Burping for Jesus

In San Cristóbal, Chiapas, which is most famous for being the home of the Zapatistas. Not seen any yet so no appearances on hostage videos for the timebeing. Instead I´ve spent today cruising round Mayan villages including one (Chamula) where they´ve given up any pretence of Christianity and instead just do their version of the whole Mayan thing. For the most part this involves burning lots of candles, chanting, and downing bottles of coca cola so that they can burp out evil spirits. Apart from this last bit, it could almost be like church back home. Apparently coke works because the spirits are afraid of carbonated water. But some (mostly the men) insist on using the traditional method of distilled sugarcane.

So basically I went to a church full of drunks drinking rum and coke and waving their arms around. The pope has said that this isn´t Christian enough and excommunicated them; they´ve said they don´t care.

On the way out, I also saw an old dear very discretely, but firmly, sacrifice a chicken. Which was pretty grim. Nice villages round San Cristóbal, but this is no Mayan paradise. In Chamula the women can´t vote, the men can marry as often as they want, there´s no birth control, post-11 education is limited to boys, and they expel anyone who doesn´t practice their Mayan ways or who marries an outsider. 30,000 people and counting. Apparently they´re all very happy; I wandered round thinking about false consciousness (and blaming Ray Mears).

Not all the villages are like that though. One, called Zinacantan, had had its own little reformation in the 1960s when they realised they could make lots of money from flowers and didn´t have to throttle any chicken. Now they run a kind of flower mafia across the Yucatán. They also had a very nice church (with great floral displays, obviously).

On to Palenque tomorrow where I´ll wait out Hurricane Dean. Sounds very cool, but in fact I think it´ll just involve getting absolutely soaked by tropical thunderstorms.

Bye for now.