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  Terror, Grief, and Recovery Genocidal Trauma in a Mayan Village in Guatemala Beatriz Manz In the hot, humid afternoon of Saturday, February , , a long column of soldiers moved with an angry, deliberate gait down a muddy path toward Santa Maria Tzejá, a small, isolated village in the rain forest of northern Guatemala. As the troops approached, the terrified inhabitants scattered in every direction into the surrounding forest, having heard that the military had massacred the people of a nearby village two days before. When the military unit arrived, it found an eerily quiet, deserted community. Only one woman inexplicably remained. The soldiers beat, repeatedly raped, and murdered her. They then dumped her battered body near the building housing the village’s cooperative. This heinous act was only the prelude to the horrors to come. Over the next two days, the soldiers looted and torched every structure in the village. Then, as the flames consumed more than a decade’s worth of hard work and dreams, a long line of troops hiked down a path that skirted an area where two terrified groups, a total of fourteen women and children, were quietly hiding. Crouching in fear in the dense foliage, mothers had stuffed rags into the mouths of their infants so they would not cry. As the last soldier passed, a little dog suddenly began to bark. The unit halted and then returned to scan the area more closely. They soon discovered the first group, a pregnant woman, her infant, and two boys left in her care. A young boy, who was running to warn his siblings of the approaching army, heard the soldiers say something to the terrified woman, and then the troops opened fire upon them, after which a soldier threw a grenade to finalize the carnage. The unit then moved on, locating the second group of eight children , their pregnant mother, and a grandmother. As they did with the first group, the troops methodically and mercilessly slaughtered everyone. Some were shot, others hacked to death, some decapitated. Soldiers slit open the stomach of the pregnant woman, killing mother and child. Others, laughing, threw babies into the air. The only survivor was a six-year-old boy who ran and hid behind a tree, a silent witness to the bloodletting that destroyed the only world he knew. When news of the massacre reached the hiding places of those who had escaped , the stunned villagers took further precautions to save their lives—among them the gruesome task of killing their own dogs, about fifty in all. There is no doubt that the army would have slaughtered every villager had they found those who had eluded them—as they did in nearby villages days before and days after this massacre. After several months in hiding, more than half the families made the arduous and emotionally devastating journey to find refuge in Mexico, where they stayed for more than a decade. The army eventually placed those who remained behind—about fifty families—under military control, literally on the ashes of the original village, and brought in new peasants to occupy the lands of those in refuge. Santa Maria Tzejá was part of the much larger tragedy endured in Guatemala. Governments, at various times and in various places, have unleashed statesponsored terrorism across a wide swath of territory, at times engulfing a region or even drenching an entire nation in blood. On occasion the intensity, extent, and purpose of the violence is so extreme that it becomes genocide. In Guatemala, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)—as the Truth Commission is officially called—was created in June  as part of the Oslo Accords between the Guatemalan government and the umbrella group of insurgent forces, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). “Truth commissions are born of compromise between two extremes: institutional justice vs. silence and sancti- fied impunity,” Amy Ross (b:) observes. There was little equivocation, however , in the commission’s conclusions. In a stunning judgment, the CEH charged the Guatemalan military with genocide: “[T]he CEH concludes that agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between  and , committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people” (CEH b:). According to its findings,  percent of the victims were Maya. “After studying four selected geographical regions,” the commission concluded “that between  and  the Army identified groups of the Mayan population as the internal enemy, considering them to be an actual...

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