About two years ago, maybe more, I became interested in the ways in which the genocide was marked (or not) in public space. This interest has its roots in my work with an artists' collective called REPOhistory starting in the late 1980s; we began to explore and document the histories that were ignored, marginalized, or absent, and create alternative historical markers. This interest in what is, and what is not, represented in museums, markers and monuments has been a simmering undercurrent for a long time.
In one of my first trips to Guatemala, or maybe it was when I was living here in 2011, I visited the parish in Zacualpa, and the nun who was then more or less in charge of things, Sister Ana Maria Álvarez (she is no longer at the parish in Zacualpa but spent a few years in Africa, and now has been reassigned somewhere else) took me to a chapel that had been used as a torture and killing chamber, and that the parish had decided to preserve as a memory site. On the ceiling beams, there were brass doorhandles that had been used to suspend torture victims by their hands, and community members had made small wooden crosses with the names and dates of their loved ones who had perished. One of the floor stones had been removed and there was a small hole in the earth beneath, where some remains had been found. Sor Ana Maria pointed out some faint reddish-brown streaks on the walls, and told me that those were bloody handprints. She told me that after the war, a group of volunteers from Italy had come and helped re-establish the church, and that some of the volunteers in their zeal had started to clean the bloodstains from the wall, but someone stopped them before they were able to completely eradicate the traces.
There was another small chapel farther back in the cloister, but I don't remember as much about that from my earlier visit (I'm trying not to bleed in my record of what I saw today). There were also some murals and photos on the walls of the cloister-- I'm not really sure what to call it -- it's the place where the nuns and lay sisters who staff the parish most of the time live. Cloister? Convent? It is not closed off to the public -- in addition to the sisters' living quarters and offices, there are classrooms and dormitories for visiting delegations and retreats, and on several occasions when I have been there, people have come in and out, working in the garden or helping out with various tasks.
These chapels made a big impression but they weren't directly connected to what I was researching at the time. On another visit to Zacualpa, I made a pilgrimage to the site where the mother and younger siblings of one of the Guatemalan women I interviewed in New Bedford had died. It was the site of her former family home, which had been set afire by government troops in the early 1980s. Paula (I will use her first name only), her father and older siblings had been able to escape into the woods nearby when the troops came and surrounded the house, but her mother was several months pregnant and also tending the two youngest children, and so unable to run fast enough to escape the troops. The army tore the house apart, throwing everything on the ground and then set it on fire, burning the pregnant mother and two youngest children alive. Some time later, the survivors were able to return and bury the remains. Paula had asked me to visit her older sister who still lived in an aldea (rural hamlet) of Zacualpa, and have her sister take me to the site. We walked to the area where the home had been and into the cornfields, and Paula's sister showed me the small indentation in the earth that was an unmarked grave. We had brought flowers and candles and made a small offering at the site. I took photos and showed them to Paula when I returned to the U.S. And I know that there must be thousands of such private memory sites throughout the country, known only to the families.
Then, a year or so later, on another trip to Zacualpa, I saw that a large white cross had been erected in the courtyard adjacent to the church, with the word "MARTIRES" (martyrs) in metal letters on the top.
Thinking back even farther to my very first trip to Guatemala in 2009, which was more of an exploratory visit, one of the first people I'd met in the Mayan community in New Bedford, whose father had been killed in a massacre in San Andrés Sajcabajá, asked me to take a photograph of a plaque bearing the names of the massacre victims that the municipal administration had installed in the town square. I did so, and made a copy of the photograph for my acquaintance. But again, these were somewhat isolated instances.
Later, as I spent more time in Guatemala City for a variety of reasons, I noticed the flyers that the group H.I.J.O.S. -- children of the victims of forced disappearances and massacres -- constantly plastered on the walls of Zona 1, the historic center of Guatemala City. The flyers are all in black and white, on 8-1/2x11 paper, and usually H.I.J.O.S. posts large swaths -- several flyers across and several down. They mostly follow a similar format: in the center a photograph of the victims, and on top, "Donde estan ahora"? (Where are they now) and below the photograph, the name and a brief description of the person. Every time I visit Guatemala there are large patches of these posters so obviously members of the group go out frequently and replace them. Another form of keeping historical memory alive.
Another little piece of the patchwork, as I try to reconstruct how my interest in this evolved, came when I was trying to plan a study abroad trip for students at my university, which never came to fruition. I thought it would be important to start students off by learning about the genocide, and I thought that a museum or exhibit --some kind of immersive experience -- would be a good place to do that. So I asked around friends who were involved in alternative media and documenting what was going on with current attacks on indigenous communities, and they told me about a small exhibit in the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation headquarters -- the FAFG (its Guatemalan acronym) has been instrumental in excavation mass graves and exhuming bodies of genocide victims. It was, I was told, a personal museum, started by the family of one man who had been forcibly disappeared in the early years of the armed conflict. I don't remember now whether the family had finally found out what had happened to their loved one through the discovery of the National Police Archives in 2005 (the police documented many of the disappearances as well as torture, executions and other atrocities), or through the Diario Militar (Military Diary), which was a published list of 183 victims of forced disappearances. However it had happened, they had finally learned the fate of their relative, and had established what was basically a two-room museum. I don't remember it in detail, and it no longer exists, as the family didn't have the resources to staff and maintain it.
Then about two years ago I decided to start exploring this a little bit more. In the aftermath of the 2013-2014 Ríos Montt genocide trial -- the first trial, where he was declared guilty --there was a virulent response from the right wing, elite and military, under the slogan of "No hubo genocidio" (there was no genocide). This became a rallying cry as the right wing took to the streets, threatening that there would be violence if the verdict were allowed to stand. They succeeded in part; the verdict was vacated, and a second trial was ordered. Ríos Montt died before the retrial was concluded.
Therefore, genocide denial and the efforts to wipe out historical memory are very salient issues in Guatemala. In many communities where massacres took place, many people are still hesitant to talk about what happened, about the losses, about the lands they lost and the family members who were killed. In many small towns, genocide survivors have to live with the people who were collaborators, informants and sometime perpetrators of those acts. The local elites who sided with, supported and aided the military are still in place -- local power structures haven't changed that much in many places. People still fear reprisal for naming names.
At the same time, there have been several significant legal cases for war crimes, many of which have taken decades to work their way through to a public hearing, and some of which have resulted in guilty verdicts against both material and intellectual authors of war crimes. I've written about the trial for the burning of the Spanish Embassy in 1980, which I attended, and which ended in a guilty verdict for the then-chief of police, who prevented the police and fire fighters from responding to the fire, allowing the building to burn, killing not only the members of the Committee of Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, or CUC) who had peacefully occupied the building, but also Embassy staff including the Ambassador.
Most recently, a bill was introduced in the Guatemalan Congress that would have granted amnesty to those who committed war crimes during the armed conflict -- the infamous "Ley de Amnistia" (amnesty law). More precisely, what was under consideration was a revision to the "Ley de Reconciliación Nacional" (National Reconciliation Law) that was passed in 1996 just as the peace accords were being negotiated. So far it's been stalled, but the proposal to grant amnesty to war criminals re-ignited the debate.
So, over the past few years this has been percolating or simmering in the back of my mind --where were these histories being represented in public spaces or in museums? One day while walking around Zona 1 and Zona 2, where I usually stay when I am in Guatemala City, I noticed two small, new museums, more or less across the street from each other on La Sexta Avenida (Sixth Avenue), which is the iconic street of the district. One was labeled Museo del Holocausto (Holocaust Museum) and of course it told the story of the European Holocaust of the 1940s (we can talk another time about labeling this "THE" Holocaust -- there were others, in my view). The other museum was Casa de la Memoria Kaji Tulam (House of Memory), founded by a human rights organization that emerged during the armed conflict, the Centro Para Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (Center for Human Rights Legal Action, known by its Spanish acronym CALDH). I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two museums.
I started to poke around, trying to find out where in Guatemala City there were plaques or markers commemorating people who had been disappeared. There weren't massacres in the major cities -- those took places in rural areas, where entire villages were wiped off the map in many cases. But prior to the large-scale massacres (the Spanish Embassy fire wasn't technically a massacre: people weren't rounded up, tortured and then executed, which was the typical pattern during the 1980s), student activists, trade unionists and others were forcibly disappeared -- grabbed off the street and whisked away in a car -- or gunned down. People told me about some markers and I went traipsing around the city looking for the plaques. Some were in small parks, others on the sidewalks of Zona 1. Mostly they seemed ignored by passersby. Street vendors, children on their way to school, vagrants, workers, and tourists, all walked along the pedestrian-only part of la Sexta Avenida paying no mind to the plaque in the floor tiles at the entrance to the La Perla shopping arcade just off the Plaza de la Constitución, or the plaque on the side of a store marking the spot where a street kid ("nino de la calle") had been shot.
Two years ago, at the big book fair (Feria Internacional del Libro de Guatemala or FILGUA), I happened upon a booth for something called El Mapeo de la Memoria -- the mapping of memory. This was a website compiling documentation and information about memory sites throughout Guatemala -- monuments, museums (or rooms within museums), plaques, murals and other markers. This was a gold mine, and I interviewed some of the people involved with the project.
So I was researching this in fits and starts, along with the other work I was doing here on indigenous peoples and the state.
However, this got pushed onto the front burner when someone circulated a call for proposals for an edited volume on cultural responses to war. And I thought that would be a good opportunity to force myself to do this in a more systematic way and write something. However, the project languished, and finally the editor decided to turn it into a special journal issue, so that provided the incentive or the push.
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