Hey All. I recently returned from Guatemala after spending a little over a month there. While learning Spanish and volunteering in hospitals I had time to meet a lot of interesting people. I soon came to find out that there were two main types of Americans there in Guatemala and possible a third type. The first was similar to me just a typical tourist helping, learning or doing a combination of these. The second type was from my opinion a very liberal, leftist leaning/liberal hippie/suffer type. Not that I had anything against these guys…but they all seemed to be US government conspiracy theorists particularly in regards to Guatemala i.e. many of them thought the US government deliberately had people killed in Guatemala in the 80s to keep the all powerful American Fruit companies on top. Also they claim that the US also had people killed in order to keep a democratic government in Guatemala. Many of them were VERY angry at the US government for it’s past acts in Guatemala…and thus they saw the war in Iraq as another example of the lies and manipulations of the government. One guy told me he is going leave the US for good if GW gets another term in office. They also contended that many Guatemalans were schooled in the famous “school of the americas” including Rios Montt who mass murdered 20,000 myans. Of course I listened to all of this with an open mind but found it hard to believe. One of my friends argued with them but they never really offered any hard evidence of all of this. Does anyone know about this? Can anyone confirm or deny? Is their any evidence of this? Thanks
PS the 3rd type I was told were criminals running from the US government.