In the capital, I met a Guatemalan woman friend in a restaurant as arranged. We spoke with voices low; certain words and acronyms were whispered or scribbled on a piece of paper, then crossed out, as we discussed the current situation in development and politics.

Guatemalans are so careful, in contrast to many foreigners, who talk too freely on the phone, use the mail, operate openly.

Are we really safer or are we naïve? Is it because we haven’t seen friends and relatives disappear and never come back? People are still being killed and disappeared, albeit in a more selective way than formerly; the number of deaths and disappearances remains high. Is there a depth of commitment that we, free to leave for home, can never achieve? Is it that we are not touched personally? There are places Guatemalans need military permission to go, while foreigners move around quite freely. Are we deceived by the surface appearance of calm and the promotion of tourism – hence our “immunity”? Perhaps they have evolved their ability to be careful through a Darwinian “survival of the most careful”.

Meanwhile, the political news that makes the Guatemalan media is the campaign of the business community and the right-wing opposition against the tax reforms being brought in by the Christian Democrats. The reforms include progressive indexing so that those with greater income would pay a higher percentage of income tax. The army itself tried and failed to change the tax system two years ago. The Right, out of character to be so concerned for the hungry masses, is arguing that the inflationary effects of their higher taxes would most hurt the poor, who are “suffering already and can’t take anymore.” At the same time they are promoting the economic argument that “what’s good for free enterprise is good for the country,” and making the rich pay would be bad for free enterprise.

Privately, people I talk to decry the manipulation of popular discontent into support for the Right, and the use of this issue as a steam escape valve for discontent. One person went so far as to say that the end purpose of the protest is to make people accept the increased burden, once they have let off steam.

The Left, of course, does not have access to the mainstream media. The closest thing to a Left critique that I’ve seen in the media was a statement by the University that tax reform is needed, but with mechanisms to ensure that the burden is paid by those whose fortunes have increased in the last few years, not passed on to the poor who have been getting poorer.

A price and rent freeze were announced, but the means to enforce them does not exist.

The fact remains that Guatemala has one of the lowest tax rates in the world, as government has been a cheaply-run instrument of the oligarchy. Social programs, if they exist, are poorly funded, or run by foreign aid agencies. If a community wants to build a school, for example, the government will pay half the building costs and give each student one notebook a year. The students must supply everything else, including brooms and mops. There simply aren’t enough schools, and many kids just cannot afford to go.

Another factor in this issue is that government corruption is so entrenched that there is little faith in what it would do with more money.

The price of a pound of beef, meanwhile, is more than the daily minimum wage, which many workers do not even get, so meat has become an unknown luxury for most people.

And a British student of Spanish in Antigua is so concerned with the plight of the dogs that hang around the park that he buys meat and feeds it to them.

Because the Guatemalan government is promoting tourism and its image abroad, foreigners presently enjoy a certain immunity from persecution or forced disappearance. This can lead us to forget that Guatemalans aren’t so privileged, and that these threats are very real to them. We can endanger their security by association if we become known as leftist journalists or solidarity workers or whatever. I heard of a Guatemalan who was killed by a death squad after being interviewed by an American journalist whose views were well known.

To avoid being unwitting tools of the Guatemalan army for weeding out those they consider “subversives”, we owe it to the Guatemalans we meet to be as careful as they are.