Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  * * *

  I had seen refugee camps on TV—Sally Struthers, eyes tearing up like a kind of anti–Tammy Faye Bakker, in front of rows of tents in the sun and babies with flies on their eyes—but face to face it was different. TV has no smell, no feel. This kind of poverty stinks. It smells like too much sweat and not enough soap. It smells like human shit baking in the sun. That said, the camp was laid out in an orderly fashion. There were numerous dwellings and several communal buildings constructed from what the jungle had to offer: rough-hewn lumber, bamboo, palm leaves for thatch. The three thousand inhabitants, mostly women, children, and the elderly, carried themselves with grace and dignity, though they were clearly desperate. That was the most moving part of being there, to see the suffering, and to see the strength in the face of that suffering, of the constant threats, of the immense and brutal theft of life and security. Their response to chaos was organized and cohesive, though they had absolutely nothing, no prospects whatsoever. They were even building a school, never mind that they had nothing to put in it, no books, no teachers. At Chanjul, we would later see, they had constructed a little infirmary, which was staffed by a couple of nuns. There was no medicine, but they would be ready when supplies came. They never did, of course, not in any significant way. Later the Mexican army went in and burned it all down anyway. When I saw the strength and clarity of the people in those camps, combined with the threat of violence and starvation, I experienced intense waves of emotion, alternately dark and light. There was no way for a greenhorn like me to find balance in such conditions. I was in awe, appalled, incensed.

  People greeted us warmly and took us to meet the elders of the community. There was some head scratching about us. Why three Canadians? Why musicians? We explained that we had come to bear witness and to bring to the outside world what we saw and heard. They seemed pleased that someone was paying attention. The people we met had survived demonic counterinsurgency tactics, and now they gathered in relative safety but on the brink of starvation and still suffering sporadic acts of violence by the Guatemalan military, even on Mexican soil. Food was rationed: three tortillas a day per person. Parents boiled leaves from trees to feed their hungry children. But it was better than where they had come from.

  The Guatemalan military wasn’t content to simply torture and slaughter and destroy villages where they were. They continued to harass the survivors, crossing the border into Mexico and attacking the refugee camps, strafing from helicopters, now and then dragging people off into the jungle and hacking them to pieces with machetes. A helicopter assault had occurred at Chanjul, which was only a few hundred metres from the border, the week before our visit. The week after there was another. We were lucky it didn’t happen to us, because no one knew we were there.

  The first night in camp we stayed in a little guesthouse, sleeping in hammocks. It had a tin roof and cement-block walls with large, paneless windows, and had been on this remote farm before it was a refugee camp. Some young men came in. They were refugees but weren’t living in the camp. Some of the young men who had not joined the guerrillas were sneaking back to their farms to keep the crops alive, hoping to save the harvest. It was hard to imagine how they could carry any of their produce back to the camp over thirty miles of mountains, but it was clear that if anyone could do so, it was they. Farming had to be carried on clandestinely because the army was constantly surveilling the villages, and former villages, for activity.

  Rick asked them in Spanish, Why did you guys flee? One of them described what happened to his neighbour. The army came and took this man. They tortured him, then cut all the flesh off his forearms from his elbows to his wrists and hung him up on his own gatepost to die slowly. There was another episode: The army went to a house. The wife was pregnant. They beheaded the husband, then slit open the woman, ripped out the fetus, and stuck the husband’s head where the fetus would have been. This was a message to the neighbours. These acts were aimed to shock, to prove their dominance. These sorts of atrocities were being committed every day throughout the countryside by the U.S. client state of Guatemala, along with the annihilation of whole villages, using U.S. weapons and training. The strategy was to create what during the Vietnam conflict were called “strategic hamlets,” by forcing the people to abandon their traditional villages and cluster in artificially created population centres that could be closely watched.

  Mayan people feel a sacred connection to the place where they are born. Few would willingly leave land they understood themselves to be a part of. To this end, the army, not content with massacring the people, also destroyed everything they valued. That’s why our hosts were refugees, and why so many others had taken up arms.

  * * *

  I understand now why people want to kill.

  * * *

  According to the venerable British Peace Pledge Union, the stories we heard were commonplace:

  Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including “civil patrols” of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn’t escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalized and demolished, and a “scorched earth” policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols. Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disemboweled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured.

  In due course our macho pilot appeared and we moved on to Chanjul. Our approach to the camp took us low over the silty brown flow of the Lacantún, between walls of jungle rising from sheer gravel banks. A sudden, steeply banked left turn had us aimed at the runway. This was a strip of cleared land, free of stumps and rocks. The only obstacle was a little gang of half a dozen dogs milling about, wagging their tails and sniffing each other’s hindquarters, right where we’d be touching down. Despite the danger I felt a twinge of perverse pleasure as the pilot blanched and started muttering, “Los perros! Get the dogs out of there!” Alice Cooper’s (pyrrhic) revenge. At the last possible moment someone in the mob of refugees, which had lined the airstrip when they heard us coming, realized the problem. A small boy ran out and chased them off. It was a bumpy but fair landing.

  People went out of their way to be hospitable. They apologized for having so little to offer. They had suffered in the worst of ways, but they were serious, and they wanted us to hear their stories. Those stories were delivered in a near deadpan tone, which made them all the more horrifying. It was as if they were recounting ancient myths, but they weren’t. It was what they had very recently lived through. These calm voices. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was how an oral culture does things. Maybe their sense of connection to that culture gave them unexpected strength.

  Strength enough that Chanjul camp threw us a party. We were musicians, so there should be music. A full-sized marimba appeared, as if by magic, in front of one of the houses near the centre of the camp. Some of the refugees had managed to haul it with them in flight from their village, each person carrying a piece of it. They rebuilt it when they reached what passed for safety.

  In the Guatemalan folk tradition, the marimba is handled by three players. One stands at the low end and plays bass, another stands in the middle and plays chords, and the third plays the melody in the upper register. Each man donned his one good shirt for the occasion. The rich sound of the instrument brought people flocking around. I was invited to jam with them. Easy enough: the harmonies were simple and the beat was strong. Peopl
e started to dance, especially the little girls, dolled up in their brightly woven “best” clothes, many with tiny siblings slung on their backs. The party didn’t last long, but it was real. The smiles and laughter in that setting were heartbreaking.

  As a backdrop to all this was the intermittent throbbing drone of the Guatemalan choppers, hunting wasplike along the border. The so-nearby border. After a couple of days in each camp, we returned to San Cristóbal. I was overwhelmed. To intellectually understand, or at least consider (because who can understand it?), the evil that humans inflict upon one another is one thing; to feel the results through the faces and stories of the survivors was something other. I was intellectually prepared but emotionally wrenched. What makes a government do this to its own people? What allows a human to do this to another person? What could possibly convince the world’s most powerful nation, our neighbour the United States, not only to accept but to support, even design, such slaughter?

  It seems possible to view the genocide against Mayan people as an extension of the historic U.S. policies of extermination at home against Native Americans. The atrocities were not unique. They were part of a pattern of depravity that surfaces again and again all over the globe. In southern Mexico we found raw evidence of the banality of evil. Not only was it horrible, but for the most part it wasn’t even creative. Not much has changed in the realm of mass murder since biblical times. Though the tools of the trade have become more sophisticated, when we get down to it, it’s somebody bashing someone’s head with a hammer or a shovel, or herding folks into a church and setting it ablaze. Same old shit. The difference for me was that this aspect of us had leapt off the page and become flesh and blood.

  Asking God how he could allow such brutality seemed like an irrelevant question. Here, splayed before me in ways I had previously only imagined, were the “juicy bits” from the Bible. Here was the horror, Conrad’s heart of darkness, Thanatos projected, all too real. I felt the violence pulsing through our DNA. These actions are embedded in our social, religious, and political traditions. A decade later, surveying the mine-strewn beauty of a Mozambican landscape ravaged by the same evils, it struck me that war is the default position of mankind, peace an aberration.

  In San Cristóbal I bought a bottle of cheap whiskey and holed up in my bare hotel room. I needed the simple whitewashed walls. I didn’t want to see anyone. I kept reliving the terrible stories, trying to breathe them into some comprehensible order. The quiet courage, the fierce determination and dignity of the refugees, the children still being children after all they’d seen—all of it hit me like an ice pick to the heart. When I thought about the perpetrators of those deeds, especially the anonymous airborne ones, I felt all-consuming outrage, a conviction that whoever would do such things had forfeited any claim to humanity. I envisioned myself with an RPG, blowing them out of the sky. In the hotel room, through tears and under dim light driven back from night’s rippled windows, I began writing.

  Here comes the helicopter—second time today

  Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away

  How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say

  If I had a rocket launcher

  I’d make somebody pay

  I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate

  I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states

  And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate

  If I had a rocket launcher

  I would retaliate

  On the Río Lacantún, one hundred thousand wait

  To fall down from starvation—or some less humane fate

  Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate

  If I had a rocket launcher

  I would not hesitate

  I want to raise every voice—at least I’ve got to try

  Every time I think about it, water rises to my eyes.

  Situation desperate, echoes of the victim’s cry

  If I had a rocket launcher

  Some son of a bitch would die

  “IF I HAD A ROCKET LAUNCHER,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/46.

  12

  During the tour that followed the release of my 1984 album Stealing Fire, after a gig in L.A., an acquaintance—a man of good intentions who belonged to one of those California hipster churches—challenged my take on Guatemala. He spouted a surprisingly conservative line: How did I know Ríos Montt was so bad? How did I know there were massacres?

  “I met the survivors,” I said.

  He went silent for a moment, then mumbled: “Oh . . . well, we have to stop Communism.”

  All you had to do in those Cold War days was cry “Communism,” and some members of North American society would fall all over themselves to support, at least ideologically, a U.S. policy—so demonstrably insupportable—that was resulting in the murder of thousands of peaceful people in a tiny country fifteen hundred miles away. I suggested to my friend and others like him that they take some time to dig below the surface of the scam, to learn what was really happening to real people with real dollars that came from people like them. Now, of course, the buzzword is “terrorism,” but the same dynamic is at work.

  On May 10, 2013, a Guatemalan court convicted former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt of the murder of at least 1,771 Mayan people during his scorched-earth reign as a general in the Guatemalan army, and as de facto president after he seized power in a CIA-backed coup in 1982. (He was deposed a year and a half later in another coup, by officers who presumably seemed more “reasonable” to the vested interests they represented.)

  Ríos Montt’s conviction was extraordinary in Latin American politics—particularly in Guatemala, which, despite some reforms, remains under the control of wealthy oligarchs heavily in thrall to the United States. But in the politico-legal saga that starred the former strongman, the charges were first quashed and then reinstated; Ríos Montt was sentenced to eighty years in prison; and finally—as of this writing, anyway—his conviction was overturned and the charges thrown out again. One waits with bated breath to see what will happen next.

  The general’s relationship with the United States is typical of the way an imperial power maintains control of smaller nations through local proxies. In 1951 Ríos Montt attended the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which specialized in training military types from all over the southern continent in “counterinsurgency” (read: anti-left) strategies, including coups, assassinations, and the use of terror. By 1970 he was an army general active in Guatemalan politics.

  In 1978, shifting his approach, he became an ordained minister with the California-based Church of the Word, then forged close relationships with an Augean stable of right-wing U.S. evangelists, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. After the Carter administration denied U.S. military support to Guatemala, Ríos Montt drummed up money from conservative Christians committed to defending the Western world against the alleged threat of Communism. (Illicit funding and arms for Central American regimes were often facilitated by Israel.) At the same time, Falwell’s Moral Majority was a major contributor to the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president in 1980.

  The Reagan administration then cozied up to Ríos Montt and began funneling weapons and money to the Guatemalan military for its war against Mayan villagers before his installation, by the CIA, as dictator in 1982. Later that year, Reagan bypassed congressional objections and sent additional millions of dollars’ worth of military hardware to Guatemala, even after receiving reports of atrocities, and declared, “President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. . . . I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” (At nearly the same time, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops charged that the Guatemalan military was committing “genocide” against the Mayan people.)

  The general was not called to account for his reign of terror against
tens of thousands of campesinos until 2012, when he was indicted. By that time, he was a wealthy and well-fed eighty-five-year-old.

  Ríos Montt’s Christian connections are particularly galling, though not surprising. Acquiring and violently wielding a religious power base is a time-tested way of ensuring popular obedience. “I’m doing God’s work,” sing the false prophets.

  In 1999 U.S. president Bill Clinton offered a remarkable apology for the U.S. role in the Guatemalan genocide. Clinton said his country’s “support for [Guatemalan] military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

  Clearly his successor, George W. Bush, wasn’t listening. In fact, several of the players in the theatre of misery created by U.S. wars in Central America in the 1980s would resurface in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. These include U.S. colonel James Steele, who was instrumental in the unleashing of a counterinsurgency program in El Salvador that killed seventy-five thousand civilians, and who went on to oversee similar operations in Iraq that resulted in major sectarian violence. (The counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq became known as the Salvador Option.)

  Steele was also one of the six known operatives, along with the infamous colonel Oliver North, who orchestrated the Iran-Contra deal. North went on to become a correspondent for that mighty bastion of journalistic veracity, Fox News, even reporting from Iraq during the American war. At this writing he is a consultant for violent video games and hosts War Stories with Oliver North on the Fox network. He also contributes a regular opinion column to Soldier of Fortune magazine.