Lurking on the shores of Lake Atitlán, amongst the raw sewage outlets and lice infested hostels, Edwin Manzoni preys on those, wishing to learn Spanish.
Anyone who thinks they can learn Spanish at poverty pack rates with just a few lessons from an almost illiterate lad, who developed his own teaching system from a stolen manual belonging to his previous employer and has never heard of an irregular verb, needs a CAT-scan.
|
Investigation: © J. Russell, October, 08, 2015 |
The Gauls of course, bamboozled us into believing that French is the language of love by inventing some sexy sounding words to use when making love to someone oozing gallons of stale garlic oil from every pore, inspired no doubt, by Napoleon’s note to Josephine, that said; “Arriving in seven days, don’t bathe”.
Spanish however, is very different. The British refer to it disdainfully as the Spanish Tongue, suggesting that it’s nothing more than a dialect of duplicitousness and since Don Quixote’s creative spurt some 400 years ago, baby production has become the main activity of the loving tongue as Bob Dylan reminded us in the late 60s, when grasping for an irrelevant rhyme.
Even so, having a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish is quite useful when buying tortillas, handy when ordering chuchitos and tamales, essential when negotiating cocaine shipments and critical, when needing a friend assassinated.
No one chooses Spanish to write a scientific thesis, author documents with useful ideas for mankind or develop technical manuals, as most of the important words will be in English, anyway.
Edwin Manzoni claims to be a “Spanish Language Teacher” and promotes himself as such via his website www.edwinmanzoni.com which is no longer operable, owing to his last round of naughtyness.
There have been a number of famous Manzonis throughout human history, but Edwin isn’t one of them and will go down in lake Atitlán’s folkloric history, as totally in-famous..
Edwin has resurfaced again, this time at worldwidespanishtutor.com, where he will snip you fo $200, $300 or $500 dollar pre-paid amounts, on the promise of providing you with Spanish lessons in person or via Skype.
Manzoni’s primary Modus Operandi is to fleece your Credit Card and PayPal account. He does this by simply providing a couple of lessons and keeping the balance of your money.
If you don’t complain he’s way ahead and if you do complain, he will invent an endless string of excuses and lies as to why he doesn’t think you should get a refund. In other words he’s a hustler.
Following a brief investigation, we have learned that Edwin Manzoni was born in Santa Bárbara, Honduras and is the second son of an incredibly beautiful woman and a scummy evangelical Pastor, who loved his first born but hated Edwin, because he was different.
Six years later, the Pastor moved his family to Guatemala as he’d been promised his own church, however the deal turned sour, so the family moved to a room in La Limonada, the worst slum in Guatemala City and his father got a job as a security guard at a Hiper Paiz supermarket, which drove him to drink and domestic violence.
By the time Edwin turned nine, he and his brother were begging on the streets. Owing to his father’s drunkenness and his mother’s illiteracy, Edwin wasn’t taught to recognize colors on traffic lights, so he crossed on a red, got hit by a car and ended up in the San Juan de Dios hospital, where he remained in coma for 30 days and subsequently, lost his memory.
A couple of days after emerging from his coma, a doctor at the hospital introduced Edwin to a foreign couple he had never seen before, who told him;“Hi, my name is Becky and this is my husband David, we are your new parents now”.
Without so much as a how’s your father, Edwin and his NEW parents immediately got into a car, stopped at MacDonalds for some burgers and headed off to Sumpango, eventually arriving at Funda Vida (Fundación Vida Ilimitada) near the the village of Las Flores, where a gaggle of young boys, welcomed him as their long lost brother.
A year later, just as Edwin was regaining his memory, 21 American Jehovah’s Witnesses turned up to groom the boys, cook lots of food and roast marshmallows around the campfires at night, while singing kumbaya and songs of worship.
Currently, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia are being investigated by a royal commission (equivalent to a national Congresional Hearing but with lots more balls) into thousands of cases of child molesting, they have been deliberately hiding from the authorities. .
David, Edwin’s instant new father and a practical sort of man, put all the boys to work as unpaid labor on his barracks like complex, mixing concrete, carrying concrete blocks and cutting steel, effectively pressing them into service to construct their own prison.
This of course is ideal training for Edwin’s next great caper, when he will probably meet Jesus and become another evangelical Apostle roaming the Guatemalan countryside, while extracting copious amounts of money from his naive followers, for his personal benefit.
What is most concerning about this story is that Fund Vida, where Edwin was held after being illegally kidnapped from the hospital, was a home for young boys only, such as Melvin, Daniel, Miguel, Andrés, Jorgito, Jorge, Ricardo, Antonio, David and Joaquin, who also lived there at the time.
These boys, have since left Funda Vida as they got older, just as Edwin did, and been systematically replaced by others over the years, all acquired by dubious means and housed in far away from Sumpango.
Numerous pedophiles and child traffickers establish their operations in remote areas of Guatemala under the pretext of helping young children, like Semillas de Amor, the adoption scam operated by an American woman called Nancy Bailey from the town of Parramos near Antigua Guatemala.
An arrest warrant was issued for Bailey in 2008, charging her with taking children and putting them up for illegal adoption for fees as high as $40,000 according to the prosecutors, but she managed to avoid capture by flitting around and keeping a low profile.
Bailey was apprehended in El Salvador in December 2014 and turned over to Guatemalan authorities via Interpol at the border between the two Central American countries, charged with human trafficking and participating in illegal adoptions.
As to David & Becky’s underhanded deals with shady doctors at Guatemala’s largest public hospital, it’s clear the Jehovah’s Witnesses are up to their usual tricks in all the countries they operate in.
Watch out for Edwin Manzoni, he’s liable to pop up in many different incarnations, silently waiting to prey on the next batch of people wishing to savour the joys of Spanish, the loving tounge.
“There’s thieves and whores and guns and murder
. . . but there’s also a dark side”.
|
Investigation: © J. Russell, October, 08, 2015 |
edwinmanzano
I never said that my lastname wasn’t manzano, and that doesn’t answer my question, are you able to have an interview in person with me? have you ever interviewed the persons you wrote about? my guess is that you didn’t, I am waiting for an answer.
Best regards
EDWIN MANZANO.
LikeLike