READ
It’s been a
long time since my last post, and frankly, there were times when I thought I’d
never finish the book I had chosen for Guatemala, The President, by
Miguel Angel Asturias. There were unrelated reasons for the delay – we had visits
from out-of-town family and we sold our house and moved from one city to
another – but it was the relentless misery facing the characters in this novel
that made it difficult for me to pick it up and read it through to the end.
But it’s a
new year, so I thought I’d try to get on track again. I just read the last page
of The President, and am overwhelmed by the sheer horror of what life is
like for people living in a country run by an unfeeling, narcissistic dictator.
The setting for this novel is an unnamed Latin American country sometime early
in the 20th century. It is believed that the president in this novel
is based on Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled Guatemala from 1898 until 1920,
when he was finally forced out of office and imprisoned for corruption.
There is no
such happy ending in this book, which opens with the random murder of one of
the president’s most loyal military men. The president decides to use the
murder to his advantage by pinning the crime on two people he believes are
plotting against him. Many people are tortured into giving evidence to fit the
president’s narrative, and the lives of the two men the president has accused suddenly
become fraught with peril. One flees the city and goes into hiding; the other
is arrested, faces a sham trial, and is executed. Camila, the beautiful
daughter of the man who has gone into hiding, is abducted by the president’s
closest adviser, a man known to the people as Angel Face. Throughout the book,
it is said of Angel Face, “He was as beautiful and wicked as Satan.”
I found this
description curious, because as the book progresses, Angel Face appears to be
one of the very few characters who experiences any growth. He falls in love
with the woman he has abducted, and she with him, but even before that, there
are examples of Angel Face following his conscience. Perhaps his close
relationship with the president makes him feel secure enough to do the
occasional act of kindness for people in distress.
Unfortunately
for Angel Face, in a country ruled by a brutal dictator, no one stays in favor
for very long. I kept hoping for a good outcome, but in a regime where a person
can be tortured or killed on a whim, and rumor and innuendo take the place of common
sense and hard evidence, no one is safe. The book ends as tragically as it
began.
COOK
In such a
grim book, food descriptions take a back seat to the suffering of the
characters. However, there were a couple of mentions of stew, so I found a
recipe on ArtzyFoodie.com for Guatemalan
stew that I was able to veganize.
This stew is
generally made with chicken, simmered in a tomatillo sauce. Instead of chicken,
I defrosted Gardein chick’n strips, sliced them into some approximation of shredded
chicken, and added them to the stew for the last ten minutes of cooking. Served
over white rice, this was a delicious and satisfying dish.
GIVE
GlobalGiving.com lists several
projects in Guatemala, where the need is very great. It was difficult to choose
just one, but I ended up donating to the type of project that always appeals to
me, providing books for children in rural areas. According to the project
description, “Guatemala has the second lowest literacy rate in Latin America
and only one out of ten rural Guatemalans graduates from middle school.” Funds
collected for this project will be used to “build lending libraries in
indigenous, coffee-growing communities in Guatemala to provide children with
access to books and literacy activities. We train local teachers to use library
resources to weave reading and writing into the fabric of their classrooms.” By
increasing the literacy rate, it is hoped that opportunities for economic
mobility will also increase.
More
information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/help-build-school-libraries-in-rural-guatemala/.
NEXT
STOP: GUINEA
