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133 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S “Pueblo against Pueblo” I dare say that the militares understood the ethnic component and how to manipulate it better than the revolutionaries. They understood it was a very serious issue . . . and that they had to disarticulate it, prevent indigenous support for revolution. —Domingo Hernández Ixcoy, 20021 E meterio Toj Medrano of Santa Cruz del Quiché wore many hats over the course of the 1960s and 1970s: he had been an AC catechist, radio broadcaster, and someone involved in pan-Maya discussion groups since their inception. He was a CUC founder and an EGP guerrillero. Beginning in the late 1970s, the EGP gave him a new task: to strengthen connections between the revolutionary Left and the movimiento indígena and to bring the organizing networks around Quetzaltenango more fully into the opposition movement. While working as a radio broadcaster earlier in the decade, Toj had provided Jesuits and Ladino university students with access to the Maya countryside. His role for the EGP was similar. Since he had maintained connections with Mayas in racially focused organizing, he was ideally positioned to bridge divisions between the revolutionary opposition and the movimiento indígena. As Miguel Alvarado remembers, Toj had “a special task, to organize indigenous intellectuals so they would not be a counterrevolutionary threat, but rather a force . . . to strengthen the revolutionary struggle.”2 In discussions with area activists, Alvarado recalls that Toj talked both of revolution and problems specific to Mayas. He said that the pueblo indígena had no alternative but to organize itself as a body and join forces with the popular, revolutionary struggle. “The main theme of the meetings was how . . . indígenas could organize as their own force, and as their own force, participate in the popular struggle. . . . [ Just like] unionists, women’s groups, the indígenas also had to take part. It could be 134 C H A P T E R S I X done, it was feasible because we were interested.”3 As Alvarado explains further, “We were conscious of the injustices that existed in our country, and that a struggle for revindication of the rights of indígenas was needed, that we couldn’t do it as indígenas [alone], but had to work with Ladinos . . . , conscientious revolutionaries. We had to do it together because that was the history of Guatemala.”4 Area Maya activists had, in fact, been working in roles supportive of the revolutionary movement since it emerged. Activists in Quetzaltenango explained that they provided fleeing or injured guerrilleros or CUC members with places to hide, often in their own homes. They provided food, money, clothing, medical attention, and transportation . A woman working at a local health post that received aid from the international organization CARE managed to pass some of the products to the guerrilla, her husband recalls, through the Alvarados in Cantel, through a local Catholic parish, and through Emeterio Toj. Others helped in other ways, passing information, for example, between the armed movement and area Mayas. After the Spanish embassy massacre and the Declaration of Iximché, the revolutionary groups were looking for a more formal commitment from the movimiento indígena and full incorporation. Emeterio Toj believed that the professional class in Quetzaltenango had to be incorporated on its own terms, though, so that they could make the revolutionary struggle their own. He felt it was vital that the guerrilla “incorporate their knowledge, their political power. . . . The strategy was to invite them, and that they would decide how to collaborate, the form in which they could make the revolution theirs.”5 In practice there was considerable disagreement over the roles activists from the movimiento indígena would play. The EGP was not willing to grant any privileges to professionals, one activist remembered, and expected them to be like everyone else, low-level recruits, a fact that did not go over well with the indigenous movement. There was distrust, Toj explained, and no room for leaders.6 Ricardo Cajas describes a meeting in Patzicía when activists met specifically to negotiate the position of Mayas in the revolutionary movement. Jesuits came, and CUC and EGP members. “They came to say that the cristianos [those affiliated with the church] were already taking on a role,” Cajas remembers, “through [the organization] Justicia y Paz. The universitarios are in, labor is in it. . . . Now what part are the indígenas going to take?”7 Domingo Hern...

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