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.