Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Candidate


I was at a gas station in Honduras
drinking coffee and reading
when I met the candidate.


There were three employees dressed in bright red vests.
One put the coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
Another fetched sugar packets
and a little red straw.
The last took a pile of napkins from the dispenser
and placed them neatly under the sugar packets.


I knew by his stature,
his perfect mustache, and cowboy hat
that he was someone important;
a wealthy rancher
or a member of the cartel.


He sat next to me and asked where I was from
and I told him, and he said he had family in Waukegan
and I told him what I knew of the place.
He said he'd lived in New Orleans
and then California,
where he’d picked artichokes with Cesar Chavez.
Knew him personally.


I nodded and noticed his face by my right elbow
on a stack of laminated flyers.


Mario Padilla, candidate for congress
running for the newly-formed leftist party, Libre.


Next to Mario is Libre's presidential candidate:
an attractive, dark woman
with thick black eyebrows named Xiomara Castro,
wife to former president Manuel Zelaya
who was ousted in a coup in 2009.


I told him I was a leftist too and then had nothing else to say,
so I motioned to the chaos of the street where the construction
of a four-lane road was underway.


“I heard it’s all for politics,” I said, baiting him. “They want it done by election time.”
“You see that?” he asked,
pointing to a boy sweeping dust from the street. “The poverty. It breaks my heart.”


Maybe a week later I heard an interesting story:
I was told Mario Padilla stole the gas station we'd been sitting in.
More precisely President Zelaya
had seized all the gas station in town
and given them to party supporters, like Mario.


Perhaps it's for good reason that people say
Libre is more of the same.
They had a shot at winning, but that was seven months ago.


In the mean time,
the new road was completed,
the Che Guevara memorial was demolished early on election day,
and Libre lost the election,
though their red flags hang from the tree stumps
and gutters in the poorer neighborhoods
where everyone with nothing to lose
somehow lost again.


The new president is conservative.
He promised: A Soldier on Every Corner
and now with the machine guns
there’s no fear of being robbed of your wallet,
there's just fear,
which is robbery of hope.


What it comes down to in Honduras is security
and that’s the way it is now: secure.
People with money like conservative politicians
because they buttress inequality,
giving you the choice between warm shit
or cold shit,
corruption or martial law,
poverty or crime.


Sooner or later we’ll say enough is enough.
There is hope, I know it,
because inequality is not a natural state;
it takes energy.


Imagine a hand shaking a snow globe
or sand agitated in water.
Gravity takes over
sooner or later.

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