Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures

CHAPTER 4. K’atun Turning in Greater Guatemala: Trauma, Impunity, and Diaspora

To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. —Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others T he novel Cuzcatlán donde bate la mar del sur ends with an imaginary act of reparation, as Pedro Martínez, a soldier in the Salvadoran National Guard, is at last brought before a people’s tribunal to face charges of war crimes against the Salvadoran people. Unbeknownst to Martínez, his niece, Lucía—a leftist revolutionary—is a member of the tribunal. Conscripted into the army as a boy and transformed into a “uniformed man,” Martínez has terrorized and killed countless Salvadoran peasants for many years. Moreover, he is responsible for the death of his own grandfather, Emiliano, his mother, Beatriz , and members of his family’s community (Argueta 1987, 246–285). In her interrogation, Lucía challenges Martínez to assume responsibility for his actions by asking him almost rhetorically: “Who will take vengeance against you for your twenty-five years as a soldier committing injustices with impunity?”(283; my translation and emphasis). Who will judge and punish the soldier when his superiors remain untouched and impunity is the rule of law? How will El Salvador and the rest of Central America deal with the enduring effects of violence and trauma under state imperatives of national reconciliation, forgetting, and impunity? After jury deliberations, Lucía announces the people’s verdict on Martínez’s fate: “lo hemos condenado a que siga viviendo [we have condemned him to continue living]” (284). Essentially declaring him guilty CHAPTER 4 K’atun Turning in Greater Guatemala: Trauma, Impunity, and Diaspora 104 Dividing the Isthmus of all charges in the production of violence and war in El Salvador, Lucía, however, leaves open-ended and ambiguous the question of social justice, reparation, and restitution in the context of postwar El Salvador and the isthmus. Although seemingly incommensurable with the soldier ’s horrendous past deeds, the sentence, as Lucia explains, can only be understood within the “profound history” of war, trauma, and recovery in her country, where victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and sympathetic and unsympathetic parties have all played significant intertwined roles in the production of violence. In such a context, it is difficult to differentiate victims and perpetrators and to apportion justice evenly and easily, although for the victim and the injured it will always matter who the perpetrator is, as Susan Sontag reminds us in the epigraph to this chapter. Indeed, with her pronouncement on Cabo Martínez’s fate, Lucía acknowledges that decades of institutionalized violence in El Salvador and the rest of Central America have left gaping social wounds and deep psychic traumas in individuals and in societies as a whole. Indeed, the cultural critic Ileana Rodríguez does well to remind us that countries , like individuals, carry specific genealogies of violence,1 which are rooted in larger global systems of power and control enforced through local forms of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, racism, war, genocide, and impunity. As it should be clear by now, impunity serves as the cultural logic that gives shape to postwar cultural memory in Central America and informs the production of a posttraumatic literature across the isthmus , even in those locations that did not experience war. This chapter explores in the context of Guatemala the production of what Dominick LaCapra (in reference to the Holocaust) calls “posttraumatic narrative” or “traumatic realism” (2001, 179, 196). According to LaCapra, such narratives replay and perform collective experiences of posttraumatic stress disorders (ptsd) deeply embedded in the cultural and affective psyche of a people who have endured persecution, violence, and, in some cases, genocide, as is the recent case of the Maya in Guatemala. Perhaps before continuing, a brief description of ptsd and its relationship to the production of a posttraumatic literature is in order. In Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), Ruth Leys describes the clinical condition of ptsd as “fundamentally a disorder of memory”: The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect K’atun Turning in Greater Guatemala 105 and integrate...