Central America: Men and Women with Guns
Action
When Josh took this picture of me at a gas station convenience store, his goal wasn’t to capture my joy at hanging out in front of a convenience store. Rather, he wanted to take a picture of the armed guard in the blue uniform by the door. Private security forces were ubiquitous throughout Central America. They guarded banks, stores and delivery trucks. They usually held their rifles ready to use in front of their chests.
Besides seeing guns on the streets, we saw plenty gun-related imagery throughout the region. At the Museum of the Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador, there’s a photo of a group of rebels who were fighting the right-wing government. The caption reads, “Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.” In Chiapas, Mexico, Zapatista dolls were sold on the streets complete with a little stick representing a gun. Several of the murals we saw in Oventic (a Zapatista community in Chiapas) featured guns and bullets:
In Leon, Nicaragua, we saw this image of a mother, her baby and her gun:
Reflection
The abundance of guns is another facet of the cycle of violence that the civil war left behind. Josh has already commented on the violence in Central America produced by post-war society. Ostensibly, the private security guards we saw were armed to protect against that violence. Instead they had the effect of making us more edgy as we explored Central American cities. When the Guatemalan civil war was resolved by peace talks in the mid-1990s, the UN organized a disarmament plan. One of our teachers estimated that about half of the guns were destroyed, one quarter are in the hands of these private security forces and another quarter are on the black market.
I have trouble resolving the practical effects of all the guns on the streets with the joyous imagery of revolutionaries with guns depicted in murals.
Practically, I don’t believe that arming private security guards with machine guns actually makes people safer. I know that in the US, if there is a gun in a home, it is more likely to injure someone who lives in the home than an intruder. I imagine, therefore, that guns used to “protect” stores would actually lead to more violence, for example, accidental shootings and the unintentional injury of innocent by-standers. Josh and I certainly felt uneasy seeing guns slung so casually on the backs of the young guards.
On the other hand, I was surprised at all the joyful gun imagery in Mexico and Nicaragua and El Salvador. I associate obsession with guns in the United States with creepy, kooky hunters (see Bela’s blog from Montana) gangster rap videos, or dangerous paranoia with tragic consequences (for example, suburban high school shootings). While the writers of the U.S. Constitution declared the right to bear arms in order to grant the people a means to combat an oppressive central government, actually taking up arms against the government seemed like a distant, if not archaic, idea to me. To rebels in El Salvador, Chiapas, and Nicaragua, though, taking up arms was a necessary step to asserting their dignity as human beings. The quote at the museum in El Salvador (“Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.”) sounded like a contradiction to me. How can one ensure peace through the threat of violence? On the one hand, I doubted that the private security guards were effectively ensuring peace. On the other hand, the images of revolutionaries smiling jubilantly with their guns stirred me.
Question
What do you think when you see an image of someone joyfully waving around a gun? Does it matter if that person is a Latin American revolutionary or appears in a gangster rap video or is a US soldier?
When Josh took this picture of me at a gas station convenience store, his goal wasn’t to capture my joy at hanging out in front of a convenience store. Rather, he wanted to take a picture of the armed guard in the blue uniform by the door. Private security forces were ubiquitous throughout Central America. They guarded banks, stores and delivery trucks. They usually held their rifles ready to use in front of their chests.
Besides seeing guns on the streets, we saw plenty gun-related imagery throughout the region. At the Museum of the Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador, there’s a photo of a group of rebels who were fighting the right-wing government. The caption reads, “Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.” In Chiapas, Mexico, Zapatista dolls were sold on the streets complete with a little stick representing a gun. Several of the murals we saw in Oventic (a Zapatista community in Chiapas) featured guns and bullets:
In Leon, Nicaragua, we saw this image of a mother, her baby and her gun:
Reflection
The abundance of guns is another facet of the cycle of violence that the civil war left behind. Josh has already commented on the violence in Central America produced by post-war society. Ostensibly, the private security guards we saw were armed to protect against that violence. Instead they had the effect of making us more edgy as we explored Central American cities. When the Guatemalan civil war was resolved by peace talks in the mid-1990s, the UN organized a disarmament plan. One of our teachers estimated that about half of the guns were destroyed, one quarter are in the hands of these private security forces and another quarter are on the black market.
I have trouble resolving the practical effects of all the guns on the streets with the joyous imagery of revolutionaries with guns depicted in murals.
Practically, I don’t believe that arming private security guards with machine guns actually makes people safer. I know that in the US, if there is a gun in a home, it is more likely to injure someone who lives in the home than an intruder. I imagine, therefore, that guns used to “protect” stores would actually lead to more violence, for example, accidental shootings and the unintentional injury of innocent by-standers. Josh and I certainly felt uneasy seeing guns slung so casually on the backs of the young guards.
On the other hand, I was surprised at all the joyful gun imagery in Mexico and Nicaragua and El Salvador. I associate obsession with guns in the United States with creepy, kooky hunters (see Bela’s blog from Montana) gangster rap videos, or dangerous paranoia with tragic consequences (for example, suburban high school shootings). While the writers of the U.S. Constitution declared the right to bear arms in order to grant the people a means to combat an oppressive central government, actually taking up arms against the government seemed like a distant, if not archaic, idea to me. To rebels in El Salvador, Chiapas, and Nicaragua, though, taking up arms was a necessary step to asserting their dignity as human beings. The quote at the museum in El Salvador (“Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.”) sounded like a contradiction to me. How can one ensure peace through the threat of violence? On the one hand, I doubted that the private security guards were effectively ensuring peace. On the other hand, the images of revolutionaries smiling jubilantly with their guns stirred me.
Question
What do you think when you see an image of someone joyfully waving around a gun? Does it matter if that person is a Latin American revolutionary or appears in a gangster rap video or is a US soldier?
2 Comments:
At 5:42 PM, Jen said…
I never feel comfortable around guns. No matter who has them. I don't understand how people can feel safer by owning one. I can see having a gun to hunt for food, but who hunts for food as their sole source of nourishment anymore? And the militia thing is ok - but seriously, I can't imagine Americans today rising up against their government . . . most people are just comfortable enough to accept the status quo . . .
If I watch a movie and there are guns/violence, I feel better about the guns/violence that are part of maybe an "epic" piece, rather than something closer to reality.
I seriously can't watch some violence in movies or tv even. I get teased - I'm pretty pathetic.
I can't even watch movies with talking animals who get separated from their owners, because I get so sad and imagine my poor pets wandering around, lost and hungry and cold. But that's another topic . . . but shows how pathetic I can be :)
At 9:23 AM, lernerm said…
I don't like seeing people with guns be they hunters, revolutionary guards, drug dealers, or whatever. Guns have several purposes, none of which are particularly good - they kill (people, animals)- and unless someone is pointing a gun at you, I can't see how killing is ever justified (and notice how this wouldn't occur if they weren't pointing a GUN at you; if they have a knife, you can at least try to run away or resist them without killing them). The other purpose of guns is to control, to intimidate, to instill fear - none of which is good. The belief that guns protect or offer safety is either incorrect (as you point out, homeowners with guns are more likely to have them used against themselves) or based on the fact that a gun offers protection only because someone else is allowed to have a gun - get rid of all guns, and there's no need for gungs to provide protection. And you know, it's not that difficult to get rid of guns - shut down the factories, provide incentives to turning in guns, instill large and guaranteed penalties for possessing or using a gun - it's doable. So I think the revolutionary guards make a big mistake in using and idolizing guns - it is rare that armed revolution works - sometimes it topples a regime, but often it leads to the installation of an equally oppressive one. I think Ghandi and other nonviolent leaders showed that you can accomplish more without a gun. I believe that without guns (and bombs and the like) the world would be a vastly different place - how many people would be able to slaughter an "enemy" with a knife, And even if you wanted to and were able to use a knife to kill someone, it's hard to committ mass murder (ie war) using just knives, although with effort it can be done (see Crusades and the like). Even our own revolutionary war - we bought freedom at the price of thousands of lives, but one wonders then how the Canadians magaged to become free without resorting to violence. I think a lot of the use of guns in South and LAtin America may have to do with machismo culture - waving a gun in North or South AMerica makes a man look tough, cool, in command - Dirty Harry - instead of appearing like a potentially violent person who is not to be trusted.
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