Somebody Else´s Story

I spent a few days slightly farther into the jungle when I was in Puyo. --It is totally different, by the way then the jungle in the north, near the border of Columbia. Near Puyo it is much flatter and much, much denser. Very rain-foresty, if you will. This is not the point of the story in any case, though, and lord knows how much I always digress. So anyway.

On the way in (via trail and canoe), we passed a community of a few houses, three, I think. A Belgian guy, married to one of the older women, had been living there for a couple years and we got to talking for awhile, him asking me my plans, etc. When I said I was heading to Guatemala next, he asked how the political situation was there, and I said fine, more or less. It is not as safe as Ecuador, but is stable and has been attracting a lot of tourists the last few years in particular. And I was asking him how he came to end up here.

It turns out that he used to be a sound engineer for world tours of major groups like The Stones, Pink Floyd, etc. Usually how it goes is that after the tour stops, the group (assuming they want you again) mandates that you take 6-12 months off (paid for of course), but during which time you can´t work for other groups because being on the road takes so much time out of you they don`t want you having any kind of nervous breakdown or getting rundown or sick for the next tour. Anyway, one time, the last concert was in Mexico and so Mario decided to travel during his time off, starting there. He had a lot of Mexican contacts and friends from all the crew that he worked with and so was just making his way south. He ended meeting a women in the northern Chiapas region of Guatemala (the Mexican south and Guatemalan north are blurred as simply being Chiapas region more or less, to my understanding). Anyway, so he met this women and ended up staying there for the remainder of his time off and returned as well after then next tour, and eventually they got married.

Eventually (and now I don´t remember how many years into the future this was, but I want to say 3 years or so) she was getting increasingly worried because it was so unsafe and all of her family was in danger. Essentially, a guerilla soldier (supported by the CIA) would come into a community, demand to see so and so, and if they weren`t there, then somebody had to go find them. The person in question may be out hunting in the jungle, or fishing or doing something of the like, however, so not always the easiest to find. They would generally have 30 minutes until the first person got killed (wife or child), another 30 minutes until the next and so on. So the wife was worried, obviously because so many of the people in the surrounding communities had already had this happen and it was only a matter of time. Mario had a passport with so many visas and all these rights of way, essentially, from the concerts, it was pretty easy to get his wife and her family across the border into Mexico. Well, as they heard of more and more children, children they often knew, being shot they couldn´t stand by and not do anything, so for a couple years they helped kids cross the border. Eventually, somebody tipped somebody off (most likely), and Mario, his wife and the children they were with were stopped. They shot everyone except for Mario, who, of course, had the pleasure of watching. They couldn´t shoot him because he was white, but instead was tortured for a week. --You can still see where his nose was broken, his jaw, etc . He has an artifical hip becuase a nerve was cut off when they broke his hip and ceased to be functional. Anyway, you get the drift.

It´s amazing how you hear of these things all the time, and they are horrific and impossible for me to even imagine taking place. Then you are standing there listening to someone this actually happened to, and it is just incomprehensible. But then so much more comprehensible at the same time, as you can actually begin to picture the people and their families, and the places. Stories like this make me so ill. And then it gets worse that our foreign policy supports it. I really don`t understand why we are born so privileged in life.