Headline: Two sons, bus drivers, killed by gangs

You could get the wrong idea about Guatemala, if you just read the newspapers. But if you don’t read the newspapers and only read the tour guides, you’d get the wrong idea as well.

I bought a newspaper Saturday and found a sad story: A Guatemalan woman lost a second bus-driving son, killed by gangs.

Three gang members on Friday shot and killed Ilda Lopez’ son, Marlon Estuardo Bautista López, a 26-year-old bus driver in Guatemala City; the gang members also killed López's cousin, Byron Leonel Ordóñez Alvarado, 24, who worked as Lopez’s assistant.

The pair didn’t have correct change to pay the gang members’ extortion money at 5 a.m., and that apparently angered the trio, who shot the driver 13 times and the helper — who leaped from the bus and tried to run away — four times in the head.

Sadly, Ilda Lopez lost another son two years ago — also a bus driver, also killed by gang members demanding extortion money.

*****

Almost weekly, local papers here run stories about repatriated Guatemalans, sent back by the United States, usually with a headline like, “End of the American Dream” — for not having legal status. The U.S. has repatriated several thousand Guatemalans already this year.

I didn’t realize, however, until Saturday that the Guatemalan president Álvaro Arzú in 1998 turned down a U.S. invitation to establish a program granting Guatemalans “Temporary Protection Status” to live and work in the states. Honduras, which has 70,000 citizens in the U.S. under this program, just renewed it this past week.

*****

Up in San Miguel Acatán, Huehuetenango, torrential rains caused a river to leap its banks and wipe out 26 homes, killing four people, and leaving at least 15 missing. Here’s a pickup that likely won’t be the same again.

Here's a write-up in a Palm Beach, Florida newspaper, showing a connection between a Guatemalan community there and San Miguel Acatán.