Once I had determined to write about historical memory, I had to figure out which sites I was going to focus on. There were well over 600 documented massacres (the number that has stuck in my mind is 644, but that's from several years ago, and there may have been more unearthed since then. The massacres mostly took place in rural areas in the highlands (altiplano), far away from the capital and major cities. While the army operated in the cities, they didn't carry out large-scale military operations there.
The counterinsurgency strategy, laid out in a series of plans that were written out and therefore discovered later on -- two of the most notorious were Plan Sofia and Plan Victoria 82 -- was to eradicate Mayan villages, on the assumption that the Maya were all either guerrillas or guerrilla sympathizers (not actually the case). In counterinsurgency scripts that resemble some of those used by the U.S. in Vietnam, the army targeted specific villages. In some cases they picked off individuals who had been named as suspected guerrillas (they usually tried to find a local person who was willing to name names, and then targeted those individuals, usually torturing them first and then killing them). In others they rounded up all the inhabitants of a village, separating men and women. Sometimes they forced the men to dig their own graves. Often they cordoned the women and girls off and raped them before killing them. Or sometimes they just raped them. Other times the women were forced to be sex slaves for the soldiers; much of this has been detailed in books like Victor Montejo´'s memoir, Father Ricardo Falla's word, Victoria Sanford's Buried Secrets, and many other sources published in Guatemala. The sexual violence was laid out in detail during the genocide trial of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, when Maya Ixil women who were survivors of sexual violence testified publicly, and later in the Sepur Zarco trial (the name of a military encampment) when Maya Q'eq'chi women told their stories.
In many instances entire villages were destroyed. The army burned houses and crops, and killed livestock. The campaigns were anything but random; they were highly systematic, unlike the sporadic army incursions of prior years. Villagers often managed to flee to the surrounding hills and forests; some went farther and ended up living for years in organized Comunidades Populares de Resistencia (popular or people's resistance communities), usually abbreviated as CPRs. The CPRs were located in relatively remote areas like the sparsely populated Ixcán -- a region in the northeastern part of el Quiché -- or in the mountains. Jumping ahead a bit, I spoke to several people who fled their villages in the early 1980s during the massacres, and didn't return until after the Peace Accords were signed, meaning that they lived in the CPRs for 14, 15 or 16 years (depending upon when they fled and how quickly they were able to return after peace was declared.
The army's strategy in the cities was different, and it began earlier than the campaign of massacres. What happened in the cities were forced disappearances and assassinations, usually of individuals (although sometimes more than one person was killed). The army or military police broke into people's homes and whisked them away, or grabbed people off the street. University students, teachers, trade unionists, activists were among the targets. About two years ago I started to visit the places in Guatemala City where there were plaques marking sites where people had been disappeared or assassinated.
For this trip, I decided to look at memory sites in rural areas where massacres had occurred. But there are dozens of sites, and so I had to figure out how to narrow it down so that I could write a reasonably coherent 20-page article (somewhere in that ballpark).
As luck would have it, in early June I got a couple of text messages from colleagues who do human rights work in Guatemala, telling me that there were two indigenous leaders from Guatemala visiting the U.S. who needed a place to stay in New York. I already had a house guest but said that as long as they didn't mind having a slightly crowded place and sharing a fold-out sofa bed, and weren't allergic to cats, I would be happy to host.
And so don Miguel de León from Nebaj and don Marvin (I didn't get his last name) from the Garifuna community in Livingston came to stay with me for several days. We had some opportunities to talk during that time. Both were leading members of what are generally referred to as "autoridades ancestrales" (ancestral authorities) in Guatemala. Miguel was a member of the alcaldía indígena (indigenous mayoralty) in Nebaj. Both urged me to come visit them when I was in Guatemala. But it really wasn't until they had left, and I started to plot out my trip to Guatemala, that I realized that I might want to include Nebaj as one of the places I focused on for this article.
During the genocide trial in 2013-2014, some of the most convincing evidence against Ríos Montt was the testimony provided by Ixil women from Nebaj who laid out in detail how they had been gang raped by soldiers during the military incursions into the Ixil region. Their testimony was especially gripping because in general, in Maya culture, one does not discuss intimate matters, matters having to do with sex, in public, and especially not in a courtroom where the proceedings are being transmitted internationally via social media. Sex is one of those things "de eso no se habla" (you don't talk about that). Tens of thousands, perhaps more, women and girls had been raped during the armed conflict. But for the most part no one talked about it. Being raped is a matter of shame. Obviously many of the rape victims were also killed so there was no danger of their revealing their stories. Rape shames not only the victim herself but her family -- this is why the army often raped women in front of their families, to humiliate the family, terrorize them and buy their silence. The mother of a good friend was raped in front of her children; her husband was not present and she begged the children not to tell him. I think they never did. She also asked my friend to not talk about the matter until she was dead (he didn't keep that promise; he ended up in the United States and when he sough asylum, he told the story to the attorneys and the immigration judge).
So it was stunning that the Ixil women had decided to break the silence in an extremely public setting. They covered their faces with their shawls when they spoke, and turned away from the accused, who was sitting in the courtroom with headphones, as the women spoke in Ixil and their words had to be translated for the defendant.
I hadn't previously considered traveling to the Ixil region to look at monuments and markers because with the exception of one friend who has had to move away for work, I didn't really know anyone there, and I know from experience that you don't just walk into a region where there were massacres as an unknown person and start asking people about the genocide. But since don Miguel was part of the indigenous mayoralty in Nebaj, if he were supportive of my project, then I would be able to proceed.
A colleague, with whom I was co-organizing a conference in July for the Guatemala Scholars Network, had suggested that I visit a community museum in Rabinal, a municipality in Baja Verapaz in the eastern part of the country, where there had been several massacres during the conflict, so I put that on the list.
The other site I decided to include was Zacualpa, which was my first experience of memory sites in Guatemala. It has been several years since I've visited the department of Quiché, where I had lived in 2011 during my Fulbright. I'd visited the chapels in the church cloister a few times but hadn't really "investigated" them -- that is, I hadn't looked at them with a researcher's eye, hadn't taken notes.
And of course I would look at some of the sites in the capital that I had noted before - the numerous plaques and markers in the Zona 1 that mostly go unnoticed by passersby, as well as the street posters and the two small museums that I had visited previously but again, hadn't really "researched."
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