Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited

Introduction: Revisiting Harvest of Violence in Postwar Guatemala - Walter E. Little

vi / Contents 9. Everyday Politics in a K’iche’ Village of Totonicapán, Guatemala Barbara Bocek 124 10. Fried Chicken or Pop? Redefining Development and Ethnicity in Totonicapán Monica DeHart 139 11. Neoliberal Violence: Social Suffering in Guatemala’s Postwar Era Peter Benson and Edward F. Fischer 151 12. Harvest of Conviction: Solidarity in Guatemalan Scholarship, 1988–2008 David Stoll 167 Conclusions Robert M. Carmack 181 References 195 List of Contributors 213 Index 217 Illustrations 1. Guatemalan political divisions at department level 10 2. Major Guatemalan roads, cities, and towns 11 3. Mayan language areas referred to in the text 12 4. Trabajando en el campo and Mujer tejiendo un mundo mejor 13 5. Cantar al señor and Traje pueblo San Antonio Palópo Guatemala 14 6. El joven Maya cortando la leña and El joven Maya caminando cargando el palo 14 7. Traje pueblo Sololá and El joven Maya caminando el templo 15 8. El abuelo lee la Prensa Libre and Apostol Pedro predicando palabra de Díos 15 9. Calming down the masses at second election protest in Sololá, December 2001 17 10. The evangelical message in Guatemala finds unique media in Nebaj 43 11. Mayan street vendors defend one of their peers from Tourism Police intimidation in Antigua, July 2005 55 12. La Esperanza from the roof of UPAVIM in Guatemala City 69 13. Main Street,Todos Santos Cuchumatán, July 2006 97 14. Mayas gather for a religious procession in Tierra Blanca 125 15. The Cooperation for Rural Development of the West logo 142 16. Youths hang out in front of a store in Tecpán 152 17. Amajchel reunion on May 12, 1994 168 Mayas in Postwar Guatemala Introduction Revisiting Harvest of Violence in Postwar Guatemala Walter E. Little Guatemala has fascinated popular, mainstream imaginations for years. It is the home of the Mayas, tropical forests, rugged landscapes, and wild animals. These have attracted travel writers, tourists, and television and movie producers for decades. In 1935’s The New Adventures of Tarzan (also known as Tarzan in Guatemala),Tarzan recovered a high-powered explosive that “could threaten world safety” from natives living in a Guatemalan tropical forest. Although Homer Simpson of the television cartoon series The Simpsons has yet to visit, he has eaten the “merciless peppers of Quetzlzacatenango! Grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum”in the 1997 episode titled “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer.” Even the 2005–2006 television season of Survivor, subtitled “Guatemala, The Maya Empire,” pitted cast members against the wild tropical forest and each other with pre-Columbian Mayan ruins as a backdrop. The above examples may seem trivial in a volume concerned with how Mayas contend with crime, political violence, and internal community struggles. The popular fascination with Guatemala as a place of exotic people living in an exotic locale goes hand in hand with the other common representation of the country and people—a violent, repressive country, ruled more often than not by the military. This latter representation, of which there are ample examples by journalists, activists, academics, and others, tends to characterize Mayas as victims. We aim to counter these powerful representations—exotic and victim—with the arguments that constitute this volume. This volume is our ethnographic response to the lack of attention—scholarly and popular—given to how Mayas themselves try to constructively contend with the violence that constitutes a large part of their lives. In the strictest since, we do not revisit the Harvest of Violence (Carmack 1988), since this is not a reassessment of that project. However, we revisit it in the sense that we are concerned with the dearth of information about actual Mayan social reality, 2 / Little not merely the ways that Mayas have been represented and misrepresented. We especially want to draw attention to the difficulties that have faced Mayas and point to how they contend with those difficulties. Mayan Politics and Guatemalan Political Change 2000s Guatemala is a categorically different place than 1980s Guatemala that Robert M. Carmack and David Stoll (the two Harvest of Violence contributors whose chapters are in this volume) witnessed. Subtitled The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis, Harvest of Violence appeared just a few years after Guatemalan Mayas...