Huehuetenango

Unlike Quetzeltenango (Xela) , where people seemed almost hostile, people here are extremely polite and very friendly. Everyone says "good morning" even when meeting strangers. The people are mostly Latino. When indigenous people (Indians) come down from the mountains looking for work, they dress in a rural style, and some in their colorful native attire. The Indians seem to be treated well by the Latinos. Like all Latin counties there are lots of kids, barking dogs, crowing roosters, and air horns of the chicken buses.

Huehue has very narrow streets with very narrow sidewalks creating a real hazard since both the sidewalks and the streets are congested. Several times, I have stopped myself from stepping off the sidewalk to allow a lady to pass, just as a vehicle passes so close that I would have been struck.

There is a beautiful small central park (zoculieu) and a large church in the center of town. High mountains surround the city. The mountains to the north, the highest in Central America, separate this area from the Ixcan. The climate, since we’re at 6,200 feet of elevation, is near perfect, but there is continuous haze and smoke obscuring the view of the mountains.

Huehue is served from the capital by 4 or 5 buses a day (5 or 6 hour ride) and a daily flight on a single engine plane (usually has 3 or 4 passengers). The landing strip is gravel, 3,000 feet long and hazardous: obstacles at the ends, high surrounding terrain, no instrument approach, and people and cars on the runway.

Overall, I like Huehue. Maybe I am naïve, but I feel safe here. I’ve rented a room with private bath across from the airport for a place to stay when I need to overnight in Huehue. The family is unbelievable. They bring meals to my room, do my laundry, and the father, Carlos, pitches in to help with work I’m doing in the bodega (storage house at the runway). He helped load fuel from the truck to drums for hours and he helped me repair the roof. He refused money for his work. A friend of his was passing by while we worked on the roof, and he pitched in, too.

Mayalan

Mayalan is the premier village in the Ixcan. It has a frontier image. It’s a village of 200 families, no electricity, no running water. Things are changing, you might say improving. An all weather dirt road comes in from the east with daily van service, bringing worn-out travelers from their two-day journey from civilization. The houses, really just small shacks, are of rough board construction with corrugated iron roofs. There is a new school, a clinic manned by a medic, a shack with a telephone, and a co-op store. The people, Mayan Indians, have been extremely friendly and glad to have the airplane back. They share the history of the Ixcan and are recovering from the horrible events of the war.

I live in the best house in the village. It has three rooms opening onto a porch. It sits high off the ground (unusual for here), the windows, openings with wood shutters, are even higher. It was planned that way because, if the kids could, they would stand outside the windows and stare in at the aliens. The house belongs to Mike Sullivan and family of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but that’s another story.

Ixcan

What I am relaying here, I have received from several sources and I have no personal knowledge except of the geography.

The Ixcan is defined by the border with Mexico (Chiapus) to the north, a range of high mountains to the south, by the Xabal River to the east, and by the Ixcan River to the west. It is rolling hills, but next to the mountains it seems flat (elevation 1,000 feet).

Until the late 1960's, the Ixcan was pristine uninhabited jungle. At that time the Mayan Indians, who lived in the mountains began moving into the area much like homesteaders. Each family received 40 acres somewhere in the area that had no roads. Villages were established with a layer of local government, called a cooperative. Some villages had crude airstrips cut nearby.

I don’t know the causes, but by 1982 a war of insurgency was in progress. In the army’s handling of the war, autocracies were committed. Villages were burned, animals killed, crops wiped out, men and boys rounded up and killed (and sometimes women and children were included). To escape, the people fled to Chiapus in Mexico. After pressure from the UN and others, a peace agreement was signed in 1996. By 1998, the people, often accompanied by an outsider, began coming back to reclaim their land. Some were not successful. I still see numerous UN trucks and an occasional helicopter in Huehue.

The government has built an all-weather road from the Peten region in the east to Mayalan with several cul-de-sacs to the north and to the south. If the Ixcan River is bridged, the road could proceed west out of the Ixcan to connect with the Pan Am Highway. This still leaves many villages with only foot paths or seasonal roads.