the road to guatemala

we did end up crossing the border into guatemala, but not without a little trepidation, due in no small part to a full-page text box in frommer's explaining how tourists have experienced hold-ups, and robberies, and death. this is obviously especially bad in guatemala city which has travel advisories up the wazoo, but apparently even the road from san ignacio into eastern guatemala was not a lot of fun either up to a few years ago.

anyway, this particular post is not about how we got there in one piece (see the brother for his treatment on that,) but rather about the economics of highway banditry. see, it would appear that, left to the free market as it were, highway robbery on the way to a tourist attraction is a weird form of a tragedy of the commons. if everyone operating along that road just got robbed/raped/killed, it wouldn't be too long before the government and/or various states would put out a severe travel advisory, thus shutting down all tourism to the region and closing off that source of income forever. on the other hand, there's no particular reason why any one bandit should curtail his activities out of that fear.

we puzzled a little while over why that scenario did not come to pass prior to the government increasing its presence in the area, and decided that it must not obtain due to gangs fighting amongst themselves for the right to rob, thus establishing a monopoly/oligopoly of robbing and preventing the over-robbing that would lead to complete shutdown. alternatively, the bad guys have figured out the principle of dunbar's number and managed to appropriately split the territory into small enough groups to ensure an optimal solution.

in conclusion:
a) there is definitely a paper in here somewhere.
b) no, we didn't get robbed.