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Hound Dog

Mar 28, 2009, 10:00 AM

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Just Another Day in Paradise

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We have a guest from France who is a cousin of my wife and so my wife decided to make the requisite trip from San Cristóbal to Palenque to the famed riuns there with a side stop near Ocosingo to visit the much less famous but fabulous ruins at Toniná. I begged out of the rather lengthy drive so she and her cousin decided on a combination of public buses and collectivos and that is where the edventure began. One must realize that Chiapas is a cultural mix of many different ethnic groups and the rule of law here is mostly illusory so people tend to settle their differences in a fashion that, shall we say, oftentimes becomes confrontational and outright dangerous. These face-offs are not simply between the indigenous and mestizo factions in the community but also sometimes involves the army and federal and local officials and perhaps a contingent of the local landed gentry but also quite often these sometimes bloody confrontations are among various factions within the indigenour communities themselves over issues involving land use disputes and myriad other problems and, I am given to understand that these disputatious confrontations have been used as a way to settle community issues well before the Spanish got here.

Well, anyway, my wife´s collectivo was to leave about 10:00AM for the first leg of the journey to Ocosingo which is about two hours from San Cristóbal but villagers from a delegation of the municipality of Ocosingo were blocking the San Cristobal-Palenque carretera and refusing to let any traffic through since there had been a traffic accident on the highway that had brought down a CFE transformer and the villagers wrer demading that CFE agree to replace that transformer at their own expense before anyone was to be allowed to go through.

After some time it became apparent that the collectivo would not be making the journey to Ocosingo so a bus was offered that would take my wife and her guest to Palenque via the much longer road through Villahermosa, Tabasco.

More in a minute.

So, my wife didi eventually make it to Palenque but was unable to return to San Cristobal via the route through Bonampak as there had been another traffic accident near Frontera Corazol on the border with Guatemala and that accident was reported to me to have involved two vehicles each of which was filled with two separate groups of indigenous folks who dislike eaxh other to put it mildly so a near riot had ensued as eeach group confronted each other with dangerous weapons and demanded of the other group that it pay for the accident. I really do not know how this confrontation was resolved as these sorts of confrontations sometimes become violent and result in injury or even death. So, rather than becoming even tangentially involved in a nasty confrontation beween these two indigenous groups, she and her cousin spent the night in Palenque.

Meanwhile, back in San Cristobal, the federal government has ordered the eviction of a large number of indigenous squatters who have illegally occupied a federal housing/office complex and a forest preserve near the city and the squatters are adamantly refusing to leave these places they have occupied for years and the state in cooperation with the feds are giving the squatters a couple of weeks to either vacate or be forcably removed. There have already been some street demonstrations resulting from this confrontation and we, of course, take no sides one way or the other when it comes to these local matters but it happens that out Chiapas home is in a barrio that is a center of these complex "negotiations" so it is time to lay low for a while.

Thdere are a couple of other local stories to relate but yesterday Dawg busted his butt while strlling down the ever dangerous sidewalks of San Cristobal which is a fine walking town just as is Ajijic except for the fact that some of the sidewalk holes and impediments pre-date the construction of Palenque so one tends to find oneself occasionally flying through the air when the intention was to stroll down the boulevard like a good Parisian where the most common sidewalk impediment is dog excrement.

(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Mar 28, 2009, 10:47 AM)