It strikes me upon crossing the border from Guatemala into Mexico that the two countries are built on different scales.

Mexico is big: the bus is bigger, it goes longer distances, it is designed for bigger people.

The landscape is wider. You can see farther in the distance.

The money is bigger: the coins are chunky and heavy, and prices are in the thousands of pesos.

The people are bigger, and louder too, with bigger egos.

As the big bus crosses the wide valley and starts climbing up to the broad plateau of Chiapas, I look back at Guatemala’s mountains in the distance and realize what a small place it is – El Salvador and Nicaragua too – small countries, and poor, very poor.

Yet they find themselves in the vortex of so much international attention, and their fate is decided in the Congress and the boardrooms of powers infinitely mightier than they.

Meanwhile, the daily struggles of life go on for those little people, and the pettiness of their bourgeoisie fills the newspapers as they, too, struggle to survive as a class in the face of all the little people who have had enough.