the guatemalan elections

I read about the elections every day when I was in Guatemala this summer. Under Guatemalan law a president is limited to one 4 year term so that means a new president every four years. This year there were 14 or so candidates running and on September 9th it was no surprise that no one candidate garnered over 50% of the vote. To avoid having elected presidents who receive less than a majority of the vote, many countries have run-off elections between the top 2 candidates. In Guatemala, this matches the center-left Alvaro Colom who is running for his third straight time against former general Otto Perez Molina.

In Guatemala where 56% of the country lives in poverty and a large percentage of population is illiterate - the primary way of voting is putting an X through a political party's emblem. When I first arrived in Guatemala I thought that opposing factions had crossed out advertisements for competing political parties but only later did I learn that this tactic was trying to get people to vote for a particular party. This means that graphic design is a major component of elections in Guatemala. Here are the two emblems for UNE and Partido Patriota, the parties of the two remaining candidates in the election.


Are these images loaded with symbolism? You bet they are. UNE loosely translated into English is the National Hope Party. Partido Patriota is the Patriotic Party and their slogan is Mano Dura or the Strong Hand. Is it something to have a clinched white fist be a symbol of a dominant political party in a country where half of the population is indigenous Mayan? I would think so.

This has been a particularly bloody campaign in Guatemala. The 40+ year civil war there ended in the early 1990s. Running for a political position can be a very dangerous proposition. More than 50 candidates, activists, and their relatives were killed in the run-up to this election. Here's a Washington Post article on the violence in the months before the election and here's election reports from the Washington Post and the BBC. I'll be keeping track of the run-off election and will keep you all posted. If I were one to make political predictions, I am almost certain that Otto Perez Molina will win the election in November.

who's afraid of google?

well, I am - at least a little bit. Of course that doesn't stop me from using and thoroughly enjoying google applications such as Googe Earth, Google Maps, and of course this blog. I'm still waiting for Google Marc to come out to render what I do at least academically completely useless. Did you know that Google's motto is "don't be evil"? I sure didn't. Check out the article in the Economist.

the prescience of fall

It is an impressive feat to write a song or collection of songs that captures or expresses the emotions of a particular time. Bruce Springsteen's The Rising is a tremendous creation following in the wake of 11 September 2007. It is an entirely different accomplishment to write a song before an event occurs that comes to be inextricably connected to the subsequent event.

One that comes to mind is Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends. Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke and Kanye West's declaration "George Bush doesn't care about black people" televised live on NBC captured in many and varied ways the frustration, horror, and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. I associate Green Day's song very closely with Hurricane Katrina. Wake Me Up When September Ends was released in Summer 2005 with a video depicting the horror of war and was still on the radio when Katrina hit, and while Katrina made landfall on August 29 it was the month of September that seemed to last forever.

summer has come and passed
the innocent can never last
wake me up when september ends

like my fathers come to pass
seven years has gone so fast
wake me up when september ends

here comes the rain again
falling from the stars
drenched in my pain again
becoming who we are

as my memory rests
but never forgets what I lost
wake me up when september ends

Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released for free on the band's website in November 2001 and all of the songs had been written before September 11. For me the song Ashes of American Flags epitomizes the emotions of that time.

I would like to salute
the ashes of american flags
and all the fallen leaves
filling up shopping bags

Mbuji-Mayi: the Chicago of the 21st century?

As I was reading Mike Davis's Planet of Slums this summer I was struck by one particular paragraph. In discussing the rapid urbanization in much of the so-called third world, Davis wrote about the stunning growth of a city named Mbuji-Mayi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - the central African country formerly known as Zaire. Davis writes of this rapid growth: "Most spectacular, perhaps, has been the transformation of the bleak Congolese diamond-trading center of Mbuji-Mayi from a small town of 25,000 in 1960 into a contemporary metropolis of 2 million, with growth occurring mostly in the last decade" (8).

This growth pattern made me think immediately of Chicago. When it was founded in 1833 Chicago had a population of just over 300 people. By the 1893 Columbian Exposition the 'second city' of the United States had grown to well over 1 million people. Although Chicago and Mbuji-Mayi share similar patterns of metropolitan growth and both serve as centers of industry the differences between the two cities could not be greater. I can safely say that the vast majority of people in the world have never heard of Mbuji-Mayi. It is stunning how a difference of 100 years can render such incredible urban growth to relative obscurity.

Searching around the internet for information on the DRC city yields little additional insight. The wikipedia page for Mbuji-Mayi, a source which typically contains a decent amount of information, is just a few sentences long. The primary reason for the city's tremendous growth is because of the mining industry and in particular the diamond mines. One site claimed that Mbuji-Mayi is responsible for 10% of the world's diamond production by weight but I'm not sure how accurate that statistic is. Wikipedia notes: "The city remains extremely remote for its huge population, with little connection to the outside world." The lack of information is underscored by the uncertainty over the city's population. Mike Davis states that the metropolis of Mbuji-Mayi contains 2 million people, wikipedia has the stunning figure of 3.8 million, and answers.com says there are just over 1 million inhabitants.

As a formerly Belgian colony, there seems to be some information on this mining site. I still am baffled that there is a city that multiplied its population 80 times since 1960 to well over 2 million today that I had never heard of - but perhaps that is just life in the urban millennium.