Maya after War: Conflict, Power, and Politics in Guatemala

1. War and La Violencia in Todos Santos: Accounting for the Past

CHAPTeR 1 War and La Violencia in Todos Santos: Accounting for the Past I went to Todos Santos for the first time with two vivid images in my mind that defined the town for me as a particular place on the map and as a place with a wartime history. Both of the images were from Olivia Carrescia’s 1989 film, Todos Santos: The Survivors. The first was a pile of stones in the street, meant to block army vehicles from reaching the town center in 1982.The second was the burned-out hull of a school bus, its jagged edges like a scar on the village landscape. The roadblock was long gone by the time I arrived in 1993, but the bus was parked in front of the cemetery—a silent, ever-present reminder of the war. My own understanding of la violencia in Todos Santos developed in many ways, over an extended period. I didn’t hear many testimonies, explicit civil war stories, or accounts of genocidal violence. For many years, I knew only the very basic histories of some key events. The army locked men in the church. Stones spelling “Todos Santos” were placed into the mountainside so the town could be quickly identified in the army’s Cuchumatanes flyovers. Todosanteros lived in exile in Guatemala and Mexico. I gradually came to realize that I had been hearing about la violencia consistently , since my first summer of fieldwork in 1994. I was told the subtle details that evoked the variety of feelings, shifts in daily life, and ruptures in relationships that had occurred. These weren’t testimonies. Instead, they conjured a sense of lived and shared experience in the present that was indelibly shaped by the past. It took me some time to realize that these were war stories. In 1999, the much-anticipated Memoria del Silencio, the exhaustively researched ten-volume report prepared by the UN-sponsored Committee for Historical Clarification (CEH), was released. From 1981 to 1983, the committee determined, genocide was carried out against the Maya, 24 Maya after War leaving approximately two hundred thousand dead in the wake of 626 army-perpetrated massacres (CEH 1999).1 One million of Guatemala’s 7.5 million people, mostly in the western highlands, were at least temporarily displaced. Importantly, Guatemala’s long history of severe social inequality was officially acknowledged in the report as being among the causes of the war. With this, the CEH became the first commission of inquiry to make explicit the connections among structural violence and war and its aftermath. The committee demonstrated these connections by showing how the escalating civil war was linked to local conflicts and their fault lines: grievances among families, villagers, and communities (Grandin 2010). The “scorched earth” campaign that came to define the brutality of the war was a systematic attempt to break down community structures and thereby destroy any possibility of nurturing insurgency (Schirmer 1998). The military killed through acts so heinous they are difficult to recount. They destroyed sacred sites, ceremonial spaces, and cultural artifacts. Indigenous language and dress were repressed. Bases of traditional authority were undermined and communal forms of power were shattered (Grandin 2010). Much of this destruction was performed in an ongoing spectacle of terror, one that was particularly successful because the military assiduously cultivated parties already engaged in local conflicts, and forcibly inducted indigenous men and boys into military service, harvesting their insider knowledge while producing some of the fiercest killers in all of Latin America. The National Picture: Prelude to Genocide In 1954, following a decade of social and political progress, land redistribution throughout the Guatemalan countryside, unionization, and representative democracy, reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was overthrown in a U.S.-backed “anticommunist” coup. It was designed to protect the interests of U.S. investors in the country, particularly the United Fruit Company and their Guatemalan supporters (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1982, Smith and Adams 2011). Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was initially placed in power, following an “invasion” from Honduras and the implementation of an experimental strategy involving diplomatic, economic , and propagandized campaigns that utilized radio broadcasting and pamphleteering. After Castillo’s assassination in 1957, and an irregular election, General José Miguel Ramón Ydígoras Fuentes was placed in La Violencia in Todos Santos 25 power. He would be widely considered a puppet president who supported U.S. business interests (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1982). An unsuccessful...