Acronyms for Political Parties: Guatemala>USA

Many Guatemalans are upset about the nastiness in Gaza. Big protest of Arab Guatemalans on Friday, in Guatemala City. I took this picture near the language school in Xela.

Went last week to Almilonga, which is a farming town in just outside of Xela, but still in the same department (a department is like a state in the U.S.). There I saw the largest produce I have seen in my life. Because the larger produce is worth more money as an export, most of it heads to other nations in Central America, and southern Mexico, I think for use in restaurants.

Massive carrots for use either as blackjacks, or for restaurants in Oaxaca.

Smaller carrots for use in Guatemalan households.

Here is one of the most intimidating radishes I have seen in my life.

Here are some political signs leftover from the last election. There are many parties here, and no one seems to like any of them, and many of the center-right parties include in their membership former leftist-guerrillas. I don't get it and neither does anyone else I've spoken with. They come up with great acronyms and really neat looking logos, probably because it's a necessary way to distinguish your party from the others. No donkeys and elephants here. Parties with names like CASA, GANA, and PAN. These names actually mean something in this language, and in this way they probably try to hide the bad intentions of the parties.

Here's CASA. Their logo is a house.

The guy who drives us around to futbol games and farms and factories and such is named Oscar. He is really nice, and when I asked him about all the CASA stuff around Almilonga, he said that CASA has a major base of support there because it is a party that represents the indigenous, and Almilonga is mostly indigenous.

Whatever party this is, it scares me.

Okay, I just looked it up and their leader is a former army general and a graduate of the School of the Americas. Ouch.

There is also a party called FRG, who seems to have some base of support just about everywhere. This initialism means nothing, but in the propganda it looks less like "FRG" and more like an unpleasant American slur that I won't type here. FRG is the party of Efrain Rios Montt, who initiated a "scorched earth" campaign of ethnic cleansing during the early 1980's. During a really short period, I think something like a year, he had pretty much every living soul in 400 to 600 towns killed.

Bob Marley just came on the radio in this Internet cafe. And everyone is singing along under their breath.

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