The computer screen shows the sharp green peaks of a sound file, with five seconds highlighted. The man in front of the screen turns to the man in front of the microphone. "Ronohey?" he asks. The first man nods. We have been recording excerpts from the Rabinal Achi, an epic poem passed down orally from more than 3 centuries before Columbus, older than the Canterbury tales. The poem is in the Maya language Achi, as is the word "Ronohey" all of it. In addition to the green sound squiggle, the display contains a controller with universal recording icons ("Red Triangle, Black Square") familiar from tape and CD players. The computer operator occasionally uses pull-down menus written in Spanish, but mostly uses icons and wave highlighting, which are independent of language. Much of what he does could be done by some one illiterate, or illiterate in Spanish. And when the two men discuss operating the computer, many of their words are in the same language as the 800 year-old poem we are recording.
Another day I travel in the back of a pickup with a friend to a rural village forty-five minutes from town, where he teaches first grade. All but three of the students speak only Achi and he teaches them in that language: teaches the alphabet, simple words and a few nursery rhymes "Katzenoj we lik katkikotik, ha ha ha!" It occurs to me that although the words are foreign, much of the non-verbal content of the class: the pictures, the activity, even the tune of the song ("if you're happy and you know it") would be recognizable to a teacher in the United States. Like the computerized recordings, these social technologies can be transplanted into all sorts of cultures without separating children from the voices of their grandparents. Of course the classroom is much more basic than anything in the United States and the morning refreshment (a cup of atol cooled over an open fire and served in cups students store and wash themselves) reflects a school system where there was a telethon a few years ago so students would have pencils.
The question of bilingual education in this valley is reminiscent of the issue in the United States. In the US the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Spanish to master English, the language which dominates culture and business. In Guatemala the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Achi, or other Maya languages, to master Spanish, the language which dominates culture and business. And my friend says, most of the peasant farmers recognize the importance of Spanish for life beyond their valley and want their children to be fluent. Much of the pressure for bilingual education comes from more urbanized people who live very differently from their parents and for whom language is one of the few things connecting different generations. But in places like this, theories about bilingual education matter less than teaching staff. Although most students start off with no Spanish, the fourth grade teacher only speaks Spanish, so all the class takes place in Spanish. Some time is set aside for learning Achi names of plants, but she cannot direct or inspire them having anything beyond a third-grade conversation in the language of their ancestors.
The Rabinal Achi drama is still performed, by people wearing masks and elaborate feathered costumes, and the man we recorded is one of the ones who helped keep the oral tradition alive. During January a few dozen people watched the drama in any single performance, one morning it seemed half the people watching were foreign. At the same festival the mayor sponsored another "Dance" with a huge sound system, roped off and a dozen or so people in Halloween style masks and Costumes moving to booming techno beats. Thousands of people pressed against the ropes to see that performance, without quite so much traditional significance. Of course that is much more in line with modern ideas of spectacle, and in the US as well more people watch the spectacle of WWF and Monster Truck rallies than Shakespeare or recitations of the Canterbury Tales. And even in Shakespeare's time the loudest applause was probably not for the things people study in literature classes.
Throughout the Rabinal Achi, both peoples speak often of nuhuyubal, nutaqahal: my mountain, my valley, to denote where they are from. The play tells the story of how the Achi people won their independence from the much larger K'iche people of several western valleys, who had dominated them for several centuries. The story focuses on a single symbolic event in that battle: the capture of a K'iche warrior by a local warrior, the Rabinal Achi, and the K'iche Achi's execution as a prisoner of War. This is a reminder that war and conquest were not European invention—and would have played a role in the last five centuries of history on this continent even if Columbus had stayed home. But it is significant to compare how different peoples speak of war and battle. The K'iche prisoner of war who dies at the end has many more lines than the Achi characters... as if Beowulf had been devoted more to the words of Grendel and his mother, rather than the eponymous hero, or the Song of Roland had talked about the glory and faith of the Muslims rather than caricaturing them as vicious idolaters. Here the captured prisoner speaks, is killed, and his words are recorded by those who kill him. Unlike European War stories, those who preserve the words of the foreign warrior do not need to describe their enemy as a sub-human monster in order to assuage their guilt about killing him.
The way in which the traditional languages and folkways have survived despite the influx of globalized technology is visible throughout the valley. There is a new supermarket, owned by the Walmart Chain, well-integrated into the streetscape, a metal-roofed two story yellow building between older one-story tile roofed buildings housing a doctor's office and an internet cafe. No sea of parking, just a mass of bicycle and motor cycle taxis (tuc tucs) in front of the entrance. Inside you see women in traditional clothing and headgear looking at the plastic-wrapped frozen foods in the freezers and tall shelves, the way other women examine salted fish in wicker baskets in the centuries old market two blocks away. I take a minibus out to one of the outlying communities, and listen to people chattering in Achi as the Korean-made minibus speeds the dirt roads past adobe houses and cattle pastures with too many plastic bags. Many items from beyond Guatemala make it into this valley, the market is full of CDs from Mexico, t-shirts with WWF figures like John Cena, the Marine, even the Argentinian Che Guevara. But to the people who make a livelihood selling these things, like the minibus drivers, or the man who runs the internet cafe, these items by themselves are not necessarily evidence of cultural erosion. I am sure that when the Rabinal Achi first celebrated the defeat of the K'iche army the markets of this valley were filled with trade goods such as weavings, cooking pots, maybe even songs, from the many valleys of the K'iche nation. Some of these no doubt out-competed the products of this valley, but a Rabinal musician playing a K'iche song is still a Rabinal musician. A Rabinal vendor selling CDs from Mexico or cellphones from Norway is still a Rabinal vendor. The products come from many valleys: some Achi, some K'iche, some Yankee. Some patterns of commerce enrich the residents of this valley, others do not. I suspect some one driving a minivan earns more than some one working for Walmart, some one selling internet time more some one than selling John Cena t-shirts. And if I am wrong in those specifics, it is questions like that which matter more for the economic health of the valley than the origins.
Showing posts with label Rabinal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rabinal. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 July 2007
Tuesday, 4 May 2004
Arriving in Rabinal
Rabinal is the name of a town of about 10,000 people, and of the land surrounding it, an administrative district analogous to a county in the US, albeit smaller in size. Winding up the steep red dirt roads into the hills looming over the town you get a view of dusty hillside pastures marked by waist-high stone walls. As you continue you can look back on the green of irrigated cornfields and banana trees near the streams, the grid of town dominated by the white cathedral, a few clusters of adobe houses in villages outside town, and a few patches of trees. As you rise towards the clouds, the hills which loomed at the edge of town shrink into insignificance far below you, and you can look across the bowl of the valley to the mountains which enclose it on all sides. Five centuries ago, this valley was the land of a people called Achi. Their battles with surrounding kingdoms before the
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
