The 2012 Story

through the trip that it dawned on me—I was wandering in a war zone.

The shock of realization happened on a bus trip through the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala. I’d just visited Tikal and was making my way to the contested Belizian border, which I’d heard might be shut down by the Guatemala army. The bus itself was the typical ramshackle affair, packed to the brim with Maya campesinos and assorted characters, so I had to climb onto the roof. The four-hour ride through the dewy scrubland would have been pleasant, as I nestled down into sacks of corn chips, except for the annoying fact that every hour the bus stopped and we were all obliged to get out and present our belongings and identification to malevolent-looking machine-gun-toting soldiers. I was the only gringo on board. At the third checkpoint, three travelers, young men, were yelled at and dragged away. I wondered why they had passed the previous inspections unscathed, whereas at this one they became targets. That was a question that was never answered; it has no answer. Genocide follows no reason.

The genocide in Guatemala was brought to the attention of the American media by Jennifer Harbury, whose Guatemalan husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, had been “disappeared” under mysterious circumstances. Under the threat of death she investigated his kidnapping and was able to trace, by herself, a sequence of events that clearly indicted specific officers in the Guatemalan military.² She held out hope that he was alive, but after filing lawsuits and digging deeper, she eventually discovered that he had been brutally tortured, murdered, and dumped in a shallow grave along with a few dozen other unfortunates. The tragic fact that Harbury humanized with her story was that her husband was one of hundreds of thousands of untold stories. Fathers and brothers, sisters and mothers, were kidnapped from their homes or as they walked on roads, corralled into army trucks, and hauled away, never to be seen again.

Harbury, a heroine for calling attention to a story that the U.S. media refused to report on for years, used to sit in front of the governmental palace in Guatemala City for weeks on end, sleeping and sitting in one spot in a hunger strike. That’s what it took to draw the media’s attention and to get answers. It took years, and she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, to expose what was obvious to anyone who knew how international politics worked: Bureaucratic governmental leaders in Guatemala had ordered the killing of Maya peasants to clear the land for transnational development of prized export crops, such as coffee and sugar. The Zapatista rebellion in nearby Chiapas, Mexico, was launched precisely when NAFTA (the North Amercian Free Trade Agreement, which would result in the appropriation of indigenous lands) went into effect on January 1, 1994.

During my early trips to Central America, in 1988, 1989, and 1990, my attention shifted to human rights issues. I fancied myself to be a footloose journalist masquerading as an anthropology student, hitchhiking through war-torn Nicaragua just after the Sandinista ousting of 1990, living and working with the highland Maya in San Pedro, while continuing to explore the Maya ruins. I researched and studied the history of Central America. The CIA-led coup of democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 was the seed that developed into the murder and disappearance of more than 200,000 Maya Indians in Guatemala throughout the 1980s. Four hundred and forty villages were wiped off the map, making way for international companies to appropriate the land for export crops.

Arbenz wanted to return some of the Chiquita Banana landholdings, which were not being farmed, to the Maya farmers they had originally been taken from, for subsistence farming. That’s why they got rid of him. Entire Maya communities, such as Batz’ula on rich arable land in the highlands, were having their legal land grants rendered null and void, while the army intimidated and murdered men, women, and children, forcibly relocating the survivors to distant camps in the cold altiplano or pushing them across the border into Mexico. By 1994, when NAFTA was launched, the genocidal tactics had abated but the result was a national health issue—tens of thousands of Maya Indians were displaced, trying to live in marginalized areas or survive in government camps. Many refugees moved to the dumps of Guatemala City, where they foraged for food scraps and various items, such as plastic bags and paper, which they tried to resell on the streets. Glue sniffing became an epidemic among children as young as five years old. In 1994, I flew to Guatemala with relief supplies for the community of Batz’ula, including medicines, clothing, and viable seeds. The need was immense, and I felt helpless amid a national crisis involving the Maya people I had grown to love.

My earliest writings were journalistic pieces published in my brother’s Chicago-based newspaper, Scenezine, reporting on my travels and the political injustice endured by the Maya. Some of these observations and experiences also appeared in my first book, Journey to the Mayan Underworld, in 1989. Throughout the nineties, a sea change in the Maya world was astir, one that promised better times ahead. In 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America was trumped up in the media, greatly to the dismay and outrage of Native American rights activists. This of course galvanized the Columbus defenders, mainly Italian Americans who didn’t really understand Columbus’s true motivations. The romanticized image of an intrepid explorer charged by God to open up an empty hemisphere for European exploitation was alive and well. Oh yeah, there were two-legged creatures occupying the “new” world. Savages, of course, heathens; theologians doubted they had souls. I can remember going to a talk by political commentator Michael Parenti, and he read from Columbus’s journal. Reporting back to the Spanish Crown on the nature and demeanor of the “Indians” (he thought he was in India), Columbus said they were gentle yet robust and healthy, good natured, loving and kind, trusting—they’ll make great slaves. That was not the Columbus being celebrated in 1992.

OUT OF THE ASHES

An inspiring and courageous Maya woman emerged as a galvanizing figure in the 1990s, introducing the outside world to the stark realities of being Maya. Rigoberta Menchu was born in 1959 and spent her early years like many Maya peasants, traveling between her highland village and farming cooperatives where she worked on the coast. Notorious for unethical practices that kept their workers in debt, these slave-labor fincas, or farms, have come under international ridicule. Throughout the 1970s civil unrest in Maya communities was growing, spurred by unjust treatment by the Guatemalan government. Any effort to organize themselves was called communist, and civil patrol forces—often poorly supervised local regiments of the National Army—were armed to supervise the Maya in their remote villages. This threat of violence within their midst caused a great deal of tension among Maya townspeople, as one might imagine, and they sought to organize themselves so as to have a stronger voice when petitioning the government for reform.

As a result, in a typical turn of events Rigoberta’s family was accused of joining guerrilla efforts and her father was imprisoned and tortured. In 1979 Rigoberta joined, along with her father, the Committee of the Peasant Union (CUC). Within three years her father, brother, mother, and other relatives were killed as a result of government backlashes against Indians who wanted to empower themselves through organizing. She had taken an active part in Maya rights demonstrations for several years, but then had to go into hiding, and eventually she fled Guatemala for Mexico.

In 1984 her famous biography, I, Rigoberta, was published and translated, to international acclaim. Although some of her recollections on details have been called into question, her shocking story drew attention to the genocidal tactics employed by the Guatemalan military, working in the interests of transnational corporations who sought the use of traditional, legally held Maya lands. Through the following years Rigoberta has been celebrated as an outspoken advocate for Indian rights and multicultural reconciliation. In an amazing contretemps that rocked her home country, in 1992 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She used her $1.2 million cash prize to create a foundation in her father’s name to fight for human rights for indigenous people. Her efforts resulted in the United Nations declaring 1993 the International Year for Indigenous Populations. Since then she has educated people about the Maya and human rights internationally. In 2007, she ran for the presidential office in Guatemala but withdrew before voting commenced due to violence against her constituents.

Another Maya leader who emerged from the genocidal tumult of the 1980s is Victor Montejo. His journey from a Jakeltek Maya village in the Guatemalan highlands to a PhD-holding chair of the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California is impressive and inspiring. His story embodies the themes of death and resurrection, and he has become a primary voice for the renewal of Maya culture.

In September of 1982, he was a young schoolteacher in his home village in the Guatemalan highlands. In order to fulfill their “objective” of discouraging community self-determination, the Guatemalan army launched a