On the flight back to the States, Ridinger stared out the window at the empty Pacific. He felt ridiculous, he told Johnson. Now he could see that the Chinese didn’t understand New World jade, that they preferred to deal with their longtime partners in Burma. Even the lone trader who had agreed to take their stone was undoubtedly going to pass it off as Burmese. And if the partners couldn’t sell their jade in China, with its deep affinity for jade and its long history of importing it, he despaired of any other country buying it. Their venture was over before it had fairly begun.
Back in Antigua, the partners consulted. If there were no international market for Guatemalan jade, they decided, they would have to create a market. And not in Hong Kong or New York or London, but in Guatemala. They already had the equipment; they could carve jade into reproductions of masks and other artifacts and sell them to tourists who wanted to take home an object that was not only handsome but culturally significant. Johnson reminded Ridinger of what their friend David Sedat had once told them, “The story sells the stone.” It was jade’s association with ancient civilizations like the Olmecs and the Maya that would make it marketable. And Johnson’s credentials as an archaeologist made her the ideal saleswoman-in-chief.
They would need to learn how to work jade, but Bob Terzuola and Jean Deveaux would help them. Then, at the earliest opportunity, Mary Lou urged Ridinger, they had to disassociate themselves from the meddling Belgian. But first, they’d have to find their own source of jade.
It was December in the Sierra de las Minas. The rains had ended and with them the cool season known in Guatemala as el invierno, “winter.” The heat had resurged, with punishing sunshine and temperatures close to a hundred degrees. Shaded only by their broad-brimmed hats, three figures were walking single-file along a narrow hillside trail, through spindly cacti and thorny acacia trees. Every so often, they would stop, incline their ear to a stone, and take a sharp swing with a hammer. Then they would straighten up and trudge on. Jay Ridinger had gotten his wish: He was finally prospecting for jade.
With Jerry Leech focused on the venture’s business affairs, the brunt of the search fell to Ridinger and Johnson. Unlike gold, their friend the geologist Josh Rosenfeld had explained, jade wasn’t generally located by panning or digging. It would most likely be found in long, roundish pieces called “pods,” sitting in riverbeds or on the ground, or jutting from outcrops. But this didn’t mean it was in plain sight. When jade is exposed to the elements for long periods, its surface weathers to form a generic brownish crust, or “rind,” which gives no hint of the stone’s true color—one of the reasons jade was so devilishly difficult to locate. So, the first clues that they had found jade wouldn’t be visual, but aural and tactile: Struck by a hammer, it wouldn’t produce a flat thud as lighter rocks did, but an almost metallic ping, and the hammerhead would recoil with a snap they could feel in their wrist. If a stone seemed promising, the next step was to break off a chip with a glancing hammer blow, which required some practice to master. Finally, they would drop the piece into a vial of bromoform for the density test.
They’d driven east from Antigua, through Guatemala City and up the Atlantic Highway. Not far outside the capital, they’d gotten a glimpse of the Motagua. Rising in Guatemala’s western highlands, near the ancient market town of Chichicastenango, the Motagua sweeps eastward for almost three hundred miles to the Gulf of Honduras. En route, it incorporates nearly forty tributaries and drains some five thousand square miles, more than any other waterway in the country. To Ridinger and Johnson, the river appeared as a broad ribbon at the bottom of a broad valley. Or at least its course was wide, scoured by the inundations of the rainy season. Now, in the dry time, the Motagua was a meager thread twisting through sandy flats. But over millennia, its floods had deposited millions of tons of rich soil along its banks, and on either side were stands of melons, beans, and corn—and the tomato field where Robert Leslie had run a cultivator over his jade boulder. To the south could be seen a line of violet peaks some 6,000 feet high; to the north was the even more foreboding Sierra de las Minas, jutting nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.
To Johnson, it was a landscape seething with history. Downriver, near the coast, were the remains of the Maya city of Quirigua. And about thirty miles south of that, just across the border in Honduras, the ruins of Copan, where the first royal Maya tomb had been reported opened, by Juan Galindo, in 1834. Now known for its great stelae carved with elaborate portraits of its rulers, Copan had founded Quirigua in A.D. 426 and had held it as a vassal for three centuries. Then in 738, tiny Quirigua, possibly with the help of Copan’s longtime rival Calakmul, had managed to slay the great city’s king and shatter its control of the region.
Even as Johnson’s thoughts drifted back to the past, Ridinger dreamed his mercantile dreams. He’d already been to see Deveaux’s lawyer about dissolving their partnership.
“On what basis?” the attorney wanted to know.
Deveaux did deliver some jade, allowed Johnson, who was acting as interpreter. But most of his stone was worthless aventurine quartz.
The lawyer’s face drained of color. “You mean,” he sputtered, “all those rocks piled in my garage, which this gentleman has paid me for my services, aren’t jade?”
After that, the attorney was more obliging, and even represented Ridinger in a few matters. (Ridinger liked to say that you needed three lawyers in Guatemala: One with the clout to negotiate with government officials, one to handle routine matters such as contracts and bribes, and one whom you could call at three o’clock in the morning to get you out of jail; Deveaux’s lawyer was of the second variety.)
Ridinger and Johnson also drove into the campo and managed to find the Belgian’s jade prospector, or “picker.” Isaac was painfully thin in his blue jeans and straw cowboy hat, grizzled, with chiseled European features that made him look like the last of the conquistadors. It was clear he didn’t know one green stone from another, but thanks to Deveaux, Mary Lou Johnson had had an education on that very subject. More important, Isaac was energetic and eager, and he knew the country and the people. And the Belgian hadn’t paid him as promised. So Isaac was happy to show them possible sources of jade and to soothe landowners who might not appreciate strange gringos wandering their property. When jade was discovered, Ridinger and Johnson would negotiate with the proprietors, but until then there wasn’t much to discuss.
The first few outcrops that Isaac showed them weren’t jade but more aventurine. So the three started combing the wide, sandy banks of the Motagua. When this produced nothing, they cruised the Atlantic Highway, pulling over to examine the deep cuts made when the road was built. After this yielded no jade, they turned to the hot, dry terrain along the Motagua’s many tributaries.
Jade prospecting was turning out different from Jay Ridinger’s fantasies. For one thing, there was no jungle in sight, only these scrubby hills. The northern, windward side of the Sierra de las Minas was covered in lush cloud forest, where rain fell in an incessant drizzle known as chipi-chipi. But here to the south, in the mountains’ lee, lay the only arid part of Guatemala and one of the driest areas in Central America, collecting only twenty inches of rain a year.
Searching for jade along the Motagua didn’t entail sleeping bags or campfires, either. Ridinger and Johnson stayed at a serviceable motel called the Longarone, complete with an Italian restaurant and swimming pool, and passed their evenings playing gin rummy. But for Jay Ridinger their daily forays were serious affairs. Having resolved to find jade in Guatemala, he focused on the search with the same intensity he focused on everything, from playing poker to speculating in real estate. It was Ridinger who checked the maps, planned the routes, organized the supplies, tried to keep to a schedule.
The area south of the Sierra de las Minas, the only arid region of Guatemala.
Photograph by the author
Mary Lou Johnson was more relaxe
d. Not that she was uninterested, but as she wandered the scorching trails, stopping to tap the occasional rock, she found herself daydreaming not about jade’s commercial value but its historical significance, about the ancient peoples who had wandered these same paths over centuries, about what they had seen and what the jade had meant to them. She recalled how the Indians said that jade gave off a delicate vapor, like breath, in the early morning sunlight and considered whether there was any scientific basis to the legend. She wondered, could it be because the stone’s density made it absorb heat faster than the surrounding rocks?
Johnson was also more fatalistic: If they were meant to find jade, she figured, they would find it. For her, the outings weren’t just a means to an end but an adventure to be savored. And she was, in her words, “a diffuse thinker,” always “eight-tracking,” taking in the big picture, whereas Jay was more fixated on the immediate task. While he would charge ahead, wielding his geologist’s hammer, Mary Lou would hang back, stopping to admire the foliage along the river and to chat with curious campesinos. She was, she says, “floating along on a little pink cloud.”
Mary Lou Johnson was in love, and not just with Antigua or jade prospecting. There were so many things to admire about Jay Ridinger—his virile radio voice; his bearded good looks; his intelligence; his courage; his determination; his panache. And Jay was clearly attracted to her; why else would he have invited her in the first place? Besides her blonde features and open smile, there was her warmth and generosity, her intellect, her deep feeling for ancient cultures; but sometimes she wondered whether her greatest allure for the young widower was that she was, as she says, “healthy as a horse.”
Mary Lou had quickly grown fond of Jay’s daughters, too. In the beginning, she hadn’t been sure what to expect from the girls—seventeen-year-old Renée, fourteen-year-old Robin, eleven-year-old Angela—but all three had been sweet and welcoming. On Mary Lou’s third morning in Antigua, little Angela had served her and Jay breakfast in their double bed. And when Mary Lou had had to return briefly to Mexico, Renée had taken her aside and pleaded, “Please come back; we really need you.”
While prospecting, Mary Lou Johnson would daydream about jade’s historical meaning.
Courtesy of Mary Lou Ridinger
Drifting along on her little pink cloud, Mary Lou Johnson was largely unconscious of the obstacles and perils of prospecting. There was the treacherous heat, which could strip your body of fluids and leave you lightheaded before you realized what was happening; if left untreated, the heatstroke could result in coma and death. The sere hillsides were also home to ticks, scorpions, and snakes. And then there was the civil war, which had been devastating Guatemala for more than a decade.
Since the time of the conquistadors, Guatemala has seen many strong governments but very few good ones. In 1524, the country was effectively conquered by Hernán Cortés’s lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado, who may also have given the place its name, possibly from the Nahuatl word for “among the trees.” The Spanish put the Indians to work first in the mines, then, when Guatemala’s mineral wealth didn’t rival that of Mexico or Peru, on plantations of cacao, indigo, and sugar. Though conquered and divided, the country wasn’t pacified, and, as in the Yucatan, the Maya would rebel for centuries to come.
The conquerors were also at odds with themselves. On top of the social heap were the peninsulares, the Spanish-born bureaucrats charged with administering the colony. At the bottom, just above the unassimilated Indians, were the ladinos, people of mixed Spanish and indigenous blood, who provided the colony’s nonslave labor. And in the middle were the creoles, purebred Spaniards born in Guatemala, who controlled the haciendas. Wealthy, landed, but thwarted in their ambition for ultimate power, the creoles resorted to smuggling and corruption to advance their political and economic interests. And as the seventeenth century wore on and Madrid’s demands for taxes escalated, the creoles turned increasingly toward extralegal means of redressing their grievances.
In 1700, the Spanish throne passed to the Bourbons, who introduced a variety of commercial and administrative reforms to bolster their authority and increase revenues. Pressed by the demands of the mother country, jealous of the rising fortunes of the ladinos, who were entering trade and the professions, and worried by the influx of even more of the wealthy peninsulares, the creoles grew more conservative and obstructionist. By the end of the century, these descendants of the conquistadors were bemoaning the state of the colony and longing for the palmy days of their forebears. Increasingly, they were also considering how to rid themselves of the interloping Bourbons.
Then in 1821, Mexico, their neighbor to the north, achieved independence. Two years later, all of greater Guatemala except for Chiapas formed the United Provinces of Central America. The new nation won its autonomy simply by declaring it, but peace and unity wouldn’t be so easily maintained. The impulse to independence had had more to do with self-interest than with patriotic feeling or the desire to extend the fruits of liberty down the social scale, and the new federation quickly became entangled in civil war between the Liberals, who pushed for trade and development (which, not coincidentally, would also benefit their own interests) and the Conservatives, who were dominated by the land-owning creoles. The federation couldn’t survive the chaos, and by 1841, five of the constituents—Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua—had formed sovereign countries. (Chiapas became part of Mexico.)
The new, reduced Guatemala was hobbled throughout the nineteenth century by corruption, legal preference of the moneyed few over the impoverished many, military strongmen, coups d’état, and armed revolts by the Maya, whose enduring rural misery had seen no relief from the change in regimes. In the late 1800s and into the new century, the country’s infrastructure and economy improved, thanks to the Liberals’ lavish concessions to foreign corporations such as the United Fruit Company, a huge American landowner and grower that also controlled the railways and steamships. But living conditions in the countryside and the urban slums continued to deteriorate.
In the 1920s, prodded by the universities and the labor unions, the country shifted to the left. The trend accelerated in 1944 after the election of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, who introduced a constitution with new protections for workers, an extension of the vote, more authority for local governments, and expanded education and health services. Predictably, the reforms didn’t sit well with foreign investors, wealthy planters, and most crucially, the military, which had been the ultimate arbiter of political fortunes for more than a century, ever since caudillo José Rafael Carrera Turcios had styled himself “the Napoleon of Central America.”
Despite more than twenty coup attempts, Arévalo managed to serve out his five-year term. His successor, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (elected in a landslide after his opponent was shot to death), accelerated the move to the left and strengthened ties to the Soviet Union, at the same time arresting or assassinating the opposition. Faced with a Communist-leaning state in his own hemisphere, President Dwight Eisenhower later recalled, “Our proper course of action—indeed, my duty—was clear to me.” In 1953, he authorized the covert CIA operation “El Diablo,” which marked fifty-eight Guatemalans for assassination and provided arms to right-wing exiles in Honduras and Nicaragua. When the rightists invaded the following June, the army refused to come to Arbenz’s aid, and the junta named as president Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas—who canceled Arévalo’s reforms, outlawed all political parties, purged labor unions, reestablished the secret police, and instituted death squads to eliminate his opponents. “By the middle of 1954,” Eisenhower reported with satisfaction, “Central America was free, for the time being at least, of any fixed outposts of Communism.”
After Castillo was assassinated by one of his own guards in 1957, General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes was nominated by the army and duly elected president. Though autocratic, Ydígoras ruled with a lighter touch than his predece
ssor. But in 1960, a group of junior military officers staged a leftist revolt in Guatemala City. The rebellion was put down, but the leaders escaped to the countryside, where they formed the nucleus of a revolutionary movement that would wage guerilla warfare in Guatemala for the next thirty-six years. In 1963, a coup replaced Ydígoras with military dictator Enrique Peralta Azurdia, who, with American support, continued the reign of terror against even moderate leftists. Three years later, when a rural counteroffensive crushed the revolt in the countryside, the rebels began to launch unnerving attacks on Guatemala City.
On August 28, 1968, American ambassador John Gordon Mein was returning to the embassy after a luncheon for a visiting State Department official, when two cars forced his Cadillac to the curb on the main thoroughfare Avenida de la Reforma. Two men in green fatigues ordered the ambassador from the limousine. When he tried to flee, he was shot in the back with a submachine gun. Mein was the first U.S. ambassador ever assassinated anywhere in the world, but he wasn’t the first American to die in the Guatemalan civil war: The previous January two U.S. military advisors had also been killed in the capital.
While Mein’s death “naturally shocked Washington,” reported Time magazine, “Guatemalans were not so startled. Since civilian rule supplanted a rigid military regime in 1966, Communist and right-wing terrorists have killed some 2,000 people in their running crossfire.” The attack provided the pretext for more repression, and President Julio César Méndez Montenegro “not only ordered flags to half-staff in mourning, but also temporarily reimposed emergency government powers, including the right to make arrests without a warrant. Outgoing foreign-press dispatches were delayed and censored.”
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