Revolution and Papusas

Observations on communism while stoned in Latin America

DYLAN FERGUSON STAFF /ILLUSTRATION DIRK BLOUW

I thought I would find a revolution in Mexico. At least I was hoping, I knew the elections were furious, I read the news, I wanted marches and singing, and big mustachioed hombres, with criss-crossed bullet belts and sombreros out to here. What could be more fun than a revolution?

I arrived Maxico just after the elections last summer, when the Bush-friendly, right-leaning successor to Vincente Fox, a certain senor Felipe Calderon, had officially won the election by the slimmest margin in Mexico’s brief history of democracy. He beat out Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, as the personality-cult posters were calling him. The socialist former Mexico City mayor, beloved, it seems, the capital was inundated with images of him, there was even a children’s colouring contest, little AMLO caricatures, giving the thumbs up with scribbly green or purple faces, strung along clotheslines across the central plaza. Alongside signs screaming “Vote X Vote” the recount camp’s motto, and hammer-and-sickles in full-force, red-and-yellow, images of Che, tents giving away free food, drink, and even medicine. Other tents sold communist literature, DVDs, and CDs of revolutionary tunes (I bought one) at very capitalist prices.

The one time I turned out for the nightly protest, we were inundated with rain, and had to stand under a tent chanting slogans I could only pretend to pronounce. I left Mexico City disappointed. Maybe I wanted shots fired.

A bit later on in my travels I was in Guatemala, in a pretty little town called Flores in the middle of a lake in the middle of a jungle. Almost broke, I had secured room and board at a local bar-and-restaurant called Los Brisas, in exchange for getting passing gringo tourists who spoke English or French to drink with me.

I remember the night I met Chato; it was a wild drunken night where some locals and some tourists got together on the dock-patio of Los Brisas, overhanging the pristine lake, we all got smashed, stripped down, went swimming, hauled pot out of a hand-made bamboo bong. Steve, a Brit, got robbed at gunpoint right there on the dock, most of us too drunk to care, or notice. They took his cellphone, but he talked the young mugger into letting him keep his SIM card, almost got shot in the face in the process.

Steve needed some weed after the incident, but I had just consumed the entire bud of Canadian that I brought with me, resourcefully smuggled across three borders. Chato rose out of the water and said he had some. Chato was a native El Salvadorian, his dark brown body covered in gorgeous black tattoos, huge wooden plugs in his ears, and long hair with two longer dreadlocks used to tie it back.

That was my first encounter with the El Salvadorian madman, and the beginning of our friendship. In the following days, we would drink beer on the beach and go swimming in crystal blue waters in the afternoon, in the evening we would sit on the white clay roof of his apartment, with clothes hung on lines behind us, and watch the sun set beyond the rim of green jungle on the other side of the water as we passed joints.

One night there was a powerful rainstorm, the result of a hurricane on the coast, that put out all the town’s lights. Invigorated by the pounding rain and the total dark, we decided to blow the majority of our remaining money on booze, and we got wildly drunk and screamed back at the thunder. The water rushed through the cobblestone streets and around our ankles in flooding torrents a foot deep, periodic bursts of lightning illuminated our crazy grins as we hollered and splashed and sipped from bottles of throat-singeing Guatemalan rum.

When I awoke from my drunken stupor, I was on a bus to El Salvador with Kristen, my Canadian travel partner at the time, and Chato, who was going home to see his family.

San Salvador City is the capital of El Salvador, and like most big cities in Latin America, even though it is sprawling and overpopulated, it hasn’t developed the kind of crowded, ordered regularity of American or Canadian capitals. The paved streets weave about with confusing, unplanned irregularity, up and down the hilly topography, old beat-up cars navigate them lazily, and the squawks of horns and chickens are omnipresent. The difference may be the poverty, but I suspect it is the Latin American way of life, which loves hammocks and simplicity much more than order and neatness.

Chato let me and Kristen stay in his mother’s house, which, like so many others, was a charmingly roughshod shack of wood and corrugated iron built by Chato’s father, a mechanic, on a foundation of cement. His mom was unbelievably nice, though I can’t imagine what she thought of my presence there, and she kept making me beautiful meals, despite my insistence, in useless English and terribly broken Spanish, that it was unnecessary.

Chato brought over his girlfriend, Fredericka, and the four of us chomped on corncakes as chickens and little puppies scampered about, both future sources of protein. The two locals told us about El Salvador. Chato said, angrily, that their current president was an American-friendly conservative (Antonio Saca) who was a former football announcer and got elected because everyone knew his name and voice.

“My country, man, is not the same,” he said. In Guatemala, Chato was all carefree energy, but here, at home, I could tell he was burdened by

troubles. The huge, toothy grin that normally graces his face was replaced by a dark scowl that aged him 10 years.

“Everyone, now, must work in factory, comprende? American factory, they have all the job now. Factory, they only pay enough to live. My people, man, they can’t live like before.”

The next day, after a night at the bar with El Salvadorian hipsters, Chato was all grinning again. He invited me to come to a manifestacion. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded revolutionary, so me and Kristen crowded into Fredericka’s beat-up old Jeep, and we headed downtown.

A manifestacion, it turns out, is like a protest, a march through the streets, a socialist carnival. This one was being held to commemorate a date 10 years prior when many El Salvadorians disappeared without a trace. This was common in the early ’90s; the vanished are known as Los Disparasidos, and the suspicion is that most were kidnapped and murdered by El Salvador’s embattled, American-supported government, which was in the midst of a civil war. The country is more peaceful now, but there is still great unrest, and the socialists hold manifestacions to make sure no one forgets the dangers of American interference in their government, and the bloody lessons of the recent past.

We marched through the streets boldly, stopping traffic, a couple hundred of us, holding banners, shouting slogans — hasta la vitoria siempre! — and we were handed little plastic bags full of water to refresh us, as it was scorching hot that afternoon. I had a bundle of roses, each one symbolizing one of the departed, and, as instructed, I handed them out to passers-by.

It began to dawn on me that Chato was well-respected in the revolutionary movement. He took the fore-front of the march, juggling and doing a traditional circus trick called diavolo, which involves a wooden hourglass balanced and tossed around on a piece of string. Single-handedly, he ran ahead to every intersection and stopped the incoming cars, juggling brashly, defying anyone to run him down.

Many marchers seemed tense, and Chato told me why. He said at the last manifestacion, three months earlier, some masked men murdered two police officers with AK-47s, and the marchers were fearful of a violent police crackdown this time.

But he assured me there would be no trouble. Chato hates violence, and he said steps had been taken to ensure the murderous socialist factions would not attend. Everything would be “mas tranquilo,” he said, as he flashed me the peace sign with a confiding expression. I began to wonder how much influence this guy had.

The manifestacion ended in the Central Park, overlooked by a statue of Simon Bolivar on horseback. We tossed our roses in front of a memorial to Los Disparasidos, with hundreds of names engraved on it. Then there was a concert. There was hip-hop, and raggae, and punk, and a traditional Salvadorian style of blues, called “blues wanaka,” which is similar to American “talking blues.” Most of the acts, it seemed, were highly political, performers insulted the president, and shouted out other things I didn’t understand (except for the curse words) that sent the audience into an uproar of cheers.

I tried to chat with the other youthful locals as we bobbed our heads; it seemed like most of them were students at the University of El Salvador. I think me and Kristen were the only gringos in attendance, yet nobody questioned our presence, it was assumed that everyone there wanted some kind of change, and wanted it accomplished peacefully, and meanwhile, on with the joyful rebellion!

The spirit was infectious, pretty soon we were all running around, dancing insanely to a local punk act, Chato was thrashing about, guys and girls were hooking up, weed was consumed, but only inside cars. Once again, we were trying to avoid giving the cops, who were lurking on the outskirts, any reason to interfere.

Eventually, the mob produced a poster of the president, which was kicked and stomped on before somebody lit it on fire. The atmosphere was electric, irreverent and free, it was unbelievable, and lasted well into the night. Maybe, I thought, this is the ground floor of a revolution. Or maybe it’s just kicks. I didn’t fucking care, I was loving it. For once, I was happy in my own naiveté.

Not everyone was, though. The next day Kristen packed up her bags and left. I hadn’t even noticed how desolate and pissed off she was.

Communism has been gaining momentum in Latin America of late, thanks mostly to Hugo Chavez, the wildly popular president of Venezuela. Chavez is seen as a champion of liberty and revolution in the same mould as Simon Bolivar, whose statue in San Salvador is positively revered. Alongside Fidel Castro, and Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, Chavez is perceived as proof that Latin Americans don’t need much-maligned American investment to be successful. In Venezuela, Chavez has helped turn booming state oil profits into a generally better quality of life for his citizens, with greater social spending. America vilifies Chavez for the autocratic hold he has over his country. Chavez has made a point of mocking George Bush’s opposition. In 2005, he created a program that offered subsidized oil to various poor American neighbourhoods.

Many impoverished Latin Americans love the fact that Chavez is sticking it to Bush, because of the hatred they have towards U.S. meddling. It seems to me that Latin Americans have an aversion to American-style capitalism more for lifestyle reasons than political ideology. They love their hammocks, many of them will work a few hours a day, then spend the rest of it chilling. As long as they have a few chickens in the yard, and fruit on the tree, they’re happy. Nobody wants to nine-to-five it.

But many are desperately poor. Perhaps because I only hung out with the poor and reactionary, I never encountered the flip-side of the ideological argument — I never met a Latin American who defends pro-American conservatism, like the half of Mexican voters who chose Calderon. I understand they are mostly in the business class, and their thinking may be sound. Welcoming American business may be the only way to economic stability. The communists say that Chavez has proven that theory wrong, but in reality, not every country has huge oil reserves it can exploit. Countries like Guatemala and El Salvador simply do not have enough sought-after natural resources to support a healthy Bolivarian revolution.

Last week, George Bush and Hugo Chavez went on competing tours of Latin American capitols, in a symbolic struggle for support. They were careful to never arrive in the same city at the same time.

The next day, with Kristen and all but a few dollars of our money gone, Chato and I decided to drive out to the beach.

We were going to Chato’s favourite Pacific hangout, called La Zona, which at one time was a place only he and a group of friends knew about. On our way there, we passed a block of American hotels that had sprung up in the past two years, recent attempts by U.S. developers to turn La Zona into a tourist destination. Chato put his head out the window as we passed, and let out a furious, primal bellow at the hotels. They made him so obviously irate, he couldn’t even communicate properly in English, a language which he normally had a good handle on.

“Fucking hotel, man!” he said, looking at me with the 10-year scowl. “These fucking . . . Americano . . . KFC . . . puta! . . . What does that have to do with the sun?”

We stopped by a papusa shop hidden away in the forest. Papusas are an El Salvadorian food, beans and cheese fried in tortillas, they’re filling and delicious, and they only cost 25 cents American each. All of these reasons made them my go-to food in San Salvador. At the papusaria, Chato taught me how to judge a good papusa, both by its contents, and by the variety of spicy, jellied vegetables available to garnish it with at the restaurant. He recommended a beverage to wash it down with, a kind of cold milk and coconut drink. It was delicious, and I told him so.

Chato was still in a bad mood after passing the hotels, which bummed me out because I was stoned and didn’t want his bad vibes.

“Yes, it is good,” he said flatly. “This is my culture, man. All this shit man, this KFC, destroy my culture. Soon, no papusas.”

Chato’s one source of income is his hand-made jewelry, which he bends and crafts from silver, and jade from Guatemalan mines. At the beach, as I bathed in the ocean, he tried to sell his pieces to passing tourists, mostly surfers. It was a bad day, and he only sold one set of earrings for $15 American. He tried to entertain some tourists with diavolo, but he was feeling bitter and kept dropping the wooden hourglass.

I could no longer stay with Chato’s mom, and could not afford a hostel. I said I would sleep on the beach, which I have done before, but Chato said that was no longer an option there. As we watched the waves crash on the rocks, he told me sadly that the cops recently started patrolling the beaches, so El Salvadorians, who had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, would now be arrested on site.

Chato insisted, despite my protests, that I take three dollars of the day’s earnings, and arranged for me to stay at a surfer’s hostel. He convinced the proprietress, called Nina Chepa, or “Little Girl Chepa,” who was at least 60, that I was very good at recruiting gringo tourists, so she offered free lodgings. I suspect, more out of respect for Chato than kindness towards myself.

He was still in a bad mood when he left me. I had told Chato, somewhat shamefully, perhaps erroneously, that I was a writer. Before he drove off in that lovely, shitty Jeep, he asked me to write about what I saw.

Eventually, everything tires. Eventually, I had enough of bumming around a Third World country, and, like Dorothy, I had an easy way to escape. I clicked my heels three times, pulled out the MasterCard, and it was like pulling the plug on a dream, suddenly I was no longer a hobo, I was a well-established Canadian with a line of credit in my name. I always knew there was something separating me from the hipster bums of San Salvador, I just never realized it was a thin piece of plastic in my wallet.

I used my flexible friend to secure a plane ride to Mexico, from whence I could make my way to the True North, strong and free. When I passed through Mexico City later on, I would discover the election recount had taken place, and no voter fraud was found. The socialist camp, who were threatening an uprising, effectively rolled over once all but the most extreme recognized that Calderón had been legitimately elected.

On the plane ride I sat in a right cushy chair with lots of legroom, and there were free drinks. I guzzled as many scotches as possible, trying to maximize my sudden re-acquaintance with the lap of luxury. I had slept in a bathroom stall the night before.

A fat, toad-like American businessman with greased hair was sitting next to me, and I was trying my best to ignore him as I kept my eyes peeled for the next passage of the drink cart. I didn’t feel like talking, but the American wouldn’t shut up. He worked for a branch of some big seafood company in Nicaragua, and against my better instincts we got to discussing the Mexican elections.

“Yeah, those left-wingers are trying to take over everywhere, hey?” he said, smirking like it was a dirty joke. “We got the same thing going on in Nicaragua, man, there’s an election soon, and those fucking commies are coming close. We held them off for years, but they might win this time!” At this he laughed out loud. I buried my face in my plastic cup and finished the scotch. I now know he was referring to Daniel Ortega, who did indeed win the election.

“But, whatever, man,” he said, smirking still. “We’ve made campaign donations to both sides, so whatever way the cookie crumbles, right?”

Politics. What does that have to do with the sun?