When I traveled in November 2023 from the mountainous part of Chiapas around San Cristobal de las Casas to the southern Mexican state’s lush coastal plains around the hippie hideaway of Entremares, tens of thousands of migrants were walking northbound, on the highway, coming from the Mexican-Guatemalan border. There were so many, and as I was driving southbound, the stream of migrants, adults, children on shoulders of a parent, little babies in less than a plastic bag, never stopped. Never in human history so many migrants have been on the move than right now – here I saw it with my own eyes. That’s how Exodus might have looked like, I thought. Venezuelans and Ecuadorians, but also migrants hailing from countries as far as Haiti, Afghanistan, India, Iran or Iraq were on their way. In their quest to flee from conflict, violence, persecution, poverty or from a combination of these woes, the latter had to first make it somehow into South America.The ones I met had at least managed to survive the infamous jungles of the Darién Gap. Other migrants were just hailing from Central American countries. As were six Guatemalans I happened to chat with meters before a checkpoint of the Mexican Guardia Nacional. They were young, some still minor, five friends, one with his wife and their little baby. Asked for their motives why they had decided to leave their home country, they replied in a mix of courage, defiance and naiveté: One evening, their leader said, they were sitting together in their home village in the Sierra in central Guatemala, and they commonly decided that it was time to leave. To leave their ramshackle huts with no space and no privacy, to leave their parents and brothers and sisters, their joblessness and hopelessness, in search of a better life in the cherished land called the United States of America. Where they wanted to go? They said they had yet no friends or relatives in the US, but had heard that Washington must be good. It was mid November and it was about to get damn cold even in Mexico, and the six had nothing to wear but their one t-shirt and shorts. 

On my trip to Guatemala in 2007, I had a weekend to spare: From the posh neighbourhood of zona 9 and its great steak houses, I did the small 50 minute drive to colonial Antigua, former capital of Guatemala. I cannot figure out one other town, not even Naples with its Vesuvius, where a perfectly shaped volcano dominates the scenery as much and as graceful as Volcan de Agua dominates Antigua. Along lush coffee plantations and fertile cow pastures reminiscencing Switzerland, I reached Lake Atitlan. With ist concert of three majestic volcanoes, its probably the world’s most beautiful lake. I flew north to climb between the jungle palaces of Tikal  and can now say after I seen the Maya ruins in Palenque and Calakmul, that Tikal is the pearl in the crown of the ancient civilisation of the Maya. Guatemala has a Sweet River, Rio Dulce,  and even a slice of the Caribbean, Guatemala has actually everything. Obviously not for everyone.