"If you don't believe in justice, if there is no rule of law, you cannot believe in a new state, you cannot believe in peace and democracy in Guatemala." | Read »
"There's something in the very intense, almost, demand in the way people tell their stories that says, 'You must believe this, you must believe what I'm saying, because it really happened.'" | Read »
"I can't forget the moment in which they killed all the women and the children. I can still remember the screams and the gunshots in the ravine." | Read »
Genocide is considered the most egregious crime. It's "the crime of crimes," as some people call it. Genocide is basically the attempt to destroy a group, an ethnic group. So, we believe that genocide in any country is the most dramatic part of the history of that people.
In Guatemala, we've gone through two periods of genocide: once, five hundred years ago for the conquest when the Spaniards arrived, and a second time, in the early 1980s, with the Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt governments.
These were years when, the Truth Commission establishes, there were massacres carried out with the intention of committing genocide. The intent to destroy the Mayan population that was seen by the military as a potential political threat. Oftentimes people don't trust what they don't know. And the problem was racism and discrimination. The Mayans were here when the Spanish culture came. But for 500 years, Guatemala has lived a virtual apartheid. Not in legal structures — we don't have laws of apartheid. But if you go to rural areas of Guatemala, you will immediately recognize that health services, education services, the state, exist only for the non-Mayan population. The Mayan population has been marginalized to the mountains, to the most remote regions, with very little access not only to schooling and housing and health, but also to potable water or electricity or the fundamental developments of society.
The killing was designed in a centralized way by the government, and in those days it was a military government. In developing the genocide policy, they forced people in the rural communities, Mayan people — especially those that were members of so-called "civil defense patrols" — to go and massacre another community. With the level of poverty of these people, and the level of force and strength that the military had, they could force anyone into conscription. And, needless to say, the army would play on old traditional rivalries that could be amongst communities. The army wanted to destroy these ethnic groups, the Mayan population, using their own force but also by pitting them against each other.
Marcie Mersky
The Roots of Conflict
Guatemala had a very long history of authoritarian rule, with a small attempt right after the end of the Second World War to establish a democratic government, what's called in the country a democratic spring. That experiment was brought to an end by a coup financed and organized by the United States government, through its intelligence apparatus. That really led to a series of military governments, direct military rule, for the next several decades. That was in many ways the background and context in which this armed conflict unfolds.
The reason why the U.S. would intervene clandestinely through its intelligence forces in Guatemala had to do with seeing the new democratically-elected Guatemalan government as a threat to large economic interests from the U.S. who were very active in Guatemala at the time. I'm thinking particularly of the United Fruit Company, which was a very important actor in the Guatemalan scene at that point, and the relationship between high officials of that company with high officials in the U.S. State Department at that time. That's a very important factor that helps us to understand what the U.S. government perceived to be at stake at that point.
I think as a U.S. citizen it's so hard to confront, but in Guatemala the very first mass disappearance occurred in 1966 when more than thirty political union leaders were kidnapped and disappeared during an operation which was largely designed by U.S. intelligence personnel who had been sent to Guatemala to train the Guatemalan military in counter-subversion techniques. That really set the stage for how the armed conflict would play out over the next years, and it eventually developed into a state policy of repressing political opposition, a vision of an "internal enemy" who had to be eliminated.
By the late 1970s, by 1977 in fact, the human rights situation of the country had gotten so bad that the U.S. government decided to cut off new military aid to Guatemala. But this, of course, came after almost two decades of U.S. military training [of Guatemalans] in counter-insurgency tactics and strategies. Much of that training took place in the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia or in Panama as a part of the [U.S.] command operations that were based in Panama for so long. Part of the military aid that came through different channels (not always formally established channels but approved by the [U.S.] Congress) included helicopter parts, which were very important in the tactics used against Indian communities. So official military aid is cut off in 1977 by the U.S. government, but in fact there's a large backlog of promised aid in the pipeline as well. [So there were] really parallel policies of the U.S. government toward Guatemala. One was its official cutting off of military aid in 1977, which was sustained throughout the 1980s because of the human rights situation, and another was an active policy of diplomatic support even in the years when acts of genocide were being committed. You have President Reagan coming to the region and saying that the Head of State General Rios Montt was getting a "bum rap," that he was misunderstood.
The Truth Commission
I've lived and worked in Guatemala over the last 23 years, in residence for about 16 of those. I've worked in research and policy development, rural development (especially related to environmental issues), and I've worked on the human rights situation, documenting human rights violations and trying to seek different ways in which to redress them. I worked on both the Church's national study of political violence in the country, as well as in the official Truth Commission that was set up as a part of the peace accords.
I was in charge of one of the regional offices [of the Truth Commission]. We were out basically every day taking testimonies from people in the communities that had been most affected by the years of armed conflict, who had suffered the burden and the brunt of those actions. The overwhelming repetition of one story after another saying the same kinds of things lends enormous confidence and credence to those results. There's something in the very intense, almost, demand in the way people tell their stories that says, "You must believe this, you must believe what I'm saying, because it really happened." I think this is because the events that people lived through are so incredible... almost unbelievable, in terms of the levels of brutality and inexplicable violence in [comparison to] people's daily experience beforehand.
The Truth Commission concluded that throughout the period of the armed conflict there was a consorted policy of human rights violations directed against what was considered to be an "internal enemy." That internal enemy was different at different points in the 34 years of the armed conflict. At some points, the internal enemy was configured as opposition politicians, or as union leaders, university students and leaders, people with an oppositional voice.
Later, in the period from 1981 to 1983, as there becomes (in some respects) a peasant and Indian uprising in sections of the country, the state directs its policy of mass violations of human rights at those communities. [When you say] that the acts of violence were the result of state policy, that is to say they couldn't be considered simple excesses of bad officers. In fact, the situation was so concentrated in that respect, especially in the period of 1981 to 1983, that the Truth Commission concluded that there were acts of genocide committed against certain of the indigenous groups in the country. That was demonstrated using the International Convention on Genocide, a very strict parameter for qualifying different acts as acts of genocide. This was the conclusion of the Commission based on very extensive on-site investigation, taking testimony over the course of eighteen months from more than twenty thousand different survivors, family members, and other people in the regions where these events took place who could demonstrate very clearly that they had taken place and why.
The Truth Commission concluded, based on this independent research, that 93 percent of the human rights violations were committed by the state or forces very closely linked to the state, like civil patrols. The civil patrols basically included all adult men over the age of sixteen to eighteen, especially in rural areas. They were structured as paramilitary forces for local control under the direct command of the local military commanders. So, 93 percent [of the acts] were committed by state forces of one kind or another, 3 percent by guerilla forces, this to say by insurgent guerilla forces, and another 4 percent the Commission simply couldn't identify. It could prove that the event had taken place, but not who had actually committed the violation. About 85 percent of the identified victims were Indian people, but the list of victims includes people from all walks of life: Indians, peasants, students, professors, lawyers, doctors, workers, housewives, Catholics and Protestants. So that it really covers the range of people who make up Guatemalan society.
"Never Again": The Catholic Church Report
The Catholic Church, a couple of years before the Truth Commission began its work, began a separate independent investigation of what had happened during the years of the internal armed conflict. It produced a report called "Never Again." I worked on the first phase of that report in setting up the investigative fieldwork operation, which took testimony throughout many diocese of the country, working through church structures and community structures. It came to very similar conclusions as the Truth Commission, that there was a systematic pattern of mass violations committed against very large sectors of the population, with many of the violations focused on Indian communities. Oftentimes entire Indian communities were the object of these human rights violations, so it wasn't just individual cases of selective repression but really large-scale massacres that affected literally hundreds of Indian communities across the country.
Within 48 hours after the Church presented its report, the Bishop who had overseen the entire project, Bishop Juan Gerardi, was murdered in his own parish house in the dark of night, in a crime that has now been shown to have been directed by military and former military people.
Breaking the Silence
One of the things that these projects documenting human rights violations have sought to do is to break the silence around these events. I think maybe at one point the perpetrators felt that by having mass raids and trying to hide the bodies, they could hide the voices as well — that those voices would be buried along with the people who were killed in the massacres. I think that's been one of the really important functions both of the Church's project and Truth Commission's, to bring those voices back to life. The exhumations that have gone on [are] another way that the voices have been brought back in a different form, not in the form of words but the remains of people, their bones, which for a forensic anthropologist actually speak in ways that sometimes words don't capture.
One of the interesting things about taking testimonies from middle-class professionals in Guatemala City is that oftentimes their testimonies to the Truth Commission were framed in fear. So that one of the first things that people would say was, "I am very afraid to be telling you this, you have no idea how hard it was for me to convince myself to come in, because I am afraid," and that persistent fear is a part of daily life even though the mechanisms of terror aren't being applied today.
For so long this society was silent about what was going on. There were all different kinds of censorship — of the press, or the fear itself acted as a kind of censorship — and so in some places, particularly in the cities, oftentimes young people don't know what happened. Or sometimes their parents are in denial about what went on in the country. I think one of the really big challenges in the future is how not only to make the figures known, but really for young people to understand how this happened, why it happened, what was at stake and who was responsible, not only in terms of the direct commission of terrible acts but also in terms of whose interests were being served [and] to have some understanding of different kinds of complicities.
The history of the armed conflict and the consequences to date is not available in the school curriculum. Unfortunately, while there are a number of different institutions and social organizations that have worked very hard to get the history into textbooks, they have been unsuccessful so far.
Post-Conflict
The signing of a peace accord is really only one very little piece in the puzzle of how societies come to terms with terrible things having been done to people for many years. The conflict here didn't drop out of the sky. It wasn't a plague that dropped on people. It was based on very deeply-rooted conflicts and patterns of exclusion, on people not having access to very basic things like food and education and work and political expression. Until those conflicts and differences are really dealt with in meaningful ways, [there will not be] a solidified peace, a peace that really means something in people's everyday lives.
I think that's another of the lessons of this post-conflict period — maybe I wouldn't call it a post-conflict period as it's often called, but a post-war period. You learn that there are many different kinds of peace. There's a formal peace which is based on two forces signing a peace of paper. [That's] very important. I'm not trying to belittle that. But there's a peace that has to deal with people feeling that they have some kind of security for themselves, for their own development, for their own realization as human beings and for their children. Will their children be part of a better world, will they have a possibility of contributing to that world or will they be weak participants, materially weak, politically weak? That's a different kind of peace.
If there's not a simple explanation for the war, [then] there's not a simple explanation for peace or how you build it. It involves rethinking this society and learning new ways of acting. It defies simple recipes. While actions like exhumations, or having people who were a part of opposing forces sit down at a table and talk to each other, are important pieces of some notion of reconciliation or peace-building, they're simply that, pieces.
[We need to] address what underlies that armed conflict in the first place: political participation, economic rights, cultural rights, social rights [and] recognition of the value of the lives that were lost. One of the things that I've tried to communicate lately to people is how important [it is] that part of the counter insurgency [policy was] seeing "the other" as the enemy constantly.
People whose lives were lost — the victims of these violations — were often seen to be criminals and there was a wide acceptance of the criminalization of the victim. I think it's very important now to decriminalize those people whose lives were lost. One of the ways that this society has dealt with the post-war coming to light is to see victims as a private problem of each family. In a sense, then, you have a privatization of the loss. As if the loss of some 200,000 lives was not also a loss for the society as a whole, but rather each mother, father, sister, brother or child's loss on an individual scale. As if those 200,000 lives didn't mean anything in terms of the country's potential toward the future, as leaders, as thinkers, as producers or as creators. I think until there's a deprivatization of the pain and of that human loss and the society really understands as a whole what it lost, it's very difficult to think about reconciliation in any meaningful or deeper way.
What I fear sometimes is that the consequences of the war, what's left of it in people's ways of dealing with each other, thinking about each other, in their own personal pain, may take more time to get over then the length of the war itself. The effects of the terror remain in many places still — in rural communities especially and in indigenous communities — but not only there.
Related Links
Read "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," the report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Truth Commission).
Read "Guatemala: Never Again," the report of the Catholic Church's Recovery of Historical Memory Project (German, French and Spanish available, English coming soon).
Jesús Tecú Osorio: "Sometimes it's hard for us humans to bear seeing such things. These trees have more memories than we do. They saw everything and so did Mother Earth."
On the 13th of March 1982, at around six in the morning the military and the patrollers, who were dressed in uniforms and armed, entered the village and forced all the people out of their homes. There were boys, girls and pregnant women.
They took me from our house together with my brothers Marcelo, Anastasio and Jaime, who were seven, five and two years old. My sister Juana Tecú Osorio, who was 25 years old, was forced from her house together with her sons Juan and Catharine who were five and two years old. They lived by the road to Chitucán.
One day before, on the 12th of March 1982, in the evening, my sister Juana asked me to get up early the next morning to collect firewood from the hillside with another boy. At nine in the morning on the 13th of March we were in the hills collecting firewood when a man came running past. He was fleeing from the military and the patrollers. We were yelling and joking between us when the man scolded us and said: "Kids, stop yelling. The military and patrollers are in the village and they are taking all the women." I was very worried and I went straight back to our house. When I got back to the house I realized that the soldiers and patrollers were taking all the women and children. So I said to my sister Juana: "Let's leave the house before they get here."
She didn't want to. They were about two hundred meters from our house. She said to me: "If the patrollers find us hiding in the hills, they will accuse us of being guerillas." I wanted to take my younger brother Jaime. My sister insisted on not fleeing. We entered the house and closed ourselves in.
From the book "The Río Negro Massacres," translated into English and published by Rights Action in 2003. Reprinted with permission.
To purchase copies of the book in Spanish or English, or for more information about Jesús Tecú Osorio's work, contact Rights Action at (416) 654-2074, email info@rightsaction.org or visit www.rightsaction.org.
A few minutes passed and then a soldier with his face covered by a red bandana came by. He had the look of an assassin. He walked in front of the women of the village. He began beating down the door of the house. The soldiers and patrollers surrounded the house so that no one could escape. The house was made of wood with a thatched roof. We had a wooden door.
They entered and said: "Where are the weapons that you took from the officers? If you don't give them back everyone will die. Where are all the men? Where have they gone?"
My sister said that we didn't know anything about the weapons and that the men had been killed in Xococ.
The patrollers and the military said that the men had gone with the guerillas and that they were not dead. After searching the house they made us leave. They took us and put us under the concaste tree that was in front of the house. There we saw a group of patrollers who were rounding up the women.
The assassins, who were in our house, began to cook and eat our food. Now there would be no breakfast for us. Having stolen our food, they then began to mistreat the women and asked them the same question. "Where are the weapons that you took from the officers? If you don't hand them over you will all die. Where have the men gone?" The women gave the same reply: "All the men were assassinated in Xococ."
Illustration by Jesús Tecú Osorio.
I remember other bitter moments of the slaughter. The patroller Pablo Ruiz Alvarado had Tomasa López Ixpatá face down. He had tied a rope around her neck forming a noose. The assassin removed the rope from her neck thinking that he had already killed her, however her body still trembled. The patroller took a club and beat her to death. He treated her like an animal. When she was dead he took her by the feet and dragged her to the ravine.
Margarita Sánchez did not want to die like the other women. She wanted to escape but the official saw her. He took her by the hair, threw her to the ground and kicked her. She apologized and said: "Don't kill me, my father lives in Pacux."
The patrollers said: "We'll send you to your father in Pacux."
She sat down beside me, weeping a sea of tears. Then I realized she was vomiting blood. She no longer had any teeth. The rest of the women cried and asked to be pardoned. They offered their cattle in exchange for their lives but the assassins had already decided to kill them.
They no longer took them to ravine, instead they killed them right there in the same place. They killed them in front of the other women and children.
Around two in the afternoon the patrollers took Petronila Sánchez and Paula Chen, who were about fifty-five years old. They forced them to lie face down and placed ropes around their necks, forming a noose. I was two meters away.
Illustration by Jesús Tecú Osorio.
I heard it when they could no longer breathe. They buried their fingers in the holy ground as if they were asking for help.
Their necks cracked. When they were dead they dragged them to the ravine. The bodies were swollen and the faces were bruised. All of the children we were crying.
We were sitting on the ground. The children were the easiest victims to kill. When they came for a child, they just put the rope around its neck and took the child away hanging by the rope. The child began to kick. Once they got to the ravine they let them go. They grabbed the child by their feet and then smashed them against rocks and trees that are still found at that place. Other children were killed with machete blows or from blows to the ears. This is the way the assassins took the life of defenseless children.
Seventeen boys and girls remained. The patrollers came closer to the older ones. At this point Mrs. Juana Tum asked the patroller Macariao Alvarado Toj to take her daughter Silveria Lajuj Tum to Xococ, asking him to care for her as his own daughter. When there were only twenty women remaining the patroller Pedro González called me and said: "I'm not going to kill you but you have to come with me to Xococ and help me with my work. I am only taking you because I have no children."
I said yes immediately to save my life. He separated me from the group and told me to go above the ravine. I took my younger brother Jaime. The rest of the soldiers came closer to the children and chose the ones they would take with them to Xococ.
After killing the twenty women who remained they brought us all together. They prepared us for the walk to Xococ. The assassin Pedro González came to where my brother and I were and said: "OK, let's go to Xococ."
Then he realized that I had my little brother Jaime with me. He told me that he could not take him as he was tired and we had to walk all night from Río Negro to Xococ. I told him that I could carry my brother and that I would take all responsibility for him. Enraged he said to me: "No because my wife is not used to caring for a child as small as your brother."
Illustration by Jesús Tecú Osorio.
I insisted on taking my brother with me. He became angry and said that if I insisted he would kill us both. I was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree. I had my brother in my arms and he took him from me by force. He wrapped a rope around his neck and took him hanging from one of his hands. Jaime was kicking his feet. I followed behind him crying. I asked him a million times to spare my brother's life but it didn't matter.
I wished for someone to help me but no one appeared. We arrived at the ravine where the bodies of the victims were dumped. He threw my brother on the ground. He took him by the feet and smashed him against the rocks. Seeing that he was dead he threw him down the ravine.
There, I saw the women who had been raped, hung, shot and stabbed with machetes. Some of the bodies were still trembling.
I sat on another fallen tree. I was crying. The patrollers reorganized themselves into lines and checked that everyone was present. I counted around thirty-five patrollers and twenty-five soldiers.
We left Pak'oxom, site of the massacre, together with the patrollers and the military. It was around four o'clock in the afternoon. On the way the assassins related how they had killed their victims. Each one tried to tally their number of victims. Some said ten, others fifteen.
We passed by Chitucán around five in the afternoon. All of the houses were abandoned. In one of the houses I found some water. It was polluted, but I drank it anyway as I was dying of thirst. We had not eaten anything all day long.
The patroller Fermín Lajuj Xitumul fainted on the plains of Chitucán. To revive him they gave him urine to drink. We left Chitucán around six in the afternoon.
Around eleven at night we reached Buena Vista. The patrollers there gave us something to drink. After resting for a while we continued walking to Xococ. We arrived there at midnight. The patrollers who had children from Río Negro reported to Captain José Antonio González Solares. He would decide the future of the children. He could give the order to kill or save them. The captain said: "Well, guys, you should have saved all the children and killed all the women."
Some people were waiting for us at the Catholic church with some food. They had cooked meat soup. I couldn't eat any because I thought it was human flesh. That night we slept in the Xococ market. I stayed by Pedro González' side. I couldn't sleep. All night long I had nightmares.
On the morning of the 14th of March, Pedro took me to his house. I couldn't get used to living with him. They gave me food but I didn't eat. What I wanted was to return to my village to find out about my brothers and sisters, what had happened to them and what had happened to the women and children who were murdered and attacked with machetes. I kept crying several days afterwards and told Pedro that I wanted to go back to Río Negro. He responded: "I'm going to advise the army official that you want to return to your village. He will decide if you will be sent there or if you will be killed."
I cried everyday. I was alone, sad, without my parents and there was no one to care for me. I tried to forget the memories of the violence by playing with other children. That was not easy. First of all I had to earn the trust of the other children so that they would allow me to play with them.
I can't forget the moment in which they killed all the women and the children. I can still remember the screams and the gunshots in the ravine.
Introduction
"If you don't believe in justice, if there is no rule of law, you cannot believe in a new state, you cannot believe in peace and democracy in Guatemala." | Read »
"There's something in the very intense, almost, demand in the way people tell their stories that says, 'You must believe this, you must believe what I'm saying, because it really happened.'" | Read »
"I can't forget the moment in which they killed all the women and the children. I can still remember the screams and the gunshots in the ravine." | Read »
Frank La Rue
Edited from an interview by Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay in March 2001.
In Guatemala, we've gone through two periods of genocide: once, five hundred years ago for the conquest when the Spaniards arrived, and a second time, in the early 1980s, with the Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt governments.
These were years when, the Truth Commission establishes, there were massacres carried out with the intention of committing genocide. The intent to destroy the Mayan population that was seen by the military as a potential political threat. Oftentimes people don't trust what they don't know. And the problem was racism and discrimination. The Mayans were here when the Spanish culture came. But for 500 years, Guatemala has lived a virtual apartheid. Not in legal structures -- we don't have laws of apartheid. But if you go to rural areas of Guatemala, you will immediately recognize that health services, education services, the state, exist only for the non-Mayan population. The Mayan population has been marginalized to the mountains, to the most remote regions, with very little access not only to schooling and housing and health, but also to potable water or electricity or the fundamental developments of society.
The killing was designed in a centralized way by the government, and in those days it was a military government. In developing the genocide policy, they forced people in the rural communities, Mayan people -- especially those that were members of so-called "civil defense patrols" -- to go and massacre another community. With the level of poverty of these people, and the level of force and strength that the military had, they could force anyone into conscription. And, needless to say, the army would play on old traditional rivalries that could be amongst communities. The army wanted to destroy these ethnic groups, the Mayan population, using their own force but also by pitting them against each other.
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Brief Chronology March 1982 August 1983 December 1996 2000 1990, 1995 and 2003 Compiled with data from Guatemala |
The idea of genocide is a social destruction. You not only destroy a group physically, you destroy them as a social group, so they no longer exist, they no longer reproduce. For instance, the army made a point in killing pregnant women and oftentimes would slice their bellies open and take the child out and throw it on the floor. This was a message that this group would not grow, reproduce its culture and reproduce itself physically. I think one has to understand genocide as an expression not only of physical violence but also as the expression of humiliation and destruction to the values of an ethnic group. This is what the Guatemalan military, and even the oligarchy, did. It was the military who carried this out, but all the rest of the people in Guatemala City remained silent and didn't want to listen or look at it.
The International Community and U.S. Involvement
I think silence always contributes to genocide everywhere in the world. It happened in Rwanda, it happened in Bosnia until the international community decided to respond. In Guatemala, the international community responded really too late. We began going to the U.N. General Assembly in 1982, exactly in the first year of the Rios Montt regime. That was the first General Assembly where different Guatemalans living in exile brought the case. There was a good response. There was interest in it. There was sort of a lukewarm resolution, but there was no clear condemnation of what was happening. The Reagan government in Washington was saying that the press in Guatemala and the international press were giving Rios Montt a "bum rap" -- literally, that was his phrase -- and it was unfair because Rios Montt was doing whatever he could to establish law and order... by killing everyone.
In the case of the U.S. government, it's interesting that the Carter Administration had actually canceled military assistance to Guatemala. And it was Carter's policies, as much as they were criticized later, that saved the U.S. from a direct participation in this effort of genocide. One of the reasons why the Guatemalan military was so violent and so bloody was because they had very little resources. They couldn't fight from Monday through Friday and then fly back home for the weekend, like they could in El Salvador. And so the army in Guatemala decided to compensate with violence for what they didn't have in resources -- especially air resources, helicopters and planes. This is why the campaign was a campaign of terror, of organized terror from the state. You have to terrify the population into absolute fear so they respond to what you want.
And I would say the U.S. did not participate directly, to the extent that the Carter policies had canceled the aid. But the U.S., in the Reagan years, would be responsible for the cover-up, with Reagan himself trying to defend Rios Montt, folks at the State Department during those first years trying to deny what was happening in Guatemala. Twenty years later you have the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission saying there was genocide in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983. So now it's an unchallengeable truth.
The reality of Guatemala today is very much connected to past U.S. involvement. You see, during the Eisenhower years, the U.S. inaugurated a new foreign policy, moving from overt military operations to very covert actions. The two cases that come to mind are the coup in Iran in 1952 and the coup in Guatemala in 1954. This was a new pattern of foreign policy for the U.S., but also a new period -- a tragic period -- for Guatemalan history. The coup of 1954 was the famous coup related to the interests of the United Fruit Company. The U.S. government -- Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state -- engaged themselves in a covert action to overthrow the legitimate government of Jacobo Arbenz because the United Fruit Company felt their land holdings were in jeopardy. A puppet regime was established, which was a very right-wing regime.
After that point, Guatemala became this ultra-conservative and violent country. Guatemalan society was already marked by racism and discrimination, which date from the colonial period. When you have such a society, and you have these very conservative military puppet regimes, you have a crisis. So in 1960, there was a reaction from the military establishment. Young officers tried to stage a coup that failed and that's when the insurgent movement begins. And Guatemala lived under civil war for 36 years, from 1960 to 1996 when the Peace was signed. In these 36 years, thousands of people, 200,000 people according to the Truth Commission, were murdered or disappeared in different stages. This is an enormous amount of violence, an enormous amount of suffering for a nation to endure. And even within this period, the worst period was the period of genocide, according to the Truth Commission, of 1981, 1982, and 1983.
The Truth Commission
As part of the peace process -- when the negotiations were carried out, particularly from 1994 to 1996 -- there was an agreement to establish a Truth Commission. In every peace process, there has always been a discussion of how important a Truth Commission is. We believe that you cannot have peace or a transition to a new era of democracy-building unless there is some recognition of what happened -- what went wrong and who suffered. The right to truth is a permanent right that everyone should have, but it plays a definite role especially in a moment of transition.
The Truth Commission rendered the report on February 25, 1999 and it was very impressive. People were actually shocked and flabbergasted to see that there were 200,000 victims [and] that 93 percent of the atrocities were committed by the military or government officials. Only 3 percent were committed by the guerillas, and 4 percent by other unknown actors. This gives you a panorama of how consolidated the military governments were, how much of a centralized and direct campaign of violence they had.
Peace-Building and Justice
When you go through a peace process you have to think, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, of moving from peace-making to peace-building, which is very different. Peace-making involves the two parties in conflict and peace-building should engage the entire society. In peace-building you have to think in terms of enhancing democratic rule and strengthening democracy, strengthening the rule of law. And you also have to think of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a concept often linked to peace, but it normally refers only to personal relations. That's an important element, but most important is the reconciliation of the citizen with his own state.
This [genocide] was a crime committed by the state -- by those who were the leaders of the state, representatives of the government -- who embarked on a policy of genocide against the Mayan population of Guatemala, which represents more than half of the total population. Now, first, Mayan people have to regain some form of trust in the state. So that is the first reconciliation we have to see, the transformation in the relationship of the state with its own people.
In Guatemala, very few people trust the justice system. I think the real issue is that if you don't believe in justice, if there is no rule of law, you cannot believe in a new state, you cannot believe in peace and democracy in Guatemala. It's impossible to seek justice in 200,000 cases. But there has to be some form of what is now called "transitional justice." There has to be symbolic justice in order for the people to believe that something has changed, that peace is for real. In order for that to happen, the justice system has to work in at least the most serious cases. And genocide is the most serious crime that can exist.
It's interesting that in societies in transition and many societies that have truth commission reports, the question of justice was left aside. In South Africa there was a conflict because the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) report came at the cost of an amnesty law for perpetrators, and today there is a total rejection by the population because they feel that amnesty was too high a price to pay in exchange for the truth.
In the case of Argentina, there are trials against the military even today after the amnesty laws, and some of the laws are being repealed. In the case of Chile, most important and most public are the trials against Pinochet. We believe this is very important. Pinochet is still a very important figure in Chile, a senator for life with immunity as Rios Montt has in Guatemala. And still, the people of Chile today, many years later, feel that some form of symbolic justice still has to be made. I truly believe that until this is reached, in cases like Pinochet or anywhere in the world, people don't feel the transition has concluded. There's a sense of an unconcluded peace, that peace is not something that can really be achieved.
When we talk about genocide, we think of a crime of the past, of the Second World War, of something that no longer happens anymore. But, tragically, we have to recognize that in the last few years we've had genocide in Bosnia ... in Rwanda. And now we have to come to recognize that Guatemala also had its period of genocide. Genocide becomes a topic of the moment. In the same way that there has been a tribunal in Rwanda or in Bosnia, we believe that justice has to be brought to Guatemala. With domestic courts first, because we want to see the internal, domestic justice system operate and respond to the victims. The Pinochet precedents in Chile are very important [for Guatemala]. If Pinochet can be prosecuted in Santiago, in Chile itself, why can't Rios Montt be prosecuted in Guatemala?
It's not going to be easy. The military is still very powerful. They're not officially in government, but they still have a sort of veto power over the President. The staff of the President still is formed by what's called the "presidential high command" which is in the military. So, there's still a big risk and our biggest fear is for those communities that are coming forward as victims and bringing this case to the justice system. We feel that it is on their behalf that we have to build as much support and international attention [as possible]. We have to guarantee their safety.
Pursuing Justice
In a genocide case, it is always complicated deciding how far you can go in [choosing] a defendant. We decided, as a strategic legal position, to suggest to the communities that the lawsuit be filed against what is known in Guatemala as the "high command." The "high command" is basically the President, as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the Minister of Defense, and the Chief of Staff of the army. In military governments the president is also a member of the military. We have decided to focus our lawsuits only on these three individuals. They were the higher-level decision makers, they are the ones ultimately responsible for embarking on a policy of genocide.
In the case of the Lucas Garcia [government], the lawsuit was presented by the communities with our legal counsel against General Romeo Lucas Garcia, who was the President, General Mendoza Palomo, who was the Minister of Defense, and General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, brother of the President, who was the Chief of Staff.
The government of Lucas Garcia, [in power] from October 1981 to March 1982, included massacres like the massacre in Rio Negro and many other villages of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz and other parts of the country. Now the interesting fact here -- that very few people know -- is that Benedicto Lucas Garcia actually designed the policy of genocide. He had studied in France and fought in Algeria with French forces. He was a man of enormous experience and when he came back to Guatemala, he used this experience from the French in Vietnam of "strategic hamlets," massacres to intimidate the population, and eventually a policy of genocide.
Many of these cases rely on the testimony of people that were directly involved with the massacres. It takes a lot of stamina morally and personally to endure the pain of going through the story again, remembering it all and testifying. It takes a lot of valor, political valor I mean, to risk your life and appear in a court.
The fact that you have individuals who are willing to do this, like Denese and Jesus Tecu, I think is very, very important. I mean, these cases rely on their testimonies and thank God they are willing to stand up and speak the truth. The fact that Denese is an American citizen and can bring the story to the U.S. and to other parts of the world is very important. It will definitely increase the knowledge and the weight of attention on this case. I think Denese's testimony is an act of solidarity with the people, the other witnesses and victims here in the case. And her participation brings attention and support and somehow will help for the security of those testifying here.
Frank La Rue is the Executive Director of the Guatemala-based CALDH, the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights. He founded CALDH with the purpose of working on human rights issues in Guatemala. In 1982, La Rue co-founded-- along with Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu and other Guatemalans then in exile -- the Representación Unitaria de la Oposición Guatemalteca (RUOG). For more information about the Justice and Reconciliation Program of CALDH, visit www.justiceforgenocide.org.
Marcie Mersky
Edited from an interview by Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay in September 2001.
The Roots of Conflict
Guatemala had a very long history of authoritarian rule, with a small attempt right after the end of the Second World War to establish a democratic government, what's called in the country a democratic spring. That experiment was brought to an end by a coup financed and organized by the United States government, through its intelligence apparatus. That really led to a series of military governments, direct military rule, for the next several decades. That was in many ways the background and context in which this armed conflict unfolds.
The reason why the U.S. would intervene clandestinely through its intelligence forces in Guatemala had to do with seeing the new democratically-elected Guatemalan government as a threat to large economic interests from the U.S. who were very active in Guatemala at the time. I'm thinking particularly of the United Fruit Company, which was a very important actor in the Guatemalan scene at that point, and the relationship between high officials of that company with high officials in the U.S. State Department at that time. That's a very important factor that helps us to understand what the U.S. government perceived to be at stake at that point.
I think as a U.S. citizen it's so hard to confront, but in Guatemala the very first mass disappearance occurred in 1966 when more than thirty political union leaders were kidnapped and disappeared during an operation which was largely designed by U.S. intelligence personnel who had been sent to Guatemala to train the Guatemalan military in counter-subversion techniques. That really set the stage for how the armed conflict would play out over the next years, and it eventually developed into a state policy of repressing political opposition, a vision of an "internal enemy" who had to be eliminated.
By the late 1970s, by 1977 in fact, the human rights situation of the country had gotten so bad that the U.S. government decided to cut off new military aid to Guatemala. But this, of course, came after almost two decades of U.S. military training [of Guatemalans] in counter-insurgency tactics and strategies. Much of that training took place in the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia or in Panama as a part of the [U.S.] command operations that were based in Panama for so long. Part of the military aid that came through different channels (not always formally established channels but approved by the [U.S.] Congress) included helicopter parts, which were very important in the tactics used against Indian communities. So official military aid is cut off in 1977 by the U.S. government, but in fact there's a large backlog of promised aid in the pipeline as well. [So there were] really parallel policies of the U.S. government toward Guatemala. One was its official cutting off of military aid in 1977, which was sustained throughout the 1980s because of the human rights situation, and another was an active policy of diplomatic support even in the years when acts of genocide were being committed. You have President Reagan coming to the region and saying that the Head of State General Rios Montt was getting a "bum rap," that he was misunderstood.
The Truth Commission
I've lived and worked in Guatemala over the last 23 years, in residence for about 16 of those. I've worked in research and policy development, rural development (especially related to environmental issues), and I've worked on the human rights situation, documenting human rights violations and trying to seek different ways in which to redress them. I worked on both the Church's national study of political violence in the country, as well as in the official Truth Commission that was set up as a part of the peace accords.
I was in charge of one of the regional offices [of the Truth Commission]. We were out basically every day taking testimonies from people in the communities that had been most affected by the years of armed conflict, who had suffered the burden and the brunt of those actions. The overwhelming repetition of one story after another saying the same kinds of things lends enormous confidence and credence to those results. There's something in the very intense, almost, demand in the way people tell their stories that says, "You must believe this, you must believe what I'm saying, because it really happened." I think this is because the events that people lived through are so incredible... almost unbelievable, in terms of the levels of brutality and inexplicable violence in [comparison to] people's daily experience beforehand.
The Truth Commission concluded that throughout the period of the armed conflict there was a consorted policy of human rights violations directed against what was considered to be an "internal enemy." That internal enemy was different at different points in the 34 years of the armed conflict. At some points, the internal enemy was configured as opposition politicians, or as union leaders, university students and leaders, people with an oppositional voice.
Later, in the period from 1981 to 1983, as there becomes (in some respects) a peasant and Indian uprising in sections of the country, the state directs its policy of mass violations of human rights at those communities. [When you say] that the acts of violence were the result of state policy, that is to say they couldn't be considered simple excesses of bad officers. In fact, the situation was so concentrated in that respect, especially in the period of 1981 to 1983, that the Truth Commission concluded that there were acts of genocide committed against certain of the indigenous groups in the country. That was demonstrated using the International Convention on Genocide, a very strict parameter for qualifying different acts as acts of genocide. This was the conclusion of the Commission based on very extensive on-site investigation, taking testimony over the course of eighteen months from more than twenty thousand different survivors, family members, and other people in the regions where these events took place who could demonstrate very clearly that they had taken place and why.
The Truth Commission concluded, based on this independent research, that 93 percent of the human rights violations were committed by the state or forces very closely linked to the state, like civil patrols. The civil patrols basically included all adult men over the age of sixteen to eighteen, especially in rural areas. They were structured as paramilitary forces for local control under the direct command of the local military commanders. So, 93 percent [of the acts] were committed by state forces of one kind or another, 3 percent by guerilla forces, this to say by insurgent guerilla forces, and another 4 percent the Commission simply couldn't identify. It could prove that the event had taken place, but not who had actually committed the violation. About 85 percent of the identified victims were Indian people, but the list of victims includes people from all walks of life: Indians, peasants, students, professors, lawyers, doctors, workers, housewives, Catholics and Protestants. So that it really covers the range of people who make up Guatemalan society.
"Never Again": The Catholic Church Report
The Catholic Church, a couple of years before the Truth Commission began its work, began a separate independent investigation of what had happened during the years of the internal armed conflict. It produced a report called "Never Again." I worked on the first phase of that report in setting up the investigative fieldwork operation, which took testimony throughout many diocese of the country, working through church structures and community structures. It came to very similar conclusions as the Truth Commission, that there was a systematic pattern of mass violations committed against very large sectors of the population, with many of the violations focused on Indian communities. Oftentimes entire Indian communities were the object of these human rights violations, so it wasn't just individual cases of selective repression but really large-scale massacres that affected literally hundreds of Indian communities across the country.
Within 48 hours after the Church presented its report, the Bishop who had overseen the entire project, Bishop Juan Gerardi, was murdered in his own parish house in the dark of night, in a crime that has now been shown to have been directed by military and former military people.
Breaking the Silence
One of the things that these projects documenting human rights violations have sought to do is to break the silence around these events. I think maybe at one point the perpetrators felt that by having mass raids and trying to hide the bodies, they could hide the voices as well -- that those voices would be buried along with the people who were killed in the massacres. I think that's been one of the really important functions both of the Church's project and Truth Commission's, to bring those voices back to life. The exhumations that have gone on [are] another way that the voices have been brought back in a different form, not in the form of words but the remains of people, their bones, which for a forensic anthropologist actually speak in ways that sometimes words don't capture.
One of the interesting things about taking testimonies from middle-class professionals in Guatemala City is that oftentimes their testimonies to the Truth Commission were framed in fear. So that one of the first things that people would say was, "I am very afraid to be telling you this, you have no idea how hard it was for me to convince myself to come in, because I am afraid," and that persistent fear is a part of daily life even though the mechanisms of terror aren't being applied today.
For so long this society was silent about what was going on. There were all different kinds of censorship -- of the press, or the fear itself acted as a kind of censorship -- and so in some places, particularly in the cities, oftentimes young people don't know what happened. Or sometimes their parents are in denial about what went on in the country. I think one of the really big challenges in the future is how not only to make the figures known, but really for young people to understand how this happened, why it happened, what was at stake and who was responsible, not only in terms of the direct commission of terrible acts but also in terms of whose interests were being served [and] to have some understanding of different kinds of complicities.
The history of the armed conflict and the consequences to date is not available in the school curriculum. Unfortunately, while there are a number of different institutions and social organizations that have worked very hard to get the history into textbooks, they have been unsuccessful so far.
Post-Conflict
The signing of a peace accord is really only one very little piece in the puzzle of how societies come to terms with terrible things having been done to people for many years. The conflict here didn't drop out of the sky. It wasn't a plague that dropped on people. It was based on very deeply-rooted conflicts and patterns of exclusion, on people not having access to very basic things like food and education and work and political expression. Until those conflicts and differences are really dealt with in meaningful ways, [there will not be] a solidified peace, a peace that really means something in people's everyday lives.
I think that's another of the lessons of this post-conflict period -- maybe I wouldn't call it a post-conflict period as it's often called, but a post-war period. You learn that there are many different kinds of peace. There's a formal peace which is based on two forces signing a peace of paper. [That's] very important. I'm not trying to belittle that. But there's a peace that has to deal with people feeling that they have some kind of security for themselves, for their own development, for their own realization as human beings and for their children. Will their children be part of a better world, will they have a possibility of contributing to that world or will they be weak participants, materially weak, politically weak? That's a different kind of peace.
If there's not a simple explanation for the war, [then] there's not a simple explanation for peace or how you build it. It involves rethinking this society and learning new ways of acting. It defies simple recipes. While actions like exhumations, or having people who were a part of opposing forces sit down at a table and talk to each other, are important pieces of some notion of reconciliation or peace-building, they're simply that, pieces.
[We need to] address what underlies that armed conflict in the first place: political participation, economic rights, cultural rights, social rights [and] recognition of the value of the lives that were lost. One of the things that I've tried to communicate lately to people is how important [it is] that part of the counter insurgency [policy was] seeing "the other" as the enemy constantly.
People whose lives were lost -- the victims of these violations -- were often seen to be criminals and there was a wide acceptance of the criminalization of the victim. I think it's very important now to decriminalize those people whose lives were lost. One of the ways that this society has dealt with the post-war coming to light is to see victims as a private problem of each family. In a sense, then, you have a privatization of the loss. As if the loss of some 200,000 lives was not also a loss for the society as a whole, but rather each mother, father, sister, brother or child's loss on an individual scale. As if those 200,000 lives didn't mean anything in terms of the country's potential toward the future, as leaders, as thinkers, as producers or as creators. I think until there's a deprivatization of the pain and of that human loss and the society really understands as a whole what it lost, it's very difficult to think about reconciliation in any meaningful or deeper way.
What I fear sometimes is that the consequences of the war, what's left of it in people's ways of dealing with each other, thinking about each other, in their own personal pain, may take more time to get over then the length of the war itself. The effects of the terror remain in many places still -- in rural communities especially and in indigenous communities -- but not only there.
Related Links
Read "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," the report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Truth Commission).
Read "Guatemala: Never Again," the report of the Catholic Church's Recovery of Historical Memory Project (German, French and Spanish available, English coming soon).
Marcie Mersky has lived and worked in Guatemala for the past 25 years. She was field coordinator for the Catholic Church Project Report on Guatemalan Historical Memory (REMHI) and coordinator of the Final Report for the U.N.-sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification. She is currently Transition Manager for the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala.
Jesús Tecú Osorio
Jesús Tecú Osorio: "Sometimes it's hard for us humans to bear seeing such things. These trees have more memories than we do. They saw everything and so did Mother Earth."
On the 13th of March 1982, at around six in the morning the military and the patrollers, who were dressed in uniforms and armed, entered the village and forced all the people out of their homes. There were boys, girls and pregnant women.
They took me from our house together with my brothers Marcelo, Anastasio and Jaime, who were seven, five and two years old. My sister Juana Tecú Osorio, who was 25 years old, was forced from her house together with her sons Juan and Catharine who were five and two years old. They lived by the road to Chitucán.
One day before, on the 12th of March 1982, in the evening, my sister Juana asked me to get up early the next morning to collect firewood from the hillside with another boy. At nine in the morning on the 13th of March we were in the hills collecting firewood when a man came running past. He was fleeing from the military and the patrollers. We were yelling and joking between us when the man scolded us and said: "Kids, stop yelling. The military and patrollers are in the village and they are taking all the women." I was very worried and I went straight back to our house. When I got back to the house I realized that the soldiers and patrollers were taking all the women and children. So I said to my sister Juana: "Let's leave the house before they get here."
She didn't want to. They were about two hundred meters from our house. She said to me: "If the patrollers find us hiding in the hills, they will accuse us of being guerillas." I wanted to take my younger brother Jaime. My sister insisted on not fleeing. We entered the house and closed ourselves in.
To purchase copies of the book in Spanish or English, or for more information about Jesús Tecú Osorio's work, contact Rights Action at (416) 654-2074, email info@rightsaction.org or visit www.rightsaction.org.
A few minutes passed and then a soldier with his face covered by a red bandana came by. He had the look of an assassin. He walked in front of the women of the village. He began beating down the door of the house. The soldiers and patrollers surrounded the house so that no one could escape. The house was made of wood with a thatched roof. We had a wooden door.
They entered and said: "Where are the weapons that you took from the officers? If you don't give them back everyone will die. Where are all the men? Where have they gone?"
My sister said that we didn't know anything about the weapons and that the men had been killed in Xococ.
The patrollers and the military said that the men had gone with the guerillas and that they were not dead. After searching the house they made us leave. They took us and put us under the concaste tree that was in front of the house. There we saw a group of patrollers who were rounding up the women.
The assassins, who were in our house, began to cook and eat our food. Now there would be no breakfast for us. Having stolen our food, they then began to mistreat the women and asked them the same question. "Where are the weapons that you took from the officers? If you don't hand them over you will all die. Where have the men gone?" The women gave the same reply: "All the men were assassinated in Xococ."
Who are the patrollers Jesús Tecú Osorio refers to?
In their fight to control political "subversion," the Guatemalan government developed a strategy to extend their control over areas where the guerilla movement or other "insurgents of the state" were active. They created paramilitary units in these communities, known as Civil Defense Patrols, and gave these patrols weapons and training from the army. Local men were conscripted to serve, and the patrols were under the direct command of the local military commanders. By law, service in the patrols was voluntary, but in reality, men who refused to serve were threatened and often killed. These patrols were ultimately found responsible by the Truth Commission for many massacres that took place in the early 1980s. The fact that the violence was often committed against villagers by their neighbors, people who knew them and continued to live among them after the massacres, was an added social trauma.
The patrollers and the military wanted to convince the women that the men were not dead that instead they had joined the guerrillas.
After the interrogation they started raping the fifteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. They took them to the bushes and laughed after they had been raped. I saw the patroller Ambrosio Pérez Lauj from Xococ taking Justa Osorio Sic into the forest. She came back very frightened. He yelled obscenities at her. He said that she wasn't a virgin and that her body was weak.
After that they forced us to walk to Pak'oxom. This place is on the hill Portezuelo e Monterredondo. The soldiers and the patrollers mistreated us and said that we were children of guerrilla fighters.
They cut branches with thorns and beat us. No one could bear the pain. Women and children cried. At this time of year it's very hot. We asked for water and the patrollers said to us: "We are almost there. Once we are there we will rest and have some water."
It was an ironic response. They already knew what they were going to do with us. The children and women were exhausted when we arrived at Pak'oxom. The soldiers and patrollers brought us together in the flat area where we waited for the women who had not yet arrived. While they waited for them to arrive, the soldiers began to cut tree branches and one meter lengths of rope. They were preparing materials to use to massacre the people.
The military official threatened the women with a grenade that he carried on his chest. He pulled the pin and pretended to throw it into the women and children. Everyone screamed. They thought the official had let the grenade off. He made fun of them and said: "OK, you wanted some water, now we'll give you water. We will pardon your lives if you hand over the weapons that you took from the officers."
The women insisted that they did not know anything. The official threatened them in Spanish and the patrollers translated into Achi. While this was happening soldiers and patrollers took women into the bushes and raped them. If any of them resisted rape, the assassins threatened to kill them. The whole group from Río Negro was surrounded by military and patrollers.
Once all the material was prepared, they began to kill the women and children. They took them one by one to a ravine that was about twenty meters from where we were. We heard shots, screams and crying. The patrollers killed the women out of sight. They did not want us to see their cruelty. They made us lie face down on the sacred ground. I did not want to suffer or die like the other children and women. I searched for a way to escape. My younger brother, who was two years old, and I were right in front of the patrollers. Every second I could feel death encroaching on me.
When a patroller came close to us I thought he would take me next. I thought of two things: die or escape with my brother. I began to move towards the last line of women.
I told one of the patrollers that my brother needed to go to the bathroom. He gave me permission to leave. I walked towards a low ridge looking for a place where my brother and I could escape, but I realized that the whole place was surrounded by soldiers. I wanted to run but the weight of my brother prevented me from running. I came across a soldier raping a woman and he scolded me and sent me to where the group of women was.
When I arrived, I saw the patroller Pedro González Gómez trying to murder Vicenta Iboy Chen. Even though this woman had a baby on her back, she fought back trying to defend herself from the rapist. She picked up a rock and threw it at Pedro. The patroller took his machete from its sheath that was on his belt and gave her two blows. The patroller not only wounded the woman badly, but he cut in half the baby around her back. Vicenta fell down heavily at the edge of the ravine. Pedro immediately came up to her and gave her two machete blows in the neck.
Illustration by Jesús Tecú Osorio.
I remember other bitter moments of the slaughter. The patroller Pablo Ruiz Alvarado had Tomasa López Ixpatá face down. He had tied a rope around her neck forming a noose. The assassin removed the rope from her neck thinking that he had already killed her, however her body still trembled. The patroller took a club and beat her to death. He treated her like an animal. When she was dead he took her by the feet and dragged her to the ravine.
Margarita Sánchez did not want to die like the other women. She wanted to escape but the official saw her. He took her by the hair, threw her to the ground and kicked her. She apologized and said: "Don't kill me, my father lives in Pacux."
The patrollers said: "We'll send you to your father in Pacux."
She sat down beside me, weeping a sea of tears. Then I realized she was vomiting blood. She no longer had any teeth. The rest of the women cried and asked to be pardoned. They offered their cattle in exchange for their lives but the assassins had already decided to kill them.
They no longer took them to ravine, instead they killed them right there in the same place. They killed them in front of the other women and children.
Around two in the afternoon the patrollers took Petronila Sánchez and Paula Chen, who were about fifty-five years old. They forced them to lie face down and placed ropes around their necks, forming a noose. I was two meters away.
I heard it when they could no longer breathe. They buried their fingers in the holy ground as if they were asking for help.
Their necks cracked. When they were dead they dragged them to the ravine. The bodies were swollen and the faces were bruised. All of the children we were crying.
We were sitting on the ground. The children were the easiest victims to kill. When they came for a child, they just put the rope around its neck and took the child away hanging by the rope. The child began to kick. Once they got to the ravine they let them go. They grabbed the child by their feet and then smashed them against rocks and trees that are still found at that place. Other children were killed with machete blows or from blows to the ears. This is the way the assassins took the life of defenseless children.
Seventeen boys and girls remained. The patrollers came closer to the older ones. At this point Mrs. Juana Tum asked the patroller Macariao Alvarado Toj to take her daughter Silveria Lajuj Tum to Xococ, asking him to care for her as his own daughter. When there were only twenty women remaining the patroller Pedro González called me and said: "I'm not going to kill you but you have to come with me to Xococ and help me with my work. I am only taking you because I have no children."
I said yes immediately to save my life. He separated me from the group and told me to go above the ravine. I took my younger brother Jaime. The rest of the soldiers came closer to the children and chose the ones they would take with them to Xococ.
After killing the twenty women who remained they brought us all together. They prepared us for the walk to Xococ. The assassin Pedro González came to where my brother and I were and said: "OK, let's go to Xococ."
Then he realized that I had my little brother Jaime with me. He told me that he could not take him as he was tired and we had to walk all night from Río Negro to Xococ. I told him that I could carry my brother and that I would take all responsibility for him. Enraged he said to me: "No because my wife is not used to caring for a child as small as your brother."
I insisted on taking my brother with me. He became angry and said that if I insisted he would kill us both. I was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree. I had my brother in my arms and he took him from me by force. He wrapped a rope around his neck and took him hanging from one of his hands. Jaime was kicking his feet. I followed behind him crying. I asked him a million times to spare my brother's life but it didn't matter.
I wished for someone to help me but no one appeared. We arrived at the ravine where the bodies of the victims were dumped. He threw my brother on the ground. He took him by the feet and smashed him against the rocks. Seeing that he was dead he threw him down the ravine.
There, I saw the women who had been raped, hung, shot and stabbed with machetes. Some of the bodies were still trembling.
I sat on another fallen tree. I was crying. The patrollers reorganized themselves into lines and checked that everyone was present. I counted around thirty-five patrollers and twenty-five soldiers.
We left Pak'oxom, site of the massacre, together with the patrollers and the military. It was around four o'clock in the afternoon. On the way the assassins related how they had killed their victims. Each one tried to tally their number of victims. Some said ten, others fifteen.
We passed by Chitucán around five in the afternoon. All of the houses were abandoned. In one of the houses I found some water. It was polluted, but I drank it anyway as I was dying of thirst. We had not eaten anything all day long.
The patroller Fermín Lajuj Xitumul fainted on the plains of Chitucán. To revive him they gave him urine to drink. We left Chitucán around six in the afternoon.
Around eleven at night we reached Buena Vista. The patrollers there gave us something to drink. After resting for a while we continued walking to Xococ. We arrived there at midnight. The patrollers who had children from Río Negro reported to Captain José Antonio González Solares. He would decide the future of the children. He could give the order to kill or save them. The captain said: "Well, guys, you should have saved all the children and killed all the women."
Some people were waiting for us at the Catholic church with some food. They had cooked meat soup. I couldn't eat any because I thought it was human flesh. That night we slept in the Xococ market. I stayed by Pedro González' side. I couldn't sleep. All night long I had nightmares.
On the morning of the 14th of March, Pedro took me to his house. I couldn't get used to living with him. They gave me food but I didn't eat. What I wanted was to return to my village to find out about my brothers and sisters, what had happened to them and what had happened to the women and children who were murdered and attacked with machetes. I kept crying several days afterwards and told Pedro that I wanted to go back to Río Negro. He responded: "I'm going to advise the army official that you want to return to your village. He will decide if you will be sent there or if you will be killed."
I cried everyday. I was alone, sad, without my parents and there was no one to care for me. I tried to forget the memories of the violence by playing with other children. That was not easy. First of all I had to earn the trust of the other children so that they would allow me to play with them.
I can't forget the moment in which they killed all the women and the children. I can still remember the screams and the gunshots in the ravine.
Jesús Tecú Osorio is a Mayan-Achi man living with his wife and children in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. Since 1993, he has worked tirelessly towards justice for human rights crimes and towards healing and rebuilding of the communities in Guatemala. He is the co-founder of ADIVIMA, the Rabinal Legal Clinic, the Rabinal Community Museum, and founder of the New Hope Foundation.