XVII
SELF-DEFENCE IN THE VILLAGE
‘…They began to fulfil the destiny which was concealed in the marrow of their bones…’
—Popol Vuh
My time working as a maid, my long stay in the finca without going home, and my parents’ problems, made me very confused. Yes, I was very confused. I went through a sort of painful change within myself. It wasn’t so difficult for the rest of them at home to understand what was real and what was false. But I found it very hard. What did exploitation mean to me? I began to see why conditions are so different. Why do they reject us? Why is the Indian not accepted? Why was it that the land used to belong to us? Used our ancestors to live here? Why don’t outsiders accept Indian ways? This is where discrimination lies! Catholic Action too submitted us to tremendous oppression. It kept our people dormant while others took advantage of our passivity. I finally began to see all this clearly. And that’s when I started working as an organizer. No-one taught me how to organize because, having been a catechist, I already knew. We began forming groups of women who wanted to join the struggle. And I saw that teaching the children how to act when the enemy came was part of the struggle too. The moment I learned to identify our enemies was very important for me. For me now the landowner was a big enemy, an evil one. The soldier too was a criminal enemy. And so were all the rich. We began using the term ‘enemies’, because we didn’t have the notion of enemy in our culture, until those people arrived to exploit us, oppress us and discriminate against us. In our community we are all equal. We all have to help one another and share the little we have between us. There is no superior and inferior. But we realized that in Guatemala there was something superior and something inferior and that we were the inferior. The ladinos behave like a superior race. Apparently there was a time when the ladinos used to think we weren’t people at all, but a sort of animal. All this became clear to me.
I threw myself into my work and I told myself we had to defeat the enemy. We began to organize. Our organization had no name. We began by each of us trying to remember the tricks our ancestors used. They say they used to set traps in their houses, in the path of the conquistadores, the Spaniards. Our ancestors were good fighters, they were real men. It’s not true what white people say, that our ancestors didn’t defend themselves. They used ambushes. Our grandparents used to tell us about it, especially my grandfather when he saw that we were beginning to talk about defending ourselves against the landowners, and wondering if we had to rid ourselves of the landowners before we’d be left in peace. We said: ‘If they threaten us, why don’t we threaten the landowner?’ My grandfather gave us a lot of support. There was always a lot of discussion in our house, because my brothers reached their own conclusions, I reached mine, and everyone came to their own conclusions. My grandfather said: ‘Yes, my children, you have to defend yourselves. Our ancestors defended themselves. The white men are telling lies when they say we are passive. They fought too. And we, why don’t we fight with the same arms the landowners use?’ If an elderly person tells us this, then it must be true.
The first step the community took was to have my father, the village leader, living in the centre of the community. Everyone felt my father should live in the centre. When Kjell Laugerud divided our small pieces of land into plots, some people had to go and live on one side of the village, some on the other, in different plots. So we were some way away from our neighbours. What my brothers and I decided (my father happened to be with us at the time too) was that we would share the piece of land we had on the flat ground, on the plain. All the members of the community who lived some way off could come down and we’d live together, or with our houses close together so that we could call to each other when the landowners’ people came. This was the first step we took. But what were we going to tell people? They knew we had to defend ourselves against the landowners, but they didn’t understand that one day the repression would reach us and large numbers of us would be killed. We held a meeting and discussed it with everybody. We talked about sharing out the piece of land behind our house so that our neighbours could live closer. We also asked other neighbours to share their land too. We said that in two months we could have all our neighbours’ houses near ours. This proposition was put to the community: ‘Are you willing to leave your houses and live near us so that when the landowners come, we’ll all be together?’
We were making these plans when a village near ours got a taste of the repression. The repression reached San Pablo, a village nearby. They kidnapped the community’s leaders–the elected representatives, the chief catechist, and their families. They took away some other catechists too. Men, women and children were taken. They too were fighting a landowner, but they weren’t organized yet. This served as an example for us, and my brothers and I, and our neighbours began dividing up the work to be done. Everyone went to cut palm leaves to build the new houses. Some prepared the ground for the houses, others collected leaves, and others cut poles for the walls. We shared the work out. We built the houses close together.
And one day a troop of soldiers arrived. It was the first time we’d seen so many troops in the village; there were ninety of them. We couldn’t resist but we did nothing to provoke them either. The community knew more or less what to do if any one of us was taken. The idea from the beginning was that they either left us alone or they’d have to kill all of us. We wouldn’t let a single compañero be taken away from the village. That’s what we did. The soldiers stayed for two weeks and used the community house where we carried out all our ceremonies, and held our meetings. They lived there. At night they went into our maize fields to dig up our potatoes, cut off the maize cobs and young beans, and ate very well. They cut any cobs they wanted. For us this was violating our culture, because we Indians have to perform a ceremony before picking the cob, the fruit of the earth and of the peasants’ labour. We were very angry but we didn’t show our anger because there were ninety of them, capable of massacring us all. They were armed.
One night around ten o’clock, we were getting ready to go to sleep when my mother saw something black moving around at the back of our house, where we have a little patch of potatoes. She thought it was one of our neighbour’s animals and began throwing sticks at it. It was a soldier stealing potatoes. That was the first time my mother got aggressive with any of the soldiers; without a thought to whether she’d be killed or not. She had all our dogs with her. We had a lot of dogs then because all our neighbours had decided to buy another dog each to defend themselves with. So my mother went out with her dogs and her sticks. The soldier said: ‘No, no, don’t, I’m a person.’ And my mother said: ‘If you want to eat, why don’t you go and work? You’re protecting the rich and they don’t even feed you. Here we’ve worked hard for our crops, young man. Leave my things alone or I’ll beat you with this stick.’ So the soldier left the potatoes and went running off in a hurry. The next day they left. They went away.
After they left, the village got together to decide what to do with our maize fields. We would forget our customs, our ceremonies, for a while, and plan our security first. Afterwards we’d go back to the things we want to do. The community decided: ‘No-one must discover our community’s secret now, compañeros. It’s secret what we are doing here. The enemy must not know, nor must our other neighbours.’ Everyone agreed. We began teaching our children to be discreet. They’re usually discreet anyway, but we advised them not to say a single word to any children who weren’t from our village about what their parents were doing. We prepared our signals. Our signals were to be all the everyday things we use, all natural things. I remember that we performed a ceremony before beginning our self-defence measures. It was a village ceremony where we asked the Lord of the natural world, our one God, to help us and give us permission to use his creations of nature to defend ourselves with. The ceremony was conducted with a lot of feeling, because, well, we knew that it was up to the community, up to our measures of self-defence, whether two, t
hree, four or five of our members would be kidnapped, tortured or murdered. The following day everyone came with ideas of how to defend themselves. Some brought stones, others machetes, others sticks, others their work tools. The women brought salt, hot water, etc. We put all our ideas together. How would we use them? One compañero would say: ‘I think that this is useful for defence. How can we use it?’ Another would say: ‘This is what I have in mind…’. And he explains what he would do if they came. Each person contributed something. Then we organized very carefully who would plan the best ways to use the community’s ideas and who would teach them. How would we teach the children? Which duties would the children have? Who would be in charge of seeing that the women played their special part? When would we hold a general assembly to evaluate all this? We began to get a much better idea of how to organize our community.
I was enthralled by all this. As I said before, when the government parcelled the land out and tried to create divisions within the community–everyone with their own plot, their own bit of land–there wasn’t enough land for us all to live in one place together. They gave us plots which were very separate, a long way from each other, and many neighbours lived quite a distance away, and the houses were very far apart. We lived like this with the land divided up for about two or three years. They used this method to separate us but the little plots of land weren’t big enough to work. We had barely a manzana of land each. It was all divided up. What all the neighbours did was to give some of their land to the community as a whole, but even so our houses were still very far apart. So when the repression started coming closer, we realized we had to put our houses together to confront the soldiers when they came to repress our village. It wasn’t only the villages nearest to us that had been attacked, there’d been massacres in other communities too. Chajul, Bebaj, Cotzal, were the first to suffer the repression.
We had to build houses for our neighbours between us, and it took about two or three months before everyone was living together. We did it so as to make our self-defence measures more effective. When they were finished, we started developing our security system and each member of the community had special duties to carry out. The children, the women, the young people, the adults, and even the old people had their role to play. Our animals, especially the dogs, help us with our defences too. That’s when we started preparing things we had to do secretly, like the traps. No-one must know about the traps in our villages. But we all had to know where our neighbours’ traps were, otherwise they might capture one of us instead of a soldier or a landowner’s bodyguard. One of our compañeros, or perhaps a group, took charge of checking the traps which were already there and putting them in working order. These traps were initially meant for catching the mice that eat the cobs, and for the mountain animals which come down and eat our maize. We gave these traps another use–catching the army. They were usually large ditches with invisible nets so that neither animals nor soldiers could see them. They might also be something metal to stop the army. In any case, we know the army can’t come in lorries, or bicycles or cars because there are no roads as far as our village. They have to come on foot along the one path. We’d already seen that the army was cowardly and didn’t dare come too far into the mountains. They’re frightened because they think there are guerrillas there. Those poor soldiers, they don’t even know what a guerrilla is, so they imagine he is a monster, like a fierce bird or a sort of animal. This makes them afraid of going into the mountains. They have to come along paths and we set traps on all the main paths leading to our village. We don’t set only one trap, we set several because one might fail. This was our first experience with traps so we had to set three or more on every path. In addition to the traps on the path, there were more traps in each house, so that if the army gets as far as the village by another path, he will still get a shock in each compañero’s house. Each house also had an emergency exit for every compañero, every one of us.
I was helping with the security measures, by setting traps and all the other things for our defence. But at the same time I was involved in organizing and educating the compañeros. We had to do whatever work the community wanted, what was most needed at the time. And that was teaching many of the compañeros to do the same job we did. We tried to avoid all working at the same thing and changed round all the time so that everyone got experience of the different duties. We began organizing the children, the women, the men. We started using our safety measures, the emergency exits for example. We decided who’d leave first, who second, third and last, if the army took the village. At first, when we hadn’t much experience and hadn’t much idea of how to confront the enemy, we planned that the women should leave first with their children–all the kids–and that the men should stay until the last. But we found that in practice that system proved not to be very effective and we were constantly changing our ways of escaping. What happened was that the women and children were safer than the men because the army showed them a bit more respect. It was usually the men they kidnapped, especially the village leaders. So because of this, our men would leave first and the women would stay behind to take the beatings. It wasn’t that we had a set plan, with a theory and each role worked out, and that was that. No, we were putting new ideas into practice the whole time and practising the things we had to do together. And then, when people were least expecting it, we’d cause some confusion in the village to see how we’d react. We tested our traps and our emergency exits. We realized that, when the army arrived, it wouldn’t be very sensible to escape into the mountains in single file along the paths. So we dug large ditches and underground paths. Whenever a village leader gave the signal, we’d all leave and gather in one place. We broke with many of our cultural procedures by doing this but we knew it was the way to save ourselves. We knew what to do and most of the village was ready to follow us. The community elects its leader but everything he does has to be approved by the others. What the community does not approve cannot be carried through. Everyone plays an equal part: men, women, and the children as well. One of the first decisions taken was that there should be a signal for when we were to leave the village. That is a very serious signal. It’s only given when the enemy is close by. And the signal will change according to which side the enemy is approaching from. There is one signal for the day and another for night-time, because at night we can’t see where the enemy is coming from. We got together with other villages and built a house at each of the four corners from which the enemy could approach. Some of us would take it in turns to keep watch at night and others would keep watch during the day.
This is something that happened while I was in the village; it was the first time we put our self-defence measures into practice. The soldiers who’d stayed in our village for fifteen days left, but they left with the idea that we were organized. They were already suspicious of certain things while they were in the village, in spite of the fact that our organization was totally secret. They came back one night and our whole network of information was already in operation. We’d built a camp for the village so that if, at any time, we couldn’t live in the village, we could go to the camp. That’s when we found our friends from the natural world even more useful–the plants, the trees and the mountains. Our community began getting used to an even harder life in case we couldn’t go back to the village for fifteen or twenty days. It was better than being massacred. We began practising going to the camp to sleep at night whether there were any enemies or not. Our compañeros would give us the signal, from far away. So, we’d set traps on the path, and the traps in the houses, and get all the preparations ready. And also on each path, one compañero’s house was empty, except for the dogs. If the soldiers came at night, the dogs would bark and follow them. As long as the dogs kept on barking, we knew that the soldiers were still there. That’s how our dogs helped us. We knew when the army was in the village. They barked at whatever time of day the army left. That was the signal that the army had left the village.
That first n
ight they arrived, they went into the houses and found no-one. They beat the dogs, killed some of them, and left. We said to ourselves: ‘They went into our houses and they are going to go on looking for us. So now we have good cause to find new methods.’ That’s how the community itself looks for ways of improving certain things that weren’t any good. We did everything together because there were no longer specific tasks for men and others for women. Now, going to the fields or building a neighbour’s house, or anything, was all done communally. We didn’t have our own individual things, because this would disperse the community and when the enemy came, he’d be able to kidnap some of us. So we worked together. The women took turns with the men to keep watch at night. Before doing any of these tasks, we had to be sure how we were going to do them. We thought of what would happen if at any time, we couldn’t use our traps, or rather that they didn’t work. If we couldn’t use our escape route or any other of our security measures, we should at least have our weapons ready–the weapons of the people: machetes, stones, hot water, chile, salt. We found a use for all these things. We knew how to throw stones, we knew how to throw salt in someone’s face–how to do it effectively. This could only work against the paramilitary forces, from the regiment, because we knew that we had no answer for machine guns. But if the police came with their guns, our weapons can be effective. We’ve often used lime. Lime is very fine and you have to aim it in a certain way for it to go into someone’s eyes. We learned to do it through practice; we practised taking aim and watching where the enemy is. You can blind a policeman by throwing lime in his face. And with stones for instance, you have to throw it at the enemy’s head, at his face. If you throw it at his back, it will be effective but not as much as at other parts of the body. These are things we’re practising the whole time in our village. And if we’re stuck in our homes, we can resort to throwing hot water at them. The whole village must be prepared, in one place and with all their materials for self-defence ready. The whole family must know where an uncle’s or a neighbour’s things are in case they can’t use their own. We need to be on the constant lookout for new techniques. But everything must have a reason or we might do things we want to, but without knowing why we’re doing them. Our main weapon, however, is the Bible. We began to study the Bible as a text through which to educate our village. There are many wonderful stories in the Bible.
I, Rigoberta Menchu Page 17