Chiquimula

One of the great things about Spanish is that the pronunciation is
really easy, so you can figure out the pronunciation of this town
yourself--however, in case you feel un-motivated...

Chee-kee-MOO-lah

Say it out loud to yourself--isn't that just the coolest name ever?
Better than Albuquerque!

So, I was sort of hoping to make it into Honduras tonight, but I didn't
make it--still in Guatemala. The pullman bus (Greyhound-style) out of
Guate. was wicked slow, and terribly non-entertaining. Forgive me for
complaining about safe driving, but COME ON! You PASS slow drivers in
this country, even if it's a blind corner on a mountainside. However,
the bus driver for Rutas Orientales had evidently been trained as a
schoolbus driver in the states, so no driving about about 12kph for him.

So, in addition to the fact that I didn't get as far as I would have if
I had taken chicken buses, I feel guilty about being an elitist,
traveling by tourist shuttle (ugh!) then fancy bus. At least I could
sleep. And although the tourist shuttles are pricier than what the
average Guatemalan would pay taking chicken buses, it works out to be
about the same for me, because I always get taken so badly in Guatemala
City taxis. Next time I'm here, I'm going to spend a couple of days in
Guatemala city figuring out the bus system, where you can travel from
one end of the (monstrous) city for about 15 cents (if you don't get
robbed along the way).

To put it prosaically, Guatemala City blows, but I really have to get
more comfortable with traveling around it, if I'm going to spending more
time here in the future. I'm pretty much okay with traveling around the
whole country, but the city is still a bit of a mystery to me.

On the other hand, Chiquimula is nifty. I've been thinking about
spending an extra night here and visiting the pilgrimage site at
Esquipulas tomorrow, though I would like to give myself plenty of time
to enjoy Copán, and to soak in the (bloody, exploitative) Mayan history.

As an aside which may appeal to the average middle-school boy (or adult
of that maturity level), I picked a book up about the Maya when I ran
out of other English-language reading material. Among other fun facts,
it describes how Mayan male nobles would initiate themselves into
adulthood by piercing their penis with a stone knife (obsidian?). That
totally gives me the willies. No pun intended.

Anyways, Chiquimula is described as pretty much a "point of transit" for
travelers by the Lonely Planet book (and I am more of a traveler than
anything else at this point in the trip), but it's a pretty prosperous
town, and there is a nice plaza, a cool market, at least a few nice
looking restaurants, and a Paíz, which is one of the local chains owned
by Wal-Mart.

...I know, I know--Wal-Mart is evil--but their grocery stores have some
advantages down here.

First, they have much stricter health standards for produce and meat
than the people selling veggies across the street in the market (who
have no such standards). They're also reliable buyers for local
producers, and they sell a fair quantity of locally grown organic food,
encouraging the growth of a local organic industry.

But in any event, after spending a couple of days in Antigua and another
couple of days in Panajachel, it's nice to be in a place where there
aren't too many (any?) pasty faces around. That will all end, though,
if I go on to Copán. Think I'm talking myself into staying another
day. We'll see what I decide. Local fair's going on here, so it might
not make a difference what I decide, if the hotel's already full up for
tomorrow. If I'm going to pack my crap up again, I'll just pack up and
move on.

Totally jealous...

...of Boz and Aubrey's N. African experiences, by the way. Seriously,
how awesome is that!

The plan

So, I'm going to cut out of Panajachel one day early--I don't really
have any interviews that I can do very easily without going to another
village and setting up shop there, which will most likely take more than
a day--so I'm going to head out a day early for the ruins at Copán,
Honduras, which I've been hoping to see all summer.

I've been doing some early Christmas shopping, and in the process, I've
picked up a pretty big bundle of crap, so I'm going to forgo the chicken
buses mañana in favor of a tourist shuttle to Guatemala city tomorrow,
where I'll pick up a Greyhound-style "pullman" bus to, I think
Esquipulas, where there is an interesting (modern) religious site. From
there, I'll head by bus to the Guate./Honduras border, and on to Copán.
Saturday and Sunday, I'll be down there, and I'll be back in Antigua for
Monday and Tuesday, then my flight out of Guate. on Wed/Thurs, with a
13-hour layover in Mexico City (I've been under-budget enough that I
could pay the exorbitant fee for a reservation in a hotel room in the
D.F. airport Holiday Inn, spending the equivalent of about two weeks of
my typical Guatemalan lodging in a single night.

On the road again...
Like a band of gypsies, we roll down the highway...

But really, I'm looking forward to getting home for a bit, seeing Emily,
sleeping in my own bed, and having a nice cup of tea!

Jurisdictional Size

I've posted about jurisdictional size at least once before--I think
probably twice, but by God, there it was again staring me in the face!

Got in two interviews today, which should be the last for the trip.
Kind of a shame in a way, because this municipality is turning out to be
a pretty fruitful place to do interviews, but the reason I'm spending so
little time here is that there are some legitimate questions here about
the comparability of this case to a number of other cases in the
project. If you've ever traveled in Guatemala, you're probably familiar
with Panajachel, because it's so heavily involved in tourism, an not
coincidentally, because it's in such a beautiful location on the shores
of Lago Atitlan. The heavy presence of tourism also means that there
are a large number of differences between "Pana" and most other
Guatemalan municipalities, including (a) a very high concentration of
service industry, (b) very dense population, (c) high foreign-born
population, (d) many people in town who aren't residents or voters, and
if you talk to the hippies around, (e) location in a cosmic vortex...

I'm pretty sure that the "cosmic vortex" dummy variable will turn up to
be statistically insignificant, however, the other ones are real concerns.

That said, I got in this great interview which really illustrates the
argument I'm hoping to make about jurisdictional size and shape. I was
talking to one of the employees of the "mancomunidad," or co-management
area, which has it's office in the municipal building here. The
mancomunidad--called Mancatitlan (the Latinos like the acronyms, if
anything, more than we Gringos do) is made up of four municipalities on
the Eastern shore to lake Atitlan. The organization was created just a
couple years ago, in order to deal with solid waste management
problems. Basically, San Andrés, a muni up on the hillside, was
discharging its waste into watercourses that run into Panajachel, Santa
Catarina, and San Antonio, down on the lake shore.

In order to find a solution, the four municipalities joined together to
form a larger jurisdiction with the idea of addressing the waste
problem. The three lower municipalities get the problem solved--and a
reduction in the costs of being downstream (literally) from San
Andrés--and San Andrés gets some of the funding that the mancomunidad
attracts into the area, meaning that it can spend its fungible resources
in other area.

In effect, the municipalities are of a size and shape which is
sub-optimal for addressing these environmental problems, but the
creation of a mancomunidad creates a jurisdiction which is much closer
to optimal for the waste management problem. The remarkable thing is
that the four municipalities, together, match the appropriate watershed
almost perfectly, and therefore, the jurisdictional size is, according
to the theory put forth by Ferejohn and Weingast (I think) in 1995 (I
think), is almost perfectly optimal, because it matches the costs of
addressing the problem to the benefits of doing so, leaving no
externalized costs to anyone outside the muni.

The Maya and IR Theory of Conflict

So, one of the problems with international relations theory, and
especially the study of international conflict, is that there is a
finite universe of cases from which to test theory, and in general,
because the number of international conflicts is limited, there is a
problem (of varying severity, depending on who you ask) with scholars
deriving theory using the same data we use to test the theory. This
definitely takes place--we look at the record, and say, "Gee...
Democracies don't seem to fight one another very much," and then we go
out and formally test that idea using (often) huge datasets of
country-year-pairs of countries.

Depending on who you ask, this might be a major problem, or not much of
one at all--many historical institutionalists, for example, who have no
problem generating theory while testing it, as something of a dynamic
process of working with historical cases--that's a poor attempt at the
way Steinmo puts it in one of his books. On the other hand, to a lot of
positivistic-types, this sort of thing is anathema to scientific
inference.

Regardless, one interesting project might be to find a way around this
sort of thing by tapping cases and observations which haven't been very
often used for this sort of thing.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Mayan city-states, although there are a
number of other potential cases for the fruitful harvest of country-city
state-dyadic pairs.

It would be an interesting thing to go back and generate a number of
case studies and a quantitative dataset of the interaction between
different mayan city-states to determine if realist, liberal,
constructivist, or rationalist approaches to IR better explain the
outbreak of conflict between these "countries." I believe that there is
a strong argument to be made for the utility of this research
design--the only question that I have is whether archaeologists know
enough about the relations between these city-states to generate enough
data to engage in an exercise in hypothesis testing.

I am, of course, nothing but a hirsute nerd, but wouldn't it be
interesting to go back and try to build a statistical dataset of
conflicts between Central American empires, to test if, for example,
trade pacified conflict between Mayan city-states or increased it, if
similar values between societies pacified countries (for example, as
Aztec ideas waxed and waned in the Mayan territory), and if power parity
increases or decreased conflict back before Cortéz and Alvarado? And of
course, the case-study research that would go along with that process...

Man, think of the interesting people you'd get to talk to!

Haggling, Supply, and Demand

As I near the end of my trip to Guatemala (just a little bit more than a
week left down here), I'm doing three things.

First, I'm trying to finish off a couple final interviews, to be able to
come back to the states with a pretty strong idea of what's driving
Guatemalan forestry outcomes. I think I have a good handle on things
down here, and I know that in the time I have remaining I won't be able
to do all of the things I would like to do, but everything about this
process is a story about finding the optimum tradeoff.

Second, I'm missing home and Emily, and really looking forward to
getting back to the states for a little while. Missed our anniversary
while down here, but Emily and I are planning a replacement anniversary
and a trip to the Tetons for a couple of days during Labor Day. Plus,
I'm really looking forward to sleeping in my own bed for a while, and
getting a cup of tea and some good strong coffee.

Third, I'm doing some Christmas shopping. I know it's early, but it's
not often that you can buy hand-woven Guatemalan textiles for a
reasonable price.

So I bought a couple of things today--one blanket, and a couple of
tablecloths. Beautiful, all of them.

But in the process, I had to haggle, which I hate, because I'm terrible
at it. I've got the wrong cultural upbringing, the wrong skin color,
and the wrong sense of imperialist guilt to be any good at it. So I
inevitably get a poor deal.

But the process of haggling, which is commonplace in most transactions
down here, gave me some food for thought. In some ways, doesn't a
market imply the flow of complete information about the price of a
good? If prices are such an important part of the process of
interacting in a market, in what ways do economic models of these
interactions miss what goes on in places like Guatemala, where there are
often no set prices? What happens when cost is not a result of only
supply and demand, but also (a) my haggling skills, (b) the cut of my
clothes, and (c) the ability of the hawker to size me up for what I'm
worth...

Just a lot of questions without any real answers, and without a strong
enough understanding of microeconomics to be able to make any hypotheses
about these questions.

Bolivian Travel

The NYTimes has a pretty good story about Bolivian tourism, complete
with a pretty good (though not great) picture of the Uyuni Salt Flats in
the rainy season.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/travel/10adven.html

Some bad news

Two bad things happened today--one was my fault, and one (probably) wasn't.

First--not my fault--my nice, lightweight, packable ripstop montbell
shoulder bag got slashed in the market at San Juan Comalapa. A real
shame--when I got it, I had the idea that it would be a great bag to be
able to pack up in my backpack, though I can't say I've ever had the
opportunity to do that. But it was a really nice bag!

The good news is, I bought a replacement--a nice leather shoulder bag
with a pretty secure closure which I made more secure by adding a
padlock (feeling a little paranoid at the moment). Thick leather that
will be a bit of a deterrent to another such incident.

The second bad thing--my fault--is that I probably paid too much for the
shoulder bag, which isn't a bit deal, but one thing after another. The
guy kind of had me over a barrel. I told him what had happened to my
other bag, and he was the only one in the market that had a replacement
that was big enough for my computer (and I think he knew it). And I
hate haggling. Hate it!

Kind of a downer--though I have to say, I had a good time up in San Juan
today, where I bought a weaving in the local style, which uses silk
thread as an accent. Bought it from a very friendly Guatemalan woman
with a surly teenage son. Pretty entertaining. Beautiful things down here!

All in all, not a bad run without any such bad experiences--I've spent a
lot of time in places where I've been warned about such things, but this
is really the first such experience that I've had bad luck like that.

I should add, as well, that nothing was stolen--or at least nothing that
I've noticed, which means nothing of value. And if that's the worst
thing that happens today, I'm doing okay. As I always say, I always
feel like I'm getting off easily, as long as I don't get kidnapped.

"Yale's Zedillo"

I'm a little behind on my blog reading--Google Reader wasn't cooperating
with me when I was in Salamá, so I couldn't use the offline function. I
gave up on it, for offline purposes at least, and I'm using this RSS
aggregator called NetNewsWire which doesn't do the aggravating things
that Google Reader does... So I'm catching up.

On August 2, Mankiw (in his blog) refers to "Yale's Ernesto Zedillo."
We're not talking about another Zedillo here, right? There is only
one? I'm offline here, and I would normally want to check this before
sending the post off, but if I wait, I'll forget.

Shouldn't that be, "Former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, now of
Yale University?" Or am I missing something. If I was the guy under
whom Mexico democratized, and I was referred by a snarky Harvard
economics professor as "Yale's... whatever" I think I'd be ticked off!
So maybe I'm wrong, and there are two Ernesto Zedillos.

Mindless drivel

First off, I'm back in Antigua for a couple days--Maureen's heard all my
complaining about this town, but as I told Emily last night, it's pretty
fantastic to be able to travel just about four hours and go from
(relatively) rural Guatemala, with all of its charms and frustrations,
to a place where you can almost feel like you're in the states for a
couple of days.

Aubrey's put her blog up--I'll put a link in the sidebar.

She mentions in her first post that she has reservations about the whole
blogging thing--presumably thinking (at least in part) of my thoughts on
poisson models and canine rationality--then apologizes. No offense
taken! I have no illusions that many of my posts are of interest to
anyone but me. But it does feel good to be able to ramble on about
things when I haven't had a conversation in English in a while.

So, the fact that I'm here in gringolandia means that I'll be able to
put up some pictures on the internet, using (I think) my web page
(http://sobek.colorado.edu/wrightgd). I also started a picasa page, but
I'm not sure it saves me much time. On the other hand, Ying's gotten
after me for costing the data lab lots of money by never cleaning off my
sobek account (I apparently have more on the server than everyone else
in the department, combined) so maybe I should do Picasa.

In any event, I'll put a post up when that's done, with the details.