Personal Security

Back around the time of my original visits to the dental office, I became aware of the ubiquitous presence of bodyguards in this town. As I was sitting outside a café in a swanky area of GC with Francisco the endodontista, he clued me into the fact that the woman walking down the street, being trailed at 15 feet by two men in suits, was a well-to-do woman and her two bodyguards, and that the 4 or 5 men always lingering in the parking lot of the dental office are Flores Asturias’ bodyguards. I had greeted those men in my comings and goings from the office, but never really questioned their purpose. Apparently there is something like three kidnappings per day in GC for ransom money, so the rich, whether they are important politically or not, are always accompanied by guards. The man outside the house across the street from the dental office is the guard left to watch the house of the disgraced CEO of one of the recently folded banks, Banco de Café, now living in Australia to avoid prosecution for his role in the shady dealings leading to the collapse. Because so many people in GC are gun-toting, some years back Francisco bought himself a gun for protection, and would go to the shooting range with Flores Asturias’ bodyguards to practice. He fancied himself a good shot until the went to the shooting range one day and saw dozens of bodyguards practicing, all much much better shots than him. At that point he knew it was useless to try to protect himself with a gun, since bodyguards are actually the perpetrators of many of the organized bank robberies and kidnappings in the city. When those bodyguards aren’t protecting that woman from abduction, they’re kidnapping other people for ransom or probably one day will participate in the abduction of their own client. I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Petén, an area with an even higher prevalence of people just moseying around with guns stuck out of their belts, and according to Francisco the first way men up there will try to impress me will be with their guns. As such, he thought he should take me to a shooting range and teach me how to load and shoot a gun, to demystify the process so I wouldn’t be so easily impressed when I was in the Petén. Well, there wasn’t much risk of that anyway, but I went along with the plan and yesterday afternoon we drove out of GC and went to the shooting range. He was asking me, wasn’t I scared to learn how to shoot a gun? And I was like, uh, well I’m not going to have to shoot at someone, will I? Of course not, but then I told him about an article I’d read in a magazine a while ago, about how in Cambodia you can go to a shooting range and they’ll let anyone with money shoot machine guns, throw hand grenades, and if you pay enough you can use those things on living targets like goats. I think the most expensive option is to use a rocket launcher on a cow. In the end, this shooting range we went to was in such an isolated place near a sand quarry, I think we could have used a goat as a target if it’d just happened to walk across the range. I don’t know what kind of gun it was, but the bullets were 9mm and they loaded into a cartridge that was shoved in the butt of the gun, like in Magnum P.I. So now I have loaded and shot a gun, not well, but I know a little bit about basic gunmanship. And today Francisco is selling his gun, since he realizes that with pros like the bodyguards he has no chance of protecting himself with the gun, and with other regular gun owners like himself a gun is more likely to escalate the regular road rage confrontations into something that gets out of hand. And thus concludes my dental adventures in Guatemala, which in addition to providing much needed relief from pain, has been overall a pretty incredible glimpse into this place.