Background

Guatemala today

Guatemala was once like Peru a rich, fertile and civilized country, the land of the Mayas. The Mayas were masters of astronomy and mathematics. In the 16th century their calendar was far more accurate than the Gregorian one used in Europe. The Mayas were able to work out the course of celestial bodies and knew the best time to sew and harvest the land. Like the Incas, the Mayas also had a well-functioning agricultural system and hunger was unknown, until the Spanish arrived and enslaved the Mayas in their search for gold. Today, the agricultural situation in Guatemala is just as deplorable as in Peru.

Life expectancy in Guatemala is 41 and one child in 5 dies before its 4th birthday, one in ten before its first and only one child in 3 lives to celebrate its 15th birthday. Descendents of the Spanish form the ruling minority in Guatemala. Forming only 2.1% of the population, these descendents own 70% of arable land and are in charge of the military. 70% of Guatemala's population are South American Indians. They live in the northern provinces near the boarder to Mexico. The Indians continue to be driven from their land today. They have no documentation proving that they are the rightful owners of the land. The Indians regard the land as mother earth providing the people with plenty to eat. Their ancestors are also buried under this earth meaning that expulsion from their land means much more than just an economic disaster...

Peaceful attempts by Indians to protest their right to land have been met with violent massacres on several occasions. The strength of the army was increased fourfold between 1973-1988, when young Indians were forced into joining the army brutally to hunt down and exterminate their own kind as "misguided communists". To get a brief insight into just what expulsion and fight against resistance meant, I will attempt to provide a short summary of that experienced by Rigoberta Menchú, who, despite everything, decided to fight:

Felipe died in the Finca as they sprayed the plantation from the air while people were still working in it. The pesticide didn't agree with him. Nicolas died two years later from undernourishment, also in the Finca. Someone sent Rigoberta's mother a cardboard coffin in which she buried her son. She was unable to attend work on the day of her son's burial and the supervisor threw her out. Rigoberta was eight years old. 18 years later her youngest brother, Petrocinio, who was 16 years old catechist and village secretary, was kidnapped by soldiers. The soldiers tortured him for days, cut off body parts including the soles of his feet and scalped him before eventually dousing him in petrol and burning him alive in front of his family. Her father was burned alive during occupation of the Spanish embassy in 1979. Her mother was kidnapped in 1980, repeatedly raped, mutilated and beaten to death...

A total of 22 languages are spoken among the natives. Set against this background their achievement in setting up a joint organization called Comite de Unidad Campesina (CUC) in 1978 is made all the more impressive. Most Indians do not speak Spanish and most of them have never been to school.

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Counter Insurgency and the "scorched earth" policy

Uprisings occurred ever since independence at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1944 a "Revolutionary Movement" gained power to the great concern of large landowners and several large north American companies (incl. United Fruit Company). These companies felt that their interests were being endangered and intervened in Guatemala together with the CIA. In 1954 they managed to put a military dictatorship in place with General Castillo Armas as President. President Ydogoras was elected in 1958 but fell from power after being forced out by the military. Until 1978 the fight against resistance was based on "selective repression", that is, the disappearance of individuals, especially the leaders of civil movements and trade unions etc.

Under the military dictatorship of Lucas Garcia (1978-1982) and Rios Montt (1982-1983) a stage-by-stage counter insurgency plan drawn up by the CIA was implemented. This was an open war against the civil population and is now described in history books as the "scorched earth policy". The army caused a mass exodus of people into neighboring countries (especially Mexico) by carrying out mass shootings and pyres, by cruelly torturing people and by completely destroying and burning down some 440 Indio villages. The horrors committed are almost unimaginable: The stomachs of pregnant women were cut open, and the heads of children were smashed against rocks...

"The results" of the military repression between 1978-1986: 150 000 killed, 46 000 disappeared, 300 000 orphans. These figures are "very high" even for Latin America. Counter insurgency measures also included the setting up of so-called "model villages", where Indians lived in a sort of safety zone, surrounded, controlled and monitored by the military.

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On the road to peace

As a result of huge international pressure, the military was forced into introducing plans towards democracy in 1986. And so it was that for the first time since 1963 a civilian president came to power. Unfortunately, hardly anything changed and the policies and activities of those really in power continued. Before resigning, the military government granted an amnesty for all human rights violations carried out during their reign between 1983-1986. The subsequent civilian governments left it at that. This means that to this day no cases have been subject to criminal investigations - it also means that further murders are, for all intents and purposes, being sanctioned. Murderers do not have to fear punishment of any description.

Despite all this, Indians and some of the poor Ladinos have been able to organize themselves under great sacrifice. They offered resistance to the large landowners supported from abroad, multinational capital and the well-equipped military. There have been several agreements since 1993 with the government. These agreements and help from the UNO have paved the way for 20,000 refugees to return from exile (mostly from Mexico). The best that those returning can expect is a piece of land in a freshly cleared part of the rainforest. In addition to this, the so-called "civil patrols", armed and made up of forced recruits to terrorize the Indian population, are still active.

Guatemala...

...is referred to as the land of eternal spring because of its mild climate. The third largest country in Central America, it boarders Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Official name: Republic of Guatemala

Capital: Guatemala

Area: 108.889 km²

Population: approx. 10 million (over 50% of whom are Maya Indians)

Official language:

Religion: Roman Catholic

Illiteracy: Approx. 40%

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The Maya were the most advanced urban civilisation in the pre-Columbian Americas. They invented the concept of "zero" centuries before it was independently formulated in India, and measured the solar year with an error of only 17.28 seconds. Having flourished for two millennia in an area of 3,255,000 sq.km, they were first invaded by Spain in 1527, but put up such fierce resistance that the capital of their last kingdom to fall, Itza at Nojpeten, was not captured until 1697. Had the Maya not been decimated by European diseases such as chicken pox and measles, some historians believe the Spanish conquest might have ended in total defeat. According to Roderick Conway Morris, "One of the greatest crimes perpetrated against the Maya was the destruction of their thousands of books, spearheaded by the Franciscans, who - while preaching harmony and brotherly love - presided over a scorched-earth policy, backed up by the threat of the physical extinction of any who dared to resist it. So complete was the friars' success that only four books in Maya script survived."

More recently, the Guatemalan civil war began when the CIA toppled the democratically-elected government in 1954. The US-backed right-wing military juntas which followed have had one of the worst records of political repression, human rights abuses, and atrocities in recorded history. After opposition groups began organising among Indians in the countryside, the military responded with death squads and a scorched-earth "counterinsurgency" strategy that destroyed over four hundred ancient Mayan villages, displaced one million people, and left a hundred thousand unarmed Indians dead. Hundreds of mass graves across the country contain the remains of massacred civilians.

[Global Vision, www.global-vision.org/interview/menchu.html]

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Report from Amnesty International 1996 concerning Guatemala (Excerpts)

A Pattern of Systematic Human Rights Violations

Amnesty International continues to document a disturbing pattern of human rights violations in Guatemala. Extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture, death threats, harassment and intimidation persist. The violations have been directed at many sectors of society including: trade unions and popular organizations, human rights defenders, journalists, students, religious personnel, those attempting to investigate past human rights violations, witnesses, former refugees and displaced people returning to their lands and street children. Of particular concern is the alarming level of threats and attacks that have been reported against human rights defenders during the year. Some have been the subject of verbal or written death threats as a result of their work. Others have been attacked and killed.

The perpetrators of these human rights violations are mainly the police and military and army-created civil patrols. In addition and citing the rise in urban crime, the government reportedly promoted the creation of new civilian self-defense squads to be armed and trained by the military. Both these and other new vigilante-style groups, also apparently working with official complicity, have allegedly engaged in social cleansing, killing members of youth gangs and others involved in petty crime. These new death squads have also been implicated in human rights violations against those perceived as being opponents of the government, reportedly disguising the attacks as common crimes to escape official accountability.

There has been little progress in clarifying the tens of thousands of past abuses. Those responsible for human rights violations continue to benefit from almost total impunity. In August, the United Nations (UN) Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities expressed deep concern at the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of human rights violations and at the inability of the judicial system to bring intellectual and material perpetrators of such acts before the courts. The Subcommission, reflecting reports and statements by MINUGUA, the United Nations Mission in Guatemala and Mónica Pinto, the UN Special Expert, found that the majority of the violations breached the rights to life, integrity and personal security, and that state agents were either directly implicated or had failed in their duties to assure these rights to its citizens.

To date, none of those responsible for the deaths of thousands of people during the late l970s and early l980s at the height of the army's counter-insurgency campaign, have been brought to justice. During 1995, independent forensic groups undertook further exhumations at sites where large-scale extrajudicial executions had been reported during this period. Several hundred remains were uncovered, but Amnesty International knew of no case where official bodies undertook investigations to determine how the victims died nor who was responsible. Instead, family members, witnesses and human rights defenders involved in the exhumations were themselves threatened and harassed.

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