17 December 2012
The Lacandón Indians who hold title to the vast jungles
bordering Guatemala in eastern Chiapas are mostly Presbyterians, Evangelicals,
and Charismatics, though some witness for Jehovah and a few, presumably, remain
Catholic. It stands to reason that all the varieties of Christianity as
practiced in these parts incorporate vestiges (or even more substantial
elements) of the Lacandón’s pre-European brand of pan-Mayan religion. To our
knowledge, none of the Lacandón have become Jews, though if they had, and were
serious about adhering to the kosher rules, they probably don’t eat huaqueques.
As I write this the Presbyterian church up the road from the
Nueva Alianza eco-lodge is sharing it’s evening hymn service with this part of
the town via low-fidelity loud speaker with a very powerful woofer. Before
sitting down at the computer I walked for an hour through the trees above the
high bank of the Usumacinta River here in Frontera Corozal, listening to the
piercing laughter of the Corozal kids splashing each other in the shallows
where the lanchas pull up on the
sand, and to the even more piercing roars of the howler monkeys across the
river in Guatemala. It is late afternoon, and the work of ferrying tourists an
hour down river to Yaxchilán is over, and it is time for families to relax on
the river bank, women, men, and older children stripped to their underwear, the
toddlers clad in what they were born with, the kids playing tag in the
shallows, the parents sitting on the sand snacking on fruit or bags of potato
chips. I counted 55 lanchas tied up
in a line, their pointed prows pulled onto the sand, the rainbow of their
outboard motors bobbing in the current. The tourists we saw at Yaxchilán today would
have fit into a half dozen lanchas at
most. Business is bad. The media in Europe, as in the US, paint Mexico as the
second most dangerous place on the planet, after Afghanistan, and if you’ve
enlisted as a combatant on either side of the narco wars, maybe it is. But if
you’re a non-target, then for most people, in most places, at most times, it’s
a non-issue. Life goes tranquilly on. We feel as safe here as we do almost
anywhere in the States.
Frontera Corozal is on a once-and-future paved road that descends
twenty kilometers from the frontier highway to the riverbank. Bits of the road
look like they may have been paved at sometime in the past, for there are
occasional patches of what must have been asphalt, and when the sun hits the
potholed track just right we think we see faint traces of a yellow line in the
center. But it may just be our mind playing tricks. We’re sure this road will
be (re)paved someday. Corozal is a good-sized town, a high school teacher named
Rigoberto told me this afternoon. I met him down by the boats. His wife sat
waist deep in the water while their three-year-old son, also named Rigoberto,
pranced around her with a shaped stick he proudly exhibited to me as his boat. A
high school and three elementary schools, he said. Corozal doesn’t seem that
big to us, maybe because the only businesses along the paved street are three
tiny abarrotes, convenience stores
selling six cans of this, bottled water and soft drinks, toilet paper, and a
few onions and tomatoes; but the houses spread out along a grid of yellow dirt
roads, each one

on a plot large enough to hold a couple of fruit trees and a
dozen chickens. Still, the town needs a paved road to the outside world. And
besides, even though Corozal is in the remotest southern fringe of the country,
the ruins of Yaxchilán are too valuable to the tourism economy for the
government to leave this place frustratingly difficult to reach. It is
understandable why there is no road to Yaxchilán itself. Part of the
enchantment for tourists is Yaxchilán’s far-offness, and a key element in creating
that sense of exotic isolation is that the ruins can only be accessed by river.
The Nueva Alianza eco-lodge, like the higher priced Escudo
Jaguar, named for one of Yaxchilán’s rulers, which is on the river bank on the
other side of Frontera Corozal’s singled paved street, is owned and managed by
the Lacandón. As are the lanchas. The
point is underscored when you roll into town: it costs 15 pesos for a one-day
residence permit in Lacandón territory. If you recall the Zapatista National
Liberation Movement [EZLN] of the mid 1990s in Chiapas, which was led by the
elusive, masked, and mysterious sub-comandante Marcos and focused in large
measure in stopping the ecological rape of Chiapas by outside loggers and
cattle ranchers, you may remember that one of the outcomes was Mexico’s central
government recognizing the Lacandón territory in Eastern Chiapas as a
semi-autonomous region. So the Lacandón control access to the area’s major eco
attractions (waterfalls and a remote lake), and archaeological sites. To get
into Bonampak to see the best-preserved pre-Columbian painted murals in all the
Americas, you have to pay 70 pesos each to jounce over fifteen kilometers of
dirt road in a rattletrap combi owned and piloted by a Lancandon driver. To get
to Yaxchilan, you go in a Lacandón lancha.

Which is what we did, this morning, sharing the lancha with Enrique and Jesús, two
Mexican college students from Mexico City, and a second Jesús, closer to our
age, a Catalán world-traveling businessman turned tax-assessor from Tarragona. Enrique,
after looking into his thin wallet and conferring with the younger Jesús,
negotiates the price down to 600 pesos. We descend the riverbank to the
embarcadero and climb into the lancha,
a long narrow boat with a pointed snout, benches along the sides and the center
roofed like a thatched Quonset hut to shield us from sun and rain. We strap on
our bright orange life vests, and our boatman pushes off from the bank, fires
up the outboard, and putts into midstream where he pulls to full throttle. The
banks rush by on both sides. The Usumacinta is Mexico’s largest river. In fact,
it is the largest river between the Mississippi and Venezuela’s Orinoco, and
even here, over a hundred kilometers from the coast, it carries a lot of water,
water moving fast enough that when it hits a protruding snag it throws up a
plume and leaves a roil that trails 20 meters downstream.
On the riverbank near Corozal groups of women are washing
clothes, pounding them against flat stones anchored in the sand. But five
minutes down river all we see on both banks is jungle, with an occasional gap
allowing a glimpse of cornstalks gone brown or a row of fruit trees bare except
for a few tenacious leaves. The trees at the edge of the jungle are sheathed in
vines, closing the stage behind them like a thick green scrim. Behind them rise
second-story trees, many of them covered with pale violet or yellow flowers.
Every few hundred yards rises a massive upper story tree. These giants are
supported by triangular shaped buttresses of roots, and their higher branches
trail lianas that drop 80 or 90 feet to the ground looking for new places to
root and spread. The stateliest are the ceibas,
their round grey trunks, smooth as paper except for the bottom 3 meters or so
that are covered with stubby thorns to discourage predators from reaching the
world on top. On a gravel bar separated from the riverbank by a few feet of
foaming water, a great blue heron stands motionless waiting for anything within
his reach to twitch in a way that announces “Lunch.” The boat slows, the pilot
points to a sand bar where a river crocodile, half as long as our lancha, eyes us warily and then slithers
slowly into the river. There is no danger, but we pull in our hands and elbows.
Tropical mockingbirds, boat-tailed grackles, and a raucous flock of squawking
parrots pass overhead. Depending on the Usumacinta’s depth, we hug first the
Mexican and then the Guatemalan banks.
After nearly an hour, through a break in the trees we glimpse
the steps of a small pyramid. We round a bend in the river, and to our left
there is a lancha pulled up onto the
sand. Beside it a flight of concrete steps climbs to a narrow crack in the
green wall. We dock, take off our life vests, and make sure we have our hats
and cameras and water bottles. Our pilot will wait, telling us that he expects
our visit to take about two hours.
We pass a small building serving as headquarters for the
INAH staff (National Institute of Archaeology and History –by law they administer
almost all ancient sites). We pause at a large site-map and a few informational
placards, then start up a foggy, green-swathed trail toward the main ruins. In
the distance we hear howler monkeys roaring. They could be a hundred or a
thousand meters away: their roar is the loudest thing in the jungle and it
seems to travel forever.
“Rooooaaaaaaarrrrrr: this is my family’s tree. You guys keep
your distance.”
“Rooaaooaarrrrr: Alright, as long as you keep yours. And by
the way, good morning.”
I haven’t taken ten steps when I hear three birdcalls I have
never heard before. Their makers are so deep into the green that there is no
point in trying to search with my binoculars. Then young Jesús points to
something woodchuck size that is waddling out of the understory to the left of
the trail. A minute later, it is followed by a second one. Smooth skin, pug
nose, porcine eyes, long tail. To me they look like halfway between a
stereotypical piggy bank and a rubbery pigmy hippopotamus. In a moment, before
we can fumble our cameras into shooting position, they have crossed the trail
and disappeared into the woods.
I walk back to the INAH headquarters to ask one of the two rangers
who are sitting on plastic chairs in the shade.
“They’re huaqueques.”
“How’s that again?”
“Huaqueques. That’s what we call them around here. Fat? This
big?” he measures with his two hands. “With long thin tails?”
We nod.
“Yes, huaqueques. Big rodents. Some people call them
agoutis.”
“Hunh. Um, do people hunt them? Eat them?”
“Eat them? Well, yes, some do. Some people do.”
The some people probably are Presbyterians. People who when
offered a fat little huaqueque with lots of meat on its bones don’t stop to
think about kosher regulations.
Linda and I, Enrique, and the two Jesúses spend the next two
hours wandering Yaxchilán in awe. Almost until the end, we have the site to ourselves.
We are silent, but the central ceremonial plaza is as noisy as Times Square.
Constant bird calls. The roars of howler monkeys from the hills in front, from
our left, from right overhead. Flashes of color in the heights: brown jays, a fire
truck red summer tanager, a striped aracari, the bird that would have the
longest, t
hickest, brightest colored beak in the jungle if it weren’t for his
cousins the toucans. And the site itself?
It sits on a horseshoe bend of the Usamacinta, on a hill from
which its rulers dominated much of southern Chiapas and northern Guatemala. Its
glory time was the eighth century, when Europe was still sputtering in the Visigoth
dark ages. Yaxchilán’s site is militarily favored, strategically ideal, and
Yaxchilán’s rulers grew rich from tribute extracted from subjugated peoples,
and by trading with distant nations up and down the Usumacinta. But then
something happened, and despite a century now of archaeology, no one knows
precisely what. The last datable glyph here marks the year 810. Shortly after
that Yaxchilán seems to have been abandoned as a city.
Not destroyed, abandoned. And, eventually, reclaimed by
nature. In these parts, men never really conquer nature, they just briefly
interrupt it. Liana covered trees rise from the middle of flights of stairs.
The triangular buttress roots of ceibas push aside courses of foundation
stones. The trails of leafcutter ants crisscross the ground where feathered
princes walked. There are suburbs here, spreading for a kilometer into the
jungle the surveyors say, but for us they are locked behind the green wall.
And though much has crumbled, and all is clothed in slippery
green lichens, ferns, and mold, what’s left is pretty spectacular. Three, count
them three, acropolis clusters, with temples atop near-vertical staircases that
climb 30 to 60 meters above the open plazas at their feet. Yaxchilán’s
architects decorated their temples with honeycombed stone screens, four, and
five, and six layers high, each one situated, it seems, for maximum visual
effect. In the plazas, steles: flat stone slabs ranging from the size of Ping-Pong
tables to two-story buildings, carved in low relief with the figures of Mayan
kings and deities. Most of the elements of Yaxchilán we’ve seen before, except
perhaps for the honeycomb cornices. But, once again, what silences us is the
interplay of light and shadow, of green and stone, of warblers and aracaris, of
trailing lianas, yawning doorways, and a quail-like tinamous that scurries into
the bush.
As we are about to head back to the embarcadero to look for
our boatman, Enrique scampers excitedly to the top of a crumbling minor temple
and points to the high spreading crown of the king ceiba in the middle of the plaza. It’s a family of howler monkeys:
the little ones swinging from branch to branch, the mothers watching them
warily, the men snoozing in the mid-morning dappled light. Then Enrique points
to another tree, next to the temple behind him. It’s a family of spider
monkeys, their arms and legs seemingly twice as long as the howlers’, lazily
snacking on bits of green and the tiny fruits that hang from the highest
branches.
A few more photos and it’s time. We cross the plaza, enter
the green tunnel of the entrance trail, and point ourselves toward the blinding
circle of light that announces the riverbank. Five sets of tourist eyes peer
into the under story on both sides of the trail, but there are no tasty little
huaqueques to be seen . . . They’d be safe from me, but who knows about my
colleagues?
David & Linda