La Violencia + Dream

From the chapter “Guatemala: La Violencia”

Our idea was to use Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression, particularly under General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Roger had friends in San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la violencia.

Roger now asked in the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait, a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on stools in one of the huts.

He had a photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man. By itself, it meant nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it. Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what do you want?

Roger introduced me again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names, to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage his corn crop.

The man was quiet. His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep breath, let it out, spoke:

The soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of us, their families. They painted them, their hair, their faces, all over, with gasoline.

Then they lit them...

Some of them we could only identify by their belt buckles....

I have seen – we all have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life behind us – a number of American presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things, of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of these events.

I have never seen, on the face of any one of those presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.

Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark-haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creek banks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creek banks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?