An interesting occurrence in the park

We arrived in Cobán in the early afternoon and had not yet had lunch. We walked from our hostel up to El Parque, the main town square. There we found a rally of some sort underway. In the shadow of a piece of concrete public art that would have stood in the avant garde in the 60s a man in a cowboy hat made rude jokes -- "A woman looks for a man to help her with her many problems, a man looks for a woman to help him with his only problem" followed by a suggestive hand gesture. Arrayed behind this man stood a hundred or so masked and cloaked figures - mainly black, but with some brightly colored masks that even included advertising slogans. A large crowd gathered to listen to what the speakers had to say, and generally approved. Next to the stage they had parked several trucks with mounted displays.

While most of it was lost on me, I got the general gist of an effigy of Bush in the toilet.
We wandered on around the town. I thought the masks quite eerie, given the country's history of death squads and hooded judges. We didn't hear more about it.
On our way back from Semuc Champey I talked with Deborah, a local university student about it. She said that once a year the students write a manifesto listing the changes they would like to see and read it aloud in the town square. The tradition dates from when they had significant and real problems with the military dictatorship, and that the masks just serve as part of the tradition. I asked a cab driver, and he said that the students wore the masks out of fear of reprisal for political jokes they told. We'll see when we start wearing hoods & masks in the US.