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Introduction
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Introduction Twenty-two Mayas appeared in a photograph covering the front page of Guatemala’s daily newspaper El Gráfico on July 30, 1978. It was a surprising image, considering the time and the place. The young people in the photo came from disparate areas of Guatemala and spoke different languages, which would have been clear to readers because of the community-specific dress worn by the women in the image, and a few of the men.1 Gathered at the center of the group were indigenous pageant queens, or reinas indígenas, young women who represented their specific Maya communities. Yet Reinas indígenas and supporters protest a massacre of Mayas by the Guatemalan army in Panzós. Source: El Gráfico, July 30, 1978. 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N despite their different origins, they and the young people around them symbolically posed as one. Their message was even more striking. The headline at the top of page 1 read “Reinas Indígenas Repudiate This Year’s Folklore Festival,” an event featuring Maya culture that was sponsored by the Guatemalan government each year. In a strongly worded declaration quoted in the paper, the young people mocked what they portrayed as empty and manipulative state sponsorship of folklore and announced that they were boycotting the festival because of official violence against Maya communities. In 1978 Guatemala was in the midst of an intensifying civil war. A leftist revolutionary insurgency that began in the 1960s was growing in strength, and the threat was met by violent state counterinsurgency directed not only against the guerrilla armies, but also against reformers and activists of all kinds.2 Soon extreme levels of state violence would become common even against unarmed civilians suspected of sympathizing with the opposition . But in 1978 that tactic was unexpected. Its first widely known occurence—a massacre of Q’eqchi’ Maya campesinos in the community of Panzós, Alta Verapaz—prompted expressions of outrage and protest, including that featured in El Gráfico. On May 29, 1978, army soldiers shot down dozens of campesinos in Panzós who had gathered to discuss land claims with the mayor. It was a pivotal moment in the war: as one of the first in a long series of attacks on Maya communities, it serves as a marker on Guatemala’s path toward genocide. Within a few years, the Guatemalan army would routinely identify entire Maya communities in certain areas as likely sources of support for the insurgency and spare virtually no one in their “scorchedearth ” destruction of people, shelter, crops, animals, and sacred sites. The army destroyed at least 626 Maya communities in such massacres, and the United Nations–sponsored Truth Commission determined that in some instances state forces committed genocide.3 The protestors appeared in El Gráfico just two months after the bloodshed in Panzós. As it turns out, the high profile Folklore Festival was held in the very same area of Guatemala—Alta Verapaz—as the Panzós massacre, and the indigenous pageant queens and their supporters used the festival as an opportunity to confront the violence. Speaking for their dead Q’eqchi’ “brothers,” the protestors denounced a government that embraced Maya folklore while massacring Maya campesinos . While the blood of “genuine Guatemalan indios,” as the protestors pointedly termed the Panzós victims, still soaked the ground, they declared that “all the . . . festivals . . . in supposed homage to the indio of [18.205.59.250] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:39 GMT) 3 I N T R O D U C T I O N Guatemala are unjustified . . . because in daily reality the right to life is not respected, [nor] the right to our ancestral lands, [nor the right] to our cultural practices without paternalism.”4 I came across the photograph as I was reading newspapers from the 1970s in Guatemala’s National Library, researching the history of organizing and activism by Mayas in the decades leading up to the period Guatemalans call simply la violencia, “the violence.” It is a bland and safe label—since it elides responsibility—usually referring to the most brutal period of the war, beginning with the Panzós massacre in 1978 and culminating in the army’s scorched-earth campaigns of the early 1980s. The El Gráfico protest was the first instance I had seen of Mayas appearing...