VIENNA, 1969

GUATEMALA: LA VIOLENCIA

Guatemala: La Violencia

     In the late 1980’s, my friend Roger Bunch and I were in southern Mexico, on our way to Guatemala. Roger had been spending considerable time there – often more than a year at a time – and had developed a number of close friendships, including some among the indigenous Mayan people. That gave him a record of acquaintances with people who had known and trusted him since before la violencia, which was the name commonly applied specifically to the years 1981-82, and more generally to the entire decade, as continued resistance by leftist guerrillas gave the Guatemalan military an excuse to prosecute a near “scorched earth” campaign in some of the regions primarily occupied by indigenous Mayan people – historically, the poorest people in the country. They were also the majority of the population.

     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 Rios 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.

Roger 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. I don’t have his exact words. But this is what he said:

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 the events of a particular time.

     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.

     I have read numbers from 100,000 to 200,000 Mayans who were killed in this virulent attempt to eliminate “subversivos,” which often came to mean anyone who lived in a village where even one person was suspected by the army, or by any informer, of being supportive of the leftist guerrillas.