By Ken McCormick
San Pedro La
Laguna on Lago Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands is now all concrete block
buildings or adobe covered with stucco, but in the 1940’s or 1950's almost all
the houses had walls of dried corn stalks tied together and straw roofs. This was before the big fiesta in which a
malfunctioning skyrocket crashed through the roof of one of the houses in the
center of town and started a fire that took everything downwind of it to the
ground. At least that's Pedro's version
of the story. It's really very hard to
establish historical fact down here.
Even the written sources disagree about basic facts that ought to be
easy to establish.
Rosa says the
fire started in the house of a guy who was making soap over an open fire, and
who spilled some of the liquid he was using, and that flared up and set his
straw roof on fire, spread to his neighbors' houses, and ended up burning down
half the town.
Pedro says this
was 47 years ago. Rosa only says it was
within the past 60 years. Both agree
there was a high wind that night and that half the town burned down. "These people lost all their
clothes," says Rosa. "They
had nothing left but what they were wearing." "The people had no maize," says Pedro. "They had nothing to eat."
On top of this,
these were hard economic times. There
was general hunger in the land. And on
top of this, the town had been suffering under the rule of a cruel alcalde
named Diego, "muy exigente," says Rosa. If Diego came by your house and saw your pig and said "Say,
that's a nice pig," you had to give it to him, and then he'd cook it for a
fiesta for his friends. If he saw your
chicken and said "That's a nice chicken you've got there," you had to
give it to him. If you didn't give him
anything he wanted, he'd just write a note to his superior in the government,
and then you'd be in jail for a long time.
When a woman's
husband would die, he'd say the woman had to go work in a certain place, and
all the women had to do what he told them to do. One time when Diego's wife was sick, Diego told some men he
wanted them to go to Guatemala City and get some medicine for her. It took two days to walk to Guatemala City,
and Diego didn't even pay for the medicine.
So when the
town burned and the people's little bit of maize all burned up and they had
nothing to eat, nobody knew what to do.
There is a tree called the Chichicaste that has fruit. It is not good to eat, but it kept the
people from starving. The people went
down to the coast to work on the plantations there, and the women had to cook
for forty or fifty men at a time to make a little bit of money. Everybody was glad to get away from Diego,
and they had nothing left in San Pedro, so they built a new town near the coast
and named it San Pedro Cutzan.
Now, the people from San Pedro Cutzan still come back
to San Pedro La Laguna every year to visit their relatives and some to work the
coffee, and the people from here go down there to visit. It's a nice town, but it's a lot hotter down
there.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Not to lend this account a greater air of historical
accuracy than it deserves, for my interest here is more in what people now
think happened than it is in what really happened, but Don Diego Rocché was
alcalde under the Ubico regime of 1931 to 1944. Everyone says he came to a sorry end. His wife died and he became estranged from his sons, who did not
approve of the disgraceful way he had run his administration. He became seriously ill with a mysterious
malady, and his skin was covered with blisters full of pus. It was “as though he was being eaten from
the inside by worms,” said one informant.
No one would speak to him any longer.
He went down to San Pedro Cutzan for some reason and tried to ford the
river there. Due to his debilitated
state, he was unable to keep his footing.
He was swept away, and he drowned.
No one would go to look for his body, and it became, in the words of the
same informant, “food for the worms and fishes.” Some say that after three days, his sons came and found his
remains, and some say they were never found.