I climb the dusty road uphill from town with a man named Candido. Among the tin roofs below he points out a well-built house with a swimming pool for daytrippers from the capital. As the road reaches the mountain, he points out a few plants. One is square stemmed and when thrown sideways, makes a hissing sound. Another has a broad leaf with a forked stem. He cuts a stalk off and makes a slit, showing me how to use it as a trumpet. Our destination is two hours away and these lessons give us something to do when he stops to allow me to rest. The third plant is Tunay, with a hollow cane divided into compartments every nine inches. He shows me how to cut it to extract the water within. It is slightly bitter, no match for a nalgene, but good for emergencies hydration. Along the way, he points out other plants: trees which are good for firewood, house posts, herbal remedies.
It makes me think about literacy. I have been taught how to work with words and ideas, to read Chaucer, census charts, and electric bills, to use a library or the internet to search for a solution to a problem. But here in these woods, I am the illiterate, the one who doesn't notice the obvious, the one who could in hours would never realize things they Candido would notice immediately. There is a huge richness of experience, both practical like firewood, and diversionary like the trumpets—which is only accessible to me through my guide's explanation.
After two hours we reach Candido's plot. We walk for a few minutes through larger area which belonged to his father-some of it has since been sold-to a man he describes as a millionaire. It is wooded, but there are several piles of large logs piled at various intervals-hundreds of dollars of firewood which the millionaire has left-perhaps to rot, perhaps because he hasn't looked into paying some one to haul them market.
Candido's destination is a broad meadow, a half acre filled with a plant with wide leaves, 16 incehes by 6, sort of like a lily. Once a week he comes to harvest the leaves in a half-acre filled with these plants. He collects several bundles of 100 leaves and sells the bundles for $2. The thick, waterproof leaves are used for various purposes, chiefly to wrap and cook tamales.
Today I help pick the leaves, ripping them from the stalk. Later he uses a knife to make a clean cut and trim the stalks. At lunch he descends to a stream running through the center of the plot. He uses his knife to harvest vero, a cress-like plant growing in a pool. He puts the harvested vero on a plate with lemon and salt. We wrap the salad in tortillas. It tastes slightly sharp, crunchy, and complements the slightly bland taste of the tortillas well. We sit in the shade of an avocado tree, eating lunch, surrounded by thousands of Cacayus plants.
Candido is about 60 years old-most of the younger men no longer work in agriculture. Many commute 2 hours to the capital to work in factories. Instead of harvesting Cacayus leaves, they may work for a Korean company whose factories make candy or tools. One man about my age talked of working for 12 years making plastic bags. It is interesting to contrast the two experiences of working in packaging materials. Candido works for himself, providing product tied into traditional food and culture—both the product and its production involve 0 pollution. Cesar works in a factory with environmental costs in transporting and transforming the raw materials, to make a product which litters hundreds of roadsides and clog drainage ditches. People have discovered how to make money selling useful plastic bags, but there is no money to be had collecting the used ones. The plastic that people wrap food in now is different from the leaves people used before, but in much of Guatemala it all gets thrown on the ground: unsightly at a minimum and sometimes contributing to flooding and poisoned soils.
Picking the leaves is not hard work, though I suspect there was work involved in creating a field full of the species. But now that the field exists, harvesting it is actually much easier than the "commute" of walking to the field in the first place. Candido probably earns as much per hour as some one working in a factory, however unless he buys more land, he can only work a few hours a week—that is all the leaves he can pick without damaging his long-term production. And land is one difficulty: prices for land, especially agricultural land are often several thousand dollars per acre, comparable to prices in the US, for people who earn 15 times less. Candido may earn a comparable wage per hour, but Cesar in the plastic bag factory almost certainly earned more per week. And riding two hours in a bus may be preferred to walking two hours down a solitary road.
The shift from cacayus to plastic is understandable for the worker, and the people who buy them from the factory as well. Vendors at bus stops sell drinks and coconut juice wrapped in cheap plastic bags. And in small villages a family with a refrigerator can sell frozen juice treats, if they price them right they can earn more than when they sell mass-produced packets of chips in foil packets. Once in a market I bought a cacayus packet of fish and tomatoes. The leakage when I got home reminded me the functionality of plastic.
After 12 years making plastic bags Cesar is taking a vacation. I worked with him on his father's bean harvest, and sat on the hillside with the other workers at lunch, eating tomatoes, greens, and local vegetables, and sharing a bit of whiskey as a respite from the dusty work. Other afternoons I see him on the porch of his concrete block house, one of the few Guatemalan men who learned how to weave in the backstrap style usually done by women. One of the things he did during his vacation was weave his wife the traditional "corte" blouse women usually weave for themselves.
His father worked a salaried job for the town for many years in order to build the two story concrete house, without having to sell off the half-dozen small widely scattered plots he uses to grow corn, beans and bananas. San Antonio has a big variety of houses—shacks with cornstalks for walls right next to four story houses with expensive tiles and satellite dishes. In rural Guatemalan villages concrete houses usually mean there are relatives in the US sending money. Here in this town in commuting distance of Antigua and Guatemala city there are lots of people who have managed to earn the money to build their houses while living in them.
This is another difference from the US. Here people with enough money for a larger house often improve the complex they have, putting up a new wing with a two new bedrooms, building a second story, or improving the walls and floors. Their house changes but their neighbors and neighbourhood remain the same. In the US people do remodel, but seldom enough to change the amount and quality of living space as drastically as in Guatemala. When people want a different house, they often change neighbors and neighborhoods—just as they do for a different job.
I cannot argue with the economics of manufacturing plastic bags, or people with half an acre who do not rely on it for monetary income. But there was something about sitting under the avocado tree, eating cress—or similar lunches I have had when working in the fields with others. And while plastic beats cacayus for many uses, even people with automobiles, TVs and refrigerators still use them to make Tamales, something I can't imagine eating from plastic. I think this would be a poorer world if no one kept on doing what Candido does, and am glad that Cesar and his father, despite their salaried jobs, are still keeping some traditions alive.
Saturday 11 November 2006
Wednesday 30 August 2006
Postcard from Huehuetenango
In the Northwestern part of the Guatemalan highlands is the province of Huehuetenango. It is one of the few places in Guatemala where men as well as women have preserved the unique Traje, or clothing. In several places the mens’ traje consists of a sort of black wool poncho cut so men can travel in the cool mountain air. In other cases it is a jacket with beautiful red purple and white stripes. It is a region of spectacular, soaring mountains, and narrow valleys, and the geography means that several mutually unintelligible languages are spoken by the indigenous residents of the rural areas. A Guatemalan who went to an indigenous residential school where children were required to learn other Maya languages said that Mam, the language most widely spoken in Huehuetenango, was always the most difficult to learn. Here you might travel ten miles to another valley and find people speaking a different language. It seems backwards and far from the Spanish-speaking centers of power in Guatemala City. But the linguistic fragmentation and relative paucity of archaelogical sites suggest that it may have seemed backwards and far from the centers of power even before the conquest in the days when the most powerful people in the region were other Maya speaking languages like Kakchiquel and K'iche.
I was in Huehue to observe a referendum on mining concessions. Guatemala is party to an international convention granting indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the use of natural resources in their territories. In 2005 a series of referenda in another western province rejected concessions granted to a Canadian company to mine for gold. Despite these rejections on the local level, the national government and the companies are proceeding apace. The mining concessions in Huehue are nowhere near as far along—but the issues, including the destruction of landscape, poisoned streams and wells from runoff and the small share of the revenue generated by the mine which stays in the community—or even in Guatemala, are issues shared.
We awoke in the town at four in the morning to trek out to some of the 50 villages involved in the referenda. We took a bus partway, then my group of about thirty crossed a bridge in the dark, and began climbing a roadway which was blocked to put down paving stones. At one point we saw a man with a horse outlined against the dark navy sky. We mumbled greetings as the horse´s breath made slight steam. The sky continued to lighten as we ascended past cornfields, the sun slowly revealing the contours of the sheer mountainside opposite, the sparkling river below, and the rooftops of the town we had left on the opposite valley. Trekking with this group of thirty, made up of local people, Guatemalans from other provinces, and international observers as we climbed the mountain with the dawn was an experience I will always take with me.
The trekkers split up to go to five villages. In ours we received filling breakfast of soup and tortillas with a local family, then went to the local school, where a man with a megaphone started talking to a slowly gathering crowd of men in sombreros and women with colorful headbands and traje. He wasn´t speaking Spanish. Eventually some four hundred people were gathered and began registering their names for the vote. It was interesting to look out at this crowd of people with individual faces, but very similar clothing: men clustered on one side and women on the other. The man with the megaphone continued discoursing in Popti. A generation ago, even a small gathering of people speaking an indigenous language would have been greeted with suspicion and possibly bullets. Here hundreds were participating in a political rally almost no one in Guatemala city could understand (there are always a few words: “cents”, “poison”, “environment” where they use the Spanish terms).
Then there was the time for the vote, for or against the awarding of mining contracts without consulting the community. And suddenly hundreds of people were waving their arms in the air, shouting, as was the man with the microphone, triumphant. It was a scene I would see repeated multiple times, in various locations in the three municipios (county-level political unit) I observed. The unity of opinion was reinforced by the visual unity of clothing: two dozen women in long black skirts and red tops with a shared color scheme and pattern despite individual touches make quite an impression when working together. The visual unity of traje is something I noticed many times during the referendum, or when they faced the visual unity of police in uniform in the capital.
There are criticisms which could be made. The organizers of the referenda do not feign neutrality, and posters urging people to come to the “consultation against mining” make it clear which side they are on. While there may be some intimidated into keeping silent by the size of the majority view, the enthusiasm of people to defend their way of life is not fake. Both the turnout and the enthusiasm with which people respond to their local leaders is impressive compared with other meetings I have seen organized by people from the capital. If it is a little bit like a pep rally, it is about something which will affect their lives much longer than who will win a football game, or even who will win a congressional seat. The mayors and other elected officials who organized these referenda are representing an indigenous and community perspective absent in the meetings between Canadian businessmen and government officials from Guatemala City making decisions about land where neither has children, family, or roots.
It is interesting talking to the other observers. One night I bunk with a Swiss University student. He indulges my attempt to practice my German. He comes from another mountainous country with scattered dialects—though he says these Guatemalan mountainsides are much more thickly populated than the Swiss ones. He also talks about the effects email and text messaging are having on Swiss: for the first time people are having to write down, and figure out how to spell dialect words not found in any dictionary. Watching people with cellphones chattering in the various dialects here I wonder about the effects of technology. Will these technologies lead to a homogenization like BBC standard or midwest standard in broadcasting, or help people with shared language background keep in touch even as they scatter geographically?
Another night, in a bar in the provincial capital, I watch an argument between an observer from Guatemala city—an ardent socialist—and two neo-liberal economic students. Their conversation fairly quickly degenerates into insults. The neoliberals assume the North American is a potential ally: won´t mines bring jobs? and how can I believe the Maya peasants are the same race who built the stone temples and made such accurate calculations about the solar year? I try to get them to ask similar questions about Europe: are the Italians the same race as the Romans? How could soccer hooligans and blue-blood toffs be the same race as Tolkien and Lord Kelvin? And in any event it's not surprising that people denied education for centuries and only just recovering from the latest in a long history of massacres haven't been able to give rise to scientists and architects. But I´m disappointed in the lack of comity: I´m not sure either the Spanish-speakers on the left or right were interested in doing anything other than debate whether socialism is a good thing and confirm the stereotypes each already had of the other: that the other guys just don´t understand the larger repercussions of mining, or care about what Guatemala really needs.
The unwillingness to listen strikes me again on a larger stage. A few weeks later we travel to the capital where leaders of the consultation present their results to the congress, the human rights office, and finally the ministry of mines. The last is the least successful, or perhaps the most honest. At the end of the presentation one of the officials dismisses the delegation, saying “You just need to go to school to understand what mining is.” And its not too surprising that these college educated men in suits and ties with fancy computers on their desks would look askance at the peasants who would usually be working in cornfields with nary a computer or filing cabinet in sight. Though the peasants are here to talk about things being done in their own back yard and which could affect the land for generations.
We end up getting a ride with a minor ministry official, who tells us how mining has an improved ecological footprint, that the land is obtained through legal purchases, how everyone in these communities is impoverished, how the jobs will make it less necessary for people to go work in coffee plantations. His story isn´t implausible and is probably consistent with everything he has seen in word-processed reports, and when he steps out of his air conditioned pickup for an hour-long site visit. Even among educated Guatemalans concerned about human rights there is sometimes a tendency to see peasant life as a black box described by the word “poverty.”
But if the people at the ministry of mines think the peasants need to “go to school to learn about mining” and the things they deal with every day, I would suggest that the people at the ministry likewise need to learn how “economic development plans“ have historically worked in rural Guatemala. And perhaps the Yes, people seek cash working on coffee plantations, or even in the United States because of difficulty finding jobs close to home. But they value their homes, send money back, build houses in their home villages to try to keep some semblance of a way of life which strip mining and chemical runoff could destroy forever. And even if the technology exists to minimize the environmental dangers, development projects throughout the world have a history of making promises. They make promises to the powerful and well-connected and also to the poor. And they do keep some promises, but promises made to the poor and poorly connected are almost always the first ones broken. When its time for an accounting, I doubt any business will budget for state of the art environmental technology for the peasants of Huehuetenango if they believe they can save the money to pay better-connected creditors. And if they intended to treat the land an the people on it with respect, they didn't show much evidence of that respect today.
I studied urban planning in Boston, and even in the US the demolition of low-income housing to build highways or high rises destroyed communities and small businesses dependent on them, and threw people onto the street. Even forty years later the people have never been compensated. The highways and high-rises were built, and people who were already rich and well connected got richer. But the communities were destroyed, small business owners and tenants were displaced, and promises made were never kept. In Guatemala projects which don´t merely fail to deliver on promises made to people affected, but in some areas where I worked people were killed to ensure there was no one to complain about the broken promises. And the dismissive attitude at the ministry, is not a good sign that they really intend to treat people from these areas with respect, especially since they never consulted with them in the first place.
But organizing is a multi-step struggle, and even if the ministry ignores the meeting, it is officially registered, and the people are organized, and unified, and are building a network. And the logistical effort itself is impressive: computers to count and summarize results, hundreds of local and outside observers coordinated and fed. Whether mining eventually takes place or not, it is in the community´s interest to be treated as stakeholders, rather than relying on the “good will” of patronizing ministry officials. And watching the rousing meetings in Mam, and Popti I am struck by something else. A generation ago the technological divide between indigenous and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans was huge--and these villages still have many people living in wooden shacks, cooking on open fires, and sleeping on boards. But they also have a few people living in two story tile houses with cellphones, computers and pickup trucks: even videotaping the meetings with camcorders—still speaking the language, wearing the clothing and attending church services which tie them to their neighbors in the shacks. And a child in these meetings listening to the language of his or her grandparents used by hundreds to discuss life changing issues might grow up with a very different idea of the balance of power between the indigenous and Spanish-speaking world than some one living in a village with no roads, electricity, or running water and only a hoe and a machete who watched soldiers with machine guns jump from helicopters to torch houses, round up women, and shoot indiscriminately during the civil war twenty-five years ago.
I was in Huehue to observe a referendum on mining concessions. Guatemala is party to an international convention granting indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the use of natural resources in their territories. In 2005 a series of referenda in another western province rejected concessions granted to a Canadian company to mine for gold. Despite these rejections on the local level, the national government and the companies are proceeding apace. The mining concessions in Huehue are nowhere near as far along—but the issues, including the destruction of landscape, poisoned streams and wells from runoff and the small share of the revenue generated by the mine which stays in the community—or even in Guatemala, are issues shared.
We awoke in the town at four in the morning to trek out to some of the 50 villages involved in the referenda. We took a bus partway, then my group of about thirty crossed a bridge in the dark, and began climbing a roadway which was blocked to put down paving stones. At one point we saw a man with a horse outlined against the dark navy sky. We mumbled greetings as the horse´s breath made slight steam. The sky continued to lighten as we ascended past cornfields, the sun slowly revealing the contours of the sheer mountainside opposite, the sparkling river below, and the rooftops of the town we had left on the opposite valley. Trekking with this group of thirty, made up of local people, Guatemalans from other provinces, and international observers as we climbed the mountain with the dawn was an experience I will always take with me.
The trekkers split up to go to five villages. In ours we received filling breakfast of soup and tortillas with a local family, then went to the local school, where a man with a megaphone started talking to a slowly gathering crowd of men in sombreros and women with colorful headbands and traje. He wasn´t speaking Spanish. Eventually some four hundred people were gathered and began registering their names for the vote. It was interesting to look out at this crowd of people with individual faces, but very similar clothing: men clustered on one side and women on the other. The man with the megaphone continued discoursing in Popti. A generation ago, even a small gathering of people speaking an indigenous language would have been greeted with suspicion and possibly bullets. Here hundreds were participating in a political rally almost no one in Guatemala city could understand (there are always a few words: “cents”, “poison”, “environment” where they use the Spanish terms).
Then there was the time for the vote, for or against the awarding of mining contracts without consulting the community. And suddenly hundreds of people were waving their arms in the air, shouting, as was the man with the microphone, triumphant. It was a scene I would see repeated multiple times, in various locations in the three municipios (county-level political unit) I observed. The unity of opinion was reinforced by the visual unity of clothing: two dozen women in long black skirts and red tops with a shared color scheme and pattern despite individual touches make quite an impression when working together. The visual unity of traje is something I noticed many times during the referendum, or when they faced the visual unity of police in uniform in the capital.
There are criticisms which could be made. The organizers of the referenda do not feign neutrality, and posters urging people to come to the “consultation against mining” make it clear which side they are on. While there may be some intimidated into keeping silent by the size of the majority view, the enthusiasm of people to defend their way of life is not fake. Both the turnout and the enthusiasm with which people respond to their local leaders is impressive compared with other meetings I have seen organized by people from the capital. If it is a little bit like a pep rally, it is about something which will affect their lives much longer than who will win a football game, or even who will win a congressional seat. The mayors and other elected officials who organized these referenda are representing an indigenous and community perspective absent in the meetings between Canadian businessmen and government officials from Guatemala City making decisions about land where neither has children, family, or roots.
It is interesting talking to the other observers. One night I bunk with a Swiss University student. He indulges my attempt to practice my German. He comes from another mountainous country with scattered dialects—though he says these Guatemalan mountainsides are much more thickly populated than the Swiss ones. He also talks about the effects email and text messaging are having on Swiss: for the first time people are having to write down, and figure out how to spell dialect words not found in any dictionary. Watching people with cellphones chattering in the various dialects here I wonder about the effects of technology. Will these technologies lead to a homogenization like BBC standard or midwest standard in broadcasting, or help people with shared language background keep in touch even as they scatter geographically?
Another night, in a bar in the provincial capital, I watch an argument between an observer from Guatemala city—an ardent socialist—and two neo-liberal economic students. Their conversation fairly quickly degenerates into insults. The neoliberals assume the North American is a potential ally: won´t mines bring jobs? and how can I believe the Maya peasants are the same race who built the stone temples and made such accurate calculations about the solar year? I try to get them to ask similar questions about Europe: are the Italians the same race as the Romans? How could soccer hooligans and blue-blood toffs be the same race as Tolkien and Lord Kelvin? And in any event it's not surprising that people denied education for centuries and only just recovering from the latest in a long history of massacres haven't been able to give rise to scientists and architects. But I´m disappointed in the lack of comity: I´m not sure either the Spanish-speakers on the left or right were interested in doing anything other than debate whether socialism is a good thing and confirm the stereotypes each already had of the other: that the other guys just don´t understand the larger repercussions of mining, or care about what Guatemala really needs.
The unwillingness to listen strikes me again on a larger stage. A few weeks later we travel to the capital where leaders of the consultation present their results to the congress, the human rights office, and finally the ministry of mines. The last is the least successful, or perhaps the most honest. At the end of the presentation one of the officials dismisses the delegation, saying “You just need to go to school to understand what mining is.” And its not too surprising that these college educated men in suits and ties with fancy computers on their desks would look askance at the peasants who would usually be working in cornfields with nary a computer or filing cabinet in sight. Though the peasants are here to talk about things being done in their own back yard and which could affect the land for generations.
We end up getting a ride with a minor ministry official, who tells us how mining has an improved ecological footprint, that the land is obtained through legal purchases, how everyone in these communities is impoverished, how the jobs will make it less necessary for people to go work in coffee plantations. His story isn´t implausible and is probably consistent with everything he has seen in word-processed reports, and when he steps out of his air conditioned pickup for an hour-long site visit. Even among educated Guatemalans concerned about human rights there is sometimes a tendency to see peasant life as a black box described by the word “poverty.”
But if the people at the ministry of mines think the peasants need to “go to school to learn about mining” and the things they deal with every day, I would suggest that the people at the ministry likewise need to learn how “economic development plans“ have historically worked in rural Guatemala. And perhaps the Yes, people seek cash working on coffee plantations, or even in the United States because of difficulty finding jobs close to home. But they value their homes, send money back, build houses in their home villages to try to keep some semblance of a way of life which strip mining and chemical runoff could destroy forever. And even if the technology exists to minimize the environmental dangers, development projects throughout the world have a history of making promises. They make promises to the powerful and well-connected and also to the poor. And they do keep some promises, but promises made to the poor and poorly connected are almost always the first ones broken. When its time for an accounting, I doubt any business will budget for state of the art environmental technology for the peasants of Huehuetenango if they believe they can save the money to pay better-connected creditors. And if they intended to treat the land an the people on it with respect, they didn't show much evidence of that respect today.
I studied urban planning in Boston, and even in the US the demolition of low-income housing to build highways or high rises destroyed communities and small businesses dependent on them, and threw people onto the street. Even forty years later the people have never been compensated. The highways and high-rises were built, and people who were already rich and well connected got richer. But the communities were destroyed, small business owners and tenants were displaced, and promises made were never kept. In Guatemala projects which don´t merely fail to deliver on promises made to people affected, but in some areas where I worked people were killed to ensure there was no one to complain about the broken promises. And the dismissive attitude at the ministry, is not a good sign that they really intend to treat people from these areas with respect, especially since they never consulted with them in the first place.
But organizing is a multi-step struggle, and even if the ministry ignores the meeting, it is officially registered, and the people are organized, and unified, and are building a network. And the logistical effort itself is impressive: computers to count and summarize results, hundreds of local and outside observers coordinated and fed. Whether mining eventually takes place or not, it is in the community´s interest to be treated as stakeholders, rather than relying on the “good will” of patronizing ministry officials. And watching the rousing meetings in Mam, and Popti I am struck by something else. A generation ago the technological divide between indigenous and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans was huge--and these villages still have many people living in wooden shacks, cooking on open fires, and sleeping on boards. But they also have a few people living in two story tile houses with cellphones, computers and pickup trucks: even videotaping the meetings with camcorders—still speaking the language, wearing the clothing and attending church services which tie them to their neighbors in the shacks. And a child in these meetings listening to the language of his or her grandparents used by hundreds to discuss life changing issues might grow up with a very different idea of the balance of power between the indigenous and Spanish-speaking world than some one living in a village with no roads, electricity, or running water and only a hoe and a machete who watched soldiers with machine guns jump from helicopters to torch houses, round up women, and shoot indiscriminately during the civil war twenty-five years ago.
Sunday 30 July 2006
Postcard from a mountain graveyard
I have returned to the highlands of Guatemala. The whys will be explained in their proper place. One of the most affecting experiences since I’ve Eben back took place in a small mountain village. We were staying with a man I’ll call Saturnino.
This was a peaceful day. A variety of processions from a half-dozen homes around town converged in the field in front of the school. There were a few hundred people, carrying about twenty wooden caskets between them. We marched out of town and about a mile downhill, past cornfields and grazing land. The cemetery was a few acres, with overgrown grass and hydrangea bushes obscuring the pastel cement monuments. We stood under a pole shed while people offered candles, sugar, and guaro (homemade whiskey) according to pre-Columbian traditions. After the flames died, they concluded with Catholic prayers. Looking at the weathered trunks holding up the roof that sheltered us, and past them to the mountains in the distance, the mixed signs of careful tending and wildness in the cemetery, it reminded me a little of backwoods Appalachia in the States.
People sometimes ask if our time in Guatemala has given us impressive Spanish skills. It does, but in villages with shacks and clapboard Pentecostal churches, where people grow most of their own food and brew homemade whiskey, peoples speech patterns are noticeably different than they are in the big cities. As one of my coworkers put it, the language we pickup is “hick” Spanish: sing-song and slow, with a limited vocabulary and non-standard word order, along with some interjections “si, pues,ah...pobre” very different from the rapid and dismissive speech of the capital.
But if the town in 2006 recalls Appalachia, it had a very different quality a quarter-century ago. Saturnino and most of the residents of what was then a town of several thousand (it is considerably smaller now) fled into the mountains in advance of attacking soldiers who raged through burning houses, slaughtering animals and villagers. Guerrillas in neighboring areas had scored a few successes, and the government’s plan was to ensure that the villagers were too terrified and destitute to care for themselves, let alone help anyone else. People were not targeted because of what they had done but because for the army, killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and making millions refugees had no downside and a possible tactical benefit. Saturnino’s family fled higher into the mountains where they lived for several years, subject to continual government attacks. His wife and several other family members were among those killed.
There are a number of NGOs working on different fronts regarding the massacres. I have worked most closely with legal organizations seeking legal accountability. There are others working at documenting the events, at psychological counseling, at attempts to rebuild. On a later trip I also observed a team of forensic anthropologists, excavating the shallow graves where many victims of the violence ended up: tossed in piles at the edge of town, or even buried in what today are the middle of people’s front yards. At the bottom of the shallow pits they find skeletons and torn clothes. Clothing generally decomposes more slowly than flesh and is often the best way to identify the dead. Even in cases where survivors are not seeking legal redress, they are still fearful of arousing the anger of those responsible, or of those who want to make sure that the victims and the events are never discussed.
One place these anthropologists were working was in the mountains where Saturnino’s family fled, and their most recent excavation uncovered the remains of his family, along with about fifteen from that village, and more who had fled from nearby towns. After scientific analysis and documentation, the remains were given to survivors for burial. In the church, the bones were transferred from anthropologists’ boxes to wooden coffins, wrapped in blankets, and bowls and other grave offerings were added. Family members took the coffins home that night, and the next day we walked slowly down to the cemetery.
Saturnino is a catechist for the community. For this ceremony he presented the last chapters from the gospel of Luke, reading from the text in Spanish, then translating into the Mayan language K'iche for the many people who understand things better that way. The story has resonance with the events we are remembering today, the humiliation and wrongful death at the hands of soldiers, dying alone, the survivors’ search for the body and difficulty encountering it. I grew up listening to bluegrass—poor mountain folk who interwove the events of their lives with Bible stories to bring them new meanings. There is much reaction in the world today to the Christianity which speaks of the angry prophet enthroned to judge the world. But another Christian message: the transcendent worth of the man of sorrows--that twenty centuries an unjust execution on a lonely hillside in a remote province of the great empire remains more important than anything that happened in Rome.
We came back to Guatemala because of new developments in the legal case against those who ruled during the worst massacres of the 1980s. After years without progress in the domestic courts, a Spanish tribunal—the same one that heard evidence against Chilean dictator Pinochet a few years back—came to investigate things here. A number of Spanish citizens died in the 1980s, priests working in rural areas, and others who perished in the burning of the Spanish embassy. But the plan was to go beyond that to use the concept of universal jurisdiction over cases of genocide and crimes against humanity to resolve issues which had languished domestically for years.
The judge arrived to a fair amount of press coverage, focusing both on his arrival and the massacres. Even Nuestro Diario, a graphics-heavy tabloid whose specialty is bus crashes, shootings, and bikinis, (along with surprisingly good maps and computer-generated reconstructions of events) had front page coverage on the trial. Because it is widely read in rural communities where literacy levels are low, some people cited this as an important way of getting information out.
Of course the defendants did not sit still. Legal and media maneuvers were deployed to thwart the Spanish case, or portray it as a colonial power meddling in the affairs of a sovereign and independent nation. While lawyers filed motions, editorial writers wrote pieces trying to confuse the issue with praise of the accused and ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Many of these were multi-part (thirteen installments in one case) but the ones I read never discussed events. Not only did it not discuss the real events, it did not even bother to discuss fabricated ones. Mostly they condensed to innuendo: the government was fighting terrorists in the 1980s and these terrorists are behind these legal cases now. It should be pointed out that investigations by the Catholic Church and other third parties found that 90% of the 600 plus massacres were committed by the army, and only 3% by the guerrillas, and that the government was creating fear and terror as part of a deliberate strategy. These matters of public record were never brought up by the editorial writers—even in an attempt to refute or devalue them. But this pattern was also used in advance of a march by military veterans, whose leader warned of “grave consequences” should people interfere with them.
Another day I was working on a different case: events which occurred in 2003, not 1983. Someone asked me “Do you believe we will see justice?” I am never sure how to answer such a question honestly, especially after the reversals in the course of this case: apparent advances followed by regression. And if justice is done, what will it mean, so long delayed?
One of the accused was interviewed when the tribunal first arrived. Asked about the legal case, the eighty-something former security chief facing charges at the end of a long and comfortable life laughed and said “yeah, I could spend the last years of my life in jail, why not?”
The legal process may be too slow to offer much more than such hollow victories against individuals. But it can be part of setting the record straight: to ensure that the next generation of editorial writers will find it harder to pass off glib distortions about who practiced terrorism in the nineteen eighties. And the process proceeds on many fronts, including small triumphs like the fifteen human beings whose surviving family members can now visit their resting place, and the noble endurance of Saturnino and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After returning from wandering in the mountains, they rebuilt a life. Saturnino has three fine horses, and an almost completed five room cement house paid for by a son working in the United States. And that endurance is not dependent of the vagaries of Judges in the Capital.
This was a peaceful day. A variety of processions from a half-dozen homes around town converged in the field in front of the school. There were a few hundred people, carrying about twenty wooden caskets between them. We marched out of town and about a mile downhill, past cornfields and grazing land. The cemetery was a few acres, with overgrown grass and hydrangea bushes obscuring the pastel cement monuments. We stood under a pole shed while people offered candles, sugar, and guaro (homemade whiskey) according to pre-Columbian traditions. After the flames died, they concluded with Catholic prayers. Looking at the weathered trunks holding up the roof that sheltered us, and past them to the mountains in the distance, the mixed signs of careful tending and wildness in the cemetery, it reminded me a little of backwoods Appalachia in the States.
People sometimes ask if our time in Guatemala has given us impressive Spanish skills. It does, but in villages with shacks and clapboard Pentecostal churches, where people grow most of their own food and brew homemade whiskey, peoples speech patterns are noticeably different than they are in the big cities. As one of my coworkers put it, the language we pickup is “hick” Spanish: sing-song and slow, with a limited vocabulary and non-standard word order, along with some interjections “si, pues,ah...pobre” very different from the rapid and dismissive speech of the capital.
But if the town in 2006 recalls Appalachia, it had a very different quality a quarter-century ago. Saturnino and most of the residents of what was then a town of several thousand (it is considerably smaller now) fled into the mountains in advance of attacking soldiers who raged through burning houses, slaughtering animals and villagers. Guerrillas in neighboring areas had scored a few successes, and the government’s plan was to ensure that the villagers were too terrified and destitute to care for themselves, let alone help anyone else. People were not targeted because of what they had done but because for the army, killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and making millions refugees had no downside and a possible tactical benefit. Saturnino’s family fled higher into the mountains where they lived for several years, subject to continual government attacks. His wife and several other family members were among those killed.
There are a number of NGOs working on different fronts regarding the massacres. I have worked most closely with legal organizations seeking legal accountability. There are others working at documenting the events, at psychological counseling, at attempts to rebuild. On a later trip I also observed a team of forensic anthropologists, excavating the shallow graves where many victims of the violence ended up: tossed in piles at the edge of town, or even buried in what today are the middle of people’s front yards. At the bottom of the shallow pits they find skeletons and torn clothes. Clothing generally decomposes more slowly than flesh and is often the best way to identify the dead. Even in cases where survivors are not seeking legal redress, they are still fearful of arousing the anger of those responsible, or of those who want to make sure that the victims and the events are never discussed.
One place these anthropologists were working was in the mountains where Saturnino’s family fled, and their most recent excavation uncovered the remains of his family, along with about fifteen from that village, and more who had fled from nearby towns. After scientific analysis and documentation, the remains were given to survivors for burial. In the church, the bones were transferred from anthropologists’ boxes to wooden coffins, wrapped in blankets, and bowls and other grave offerings were added. Family members took the coffins home that night, and the next day we walked slowly down to the cemetery.
Saturnino is a catechist for the community. For this ceremony he presented the last chapters from the gospel of Luke, reading from the text in Spanish, then translating into the Mayan language K'iche for the many people who understand things better that way. The story has resonance with the events we are remembering today, the humiliation and wrongful death at the hands of soldiers, dying alone, the survivors’ search for the body and difficulty encountering it. I grew up listening to bluegrass—poor mountain folk who interwove the events of their lives with Bible stories to bring them new meanings. There is much reaction in the world today to the Christianity which speaks of the angry prophet enthroned to judge the world. But another Christian message: the transcendent worth of the man of sorrows--that twenty centuries an unjust execution on a lonely hillside in a remote province of the great empire remains more important than anything that happened in Rome.
We came back to Guatemala because of new developments in the legal case against those who ruled during the worst massacres of the 1980s. After years without progress in the domestic courts, a Spanish tribunal—the same one that heard evidence against Chilean dictator Pinochet a few years back—came to investigate things here. A number of Spanish citizens died in the 1980s, priests working in rural areas, and others who perished in the burning of the Spanish embassy. But the plan was to go beyond that to use the concept of universal jurisdiction over cases of genocide and crimes against humanity to resolve issues which had languished domestically for years.
The judge arrived to a fair amount of press coverage, focusing both on his arrival and the massacres. Even Nuestro Diario, a graphics-heavy tabloid whose specialty is bus crashes, shootings, and bikinis, (along with surprisingly good maps and computer-generated reconstructions of events) had front page coverage on the trial. Because it is widely read in rural communities where literacy levels are low, some people cited this as an important way of getting information out.
Of course the defendants did not sit still. Legal and media maneuvers were deployed to thwart the Spanish case, or portray it as a colonial power meddling in the affairs of a sovereign and independent nation. While lawyers filed motions, editorial writers wrote pieces trying to confuse the issue with praise of the accused and ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Many of these were multi-part (thirteen installments in one case) but the ones I read never discussed events. Not only did it not discuss the real events, it did not even bother to discuss fabricated ones. Mostly they condensed to innuendo: the government was fighting terrorists in the 1980s and these terrorists are behind these legal cases now. It should be pointed out that investigations by the Catholic Church and other third parties found that 90% of the 600 plus massacres were committed by the army, and only 3% by the guerrillas, and that the government was creating fear and terror as part of a deliberate strategy. These matters of public record were never brought up by the editorial writers—even in an attempt to refute or devalue them. But this pattern was also used in advance of a march by military veterans, whose leader warned of “grave consequences” should people interfere with them.
Another day I was working on a different case: events which occurred in 2003, not 1983. Someone asked me “Do you believe we will see justice?” I am never sure how to answer such a question honestly, especially after the reversals in the course of this case: apparent advances followed by regression. And if justice is done, what will it mean, so long delayed?
One of the accused was interviewed when the tribunal first arrived. Asked about the legal case, the eighty-something former security chief facing charges at the end of a long and comfortable life laughed and said “yeah, I could spend the last years of my life in jail, why not?”
The legal process may be too slow to offer much more than such hollow victories against individuals. But it can be part of setting the record straight: to ensure that the next generation of editorial writers will find it harder to pass off glib distortions about who practiced terrorism in the nineteen eighties. And the process proceeds on many fronts, including small triumphs like the fifteen human beings whose surviving family members can now visit their resting place, and the noble endurance of Saturnino and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After returning from wandering in the mountains, they rebuilt a life. Saturnino has three fine horses, and an almost completed five room cement house paid for by a son working in the United States. And that endurance is not dependent of the vagaries of Judges in the Capital.
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