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From “Life in the Damn Tropics” by David Unger:(page 110)
“Panajachel had been a sleepy Cakchiquel village and an upscale artist retreat through the sixties. By the early seventies, American hippies had discovered it; they came caravaning down the Pan American Highway in Volkswagen vans outfitted with sleeping bunks, cooking facilities, and a year’s supply of marijuana. When they first came to Guatemala to escape the winter, the Vietnam draft , or whatever else they were eluding, these long-haired creatures had aroused little interest. They settled into the most tumbledown motels or else drove their vans right to the water’s edge. They arrived with beads, headbands, blue jeans, and paisely blouses, and within days they were dressed like the native Indians who farmed the nearby fields. At first the Indians, speaking in Cakchiquel, would point and laugh at the hippies-they had never seen white people dressed in huipiles and wraparound skirts. After a while, however, the novelty wore off and the hippies became part of the landscape.”
“Trouble developed when the lakeshore was converted into a van parking lot and the surrounding fields into shitholes. Wealthy Guatemalans, having invested thousands to live in a remote earthly paradise, decided it was time to fight back.”
“The Guatemalan dailies alternated between grim accounts of the army’s succes in liquidating the Communist threats (students, labor leaders, university professors) at San Carlos University and the comical guerilla war between the hippies and Panajachel’s local police. As the police conducted sweeps, the hippies would retreat to the hillside town of Solola; as soon as the police disappeared, the hippies would sneak back down. Full-spread pictures captured the tug-of-war; flowers vs. rifles; till a hippie was shot in his bare behind while shitting and bled to death.”
“To stave off further protests, the army was called in to rout the remaining campers. Signs were posted everywhere:
1. No overnight camping on the lake shore
2. No nude bathing
3.No defecating in public areas”
“Rich Guatemalans were elated. For years they had tried to throw the local Indians off their ancestral lands by manipulating the judicial system, but now the police would be their agents: after all, the Indians lived by the lake, bathed in its waters, and shat wherever they could. The Indian and hippie infestations were simultaneously removed.”
“Visas were restricted to thirty days and no one was allowed into Guatemala without a ticket out. At the borders, you had to prove you had at least five hundred dollars. No one with hair covering the ears or below the neck was permitted in the country; barber shops sprouted on the border and before-and-after pictures of hippies became daily features in the press. The hippie spigot was reduced to a trickle of several dozen shaven heads. And the vestigial hippie force opened vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, shops that sold used Indian fabrics to the weekend tourist.”
(Photo from Amazon.com, film produced by Maya Media :