On the road with the Pied-Piper of Panajachel

A routine trip in Guatemala turned into a hair-raising journey with an ex-CIA mapmaker. 

The road twisted in tight, taught switchbacks down into the valley floor before disappearing into a river.

The van quaked and groaned as the driver downshifted to slow the hurtling vehicle, and we banked torpidly around corners which aging yellow hazard signs identified as being curvas peligrosas — dangerous curves. We slowed to a crawl approaching the river. There hadn’t been another car on the road for the last 25 minutes, and it was hard to tell the depth of the water that the tarmac sank into. On the other side, a rutted gravel path emerged from the river. The blacktop, cleaved jaggedly in half, fell away abruptly into the torrent.

“That happened back in the last big earthquake,” Sam, wiry, leathery and in his early 80s said, his old Brooklyn accent still detectable despite the decades of tropical living. Go back far enough in geological time, he continued, and this whole valley used to be part of Lake Atitlan. Earthquake after earthquake gradually separated this rift from the great expanse of the lake, but the striated sedimentary rock still bore testament to millennia of rains and waves. We were learning that despite his appearance and lack of credentials, Sam was the foremost expert on Guatemala’s geologic history.

We were bouncing through a river on the old Patzun road because Latin America’s main highway, the Carreterra Panamericana, was shut by protesting teachers at the Los Encuentros fork, where the Carreterra joins the road winding up from Lake Atitlan and the departmental seat of Solola. The teachers’ union goes on strike every January, but the protests were dragging on. They had begun in the capital with tens of thousands of teachers calling for raises and improvements to schools, but the government had been slow to act, and so they had fanned out through the nation’s main corridors with the goal of stopping commerce and travel until their demands were met. The result was that our motley party of 15 was two hours behind schedule and had plenty of time to talk while navigating around illegal mining works, rivers and livestock.

Sam and his traveling companion, Guido, were unfazed by the unusual route. Sam matter-of-factly said that the Patzun road had been the primary way to get from the capital to Panajachel and Lake Atitlan before the construction of the Carreterra. He was confused, however, by the small towns we passed through — “none of these were here last time I was,” he said, motioning to dusty roadside tiendas. Guido and Sam had been friends for 25 years, although Sam had been in Guatemala far longer than that. He married his Guatemalan wife 55 years ago according to Guido (Sam deferred to Guido for any personal details), and was certainly in the country long before that.

Guatemala is full of American expatriates. Around the lake, the majority are crusty old hippies who moved south in their youth, sometimes temporarily, and then got sucked into a vegetative existence of smoking dope, growing organic vegetables, and meditating. These are the types who will talk to you for three hours about the cosmic energies of the lake and who eschew baths as contrivances of capitalist “civilization.” Guido and Sam were not in this category.

Of the two, Guido was the more transparent. He bore himself with the laid back air of a west coast native, and he explained benignly that although he had been traveling in Guatemala for many years, and had lived in the village of Jaibalito on the lake’s shore off and on, he now called Mesa, Arizona home. His clothing was unremarkable except for a skullcap of colorful Guatemalan textiles. While he normally stayed in a house in Jaibalito, he wouldn’t be doing that this year — he was going to stay in the big town on the lake, Panajachel.

Guido also had a large case of musical instruments. “It’s a saxophone, a trumpet and a clarinet,” he intoned mildly as we careened around a dangerous curve during the descent towards the river.

“Why don’t you play us something on our way down,” a slightly terrified passenger joked. It was a 100 foot drop straight down from the edge of the road. There were no guardrails.

Sam laughed maniacally, “Ha! Call him the Pied-Piper of Panajachel! Leading us all, who knows where!” He paused a moment before adding that while he didn’t know about the rest of us, he would probably be going to hell.

The reason for the oddball instruments soon became clear: for however many years, Guido had supplied musical instruments to a school in Jaibalito, “I buy them and then get them fixed in the U.S.”

“No matter what he acts like, he sells them at a loss,” Sam enjoined.

While he used to rent a house in Jaibalito, Guido said he wouldn’t be going back there except to deliver the instruments this year. He had run into some trouble.

“They took me there to the basketball court, right in the middle of town, and they told me to get out … said if I didn’t they’d soak me in gasoline and light it.”

He and Sam both agreed that there was always “anti-gringo sentiment” in Guatemala. The ringleader of the villages, they said, was a man named José, who is “a murderer and a rapist,” according to Guido. He was also, tiny, they said. “They’re efficient here — why have two criminals when you can have one,” Sam said gleefully.

Yet, for whatever “anti-gringo sentiment” exists in Guatemala, Sam and Guido dished back more than enough virulent racism to explain its origins. “They’re all mongoloids” Sam said after regaling us with a tale of a man who was crushed by a falling boulder. “Goddamn if his idiot kids didn’t take over his business.” Earlier on the ride, Sam pointed out a group of day-laborers with a racist epithet. At the same time, he called his Guatemalan wife of 55 years “The most beautiful woman in the world. Seriously.”

Yet Sam’s love-hate relationship with Guatemala and its people has its roots deep in his past. As we turned from the main road and began our meandering way through the mountains, one nervous passenger unfolded her “National Geographic Adventure Map” of Guatemala. Sam quickly asked to see it — “I was a mapmaker way back. I made the first maps of Guatemala. This thing is based on my work.”

Sam’s knowledge of every twist in the road was encyclopedic, better than the driver’s at many turns, and it only wavered when we entered towns with recent construction. His recall of directions, names and obscure facts about local monoculture and bakeries supported his claim to be the first mapmaker in Guatemala.

“They only grew onions here before the Carreterra,” he said at one town. Crossing over a bridge, “This was built by one of our more illustrious dictators. Say what you will about him, but it’s still standing.”

I asked him how he had become a mapmaker.

“Well, let me put it to you like this,” Sam said, “I’m no Edward Snowden, so I won’t tell you.”

The implication was clear — Sam was the CIA’s mapmaker in Guatemala in the years before the CIA orchestrated coup in 1954. Of course, it’s possible that he was lying (“Don’t trust me!”), yet his knowledge and timeline in Guatemala supported his claim. Sam said he first came to Guatemala while on the run from the law, for what he didn’t say, and he made reference to spending some time in Sing Sing before his life as an expatriate. Shady work, like that of a spook, did not seem to bother him on an ideological level.

It’s impossible to verify Sam’s claims. He wouldn’t give his last name or agree to a formal interview. His only friend in the world, Guido, has only known him for 25 years and would be unable to confirm Sam’s distant past. There are surely many Guatemalans who know Sam, although perhaps by another name, yet they are equally unreachable — either suspicious of outsiders (and no wonder why), speaking only indigenous dialects, or hidden away in remote villages.

Sam represents an extreme in the American expatriate community in Guatemala — he was never a freewheeling spiritualist. With a possibly criminal background, and likely involvement in a coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, Sam’s work and life in Guatemala was undeniably of a neocolonial nature. Most would say he made the nation a worse place to live. If he is to be believed, Sam is an essential, yet untestable, strand of Guatemala’s history. When asked where he is from, Sam answers, “Here, Guatemala.” Extracting his Brooklyn origins is a herculean task of espionage.

A day later, I sat in a small, casual German restaurant eating fried potatoes and enjoying the pleasant lakeside ambiance of Jaibalito. Whatever trouble Guido and Sam had gotten into, I couldn’t see any signs of it now. The town was welcoming and quiet. There was no mob on the basketball court. It seems that whatever beef Guido and Sam had with the locals, it was personal in nature and bred from decades of poor relations. It was a product of history, if it happened at all.

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