Featured Stories

Earlier this spring news reached out from a mountain city in Pakistan to my small apartment in Guatemala, as it did all over the world, that Osama bin Laden was dead. I was alone as the message first appeared on the Facebook page I let idle in the background when I’m working.

I put aside an… »

Next to an ancestor cross, where Ixil priests make regular offerings, lives one of Nebaj’s better-known financial speculators. Doña Alfonsa (not her real name) has eight children and sells food in the market. She doesn’t own a motor vehicle but she does have a cell phone. Her story is well-known because she has repeatedly apologized… »

On May 10 2009 a prominent Guatemalan attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was gunned down in broad daylight while riding his bicycle down a busy, tree-lined boulevard in a wealthy residential district of Guatemala City. But this wasn’t just another killing in a homicide-plagued country. On May 11, 2009 Guatemalan television aired a pre-recorded video in which… »

On my first night in Guatemala, I sat at the circular bar in El Portal, a little café on Antigua’s parque central, watching women in long skirts with complicated patterns make their way from bench to bench selling necklaces. Lights illuminated the pillars of the white cathedral, and water arched from a fountain in the… »

A few decades back, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great pragmatic philosophers of the 20th Century, wrote an essay entitled “The Hedgehog and The Fox.” The title comes from a poem by Archilochus, written in the 7th Century, B.C.E. in which the ancient fabler noted, “The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one… »

If you were in Guatemala on June 28th of this year, you likely heard a rather loud bump in the night coming from our South Eastern border. That evening the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted from his bedchambers, still in his jammies, and hustled off to Costa Rica on a one-way flight, courtesy of… »

One of the most notable characteristics of 21st century Havana is what is not there: obvious and visible destitution. The begging and aggressive peddling prevalent in so many poor Latin capitals (and in most US cities) is entirely absent in Havana. There are no homeless people sleeping under bridges or hidden in doorways, no stumbling… »

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… »

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation. – Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather… »

The farmers said they left the building feeling dejected. Their application for a coffee export license had been denied by Anacafé a third time. The process started about six months before when Jorge, not a coffee farmer himself but a resourceful man who had offered to help, went to the Anacafé office to learn what… »