Lo Mata, o No Lo Mata?

Last night we were at a bar called Tecun. It's one of those bars in Guatemala where the foreigners usually outnumber the native Guatemalans 3:1. It's right by Parque Central, and it's probably the safest bar in the city....they usually have a security guard at the door. And here in Guatemala, when you see a security guard, they are almost always carrying a big shotgun. So you don't mess around. But it was a quiet Sunday night, and since it's unlikely anything is going to happen with a quiet crowd on a sunday night, I think that the security guard had gone home. About 10 pm most of the group of about 15 people from our school decided that they were headed home to bed, but a few of us stuck around because we were still waiting for food we had ordered. Tecun has notoriously slow service...and so about 6 of us remained at 10:30. The group consisted of my friend Richard, who works for Habitat for Humanity here in Guatemala, myself, and 4 German students who had just arrived on Friday. We were sitting there chatting amiably, when a Guatemalan man approached us. One of the German girls, who had been taking photos earlier, had attracted his attention. He wanted her to take a photo of he and his two friends sitting on the other side of the bar. The man wanted her to take the picture with her camera, and then email it to him. She patiently explained, in the best spanish that she could muster, that she had not brought the cord required to connect the camera to a computer, and thus would have trouble sending him the picture. He, being drunk and not having any experience with digital pictures, insisted that she could find an internet connection in many, many places in Guatemala. Richard, jumping in with his fluent spanish, once again explained the problem to the man but he persisted, becoming more and more angry with our delays. Deciding to put a finer point on the matter, the man lifted his shirt and extracted a large black pistol from his waistband. He declared that he would have to shoot us if the girl did not comply. He then proceeded to ask the entire group a series of questions, “Is this a toy, or a real pistol.” The group agreed that it was real, but the man demanded that a couple of us feel it to confirm it's authenticity. “Does it kill, or does it not kill?” he asked. Again we all agreed....”lo mata, lo mata.” He extracted the clip, asking us to verify the presence of bullets. He dropped the clip and had to retrieve it from the floor. At this point the danger of him accidentally firing the gun probably surpassed the danger of his intentionally harming someone, but I wasn't willing to discount the latter scenario, either, given his demeanor. The group roundly agreed that the best course of action at this point was to take the picture, and then get out of there as fast as humanly possible. The girl and Richard went over to their table to take the picture and a conversation ensued. Apparently one of the man's friends, who knew French was able to determine from Richard (who also speaks fairly fluent French) what had occurred. The two friends, who were apparently a little wiser to the ways of technology than their buddy, immediately understood the necessity of actually getting the photo onto a computer. They also quickly figured out what their friend had done, and having a somewhat more civilized attitude towards the use of small arms in commercial establishments, were embarrassed by his actions. One of the friends brought us a liter of Gallo (the national Guatemalan beer) as a peace offering, and explained that his companero was not from Xela, but from the campo. He was just a poor country mouse who didn't understand the ways of the bustling metropolis. He could not be expected to understand the subtle intricacies of when it was, and when it was not appropriate to use death threats to induce someone to do him a favor. We assured the man that we understood fully before making as swift an exit as we could manage. After all, soon the psychotic would have one more beer drowning his tenuous inhibition to use deadly force while proffering a picture.