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 Travel & Outdoors | March 2007 
For Bush, Yucatan Ruins Hold an Allure
 Chris Hawley - Arizona Republic
| | George W. Bush, first lady Laura Bush and the wife of Guatemala President Oscar Berger watch a reenactment of a Mayan game. |
Mérida, Mexico - Your place or Mayan?
As President Bush courts Latin America, he is becoming an unusually frequent visitor to ruins of this ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Today's visit to Uxmal, Mexico, during a summit with Mexican President Felipe Calderón will be Bush's third official visit to a Mayan site in the past year. He visited Mexico's Chichén Itzá in March 2006 and Guatemala's Iximché on Monday.
That's a lot of pyramid-gazing, especially for this president.
Bush has visited only a handful of ancient sites abroad since taking office, including the Roman Forum, the Great Wall of China and the Purana Qila, a fortress in India. Last year, he apologized to Indians for skipping the Taj Mahal during a trip to Asia.
Ancient locations can make ideal presidential stops: Many, like the Mayan sites, are remote, with big open areas perfect for landing helicopters. And, perhaps most importantly, they're easy to close off when needed.
During Bush's visit to Chichén Itzá last year, protesters were kept far beyond the gates of the fenced-off ruins. Mexican journalists watched the visit on closed-circuit television in Cancun, over 100 miles away.
José Huchim, director of the Uxmal site and a coordinator of the visit, said Uxmal was chosen mainly because Mayan cities, with their jagged pyramids and stately temples, make great photo ops.
"The buildings and the decorations of the buildings, all that attracts interest," Huchim said. "These are areas that conserve a certain ambience, and that makes them ideal for these types of visits."
The latest Mayan day trips come just weeks after Mel Gibson's film Apocalypto outraged many Latin Americans, who accused it of propagating an overly violent, historically inaccurate view of the Mayans.
"That movie was clear evidence of the lack of knowledge that exists about this culture," said Carmen Valverde, director of the Mayan Studies Center at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Calderón's office said the visit had nothing to do with the movie or soothing any injured national pride.
Not everyone is happy about the visits. In Guatemala, Indian priests said Sunday that they planned to perform a spiritual cleansing of Iximché after Bush left.
The ancient Mayans ruled over a constellation of city-states scattered across southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.
Uxmal flourished and foundered several times from A.D. 750 to 1200, when it was finally abandoned because of a prolonged drought. The president and first lady will visit Uxmal's oval-shaped, 129-foot-high pyramid known as the Magician's House, Huchim said. They also will tour the Governor's Palace and the Quadrangle of the Nuns.
It will be the president's only sightseeing trip during his two-day stay in Mexico. Most of his time will be spent in meetings with Calderón at a restored former plantation.
Often, the families of traveling presidents get to do more sightseeing than the presidents themselves. In Uruguay, for example, the first lady strolled around a 17th-century Portuguese fort while her husband was in meetings with President Tabare Vazquez.
Sometimes, it's the first ladies who undertake the riskier trips. In 2005, for example, Laura Bush braved protesters to visit the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. She also visited the eighth-century ruins of Hisham's Palace in the West Bank.
The most infamous first lady to visit Uxmal was Empress Charlotte of Mexico. Charlotte was a Belgian princess whose husband, Maximilian, was sent to rule Mexico after an 1862 invasion by France.
Charlotte made the long trip through the Yucatan Peninsulain 1865. At Uxmal, local officials reportedly removed ancient phallic sculptures out of concern they might offend her.
Her time in Mexico ended badly. In 1867, resistance fighters executed Maximilian. Charlotte, who had gone to Europe to plead for military reinforcements, went mad with grief. |
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