Yucatan Diary- Day 3
January 5, 2005
by Ben White
posted 01/11/05
Back to the big city of Merida. Like going from the pine barrens of New Jersey to the Big Apple. A turmoiled day full of good news, promises of breakthroughs, collapses and sobering news.
First, though, for the travellers among you, my hot hotel recommendations in Merida. My requirements are simple. Ancient yet serviceable. An open inside courtyard with lots of big tropical plants but no caged birds is a big plus, cheap is good. Ability to get phone calls and access to the internet is the holy grail.
Two places. The first is the Casa Mexilio, a several-century old home restored by its North Carolinian owner to what it might have looked like then, with the addition of lots more plants and winding stairways and rooms tucked away on rooftops enwrapped with vines full of flowers. Very cool. But what convinced me to book it on the internet before coming were the names of three of their eight rooms: Chico Mendez, Rigoberto Minchu, and Frida Kahlo. I figured that this owner might just be a kindred spirit, and he is. My only small complaint was the failure of the staff to notify me of the large cat opera planned for the middle of the night with lots of singers taking part in great emotional arias to lust and unrequited love, or something.
But now I have found a true jewel. The Gran Hotel downtown Merida for about $55 a night. A hundred years old, ceilings about 18-feet high, the original tile floors everywhere, a balcony facing the park where I can step outside and pretend to be a dictator hoodwinking the peasants, big inside courtyard, water warmer than tepid, and even a reading light above the bed- and a phone!
OK, before anyone gets worried that I am having too much fun- on to the scary stuff.
The good news from yesterday was that there might be a way to file a certain type of legal paper called a recurso in Mexico courts to stop the Ewing from beginning. This angle is being pursued thanks to Juan Carlos Cantu of Defenders of Wildlife de Mexico and my friends in Cancun with Grupo Ecologica Mayab. But then I was told that the price of such a paper would be for us to put up the cost of what the Ewing costs each day to run, with no guarantee of getting the money back even if we win. The cost would be prohibitive.
Speaking of high costs, I also got a revised estimate of what it will cost to hire a boat and hire a plane. The boat will run about $340 per day with crew- $3400 for ten days. Even though it is more than I thought, I canīt say it is unfair, especially considering the pressure the captain is under not to help me. Then I was told that the price I was quoted of $700 for two hours of flight time in a Cessna to find the Ewing was a good price!
To rub it in, I spent the afternoon doing print and TV interviews in the lobby of my new fancypants hotel. With every single Mexican interviewer that I have ever talked to, including during the Solomon dolphin capture struggle and the WTO meeting in Cancun last year, their primary curiosity is how much our effort is costing and who is paying for it? (Would that they knew that I am not sure). They are so accustomed to looking for the graft it has become instinctive, I think. You have heard of this famous scam, havenīt you? Environmental and animal activists, especially those who do direct action, are just in it for the money. All that passion and stuff is just a smokescreen.
Today Rosario, the excellent animal activist here in Merida who I am working with, told me that from everything she is reading, even though the Ewing lacks one final official approval of their daily agenda, that they plan on beginning the blasting on this Sunday the ninth. So, we are laying the groundwork to leave with the boat on Saturday, take a boatload of journalists along, go do an action and then bring the press back to land. Then we will return for as long as it takes or until the money is gone.
The press has given me a new title that I considered using today when I returned my rent-a-jeep and had to fill out a form that asked for my occupation: escudo human. Human shield. I like it. Sounds like a useful purpose for a body.
I realize that in a way I am playing a game with the universe. If I act like I am not worried of dying, if I can love this life and defend this world as flat out as I can without worrying all that much about consequences, maybe just to be perverse, the universe will choose to let me live long. Sort of like interviews with guys 108 years old or so who give their secret to longevity their cigars and whisky.
Then I got another call from a good friend down here saying that a wonderful thing had happened and that someone important whose name she couldnīt say on the phone was going to help us and that the Yucatan government was starting to rethink their approval and that she was sure that we are going to win. Yeah, well maybe. I take more stock in the prayers raining down somehow making a difference.
It does appear that the presence of the journalists and the publicity that we are getting right now will prevent an exclusion zone from being imposed around the boat. That means it is likely that I will actually have to pull this thing off and get ready to jump in the water next to the boat and stay there for as long as I can. If that transpires, and I am able to stop it for the time I am in the water, I will be putting out the plea far and wide for more people and more funding so we can last until the Ewing gives up and, like good Yanquis, go home.
I hope that one good thing that might come out of the attention we are getting here is the power of small groups of unarmed individuals to stand up to big governments that have lots of money and still fight the right fight. From talking to all of the incredibly warm fishermen and their families over the last couple of days and how they treated me, they seemed to like most that what I was doing was opposed by their government. (Remember- there were small groups of Mayans still fighting the federal government of Mexico into the twentieth century.)
I may have stepped into hot water on TV today when I was asked what I thought about the governor of the Yucatan saying a few days ago that he could do nothing to stop the Ewing. Stealing a line from my own Green campaign for commissioner I said that I couldnīt see any purpose for a government except to protect the people and the earth. And if they were not doing that, what were they doing? The interviewer smiled at that one.
Well, that's how things are down here in Merida on this cool darkening evening just off the town square, where some kind of long tailed crowlike bird screeches in the treetops, where the sad horses stand in front of the dolled up carriages waiting for tourists, where the Indians spread tiny plastic sheets to spread their kaliedoscopically colored shirts, sashes and little hippy purses, where the guy with the little stand twirls his orange peeler and fills the little plastic bags with the sections, and the bums take up residence on pieces of cardboard across the hard stone benches.
Keep them prayers and good thoughts coming. Many thanks to all.
Love and Revolution,
Ben
Yucatan Diary Day 4
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