Notes
179 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Notes Introduction 1. El Gráfico, July 30, 1978. The young people’s communities were listed in thephoto’scaption.TheycamefromSolomainHuehuetenango;Quetzaltenango, Cantel, and La Esperanza in the department of Quetzaltenango; Nahualá and Santiago Atitlán, Sololá; Chichicastenango, in the department of El Quiché; and San Sebastián, Retalhuleu. Among them were speakers of K’iche’, Q’anjob’al, and Tz’utujil, three of the twenty-one Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Departments are administrative areas similar to provinces or states. 2. The war itself began in 1962 and lasted over three decades, making it the longest running of the Cold War–era conflicts in the region between repressive military or military-controlled governments and armed revolutionary opposition movements. The bloody conflict left over two hundred thousand dead and “disappeared” (this generally involved kidnapping, torture, killing, and official denial that the person had ever been detained) and over one million displaced, out of a population in the early 1980s of less than seven million. The war was formally brought to an end in 1996 with the signing of peace accords between the Guatemalan state and revolutionary guerrilla armies. The fundamental problems that fueled that war—inequality and landlessness, subjugation of Mayas and the poor, obdurate resistance to reform on the part of the economically and politically powerful—remain largely unresolved. 3. OnthePanzósmassacre,seeComisiónparaelEsclarecimientoHistórico (CEH), Memoria del silencio, 6:13–23. See also Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre, and Sanford, Buried Secrets. National press coverage was extensive. See Guatemalan newspapers El Gráfico, La Nación, La Tarde, El Imparcial, and Diario de Centro América, June 1–4, 1978. For overall figures on the violence , see CEH, Memoria del silencio, “Conclusiones y recomendaciones.” For discussion of “Acts of Genocide,” see CEH, Memoria del silencio, section 2, vol. 3, paragraphs 849–1257, and Oglesby and Ross, “Guatemala’s Genocide Determination.” Maya communities on a national map were famously assigned colored pins by the army, white indicating areas that were judged to be free of “subversion,” pink indicating a low-level guerrilla presence that 180 N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 – 4 required the elimination of local leaders, and red signaling wholesale (actual or potential) support for the insurgency and justifying massacre. As geographers Liz Oglesby and Amy Ross explain, army assessments reflected calculations about both ethnicity and a history of activism: “The army was not simply killing Mayans; it was killing Mayans in particular places where social organizing was most intense.” The CEH findings on genocide accounted for these complications and thus “avoided reifying the racial dynamics of the violence.” “By situating its argument in the concrete geographies of genocide in Guatemala, linking both historical and territorial dimensions of violence and resistance, the CEH avoided framing Mayans as passive ‘victims’ of state violence. Mayans were victims of horrible crimes, but at the same time, thousands of people in the hard-hit communities were also participants and protagonists in broad struggles for political and social change” (Oglesby and Ross, “Guatemala’s Genocide Determination,” 21 and 30). The guerrillas, too, committed massacres of civilians, thirty-two of which were documented by the CEH. These were sometimes in retaliation for cooperation with the army. The CEH found state forces to be responsible for 93 percent of documented acts of violence and the guerrilla armies to be responsible for 3 percent (CEH, Memoria del silencio, “Conclusiones y recomendaciones”). 4. El Gráfico, July 30, 1978. The use throughout the declaration of the term indio—a label typically holding negative connotations of dirtiness, laziness , backwardness—was a purposeful act. In the 1970s indigenous activists adopted the term, challenged to do so by Q’eqchi’ intellectual Antonio Pop Caal in his December 1972 article in the journal La Semana, “Replica del indio a una disertación ladina.” For more on the term indio and on Pop Caal, see chapter 3 of this book. 5. For more on race and ethnicity in Guatemala, see chapter 1. 6. A note about interviews: I spoke with just over one hundred people in twenty communities over the course of this study, most of them Maya activists , women and men, who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Interviews were mostly conducted in Spanish, which as Rigoberta Menchú pointed out decades ago, tended to be the language of pan-community activism itself (Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Mench...
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