everything actually go. We'd both say that the Central American part turned out to be even better that we thought and hoped. As far as the safety issues are concerned there has been absolutely no problems, excluding the traffic, which belongs to a category of its own. We avoided taking unnecessary risks and thus faced none of them. We've surely talked to more than one hundred travelers and quite many of them have either experienced robberies and other nuisances personally or their fellow-travelers have done so.

Measuring the trip to Central America in terms of the journalistic goals we set to ourselves in Finland the outcome wasn't bad at all. So far we've interviewed the following people on tape: an American, who was studying in Oaxaca, Mexico, right before the uprising; the director of Casa Xalteva, a Spanish school and a community center for kids in Granada, Nicaragua; a Dutch woman behind an impressive social project which is taking place in the poor and notorious suburbs of León, Nicaragua; a Miskito Indian who moved from the Caribbean coast to the Pacific coast, learned Spanish, studied and gratuaded there, and who's active in the politics of the Miskito community; a militant FSLN member, who's part of the indigeneous Sutiaba tribe, a tribe whose language and traditions are facing extinction. With these five individuals we had in depth discussions which provided material that could be translated into a number of newspaper and/or other stories. Then there's the uncountable number of discussions with and stories from different people that would also deserve to be widely known - this is of course true to almost all trips which are a little longer.

We both were delighted to see that organizing interviews, meetings and discussions wasn't diffucult, although the practicies are somewhat different from those in Finland or Anglo-Saxon world. To illustrate, we contacted quite a number of very interesting Managuan organizations via email. That's the most common way of communicating between organizations and individuals nowadays - in the western world, that is -, and in Finland probably more than half of the organizations would've answered the very same day. That's not what happened in Nicaragua. Not only didn't we receive any responses from any of the organizations by mail, but in many cases the email addresses they themselves provided in their own websites didn't work or exist at all. Of course there's phone numbers, usually, but the thing was that the politically active people here are not (yet) nerds as much as their western collegues, who use internet all the time. Their communication channels here are, however, more active than they're in Finland. NGOs in general are working in a very impressive way. So we adopted to one of the local stategies of just talking to pretty much as many people as humanly possible and getting to know the right people through that.

Frankly, there has been a lot of surprises, too. One would think, including those who're not true believers of cultural relativism, that everything is so different in "different cultures", but now I beg to differ. Well, it's true that we're not in the midst of some cannibal tribe not yet to be found, something that really would separate boys from men, but in Central America, which is not that different from southern European countries. In the end of the day, people and cultures globally seem to have so much in common. Most of the people I know in Finland and elsewhere in Europe or North America are concerned with the same issues than the majority of the people I've talked to here: how to live your life in a way which respects other human beings and the environment, how to provide education to everyone, how to enjoy life, etc. And then we also have those who couldn't care less for respecting others or the environment, how to provide anything to anyone but yourself and so on and so forth. And most of those who'd like to consider themselves as a part of the former category are troubled by those who're happily in the latter one, every bit as much here as they're in Finland or other western countries. It's a flat-out misconception that all the people in the third world are having a deep feeling of solidarity towards one another - an impression which tends to be unfortunately persistent among European leftists. But you can sense the same atmosphere of confrontation between those with goals of solidarity and sustainability in human affairs and those with more short-sighted interests.

But there're also differences, no doubt. To start with an easy negative, it hasn't been pleasant to notice how many men look at women, even girls aboge the age of, well, too young. That special treatment is directed even more enthousiastically towards girls who're from Scandinavia, for instance, or just blonder than latinas. Meeri is a little darker-looking than most Finnish girls, but let me tell you, you would be mistaken to think that she's not getting those looks. I'm already used to it, and normally a vindictive look back, from my part (girls can't do much about it themselves), will do it. That, however, seems to mean "don't you look at my property" rather than "why don't you stop acting like a 13 years old kid who's a wannabe Sean William Scott from American Pie", which is more or less what I'd like to indicate. This is, of course, part of a much broader issue of women's rights that are a serious problem throughout the region.

Another one is the traffic. In Nicaragua our bus driver drove over a pig - not a big deal - and in Guatemala our minibus likewise finished a dog. So far we’ve enjoyed two rides, one in Caracas, the other in the highway between Managua and León, in which we ourselves were very close to a lethal car crash. These are unbelievable incidents, and I’d like to share one of them with you. This took place in the Managua-León highway. The driver in our fully crowded minibus thought that it was a good idea to accelerate roughly 35km over-speed and try to overtake a huge truck which was right in front of us. So far so good. There was, however, another sizable truck coming towards us from the opposite dicection. And to make the scene perfect, there was a minibus behind the truck that was coming towards us, too, and that minibus wanted to overtake the truck that was on its way as well. So, what happens? Our professional driver just accelerates as much as he can get out from the engine, and so does the minibus that’s coming towards us. Because this isn’t stupid enough the truck that we’re passing by starts to accelerate in order to make our move a little more challenging. Ultimately our minibus and the minibus coming towards us both manage to pass by the trucks, but it was really, really close. We almost touched each other, and both were driving more than 120 km/h. It was a matter of less than 0.5 seconds. Even a soft touch would’ve pushed both of us in the way of the trucks that both weighted more than 30 000 kg. In fairness to the drivers, they really are experienced and handling their vehicles like professionals. But in this case, ok in many cases, they really took a serious risk, and I could see it from the face of my driver. It simply was remarkably close.

A lot of people die from traffic accidents daily in Central America – accidents, that are nothing but a result of reckless and stupid driving. Relatively speaking there’re a lot more accidents here than anywhere in the EU, as far as I know. Most of the locals I talked to are very upset by that. But it just doesn’t seem to change, they would argue.

Then there've been a lot of positives as well. The first thing someone from northern Europe immediately observes is that people here don’t stay home as persistently as they do in Scandinavia. It’s normal to stay out, the market places are full, people are sitting and chatting in cafes, parks, in the streets, even in the traffic jams. Though that kind of social activeness sometimes bothers foreign travelers as they experience it intruding we both have enjoyed it, normally. It brings people closer to one another and you might still have the sense of intimacy with a stranger though there’re a lot of people around. A street full of hullabaloo then doesn't necessarily equal a lot of hurry, exhaustion and hecticness as it more often than not does in Finland. This also carries to other spheres of life. Grass-roots organizing - something which is a daily necessity under much more repressive governments than we westerners have used to - is very advanced here, and this’s so precisely because what I just described. In the cultural scene this means, for example, a lot of live music in restaurants, cafes and bars and a huge variety of street artists. All of this is something we’ve already began to take for granted and it feels cozy.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to write to this blog in the past few weeks, but luckily Meeri has been more systematic. Again, if you don´t speak Finnish then just suck it up and feel guilty.

All the best,

Bruno.