guate2005vance

01. Travels to Guatemala and Honduras, July 2005

Dangers and annoyances in Guatemala
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It was only after we had booked our tickets that we noticed in the Lonely Planet Guide to Guatemala, Belize & Yucatan, 2004, Guatemala Directory, Dangers and Annoyances, p. 192: "No one could pretend that Guatemala is a safe country - there are just too many stories of robbery (often armed) for that. Rapes and murders of tourists have also happened, but the two most frequently reported types of nasty incident involving tourists are highway robbery, when a vehicle is stopped and its occupants relieved of their belongings, and robberies on walking trails. For a scary litany of recent incidents, visit the website of the US embassy in Guatemala City http://usembassy.state.gov/guatemala and click on 'Recent Crime Incidents Involving Foreigners.' Marginally less alarming information is on the US Department of State's website http://travel.state.gov/travel_warnings.html and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office site http://www.fco.gov.uk ." (unquote)

We checked the web sites. The US State Dept site details violent crimes against Americans: robberies, rapes, 16 murders of Americans recorded in 6 years, and this is only crimes involving Americans. The criminals target tourists. Lonely Planet is not subtle in its warnings about safety in Guatemala. On its web site you can read peoples' nightmare tales, hiking around the shores of Lake Atitlan in particular, guides running away at the sight of machete wielding robbers. Groups running for lives and possessions, some escaping into the lake, others caught on the shore, robbed, the group separated, those in the lake not knowing the fate of those left on shore till much later. Guides clearly have set up their customers as accomplices in the crimes - one woman mentioned that her guide went often on piss breaks into the forest, obviously communicating with brigands stalking there (when they'd done with her they wouldn't let her return by the trail but forced her to find her way off the mountain the hard way). Highway robbery is a constant worry in Guatemala, sometimes involving robbers in police uniforms, suggesting complicacy. These well-documented instances were of real concern to us in our travels there.

One crime reported on the US government site because it involved Americans living in Antigua mentioned that robbers had broken into their house and tied up and raped the women, and robbed the men as they came home from work. I heard a caller report an almost identical crime in Johannesburg on a talk show when driving around South Africa a few years back. It was frightening that here was another country with crime on par with that level of violence.

We got email from friends who had just visited some of the places we were going to. Their impression of the country was in fact effusively positive, encouraging us to make the trip. Like many visitors to Guatemala, they had taken language courses and got quite comfortable traveling around the country. Buried in their travel report was mention of being accosted on one of their walks, we think at Lake Atitlan, and in the course of resisting robbery they were both cut with machetes. It didn't seem to have deterred their continued enjoyment of the country, but it also seems to be part of an overall picture of Guatemala that travelers there need to be aware of.