by Bruce Wydick
Rich centered most of his formidable weight on Alex’s chest to keep him from writhing. He checked Alex’s wrist. Two large pieces of glass that had severed an artery were imbedded in his wrist and the muscle of his lower forearm. Blood surged from the wound, ran over the bedsheets, and puddled on the floor. Rich carefully removed the glass, grabbed the towel, and started to apply pressure to the wounds, elevating the arm. Alex began to turn a sickening white as the white towel quickly filled with blood. Then he lost consciousness.
A hotel manager ran to the door after hearing the noise and summoned a doctor.
Two hours later, Alex was lying in a hospital in Huehuetenango, alive and conscious, and with twenty-nine stitches in his right wrist.
Angela and Rich sat by his side at the hospital. None of them had spoken since their arrival. Rich looked down as Alex opened his eyes. “You’re right.”
Alex stared straight ahead and swallowed, then looked at Rich. “Which time?”
Rich turned toward him. “You’re right. It’s not fair.”
CHAPTER 27
The young woman buried her face in the straw and wept silently for those inside the church as her baby lay by her side. The searing fire of the consumed church and its occupants burned down to a smoldering stench. Some soldiers fired shots into the embers. Did these soldiers have no respect even for the corpses of the innocent? Or could some have partially survived this inferno only to meet such a vicious end? Sadness, indignation, and fear consumed her mind. She did not understand why the army had come to their village to destroy, to destroy churches, and houses, and people. The people in her village were not garbage-eating rats. They were poor—poor people who had many problems—but people who always helped each other, sometimes even others outside the village.
On the single television that existed in the village, they had watched the president explain the guerilla problem in a speech. She heard him say, “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you must drain the sea.” This was better than the rats and the garbage, she thought, but she didn’t understand the part about the sea. One can never drain the sea; she had seen it once, the Pacific, on a journey to deliver coffee to the coast. Didn’t the president know that the people, the sea, neither could ever be drained? There will always be the people and there will always be the sea.
Soldiers ran to various locations in the village. They did not care to check every house. They seemed content to burn down the village. Within minutes she saw the lieutenant supervising two of his men sprinkling what she now knew to be gasoline around a house of a boy who used to be in her class at school. She did not know the boy well, but she remembered he was a good boy. He liked to play soccer, laugh, and chase girls around the school with the other boys. She watched one of the soldiers throw a match on the house, and saw the flames crawl up the walls to the roof.
The lieutenant and his men then turned their attention to Mildred and the other women. Many of them had become hysterical at the burning of the church and the houses, and they seemed to begin to understand their fate if they did not cooperate with the soldiers. The young woman knew what this meant, but she did not know which would come first: one of Mildred’s friends would buy her life by telling about Mildred, or Mildred would buy her own life with information about the insurgency, Alberto, and perhaps the young woman.
Chaos was beginning to surround the group of women now. One of them pointed at Mildred, and Mildred shouted something back at her. The lieutenant grabbed Mildred by the hair and took her away from the group with some other men into the forest. She saw Mildred’s face, panicked, sobbing, and red. Please, Mildred, tell them the stories you know from Alberto so that they will not hurt you. Do not argue with the soldiers. They have power over us, the power to take you away from me, and me from you.
The remaining soldiers made the other women stand up. They forced the women to march in a line behind some houses. The young woman ran to the other side of the barn to see what happened to them, but they were lost from view. She pounded her fist against the barn wall, for a moment not caring if it attracted attention. Then she sat down in a despairing silence.
After some minutes, she heard new noises outside. The lieutenant had returned from the forest. What she saw next caused her stomach to boil. She saw Eva approach the lieutenant, respectfully waiting for his attention several feet away as he finished directing three men toward some houses. She watched, sickened, as the lieutenant redirected his attention toward Eva. Hands held behind her back in deference, Eva was clearly informing her superior of something important he must know. The young woman’s body began to shake as she saw Eva motion toward the barn as she talked. The lieutenant listened and then nodded, summarily dismissing her. Then he directed some men to grab a container of gasoline and follow him in the direction of the barn.
The young woman panicked as the group of soldiers began to walk in her direction. Clutching her child, she quickly moved toward the barn door, which faced away from the center of the village and was hidden from the view of the soldiers.
And she decided to run.
Angela
A couple of days later Angela, Alex, and Rich sauntered up the dusty mountain trail to the house to visit Fernando and Juana. It was a morose, silent trudge. Angela knew Alex’s wrist still throbbed; he was hurting in every conceivable way. Rich seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts, and Angela, though melancholy herself, felt that attempts to cheer up either of them were likely to be ineffective, and anyway, she lacked the impetus to try. The relative gaiety of the summer had disappeared, replaced by a mood of confusion, tiredness, and despair.
They approached the house. Juana saw them approaching and walked slowly to greet them, looking tired. They each hugged her in turn. Angela looked over and could see that the shoulder of Rich’s green Hawaiian shirt was wet with Juana’s tears. Fernando left some other company in their house and came out to receive them, face drawn, eyes misty and forlorn.
They were introduced to other members of the family who had come to support Lourdes’s siblings and parents. Everyone in the room appeared to be grappling with the loss, trying to explain it in a way that made sense. Angela thought, How do you make sense of the senseless? Lourdes had been so young. Even so, there was a kind of acceptance of death that was foreign to Angela. Here people over fifty died frequently of nothing in particular. Most families had either experienced the death of an infant or knew another who had. Death had not made himself a stranger in their village.
They had been there for over an hour when Fernando approached Angela.
“Pues, I am glad that you returned.”
Angela studied his face. Despite his being grateful that they would be here to support them in one of their most difficult moments, she could tell that there was something else behind this. “What is it, Fernando?” she asked. “Why?”
“Because, Angela, I have one more story I must tell you.”
October 1952
Friedrich and Ester established a new plantation in Mazatenango, not far from the old one owned by the Ehrlichmanns. Basilio, his wife, Marta, and some of his brothers and cousins took their families and headed a few hours north to another Mam-speaking region where new coffee land was being developed, in the province of Huehuetenango.
By this time people in Guatemala had suffered many years of military governments and had grown weary of dictators. Right after World War II, Guatemala democratically elected its first presidents, Juan José Árevalo from 1945 to 1951, and then Jacobo Árbenz from 1951 to 1954. These were good times in the country for coffee; local harvests were plentiful and prices across the world remained high.
The new democratically elected governments had to decide what to do with the German coffee land that had been annexed by the Ubico government—eighty thousand hectares of prime coffee land. Instead of returning it to its owners or their descendants, the Árbenz government converted the land into individual parcels under an agricultural reform law
to be owned by the former mozos or managed as peasant-operated cooperatives.
Basilio worked for several years as a colono to a large coffee plantation owner as he and Marta established a home in the rural area around San Pedro Necta. Beginning in the early 1950s, Catholic priests, some of whom were Jesuit and Maryknoll missionaries from Europe and North America, began to work among the indigenous communities in the western highlands of Guatemala. Having compassion for the plight of the indigenous coffee workers, they helped local communities organize themselves into cooperative agricultural associations. In many cases new lands were cleared from the high jungle or forest to create new areas for planting. To the consternation of many large coffee growers, some mozos left plantations to join the new associations, where they believed they could avoid the drudgery and low wages of the coffee plantations.
A winsome young Jesuit priest, Father Humberto Dias, who was originally from Spain, approached Basilio about joining the cooperative. Father Dias taught the campesinos that the peasant associations were part of the hands of Christ reaching down through the Church to the poor and downtrodden to give them hope. They established a communal coffee association under the leadership of Father Dias and other leaders of the community, all sharing in the labor, as well as the fruits of that labor.
It was not a perfect system. There were often conflicts over leadership and commitment to the work of the cooperative. Some workers left the associations out of these frustrations; others stayed. But in a time of high coffee prices, there was a sense of increasing communal prosperity. Probably more central to the objectives of the missionaries, the associations created a sense of pride and economic opportunity in the indigenous communities where they operated. The members of Father Dias’s community were generally happy.
Basilio worked in the campesino-operated cooperative with Father Dias for several years until he and Marta managed to save enough from their involvement in the association to buy their own small parcel of coffee land. As he considered the purchase, he approached another indigenous coffee grower in the village who had accumulated a number of sizable coffee parcels, Adolfo Chuquahuit. He made him an offer on one of his parcels: four hectares of coffee land on a fairly steep incline, but good soil and tree cover. The deal was made, but shortly afterward a dispute arose between them over one of the boundaries on the plot. Basilio had been certain that the agreement included all the land adjacent to a small creek, with access to the water. Adolfo disputed the claim. It had never included access to the creek, he maintained. It led to a festering argument that was never entirely resolved.
But Basilio cultivated the entire area that he believed to be his own, and from this land he and Marta, especially in the good years, were able to feed and clothe their family. Over the decades they enjoyed a growing degree of leadership and respect within their Mam community. They had six children, including Emilio, the father of Fernando and the grandfather of Lourdes.
When Emilio was sixteen, Basilio’s mare gave birth to a colt, which Emilio raised in the stable next to their small adobe dwelling. One night a thunderstorm frightened the colt out of its pen. A torrential rain swept through the village, flooding roads and homes. In brazen disobedience to the admonitions of his father to remain inside, Emilio stole away with the mare and rode it bareback up into the mountains to track down the colt. Vexed upon discovering that both Emilio and his mare had ventured out into the storm, Basilio grieved to Marta about the intransigence of his son. “Like something you might have done?” reminded Marta patiently.
In the moonlight Emilio returned on the back of the mare, leading the colt behind with a rope, all three soaked to the bone. Basilio ran from the house into the drenching rain, his frustration and worry forgotten, and helped his son down from the mare. He hugged and kissed him on the forehead, hair now plastered to it by the rain. “My son, you are very stubborn and disobedient, but also very, very brave. I am proud to be your father, and I am overjoyed that you are safe. Go inside and let your mother prepare dry clothes and some atol to warm you.” Especially with his children, judgment for Basilio was usually trumped by heart.
Although it had supported the annexation of German-held coffee plantations at the beginning of the war, the United States government became concerned over the confiscation of private agricultural lands and their conversion into campesino-held lands, cooperatives, and nationalized agriculture. It smacked of communism. Perhaps most important, a significant portion of the nearly one million hectares annexed by the government was land held by the United Fruit Company. United Fruit had invested shrewdly in relationships with lawmakers in Washington DC. It made its complaint known plainly to Congress and to the Eisenhower administration. And the administration listened.
In 1954 the democratically elected Árbenz government was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup and replaced by a military government. A sequence of such governments ruled the country for most of the next four decades. In reaction to the dictatorial governments, a guerrilla war began in 1962. The guerrilla movement gathered momentum as multiple groups formed and initiated attacks in different parts of the country. By the mid-1970s, the government of Eugenio Laugerud García became determined to crush it. It was decided that the best approach was a counter-insurgency operation based on the United States military operation in Vietnam. The backbone of the operation was a network of civil patrols used to monitor villages believed to be hospitable to guerrilla activity. The civil patrols had strong ties to the military, whom they could call in as situations warranted. Lacking the support of a rural population, the guerrillas would be quickly annihilated.
The first massacres of indigenous villages under the García regime occurred in 1975, in the northernmost part of the Quiché province, Ixcán, less than ten miles from Huehuetenango. The Catholic-led agricultural communities in the region were viewed as sympathetic to local guerrilla movements, and their numbers had grown. Groups such as Acción Católica had grown all over the western highlands so that by 1967 there were 27,000 family representatives in their local associations. By 1975 the number had grown to 132,000 in over five hundred peasant associations. The communities had become a major movement among the local indigenous population. Coffee-plantation owners complained to the government about the cooperatives. They drew peasant labor away from their plantations during harvest, and on the supply side, the coffee from the associations competed with their own output. The complaints met with a receptive ear. The cooperatives were also viewed as insubordinate to the Guatemalan government itself.
The Guatemalan army’s counter-insurgency units employed a standard methodology to crush the guerrillas. In order to inflict fear in a population accused of siding with the guerrillas, army units would arrive in a village. Aided by the civil patrols, they would identify local leaders accused of supporting guerrilla activity in the village, seize them out of fields and homes, and then execute them in the presence of village inhabitants. In villages where there was believed to be widespread guerrilla support, soldiers would then systematically burn houses, schools, and churches, all too frequently with residents locked inside. In many cases the military spared no one, neither children nor the very old. Those fleeing into the jungle were often hunted down and shot. Some escaped and sought refuge over the border in Mexico or fled through Mexico to the United States. The bodies of those unable to escape in such villages were either burned or dumped in mass graves.
As word of the massacres spread, resentment against the government began to intensify. The conflict spread from Quiché to other nearby provinces, and by the early 1980s, massacres were occurring in many parts of the provinces of Quiché, Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Chimaltenango, Alta Verapaz, and Sololá.
May 11, 1983
Basilio, now over seventy, did not support the guerrillas, nor did he support the army in its counter insurgency against them. Neither did his wife or children support either side of the conflict. But one night, a platoon of soldiers arrived in their village. Adolfo Chuquahuit and his wife, E
va, were leading members of the civil patrol.
They arrived at night at Adolfo’s residence. A burly ladino lieutenant with a heavy mustache led a small group of soldiers to the house. The lieutenant and three of his soldiers walked into the house without invitation. He sat down and looked coldly at Adolfo. The right side of the lieutenant’s unshaven face was severely disfigured. A scar from a crudely repaired gunshot wound extended from his temple to his nose. His right eye was missing, replaced by a glass eye that stared straight ahead, lifeless, like that of a fish, while his left eye stared at the occupants of the room. The life in the good eye was as cold and corpselike as the dead one.
“It doesn’t seem that the patrol has been very effective at keeping the hearts of the village in line with their duty to the Republic, does it, Adolfo?” His voice carried little emotion. It sounded almost faintly bored, but it was clear that a wanton rage lingered just below the surface.
Adolfo shifted in his chair. “Lieutenant, I believe that most of the villagers are sympathetic to the cause of the Republic and its military effort, except for a few troublemakers, who by their words and actions have long communicated sympathy for the Marxist views of the guerrillas,” replied Aldolfo. He continued, “Humberto Dias and his underling priests clearly are leaders in this regard. In the association he heads, they teach Marxist principles and claim that the government hates them and wants them to be poor mozos working on coffee plantations forever.”
“Yes, of course. Dias and his guerrilla catechists must of course be eliminated. Who are his champions within the village?” Without having to be told, one of his subordinates was taking notes, calmly jotting down directions to their dwellings. It had all become routine, almost mechanized.
Adolfo casually mentioned several names, instantly sentencing them to death. He paused for a moment, reflected, and then decided to resolve a problem that had troubled him for some time. Following the previous list of names he added, “And of course there is Basilio Ixtamperic, one of Dias’s earliest followers. He is old now, but still very respected by members of the association. His sons Emilio and Eduardo also command respect by members of the association, and their counsel is eagerly followed within the village.”