Guatemala & Mexico Part 2.1 – Armed & Angry Police

This post is the continuation of Guatemala & Mexico Part 1 and Guatemala & Mexico Part 2. At this point in the travel story I have finally made it to Antigua. My plans are to learn Spanish and live a peaceful, “real” Guatemalan life with a local family. I should have known that nothing ever goes as planned.

Antigua – Learning Spanish

Antigua, Guatemala, turned out to be a great little town, very much to my liking. The Black Cat was the perfect hostel for a lonely backpacker who was looking to make some English speaking friends. Before I left from home I had imagined that I would try to find a local family to stay with in the rural areas of Guatemala. This way I would be forced to speak Spanish and at the same time I would experience the “real” life in Guatemala. But after spending a few days in Mexico without understanding one bit of the language I was very appreciative of all the English speaking tourists. So I decided to stay in Antigua for a while and start taking some Spanish lessons there.

One of the other travelers at the Black Cat told me about his Spanish teacher. I don’t remember his name, so I’ll call him Pedro. Pedro was teaching at a language school, but would offer me private classes for a bargain price after his regular work hours. This was a good deal for him, because he wouldn’t have to share the income with the school or pay tax of it. It was also a good deal for me because I got cheap lessons with a great teacher. He was a young man, approximately my own age, he had grown up in a poor family close to Antigua, and was the only person in his family with a steady income. Whatever money he could save was put aside for his own education, and he was dreaming of going to law school one day. All of this made me feel very comfortable with cheating the corrupt Guatemalan government for a little tax income.

For three weeks, four hours a day, I did Spanish lessons with Pedro, my personal teacher. Since this was highly unofficial, we could not stay at his school, so we usually sat a cafe in the city. I was very happy with that solution, and I greatly enjoyed our time together. He taught me a lot about the Guatemalan culture, people, politics and crime. One thing I remember very well is when he told me that he could never take the bus within Guatemala city. He said that as soon as he would be outside of an area where people knew him, he would be in great danger of being killed by gangsters. Since he is a man in his twenties, gang members will by default assume that he is a member of a rival gang, and therefore shoot and kill him before he could do the same to them. Criminal gangs is a huge problem in Guatemala, and Guatemala City in particular.

Another place where these gangs are extremely dangerous, is in Guatemala City’s prisons. Pedro told me a lot about this as well, and described the possible consequences for me, if I would be unfortunate enough to serve time there, in this nice way: “If you go prison in Guatemala City, as a white, foreign man, you will be either dead or pregnant by the time you get out”. This disturbing sentence repeated itself in my head over and over again when I found myself in the backseat of a police truck a few days later.

An Encounter with the Armed & Angry Police

I don’t want to risk any readers getting stuck with the wrong impression here, so in case you are too lazy to finish reading this post, I will inform you right away that I had done nothing criminal. But the police acted like I was a serious danger to their peaceful society. And it all started like most police encounters do; with a few beers. The Black Cat had a great little bar, and was extremely popular amongst the backpackers in Antigua. So I and several of my new friends were having some fun there, before we decided to move on to explore more of the lively nightlife in this town. The time was flying by, and very soon everything seemed to close. Guatemala’s alcohol laws are constantly changing, and at the time I was there it was illegal to serve alcohol after 1 am.

So the whole group I had gone out with, probably 20 people, were all standing out on the street debating what to do. But as soon as we had realized that everything was closed, a guy came up to us and said there was a “secret” after party going on at an abandoned church close by. This sounded very exciting for a group of cheerful, adventurous backpackers, and considering that we were such a big group we didn’t think that he could do us much harm. So we followed him down the street, around a few corners and up to the church. He knocked on the doors, and a few big guys opened the door and collected a small cover charge. Our guy explained to us that this charge was to bribe the police in case they showed up. The after party was illegal because they served alcohol, and most likely also because they had apparently occupied this old church. But the bribes usually worked well, and they had after parties there several days a week. As far as I know it was probably a major income for the local police officers.

We paid the cover charge and entered through a long and narrow hallway into a large and completely packed main room. We were obviously not the only tourists around, and the crowd was probably fifty percent locals and fifty percent travelers. This was apparently not as secret as our guy had told us, but we didn’t care if it was secret or not, as long as we would not get in trouble with the local law. How ironic.

I hadn’t even made it to the bar before people were frantically hushing at each other. Some people were less discreet than others, and when the whole room was completely quiet there was still one guy screaming at the top of his lungs: “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!!”. He was probably the one that alarmed the police that something was going on in there. Which should not be a problem. They have bribed the police, right?

Arrest the Tall and Blond Guy!

Well, the first rumor flowing through the room was that the police is coming in. This rumor was followed by another one saying “don’t worry, this happens every time, they have been bribed and will leave soon”, followed by a third rumor that was told in a way more desperate way: “Get out, this is a different police force, it’s the federal police and they have not been paid off! Get out!”. I was not interested in confronting any police officer and hurried towards the exit. But the long and narrow hall way was completely packed and nobody would move. Being a tall person, I could see everything that was going on over peoples heads. And against my own will I caught the most intense eye contact with one extremely angry police officer. He walked right up to me, told me to face the wall, hands out, legs spread. Ok, I can feel the handcuffs tighten around one arm, he pulls it behind my back and grabs my other arm. Great.

I still did not have any Spanish skills, the police officer did of course not speak English, and even if I could communicate with him, I would probably have chosen not to. I usually have no desire to aggravate people carrying AK47’s with their finger on the trigger. So I stood there without saying one word. My Canadian friend was standing by the entrance and was actually laughing his ass off while he saw me being led out, flanked by one little Guatemalan police officer on each side. He later told me that it looked just like a scene from the Hollywood movie “The Green Mile”, where the enormous giant walks into the prison surrounded by tiny, terrified prison guards. However, my police officers were more likely to be pissed off than scared.

I was put in the back seat of their police truck and expected them to keep filling it up with more tourists. But it turned out that they were happy with arresting the tallest and blondest person in the room. This also had the desired effect to the police, it scared everyone else at the party to quickly leave the building and hurry home. Luckily to me, I had made some very good friends who soon understood that they should do more about this than just laugh. They started some intense negotiating with the police, and did their best to help me out. During these negotiations I was locked in the car, getting frequent updates from my friends through the half opened window. After a while the Canadian guy, Dave, came up to me and explained that they were going to take me to jail in Guatemala City. Just what I was hoping for; rape and murder.

After a while, the police officers got back into the car, still angry, but they quickly cheered up and were obviously talking about me and laughing hard. I had no idea what was going on. I was scared like hell, and did not intend to say one word. My friends had promised that they would call embassies and lawyers and what not. So I decided to put all my faith in them. While my Spanish teacher’s description of Guatemala’s prisons were spinning around in my head, I was sitting in the back of the police car looking out the window. I had no idea where we were going, but we seemed to be driving for a very long time. In the end we finally arrived at a police station.

They walked me through the door, past a desk, and sat me down on the floor by a wall. As soon as my butt touched the ground, I was surrounded by at least 10-15 police men standing in a half circle around me, all pointing their massive automatic guns and rifles at me. I was terrified, but did still not say one word. The guy who appeared to be the chief collected my ID’s, and asked me for my name, where I was from, etc. This actually made me feel better, because those phrases were exactly what I had practiced with my Spanish teacher every day. Though, I had never imagined that this was the situation where I would get to use them.

The chief, as I like to call him, was actually very friendly. He did not say much that I could understand, but he had a nice smile. So I was able to calm down, even though I still had about ten heavily armed officers watching over me. I don’t know exactly how long I sat there on the floor, but I would estimate maybe 45 minutes. Then, to my great surprise and huge relief, two of my new friends from the Black Cat came strolling in. These are honestly two of the nicest people I have ever met in my life, one was Swiss and one was Swedish. To me, they were bravely walking into the lion’s den, when they entered this police station. And I had no idea at all how they had found me, but I felt confident that they would soon be sitting handcuffed on the floor next to me.

The end

Fortunately, the Swiss and the Swede had way more Spanish skills than I did, and they had a long conversation with the chief. After a short while their nice-ness had contaminated all of the police officers in the room, they were all laughing and being friendly with each other. This was the best thing that could have happened to me, and suddenly I found myself standing in the door, handcuffs off, and shaking hands with the police officer. They let me go without any explanation at all to what had just happened. But I didn’t care, I was free, alive and not pregnant.

Later that night I found out more of what had been happening. I had been arrested for “disturbance of the public peace”, or whatever they call it. When I thought they had been driving me to Guatemala City, they had actually only been circling around in Antigua. And the police station where my friends found me was just a few blocks away from the Black Cat. Arresting me was probably a symbolic act of the police to scare people out of the building. And by the way, the abandoned church did not look like a church at all to me. It looked more like a storage building, but I guess “abandoned church” sounded cooler and was easier to advertise to adventurous tourists. I also learned that one of my friends had actually called his Uncle at the Canadian embassy in some other Central American country, and a local girl had called and woken up her lawyer friend who had promised to work on my case the following day. The lawyer had also predicted that I would be in deep trouble. I’m happy that he was wrong.