I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  The government says the land belongs to the nation. It owns the land and gives it to us to cultivate. But when we’ve cleared and cultivated the land, that’s when the landowners appear. However, the landowners don’t just appear on their own–they have connections with the different authorities that allow them to manoeuvre like that. Because of this, we faced the Martínez family, the Garcías, and then the Brols arrived. This meant we could either stay and work as peónes or leave our land. There was no other solution. So my father travelled all over the place seeking advice. We didn’t realize then that going to the government authorities was the same as going to the landowners. They are the same. My father was tireless in his efforts to seek help. He went to other sectors, like the workers’ unions. He asked them to help because we were already being thrown off our land.

  The first time they threw us out of our homes was, if I remember rightly, in 1967. They turned us out of our houses, and out of the village. The Garcías’ henchmen set to work with ferocity. They were Indians too, soldiers of the finca. First they went into the houses without permission and got all the people out. Then they went in and threw out all our things. I remember that my mother had her silver necklaces, precious keepsakes from my grandmother, but we never saw them again after that. They stole them all. They threw out our cooking utensils, our earthenware cooking pots. We don’t use those sort of…special utensils, we have our own earthenware pots. They hurled them into the air, and, oh God! they hit the ground and broke into pieces. All our plates, cups, pots. They threw them out and they all broke. That was the vengeance of the landowner on the peasants because we wouldn’t give up our land. All the maize cobs they found in the tapanco, they threw away. Afterwards all the peasants had to work together to collect them up. We did it together and put them in another place. I remember it was pouring with rain, and we had nothing to protect ourselves from the rain. It took us two days to make a roughly built hut out of leaves. We only had those nylon sheets the peasants use to cover themselves in the rain. The first night we spent in the fields with streams of water running along the ground. It wasn’t raining then but the ground was sodden.

  Those few days confirmed my hatred for those people. I saw why we said that ladinos were thieves, criminals and liars. It was as our parents had told us. We could see that they were doing the same to us. They killed our animals. They killed many of our dogs. To us, killing an animal is like killing a person. We care for all the things of the natural world very much and killing our dogs wounded us very deeply. We spent more than forty days in the fields. Then the community held a meeting and said, ‘If they throw us out again, we will die of hunger.’ We had no utensils for cooking our tortillas, and no grinding stones. They’d been thrown away into the undergrowth. We organized ourselves, all of us, and said, ‘Let’s collect our things together.’ We went looking for any of our things that were still more or less all right. My father said, ‘If they kill us they kill us, but we’ll go back to our houses.’ Our people looked on my father as their own father, and so we went back to our houses. There was another village quite near ours and they helped us. People brought cooking pots and plates so that we could cook our maize and eat. So we went back to our houses. And the landowners came back again for what they called ‘collective negotiations.’ They told us we should resign ourselves to working as peónes because the land belonged to them. We could stay in our houses, but the land was not ours. If we didn’t agree, they would throw us off again. But my father said: ‘We were the first families to come and cultivate this land and nobody can deceive us into thinking that this land is theirs. If they want to be the owners of more land, let them go and cultivate the mountains. There is more land but it is not land where things grow.’ Who knows, perhaps if the community had been alone, we would have become peónes and our land would now be part of a big finca. But my father would have none of it. He said, ‘Even if they kill us, we will do it.’ Of course, in those days we didn’t have enough political clarity to unite with others and protest about our land. What we did, we did as an individual community. So we went back to our homes and did not accept the landowners’ deal. They left us alone for a month or two. Then there was another raid. All our things were broken for a second time, all the things our neighbours in the other village had given us. We couldn’t stand what they were doing to us any longer and decided to go to the finca, abandoning our land. But we couldn’t live in the finca all the time. What were we going to do? What would happen to us if we went to the finca? That’s when we united and said: ‘We won’t go!’

  We love our land very much. Since those people tried to take our land away, we have grieved very much. My grandfather used to cry bitterly and say: ‘In the past, no one person owned the land. The land belonged to everyone. There were no boundaries.’ We were sadder still when we saw our animals going hungry because of us. If our animals went near our crops, they were killed by the Garcías’ henchmen who were guarding them. (I remember that the wickedest landowner was Honorio García. The other was Angel Martínez.) My grandfather said, ‘If they kill our animals, we must kill them.’ That was the idea that came to my grandfather. We spent about fifteen days away from our house, after the second raid and our elders advised us to burn them and leave. But where to? We didn’t know whether it was better to go to the finca or agree to be labourers on the landowners’ estate. We couldn’t decide. We discussed it with all our neighbours. Among the whole community. During all this time we couldn’t celebrate our culture; none of our ceremonies. That’s when my father took his stand. He said, ‘If they kill me for trying to defend the land that belongs to us, well, they’ll have to kill me.’ The idea of life without a father, or that Papá would be shot by those guards, was terrible for us. Sometimes my mother was very distressed and begged my father not to put his life in danger with those guards.

  My father went on travelling. He was hardly ever at home now. He didn’t pay us much attention, or talk to us like he used to. He’d arrive, call a meeting of the community, talk to them and then sometimes leave the next day. We began to lose contact with him. When the landowners saw my father working so hard to save our land, they started threatening him. So he said, ‘The best guardians, the best protection a man has, are his animals. Our dogs must learn to defend us.’ We had some good dogs, they were very fierce. We spent time teaching the dogs to bite those men when they came to our houses–sometimes in the middle of the night.

  Our life was now such that we couldn’t go down to the finca because if we did our houses probably wouldn’t be there when we got back. The community decided to eat plants or whatever they could find in the fields rather than go down to the finca. Or part of a family would go and the other part would stay and watch over the house. We became much more united. When the landowners came we’d unite so that they either had to throw us all off, kill us all or leave us alone. We began teaching the children to keep watch and tell us when the landowners were coming. We lived for quite a while like this–with all this tension. I kept on going down to the finca with my brothers and sisters. My mother always stayed in the house. Or my father was there. My father never went down to the fincas because the landowners would take advantage of this and go into the village. Then they started trying other things. We had maize and beans but we had to carry all our produce down from the village to the town which was a long way away. So the landowners set up a temporary market, a place to sell produce, and tried to isolate us from the town even more, so that they could take over our land more easily.

  Then the INTA came and told us that the problem was solved. They said: ‘We’re going to give you a title to the land for you to sign and the land will be yours. No-one will bother you on your land. You can sow your crops, clear the undergrowth and go further into the mountains. This proposal comes from the government.’ We signed it. I remember even the children signed it. We can’t sign with a pen or a pencil. We signed it in ink with our fingerprints on the paper. My father insisted they read the paper out e
ven though we didn’t understand it all. We did understand some. But they didn’t want to read it. The INTA inspectors said we could rely on the paper, it was the title to the land. So we signed it.

  They left us alone for two and a half years, I think it was, to let us calm down. Our people went on working. We hardly ever went down to the finca now so that we could cultivate more land. We tried to clear large areas of the undergrowth, into the mountains. We had a dream, a real dream. In five or eight years our land would yield its fruit. Two and a half years went by when we saw the engineers on our land again, shouting, measuring, with the landowners’ guards. Now, not only the Martínez and the Garcías, but the Brols were all measuring part of our land. This time the problem was more complicated because they brought with them the document we had signed, which said we had agreed to stay on the land and live off its produce for two years only; that when the two years were up, we had another place to go to and would leave the land. This wasn’t true. We didn’t know what it was we had signed. My father said, ‘This is unjust, because we were deceived.’

  This is how my father started getting more deeply involved with the unions. I remember my father asked some unions in the FASGUA, Federación Autónoma Sindical de Guatemala–Guatemalan Federation of Independent Unions–to help us because they were unions for workers, for labourers, and we were peasants–agricultural labourers. The unions helped us a lot. They said they would denounce the fact that we were being thrown off our land. My father was continually going to see the unions, the INTA, the lawyers. It nearly drove him mad. He told us, ‘My children, you must get to know the places I go to because otherwise, if they kill me the community will lose its land.’ Very well. One of my older brothers began to travel with my father and began learning Spanish. The community had to contribute to my father’s fares. He very often had no money at all and my mother had to sell our animals to pay for his trips. But at least we didn’t leave our land. My mother thought about us more and more because, of course, they were growing up. They wondered how much their children would suffer afterwards. The whole community wondered.

  When my father started going to the unions and getting their support, the landowners offered a great deal of money to the judge who dealt with land claims, and my father was arrested. They accused him of ‘compromizing the sovereignty of the state.’ He was endangering the ‘sovereignty and the well-being of the Guatemalans’! They put him in prison. I remember that I’d been working as a maid for a year. I’d saved a little money to take home as a surprise for my family, especially my mother. I’d saved it so that my mother wouldn’t have to go to the finca for a couple of months. My brother told me: ‘They’re asking for money. We don’t know what to do.’ I decided to leave my job and go back to the finca. From the money I’d saved and my brothers’ wages in the finca, we had to pay for witnesses, lawyers, documents, secretaries. There were so many things we had to pay for to be able to get to see the authorities. Since we didn’t speak Spanish, we had to find an intermediary to translate my mother’s statements. The lawyer was a ladino and didn’t understand our language, so we had to get an intermediary to interpret for him. From the beginning the landowners paid the interpreter not to say what we said. The interpreter ‘sold himself’ to the landowners and, instead of our statements, he said something else. They played so many tricks on us. The result was that our lawyer had nothing to do because, according to the interpreter, we ourselves acknowledged that the land belonged to those landowners. They had paid us to cultivate the land. That wasn’t true. We were very afraid that they would send my father to the state prison. As long as he was in the local prison, his case wasn’t so serious, but once he got to the state prison, the one in El Quiché, we’d have no way of preventing him from having to carry out the sentence he’d been given. If he went to the criminals’ prison, as the authorities in Quetzaltenango said, it meant he would be in jail for eighteen years or more.

  We had enormous trouble getting my father out of prison. My mother had to go and work as a maid in Santa Cruz del Quiché, and the rest of us…in the finca. All our earnings went towards paying lawyers, intermediaries, everything we needed for my father’s case. I remember that the year my father was in prison, I didn’t get home even once. I didn’t stop working. My brother went up to the Altiplano once a month to give my mother the money. She and the community worked for my father. For a whole year, we went back again and again to the law courts. The whole community helped get my father out. The landowners thought that my father was the king, the village chief, and that if they defeated the chief, they could defeat the whole community. But they soon realized that it wasn’t like that. My father carried out the wishes of the community. He didn’t make the laws. The most distressing thing for us was not being able to speak. That was when I told myself: ‘I must learn to speak Spanish, so that we don’t need intermediaries.’ They asked the village for nineteen thousand quetzals to buy the land. The government asked for it through the INTA. They were just making fun of us, like saying peasants aren’t worth a shit. They knew that peasants couldn’t even dream of nineteen thousand quetzals. We had barely ten centavos. Saying nineteen thousand was like saying, ‘Get off that land quick.’ So my father came out of prison. He came out with such courage and such joy.

  I remember when I left my maid’s job, I said: ‘Before I go and work in the finca, I’m going to visit my father in prison.’ I went to the Santa Cruz prison. I’d never been in this prison in Santa Cruz del Quiché before. My father was there with the other prisoners. They were hitting each other, biting each other, and most of them were mad. He was there among all these people. Some of them had fleas. They ate with their hands and were constantly fighting. You could see blood on all their faces. I said: ‘How can he be made to live here? If he’s here for eighteen years, he’ll go mad too.’ I thought this was an enormous punishment, a cruel punishment to give my father. I said: ‘I’ll do everything I can to get him out, even if it means my mother has to suffer as a maid and all her work goes to pay for lawyers.’ We were all willing to do it. I worked willingly, so did my brothers and sisters, waiting to hear about my father’s case, to hear that he wouldn’t have to go to the state prison. ‘What could it possibly be like there,’ I said, ‘if the local prison is already hell?’ My father, humble as he was, found a friend in prison. He was a man who’d been in prison for thirty years, I think. I don’t know what he’d done. He did all his own things in prison, made his own food and everything. He was in charge of the prisoners’ work. They made bags, typical morrales, baskets, all sorts of things, and this man paid them for their work. My father made friends with him and started eating well. He ate what his friend ate. He did his work, making morrales and other things, and he was paid for it. So from inside prison my father was helping us with money to pay to get him out. They made my father make an endless stream of statements. Every five days they took him before the judge and asked him the same things to see if he’d changed his mind or changed the statement justifying his case. That is to say, the judges had no valid justification, so they were looking for something to appease the landowners. The landowners arrived with more and more money to pressurize the judges into ‘selling’ my father and keeping him in prison like a criminal. We were very unhappy because we didn’t see our mother or our father as we were working all the time in the finca.

  In the end, we managed to get him out. Papá was in prison for a year and two months. His enemies were furious when he came out. He came out so happy and determined to fight. He said: ‘Our ancestors were never cowardly. And prison doesn’t eat people. Prison is a punishment for the poor, but it doesn’t eat people. I must go home and go on fighting.’ He didn’t rest for a minute. That’s how he maintained his contacts with the unions and gained their support.

  We were very sad each time he said goodbye and went away. He said: ‘Children, look after yourselves because if I don’t come back, you have to continue my work. I don’t do it alone: you are all part of it too.
We’ll never give the landowners satisfaction. I am very hopeful. We must go on fighting.’ My father was away travelling for three months after he got out of prison. Then they kidnapped him and we said, ‘They’ll have finished him off.’ In those days, they were criminals, but a different sort. The landowners’ henchmen kidnapped my father near our house on the path going to town. One of my brothers was with him as we hardly ever let him go alone after they’d threatened so often to kill him. We were worried. So even if it meant less work, it was better for the community if someone went with him. He always went with a neighbour or one of his children. My brother escaped and immediately mobilized the whole village. They couldn’t take him very far because we cut off the paths right away. We used weapons, our everyday weapons, for the first time. The people took machetes, sticks, hoes and stones to fight the guards. They would have beaten or killed any of them, they were so angry. Around midday we found my father. He’d been tortured and abandoned. There was no sign of the torturers but we knew they were the landowners’ guards. My father was on the ground. They had torn off the hair on his head on one side. His skin was cut all over and they’d broken so many of his bones that he couldn’t walk, lift himself or move a single finger. He looked as if he was dying. It was almost unbearable for us. The community made him one of those chairs the people use for carrying their wounded and we took him down to the town. He was almost cold. He was almost dead when we arrived at the health centre but they wouldn’t attend to him there because the landowners had got there before us and paid them not to look after my father. They’d given the doctors money so none of them would see my father. All the doctors were ladinos. So my mother had to call an ambulance from Santa Cruz del Quiché, which took him to a hospital called San Juan de Dios in El Quiché. He arrived there half dead. They gave him serum and said he’d have to stay there for about nine months for some of the very badly damaged parts of his body to heal. They’d broken many of his bones and he was an old man so they wouldn’t mend quickly. More bitterness for my mother. She had to go to El Quiché and look after my father. She worked there to pay for his medicine and some special care.