TEN REASONS NOT TO BUY LAND IN GUATEMALA:

1. The Mayan "squatter" dilemma: aka, the slimy guilt you're gonna feel forcing a nice guy named Emilio and his sweet family out of their dirt-floor little hovel they've miraculously managed to carve out of a mosquito-infested swamp after years of back-breaking toil, because their home impedes upon your view of the Rio Dulce riverfront from your second-story veranda. Worse than this part of the dilemma is the utter desperate hopelessness you're gonna feel when you return to your piece of Paradise after a six-month absence, only to find a machete-wielding Emilio lying in a hammock on that same veranda.
2. That lunatic Mayan dude named Ramiro Choc (a sort of Mayan Robin Hood), who has this nasty habit of showing up at your house at midnight, holding a machete to your throat, and growling: "You stole this land from my grandfather, Gringo, you have 24 hours to get off my property." (Last I heard, he was in a Guatemalan prison with 11 felony counts against him, so maybe this is no longer a valid reason not to buy land in Guatemala.)
3. The Guatemalan National Park Service, who have an equally nasty habit of showing up at your house at noon, holding a pen and clipboard to your throat, and growling: "You stole this land from a manatee, Gringo, you have 24 hours to get off his property."
4. The seller who sold you your piece of Paradise has already sold it to six other Gringos, and will sell it to at least six more before the 13 of you figure it out, by which time he will have made so much money, he will have moved to the U.S. and left the bunch of you to slug it out in the Guatemalan court system.
5. The rebel guerillas (there are ALWAYS rebel guerillas in these countries, right?) will FINALLY win the Civil War, a victory they will celebrate by moving in to all the nice houses provided free-of-charge by all those nice Gringos.
6. Have you seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth?" No joke -- if you want to buy oceanfront land in Guatemala, I suggest you buy a lot 300 feet up the side of the Rio Dulce Canyon.
7. Why would you put yourself through all this stress when the jungle is full of perfectly decent hotels that you can stay in for as little as six bucks per night?
8. Lousy coffee, and the mojitos have ginger ale in them.
9. Vampire bats, vipers, tarantulas, scorpions, and chupucabras.
10. That disgusting little bug that lays eggs in your privates in the middle of the night while you are asleep.

If that's not enough reason not to buy land in Guatemala, let's think of a reason why you SHOULD buy land there:

If you don't buy it, some other lucky gringo will, and he -- not you -- will be the one lounging around in a hammock in Paradise, sipping on a pina colada, and smiling all the way to the bank because he knows that $20K he invested in this swamp will pay back in triple-digit spades in 10 years. I'm sure I could think of nine more good reasons to buy land in Izabal, Guatemala, but the second reason (an inexhaustible supply of cheap monkey tobacco) has clouded my mind. But the first reason is the only one that REALLY matters, and you know it as well as I do, which brings me to the Golden Rule of El Pirate Realty:

"Thou shalt not let some other Gringo snatch up YOUR piece of Paradise while you sit on your rear end paralyzed with doubt and fear."

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