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Exhumation
of Truth - Notes from Guatemala
By Brooke Casey
Friends and family,
I am currently living and studying Spanish in Xela, the second largest
city in Guatemala, high in the purple and green mountains of the
western highlands. I feel so blessed to have nearly three months
to engage myself with this lovely and complex language before I
head to Guatemala City in September for a final week of training
with the human rights legal organization CALDH and then begin my
term as an accompanier in the Ixil region. I´ve begun to understand
just how remote the Ixil is through the responses of Guatemalan
friends who ask where I will be working. They either say: ¨Ixil?
Where is that?¨ or they get wide eyes and say ¨Oh, that´s
way out there!¨
This morning I am sitting
out on the concrete patio of my casa with laundry hanging all around
fluttering in the breeze. The table on which I have splayed out
my notebook has had one wobbly leg propped up by a worn copy of
the Guatemalan Peace Agreements, the once bold seal of the United
Nations on its cover now fading in the sun. A housemate and I laughed
bitterly about the poignancy of this. ¨At least the accords
are being used for something, eh?!¨ This sentiment, that little
of substance has changed for the better since the signing of the
peace agreements between military and guerilla forces in 1996, has
been conveyed to me more than once by Guatemalans I´ve spoken
with.
You have only to browse
my vocabulary lists to know the tone of our conversations, or the
daily notices in the newspapers--various words and phrases for gangs,
rape, assault, poverty, governmental corruption, different kinds
of weapons, and the well-known verb ¨herir¨, to wound or
hurt. I was with a couple of friends in the small pub they own when
they received the news that a friend´s father had been gunned
down in a spray of machine gun fire while pumping gas into his car
at a station near his home. This just days after a young friend
of their´s was kidnapped here in xela, beaten and left to
die with a slit throat at just 18 years old. Another father caught
between two warring cocaine traffickers? Another youth lost to gang
violence?
But these occurrences
are not unique to Guatemala. There is violence the world over right?
It just happens that here there is rampant impunity for crimes committed.
As well, the same clandestine mechanisms for violence that existed
during the war (ie: counter-insurgency specialists trained in torture
techniques by U.S. military schools as well as the intellectual
authors of civilian massacres) have now been turned loose to run
rogue mafia-like assassin-for-hire businesses or to be congressional
rep´s (as in the case of former military dictator and committer
of genocide, Efrain Rios Montt). I must mention here, by the way,
that Montt´s daughter, who has served as his political strategist
for several years will soon marry Illinois Republican Congressman,
Jerry Weller. Weller happens to be a member of the House Committee
on International Relations and sits on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee
so naturally this happy union has caused some speculation over a
dangerous political conflict of interest. Weller´s response?
Well, he wasn´t available for comment but ¨his spokesman,
Telly Lovelace, said the wedding, which was to take place after
the November election, posed ''no difficulty and no conflict.''
It's like a congressman who's a farmer and serves on the agriculture
committee, or one who's on the finance committee even though his
wife works at a bank,'' Mr. Lovelace said. ''It has nothing to do
with policy.''¨ Uh, right.
The papers here are daily
smattered with contrasting articles depicting both the seemingly
constant assassinations in the Capital as well as captivating stories
about political representatives arguing over what sort of matching
shirts they should all wear to a catered meeting at the beach. Should
they be button-down or T-shirts? What color? Decisions, decisions.
I attended a conference
the other day in which a forensics anthropologist spoke to us about
his work with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team, those who
complete the exhumation of clandestine graves all over the country
as part of an ongoing criminal investigation of civilian massacres
during the war. The foundation, founded in 1996 after the release
of the Truth Commission Report, states its two intentions as: (1)To
support the legal system in pursuing cases against those who committed
atrocities, and (2)To provide dignity to the people who suffered
and survived these atrocities by allowing for proper burial and
payment of respect. Since the process has begun, 2,500 bodies have
been exhumed (about 20% of which are children under the age of 16,
but not including babies still in utero.) Of these, 350 cases have
been prepared for trial, 5 have gone through the legal process,
and 1 perpetrator has been found guilty (in the case of one of the
Rio Negro massacres.)
To initiate an exhumation,
a request must be made by survivors or a community group in the
area of the clandestine grave. The anthropologist we met told us
that most often the silence is broken by women who want to clarify
and make public the truth about the violence they endured and bury
their fallen family members in a proper ceremony. But sometimes
there is a polarization of the community in which some people want
the exhumations and others don´t. This may because the perpetrators
of the crimes live right next door to the survivors and don´t
want the truth revealed. Other times it is simply out of fear that
the stirring up of old problems will only bring more trouble to
the community, and still other times it is because the influx of
radical Evangelical doctrine after governmental repression of Catholicism
taught that the massacres were God punishing the indigenous for
their sins and that instead of complaining about the violence they
should be quiet and ask for forgiveness.
I am still haunted by
the sad, down-turned eyes of the anthropologist, whose job it is
to re-create the deaths of those who have fallen, to imagine what
happened in their final moments. He told of a woman they found with
a 7 month old baby wrapped in her arms and I can´t get the
image of that small bundle of bones curled into the larger nest
of bones, out of my mind. He told us that when a community was fleeing
from the army into the mountains, it was often difficult to escape
with small children who ran slowly and had trouble swimming across
rivers, and babies and dogs made noises that could cost the whole
community its life by revealing their hiding place. So often the
forensics teams will find graves filled with babies and dogs and
children and the one or two women who stayed behind to die with
them.
While most of the exhumations
have been of civilian graves, the team has also completed the exhumations
of several military and guerilla graves. And in fact I was privileged
to attend the funeral of 8 guerrillas recently exhumed and buried
in the indigenous village of Santa Anita. I was able to attend this
ceremony because one of my teachers, a former guerrilla herself,
was a friend of the fallen. The rain spared us that day while we
rocked and swayed to off-key Catholic hymns and firecrackers in
a sea of bright flowers and photographs. One of the speakers at
the ceremony was Rodrigo Asturias, former URNG (ex-guerrilla party)
presidential candidate and son of Miguel Angel Asturias, Nobel-Laureate
author. Later, a group of the village´s youth performed a
theatre piece depicting the reasons why their indigenous parents
had joined the resistance movement and fallen for their beliefs.
It was poignant to watch as the adults of the community witnessed
their children discovering and embodying their roles in a war that
occurred when they were just babies.
Well, I hope I haven´t
overwhelmed you with the length or content of this letter. As I
close, I am reminded by the sounds of church bells and firecrackers
and someone singing ¨happy birthday¨ down the street that
as intense are the challenges facing the people of Guatemala, equally
fierce is the determination to live and to laugh and to love. I
am humbled and enlivened daily by the profound generosity and vision
I witness both in the streets and in the community projects here.
And just as often I am reminded how little I know and how much I
have to learn. It is with an open and deeply contented heart that
I wish you a beautiful July. I hope you are finding peace and inspiration
in those around you. Please keep in touch and let me know what you
are up to, and thank you again for your profound and trusting support
of me on this path.
Abrazos,
Brooke
To read more on the Montt/Weller marriage, see: www.nytimes.com.
To read about and respond to an urgent action update in regards
to human rights violations here in Guatemala, see: http://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent/newslett.html
Brooke Casey will
begin as CAMINOS' next acompanier
in the communities of Ilom and Xix at the end of September 2004.
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