Guy:  Hey, I heard you have a lot of friends who can fix things….

DM:  Maybe.

Guy:  I have this problem with a car, I bought it in El Salvador, but I never got any paperwork for it.  I want to bring it to Guate and have it fully, you know, legal.

DM:  I see.  What kind of car is it, and how much is it worth?

Guy:  It’s a 200X [obscured] and its probably worth about $12,000 in the US.

DM:  And you have absolutely nothing for it at all?

Guy:  Nada.

DM:  I’ll get back to you.

The next day:

DM:  Hey man, I think we can take care of the problem.

Guy:  Really?  Wow, that’s cool.

DM:  Yeah, it’s going to cost you about Q2500 plus my fee.

Guy:  Q2500?!  That’s great.  What’s your fee?

DM:  Well, just remember that I helped you and one day I may call on you for a favor….

Guy:  Haha.  No, really, how much do you want?

DM:  I’m serious.

Guy:  Uh, I don’t know, that’s kind of…scary.

DM:  Ok, I understand.  Good luck with the car.

Guy:  Okay, okay!  Whatever you want.

DM:  Give me all the info on your car plus your passport and my guy will call you in about a week.

Guy: Oh, my passport?

DM: Yeah dude, I need your passport.

Guy:  Can I give you a copy?

DM:  No, I need the original.  Why, is that a problem?

Guy:  Well, yeah, you see, I’ve been here in Guate for awhile without renewing my VISA.

DM:  How long?

Guy:  Oh, about a year.

DM:  Dude, that’s Q3600 in fines.

Guy:  Oh, man!

DM:  How were you planning on going back to El Salvador to bring the car back?

Guy:  They don’t always check the passports at the border…

DM:  Yeah but they almost always check coming back this way…plus you’ll have that car with only some “brand-new” Guatemalan paperwork.  Don’t you think it would be more prudent to fix the passport situation first?

Guy:  Yeah, I guess you’re right.

DM:  I might know a guy…I’ll see what I can do.

Two days later:

DM:  Dude, I can help you out, give me all your stuff.

Guy:  What’s it going to cost?

DM:  Probably about half what it should.

Guy:  Great, but…there’s one more thing….

DM:  What now?

Guy:  Actually, my girlfriend, you see….

DM:  Let me guess, she’s overstayed her visa too?

Guy:  Yeah.

DM:  Okay, I’ll take care of it.

Guy:  Man, you’re awesome.

DM:  Don’t forget it, amigo.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. (C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 292.)

Yeah, well, get in line.  I get a lot of emails and calls these days begging for favors and promising ‘anything if you fix it’.  What they’re really saying is, “I don’t have any money and probably nothing else you’re interested in”.

But of course I help anyway and in this case it was a Windows XP machine that had committed suicide.  I couldn’t even get her to boot up in Safe Mode, and since Santiago is short one guy at the moment (a little misunderstanding about three missing laptops), I can’t lean on him for help so I took the beat up old Toshiba to Harold at DNI Productos.  DNI Productos has two locations in Antigua, one on 3rd Calle at 3rd Ave and another on Calzada Santa Lucia at about 3rd Calle.  Jorge runs the shop on the Calzada but when it comes to really serious problems Harold is the go to guy.

So I took the dead Toshiba to him and there was lots of ‘fijese’ and ‘wow’ and other stuff.  While he took it in the back room to play with it I noticed an attractive young Latina behind the counter who had been giggling at my Spanish, so I struck up a conversation with her.  I meant to tell her what beautiful eyes she had but perhaps I said something else because I heard a rustling in the other room and a very serious and matronly-looking woman came rushing out to confront me. She wanted to know ‘what I wanted’ and I chose discretion over a flippant response and explained that I was waiting for Harold and just thought I would comment on God’s beautiful creation while I waited.

She immediately ushered the chica out of the room and sent Harold out to tell me to go away and come back later.  Later became the next morning and when I returned Harold presented the laptop, with a fresh install of Windows and a bill for Q70.  Behind him with her hands on her hips was Mama, just to make sure I didn’t practice my Spanish with anyone other than Harold.

Q70 for a fresh install and some free drama.

Welcome to GuateLiving.

Bottles will be opened at 5pm.

Not in any particular order:

1.  The weather.

2.  I can smoke where there are ‘no smoking’ signs.

3.  I can park where there are ‘no parking’ signs.

4.  You can buy beer/liquor at a gas station at 2am in El Progreso with no shirt on and drink it inside, or outside, or both and stop every pickup truck that passes by asking for a ride to the capital and no one will say anything (except perhaps ‘no’).

5.  If your car breaks down, within minutes 3-5 Chapines will volunteer to push it for you and think nothing of it.  That’s normal.

6.  You can buy almost any drug without a prescription.  Cocaine?  No problemo caballero, pero, es muy carro….

7.  You can tell a cop, “You are bothering me, go away” without being tased, waterboarded and getting intimate with a broomstick.

8.  I can order a capuccino ‘con amor’ and wink at her without getting hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit (or anything else for that matter).

9.  If you know the right people and have some Q, you can get almost anything you want or need.

10.  You can go to the hospital on Christmas eve and get a wound cleaned, stitches, antibiotics and the bill for $70 and be home before Santa arrives.

A recent example was a call to the farmacia:

Senorita:   Good morning, thank you for calling, how can I help you?

DM:  Good morning, there are a few things I need, can you deliver them?

Senorita:  Of course, sir, what can I get you?

DM:  I need Gatorade, 12 rolls of your best toilet paper, baby wipes, ciproflaxin and one of those ginormous bars of Hershey’s chocolate.

Senorita:  Disculpe, qual es ‘ginormous’?

DM:  Extra grande chocolate.

Senoria:  Ah, entiendo.  Que algo mas?

DM:  Solimente.

Senorita:  Okay, we’ll send it right out to your house.

Sure enough about 45 minutes later a guy on a motorcycle arrived with everything we needed.  As far as I could tell there was no delivery charge. Friends tell me there is a Q100 minimum order, but I’ve had stuff delivered under that.  Can you imagine trying to have anything delivered from a pharmacy in the US (without a prescription or identification?)

“It’s 72 degrees and sunny, the maids arrived on time, the vegetable guy came with lots of great looking fruit and a dozen roses, the bill from my lawyer (graduate of the best university in the country and prominent member of one of the 7 families) is 1/3 of the hourly rate I pay in Phoenix, business opportunities abound, advertisers are competing for space on the blog, and the most difficult decision I’ll make today is whether to buy a Honduran or splurge and buy a Cohiba”.

Well, there is also whether to call the taxi and pay Q40 or the tuktuk and pay Q30…

Welcome to GuateLiving.

For example, two IRS agents visited a Sacramento business over a delinquent tax bill of…4 cents.  That’s four pennies.  I’m not kidding.  If it had been me I would have insisted it was some sort of hidden camera prank, but the business owner commented, “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending”.  If you’ve ever dealt with the IRS before you know the experience was real because that’s how public ’servants’ really do behave.

Then there is the story about the Pennsylvania police raiding several pubs for selling unregistered beer.  Follow this for a moment; these are places that have a liquor license, bought the beer legally from a distributor, but some bureaucrat in the capital decided to show up and confiscate a bunch of exotic beers, mostly Belgian imports.  Not surprisingly, the government idiots compounded the problem by not being able to recognize that their own lists contained typos:

At one bar, Maida had a beer listed as “de dolle Oebier gran reserva;” the beer itself was “de dolle oerbier,” but the police had it spelled as “de rolle oebier,” she said.

So…the police are having to return some of the beer.  Meanwhile the bar owner’s legally acquired beer sits in some government warehouse, probably not environmentally protected, rotting away.

And then there is the story from my own home state of Arizona, where the town of Gilbert has outlawed bible studies in private homes.  You read that correctly; local zoning ordinances apparently prevent people from gathering in a private home to study their bible.

These three examples, one from each level of government (federal, state and city), show just how tyrannical governments tend to be.  Marxists will, if admitting to the problem, claim these are exceptions to the rule but we all know from experience that it is more the norm.  That’s why governments should be small and weak, because they are the number one threat to liberty.  As President Ford once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have.”

One more reason to move to Guate, where for the most part the market sets the rules and the government, albeit as incompetent and dangerous as any from the first world, simply does not have the ability to control every element of your life.

I tried to take pics but the iPhone doesn’t do it justice.  Fortunately Brad and Kara are skilled with a camera, so go check it out!

It turns out the most recent ‘cold weld’ repair to the oil pan was just too fragile for the tough streets of Antigua.  This time around I asked Gunther to take a few additional preventive steps, which included new shocks on the front end, plus what he called some ’spacers’ which he would insert in the springs on the front axle.  I’m not a car guy, but I understood the idea would be to lift the delicate parts of the underbelly of the car about an inch higher off the ground, and the shocks would hopefully keep the old girl from bottoming out.

I had also mentioned to Gunther that the brakes were shaking a little at high speed and asked him to investigate.

Well, it took two full weeks, but here was the itemization:

1.  New front shocks

2.  Spacers in the springs to ‘lift’ the car slightly

3.  Turned the discs

4.  New weld on the oil pan

5.  Tow across town

And the bill came to Q2500.  It was hard to complain that it had taken longer than I thought it should have.

I have since had a steel skid plate designed and will hopefully have installed within a few days.  That will show those tumulos!  And, instead of bringing another Mercedes down, my next car will be a Range Rover and I’ll ride those tumulos with pleasure.

Next time you need your car worked on, don’t hesitate to call Gunther’s at 7832-0215, and tell him Don Marco sent you.