I'm back from an assignment in Guatemala, going through gigs of footage on hard drives, and scribbled story notes on frayed, coffestained moleskine pages. I'm sorting through everything on a road blog (xeni.net/trek). Emails and comments I received from readers during the trip guided me to story ideas I wouldn't have known about otherwise, and assisted me immeasurably. Here's a roundup of recent journal entries.
* Video: Market report. Quick walk through the mercado central in Antigua, Guatemala, shot on an Altoids-sized camera. Link to 1:11 video (in Flash or Quicktime).
* Travel haiku: homesick fading battery.
* United Fruit Company promotional video, 1950. Bizarre promo film produced by the United Fruit Company just four years before a CIA-backed coup protected that firm's interests in Guatemala by overthrowing democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz. If the company's foreign policy ambitions had a name: Bananifest Destiny.
* Internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup. Various documentary clips found on YouTube, Google Video, and archive.org which relate to the 1954 US-backed coup. Guest cameo by Richard Nixon.
* Is "Apocalypto" Racist? The actual title of the essay was "Is 'Apocalypto' Pornography," but IMO that gives perfectly respectable porn a bad name. (via Tom Zeller/NYT/The Lede).
* Art in response to "femicides". Over 2,000 women were murdered in Guatemala from 2001 through March, 2006. More recent stats show that 600 women died in 2006 alone. While I was in Guatemala, I interviewed government officials and human rights workers about this — thousands of women demonstrated in the capital one day. These crimes are often sexualized and extremely violent, with signs of rape, torture, mutilation or dismemberment. A Mexican-American artist in the Bay Area has launched an interactive art project in response.
* Vintage video about evil volcano near Antigua. Sensationalist '30s newsreel about indigenous people who live at the foot of the "volcano of water" near Antigua, Guatemala. It's strange to see this for three reasons: one, I woke up to this same volcano outside of my window every morning while I stayed in Antigua. Two, the smarmy narrator refers to Mayan people as "human mules," and in other offensive terms. Three, the scenes of daily life in this video don't look much different from life today in Guatemala's more rural communities.
Previous BoingBoing roundups from xeni.net/trek – Guatemala: Link. Videos: Link.
