'When you see the shattered shell of that double-decker bus the sense of familiar is still there, but it is now perverted, twisted and foreign.'

On September 11th 2001 I woke up in a mountainous village in the Andes, and spent the next week trying to catch odd snippets of CNN on a small television set above the counter of a local café.

In the final week of December 2004, I was on an island in Nicaragua oblivious to the Tsunami horror on which the rest of the world focussed.

On Wednesday 7th May 2005, I was in a southern state of Mexico occupied with eating tacos and Guatemalan visa renewal when I heard the news. My thoughts had been a million miles from home.

After nine months of travelling solely on the back of trucks or squeezed into chicken buses, to see a picture of a red double-decker bus brings back a flood of comforting familiarity. When you see the shattered shell of that double-decker bus the sense of familiar is still there, but it is now perverted, twisted and foreign.

To the average Guatemalan, England and Blair are familiar words, confused with the blurred boundaries of America and Bush. I have been asked on more than one occasion if England is a country inside of the United States. But despite this, there has been impressive media coverage here in Guatemala: special reports, updated facts and extensive photos. It has been recognised that these ‘terrorist bombs…. affect, and will continue to affect, the lifestyle of all those who inhabit the planet’. (La Prensa. 12.07.05) Exactly the kind of reporting I would expect.

What I did not expect was to come across other opinions in response to the horror that occurred, opinions that did not immediately, if at all, criticize and condemn the attacks.

Luis Morales Chúa in the Sunday edition of Guatemala’s national paper La Prensa, although recognising and sympathising with the victims asks directly in his column ‘But what of us the Guatemalans?’ When world feeling is with the British on 7th July 2005, with the Spanish on 11th March 2004 and with the Americans on 11th September 2001, he asks the reader to recognise the terrorism Guatemala has suffered, and continues to suffer, at an international, national and personal level.

Chúa illustrates this through the conquest and destruction of the indigenous and their cities, through the State executions during the years of repression, and through the attacks committed by private armed groups in their efforts to overthrow, or sustain, governments in power. He claims that the order of silence in Guatemala is ‘as homicidal as the bombs that destroy trains, planes or the highest buildings in the world.’ (La Prensa. 10.07.05)

The day after the worst terrorism assault in British history, the editorial of Mexico’s leftwing newspaper La Jornada, without any condemnation of the bombings, launched into a hard-line attack on the ‘arrogance of Imperialism that has allowed various Western Governments to believe it possible to harass other nations, to undertake remote wars and to maintain destruction and blood far from its own cities.’ (La Jornada. 08.07.05)

In the aftermath of the terror these words are severe, and my natural liberalism is surprisingly hostile to opinion that does not immediately condemn the atrocity. But is this indignation not remarkably similar to how Iraqi civilians must feel daily as yet another fatal explosion is reported as routine news without demanding the international condemnation it deserves? Or is it not how a Guatemalan journalist might feel when comparing last week’s events, and the subsequent international attention, to his own nation’s past?

Perhaps this moment in history will initiate a deeper understanding amongst the British public of the importance of condemning every atrocity that occurs across the globe, be it on home or foreign soil.

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