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Five Imagine the naked body of a young woman. Her head is turned to one side, eyes closed, lips apart, mouth halfopen . She is dead. A soiled cloth has been laid across her genitals. Her arms, in repose, are arranged across her chest, but they have no hands. These have been cut off, one placed beneath her right arm, another on top of her stomach . The left side of her face shows she was pretty, but the right side has been mutilated.Three deep gashes on her right arm stand out amidst myriad other lacerations. She must have departed life, had it taken from her, in a frenzy of agony. An ooze of yellow matter, uncontained by stitches sewn from skin to skin by the mortician, runs along what was once the top of her breasts. The polish with which she painted her toenails somehow withstood the torture inflicted on her, for the nail of her big toe, left foot, has a fleck of red unmistakably lighter in color than her dry, crusted blood. Her name is Eugenia Beatriz Barrios Marroquín. Like Guatemala itself, this image of one of its citizens, one of its victims, screams in silence, a tragedy we glimpse through the steely eyes of Jean-Marie Simon. She photographed the corpse in the morgue at Escuintla. It is important that Canadians in particular know something about the facts of this case, for Beatriz Barrios had solicited, and received, formal permission to enter Canada as a political refugee. She had been issued a visa and was abducted only a day or so before she was due to leave Guatemala for Canada. In Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny (1987), Simon writes: On December 10, 1985, two days after [Vinicio] Cerezo’s presidential victory , 26-year-old Eugenia Beatriz Barrios Marroquín, a school teacher and mother to two small children, called for a taxi to go to a friend’s home. Minutes after she left in the taxi, she and the driver were stopped by a car carrying three armed men, who forced her out of the taxi and into their vehicle. Barrios had either been under heavy surveillance or the call through A lens, dArkly a Beauty that hurts 0 that she made to the taxi dispatcher had been monitored by government intelligence. Although the taxi driver returned to tell her friend about the abduction, it was too late. Her body was found the following day, near Palín, Escuintla, by the painted quetzal-bird rock: it had been hacked, her face carved out, her hands severed at the wrists. A piece of cardboard found near the body carried her name and the words “more to come.” When security agents arrived to take fingerprints from her severed hands, Captain Armando Villegas , head of the Honor Guard G-2 intelligence office, was already there. When they asked him, “Muchá, what happened?” Villegas responded by taking out a card on which he had written Barrios’s name, and told them that it was she. The writing on Villegas’s card matched that on the cardboard message. In her book Simon documents the sweep of events that, between 1982 and 1987, saw Guatemala pass through “two presidential elections, two military coups, two states of alert, two Constitutions, an eleven-month state of siege, at least four amnesty periods, and four heads of state—three of them army generals.” A quarter century on, even though a civilian government is in place, the military continues to exercise tremendous clout. Nowhere in Guatemala during the war years was this more apparent than in the so-called “Ixil triangle ” of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, a combat zone whose fields, folklore , people, and communities are highlighted throughout Simon’s riveting photo essay. It was in Ixil country, at the Pensión Tres Hermanas in Nebaj, that I last got to speak with Simon, a couple of years after her book had been published. I’d noticed her from afar earlier in the day, walking across the town square in quick, determined bursts, watchful and alert. I had some sad news to tell her, of the death of a dear friend of mine, someone she also knew, who in fact had introduced us years before at a bookstore in Antigua. I figured I’d bump into her later on, for Nebaj is like that. We ended up eating supper together in the kitchen of the pensión. Our conversation was somewhat hushed, for Tres Hermanas...

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