Zaculpa: las capillas

Returning to our trip around the cloister in Zacualpa, the cloister is a beautiful and tranquil space. It's hard to imagine what it must have looked and felt like during the conflict, when it was turned into a veritable charnel-house. There are a few small well-tended courtyards, flush with plants, and garden in the back. There are dormitories and classrooms, a kitchen and dining room for the nuns, along with their living quarters, and an office. I may be leaving something out, as I didn't poke into every nook and cranny. Within the cloister there are two small chapels, one of which was used for torture - -this is the one closest to the entrance. And the second chapel, farther back, was used as a mass grave. 

But before you get to the first chapel there are two more walls, after the mural, that illustrate some of the relevant history.  They contain framed or mounted photographs with captions, including ones that document some of the forensic work and exhumations that uncovered the remains of many of the victims.  The image on the left shows one wall of photographs and the image on the right is the first photograph. The caption describes the entire town being affected after the army occupied the church in 1981. The town was semi-deserted. "In the rural hamlets the population was razed to the ground, hundreds of men, women, children and old people were assassinated and displaced, their homes and crops destroyed."

Subsequent photographs show results of exhumations, with careful labels about the date and site. Some include human remains -- to the left is a skull and a good part of a human skeleton, with the label "Potrero Viejo" (one of the aldeas that is fairly close to the town center). "The ones who were kidnapped, disappeared, those that were buried alive, those who were killed, were located together with the evidence of the martyrdom that they were subjected to before dying."


Other photographs, in color, show some of the funeral processions. An important part of the process is the identification, more recently through DNA testing, of the remains. I was told that it sometimes takes up to 10 years for a positive identification to be made. Then the remains are returned to the families for reburial. In some cases victims were able to be identified by other means (fragments of clothing or jewelry, other forms of identification). Very often several sets of remains were returned at the same time and so there were group reburials, solemn and significant community events. 


Burial in one's home soil is very important to Mayans, whether they are Catholic, Evangelical or practice traditional Mayan spirituality (or some combination of Catholicism/Evangelical Christianity and Mayan spirituality). People regularly visit the graves of their deceased loved ones, not only on the Day of the Dead but at other times throughout the year (the person's birthday, the anniversary of his or her death if known). So even having a small part of a loved one's body or fragment of clothing means that their spirit can finally rest once it is buried. 

Along the wall facing the entrance, the wall that forms the outside of the Capilla de Tortura, the Chapel of Torture, are more photographs, these ones unframed and covered in plastic wrap, making it hard to photograph without some glare from the daylight.

The chapel itself has been changed somewhat since I was there several years ago. I have photographs from that time, and those are the images that are etched in my mind. When I first visited, there were bloody handprints visible on one of the walls. The nun who showed me the chapel, Sor Ana Maria, explained to me that some Italian volunteers had come to work on cleaning up the church and they had started to wash off the handprints. Someone from the church stopped them before they could eradicate them completely, explaining that it was important that the traces of the war be left for people to remember. There was a piece of the floor that had been turned into a lid or door, with a handle, covering up an area where bodies had been interred; the top was left  open and the bare earth left exposed. 

Now the chapel looks much "cleaner". The hole in the floor has been covered up. There is a carved and painted statue of a woman kneeling, wearing the traditional garments of Zacualpa. There is still one metal door handle on one of the rafters -- these were used to hang torture victims by their hands. And there is still an array of small wooden crosses made by victims' relatives, bearing names and dates (if known), hanging from the ceiling. But it somehow looked more sanitized, less hand-made, than it had years back. I am looking through some photographs but I cannot find the originals from 2009 or 2010 when I first visited, just images on powerpoint presentations that I cannot figure out how to copy.

The second chapel, La Capilla del Pozo (the chapel of the grave or tomb) is a darker, more reflective space. There are thirteen beautifully carved dark wooden chairs, the size usually considered "child-sized", lined around the perimeter of the room. I don't know if the number 13 was deliberate, or if that was simply an accident. There is a table on one side, a cross on the wall in the front, and an exposed patch of dirt in the middle. As you can see in the photograph on the right, it is round, ringed with flower petals, a ring of white and a ring of yellow petals, with a vase of flowers in the center of the ring. A cross made of flower petals extends below, forming the symbol for "woman". There was no one to talk with me and tell me how or why this came to be. Clearly, the candles and flowers are replenished every so often, but I am not clear on who precisely tends this chapel, whether it is just one of the duties rotated among the various nuns who are assigned to this parish, or whether it is a group of lay people from the community.

One final artifact in the cloister caught my eye: a small poster on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, in a plastic sleeve, taped on a wall under a light switch, reading "Jesuit network with migrants Guatemala". The church has also houses a small office where volunteers have provided some advice and support to returned or deported migrants; I wasn't able to find out whether that office is still functioning but I did visit it on some of my earlier trips to Guatemala.