Life goes on.

DEC. 9 2010

Just as people try to ignore the cops while drinking beers in Mexico City, or pass by the fireworks in Oaxaca as if nothing were happening, people continue their lives despite horrific tragedy.

We arrived in Cancún yesterday at one of the alternative conferences to the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun COP 16. (There are two, apparently, because of disagreements between organizing factions.)

I was introduced to many people by my friend and old roommate. She works as a “land-use researcher” in Guatemala. She works to prevent and hopes to curb human rights and environmental abuses by Canadian mining companies abroad.

Halfway through a conversation with one woman, her face suddenly turned somber, and she informed my friend that a Guatemalan woman they worked with had been killed.

The woman had been 27 years old, and according to one article the woman read, it was a car robbery gone violent. Her brother was let go.

Sure, it could have been a car robbery, she said.

“But why do these things always happen to anti-mining activists?” she added, while my friend hugged her.

After an embrace, the two continued their discussion, and my friend, my partner and I continued packing our things for a day on the beach.

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