There have been ‘ears’ in a lot of villages–people who sell themselves to the government. But I think it’s not always their fault. They have to, they are forced to sell themselves, because they are threatened and see no alternative. The government uses them to get information from the community and this causes many deaths. So we thought this old lady was an ‘ear’ although we could hardly believe it of such an honest person. But we took it very seriously because at that time we were very clear about what we had to do. We didn’t like violence but if it was the only way of saving our lives, we would use it with justice. Although it hurt us, if this woman had sold herself, we would have to execute her. But she says: ‘I’ve got a surprise for you. I’ve killed a soldier’. ‘I’ve killed a soldier,’ she says. But nobody believed her. Well, how could we believe it because, first of all, she was very old and, second, she could hardly see, and third, she didn’t have the sort of arms the enemy did. But she kept saying: ‘I’m so happy. I don’t want to die, I want to live again. I killed a soldier.’ Still no-one believed her. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ she said, ‘look, here are his guns.’ She was carrying the soldier’s rifle and his pistol. She was happy. ‘Show me, show me how to use it,’ she said. To me it was like a dream, like a comic strip, hardly believable. She told us: ‘What happened was that they came into my house, they all managed to jump over the trap, all of them. I hid and crept out of the house on the other side, trying to get away from the house because I thought they’d catch me. The only thing I had with me was my axe. There was a soldier standing at the door looking in, I hit him on the head with my axe and he fell to the ground. The others thought it was guerrillas. They were in such a rush to get out that one of them fell in the trap and the other was rolling around on the ground. The other soldiers shot their wounded comrade. He was trying to escape.’
He was old, and afterwards we saw that the wound wasn’t serious, not enough for them to have to kill him. But the other soldiers had killed him and left. And that’s why we’d been sent the signal that they weren’t all there, and why we were so suspicious when the old lady arrived at the camp. We knew that not all the army had left the village. I was so overjoyed, so overjoyed. I said: ‘This is a great victory for our secrets, no-one has discovered them. We must go on doing this because it is not right that our lives should be worth less than a bird or anything else, and that they can kill us as they wish.’ The old lady deserved a big reward. But we didn’t know what to give really, just our thanks for what she had done. The old lady made a promise: ‘I want to live, I want to go on with you.’ She was almost dancing. ‘Now we have something to defend ourselves with. If we learn to use this, we’ll have a weapon like theirs. This is what killed my children,’ she said. Well, it was something special for her. But it was for us too.
What should we do with the soldier? He’d fallen into the trap with his guns and everything. He had grenades as well. He was very well equipped. We carried the dead body out of the village and put him on a path where they could see him, but which didn’t put the community at risk (although they knew he had been there anyway). The other one wasn’t dead. He was alive in the trap. We didn’t know what to do with him because if we went up to the trap, he’d probably shoot us. In the end, we told him to give up his weapons. We threw a rope down into the pit, talking to him from some way away, telling him that if he sent his weapons up, we’d let him live but that if he refused, he’d die. The soldier must have been pretty miserable in that hole and he said yes, and tied his guns to the rope and we pulled them up. But who could be sure he didn’t have another gun? That was very worrying, but some of the community said: ‘Even if he has a gun, he can only kill one of us, not all of us.’ So we threw the soldier a rope and we all pulled. He came out and it was true he was unarmed. He’d given up all his weapons.
We did the same with this soldier as we’d done with the one in the village. Here they asked him as well: ‘How could a soldier be like that?’ The compañeras who were pregnant told him they were carrying a soldier’s child but that they couldn’t give birth to a child with blood like a soldier’s blood. For an Indian it was like a monster, something unbearable. The soldier began to cry and said: ‘It’s not my fault. They give me orders. They forced us to come here and if we don’t obey, they kill us.’ He said: ‘We take orders from a captain, and we do what this captain says. If I go into the army, I’m an enemy of the people anyway, and if I lay down my arms, I’m the army’s enemy. If one side doesn’t kill me, the other will. I don’t know what to do.’ So we told him that if it was difficult for him, from now on he should hide or find something else to do, but that he must stop being evil, like the army. And he told us a lot about how they tortured in the barracks. He said: ‘From the first day I arrived in the barracks, they told me that my parents were stupid,’–he was an Indian too–‘that they were stupid because they couldn’t speak and that they’d teach me how people should speak. So they started teaching me Spanish. They gave me a pair of shoes which I found very hard to wear but they beat me into wearing them anyway. They hit me until I got used to them. Then they told me I had to kill the communists from Cuba and Russia. I had to kill them all and then they gave me a gun.’ But we asked him: ‘And who do you kill with this gun? Why are you hunting us? Do they say that if your father or mother are on the other side, you must use this gun to kill them too?’ ‘I use this gun the way they tell me to use it. I’m not to blame for all this, they just grabbed me in the town.’ He cried and we felt sorry for him, because we are all human.
By that time I understood the position very well. I knew it wasn’t the fault of the soldiers. The government force our people to be soldiers too. That soldier talked and told us everything they did. This time we were a bit more aware because, as I said, the first time we only begged the soldier to help us, we didn’t even ask him the things he did. Now the second time we got a lot of information from him about how they treat the soldiers in the army. ‘We have to obey the captain. The captain is always behind us and if we don’t obey, he shoots us.’ We asked him: ‘And why don’t you get together then if there’s only one captain.’ ‘Well, not all of us think the same,’ he said, ‘many have come to believe in what we’re doing.’ And we asked him: ‘And what are you defending? Where are these communists?’ The soldier didn’t even know what communists were. We asked him: ‘What do communists look like?’ And he said: ‘Well, they tell us they’re in the mountains, that they don’t look like people, and things like that.’ He had no idea of what he was doing. Then we said to him: ‘You are defending the rich. You are defending authority. You’re not defending your own people.’ ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘from now on I’m not going back. I promise you, I swear, I’m not going back to the barracks.’ And we said to him: ‘If you are a true son of your people, if you really remember the advice of our ancestors, you must go and make a life where you can, but stop being a criminal. Don’t go on killing.’ The soldier went away convinced. And we heard that he didn’t go back to the barracks but went and hid. Perhaps they’ve killed him now or he might be alive, but anyway that soldier didn’t go back to his camp.
That was my second experience of organizing work in my people’s struggle. My dream was to go on fighting and getting to know my people more closely. At the same time I was very concerned that everything handed down from our ancestors should still be practised. And even though the tortures and kidnappings had done our people a lot of harm, we shouldn’t lose faith in change. This is when I began working in a peasant organisation and went on to another stage of my life. These are other things, other ways.
XX
THE DEATH OF DOÑA PETRONA CHONA
‘Inhuman are their soldiers, cruel their fierce mastiffs.’
—Chilam Balam
There is something I didn’t say before when I spoke about the landowners in my area–the Garcías and the Martínez. I think I should say it now. I remember something I saw, now that I’m remembering things about other peop
le’s lives. In 1975, the Garcías had a market near where I lived and they tried to make all the Indians sell their maize and beans there so that they could buy it cheap, transport it to other places and sell it dear. They had a finca where I used to work a lot when I was a child since it was near our house. I used to pick coffee. It was mostly coffee there. There were banana trees to shade the coffee but the landowner didn’t let us pick the bananas because they were there for shade. The bananas rotted on their stalks while we were all hungry but couldn’t pick them.
I had a friend called Petrona Chona. She had two children, the little boy would be about two and the little girl about three. She had a husband. Petrona was very young and so was her husband. They both worked in the Garcías’ finca. Then one day the son of the landowner, his name was Carlos García, began courting my friend. I hate him in the very depth of my being. He asked her if she’d be his mistress. She was an Indian. She said, ‘How can I, I’m a married woman.’ He said that he loved her, that he really loved her, that he adored her and all that. Then he started threatening her. The landowner’s son came to the fields every day, and as he didn’t have anything else to do, he kept after her. One Friday she didn’t go to work because her little boy was ill and she had to stay at home. They lived in the finca. They paid rent and worked as peones but they weren’t paid. What they earned went for the rent of the land and the little house. She told me she was in despair because they had nothing to eat even though they worked all the time. One Friday she stayed at home and the landowner’s son came to her house. He’d been to the fields and hadn’t found her, so he went to the house, to her hut. And he began again asking her to be his mistress and to let him have his way with her. She was very worried about her little boy and kept saying no, and no. They argued for a long time but unfortunately we were all working a long way away. There were some peones near the house but they were working too. In the end she refused, and the landowner’s son went away. But what that murderer Carlos García did was to send his father’s bodyguard to kill the woman in her house. But he told the bodyguard not to shoot her but to hack her to death with a machete. Naturally the bodyguard did as he was told and went to the woman’s house and, catching her by surprise, hacked her up with his machete.
It was the first dead body I’d ever seen, and that’s why I was saying that I’ll have to talk about a lot more corpses, but this was the first one I’d ever touched. He hacked her to pieces and cut one of her baby’s fingers off because she was carrying her on her back. The other child came running out of the house in fright. He took the baby off her back, put her on one side and hacked her into twenty-five pieces, if I’m not mistaken. She lay there in pieces. I won’t forget it because my friend had talked to me earlier that morning and told me that they were leaving the finca. But they didn’t have time. The woman had shouted, but none of the workers went near because they saw that first the landowner’s son had been there and then the bodyguard arrived. Which of them was going to interfere? He’d only be killed himself or dismissed from his job. So the woman was left in pieces. That same Friday afternoon, I went to see her body lying on the ground. The parts of her body were all there on one side. I couldn’t believe it was Petrona lying there. There she stayed. No-one could bear to lift her up. Not even our community. A lot of people came. But since many different people worked there, from many different areas, no-one went near the young woman’s body. Then my father came. He cried when he saw her. He said: ‘Petrona was such a good person.’ No-one could believe it. We picked her little boy up and bandaged his finger so it wouldn’t bleed so much. But we didn’t know what to do. She stayed there all night. And all Saturday morning. Saturday night came and Sunday. No-one would pick her up. Then my father said: ‘Well, it’s up to us.’ She was already smelling very bad. The smell of her body carried a long way. My father said: ‘Yes, it’s up to us to move her. We must do it.’ There is a law in Guatemala that you can’t move a dead body until the authorities have been so we’d told the authorities immediately. They are in town and don’t come until they have time, so they wouldn’t get there until Monday. By Sunday the body was already covered with flies and everything. It’s a very hot place, so there was the smell and all that. My father said: ‘Well, it’s up to us to move the body even if they think that we have committed the crime.’ We collected Doña Petrona up in baskets and her blood was congealed on the ground. Her hands, her head, every bit of her, all cut off. We picked her up in baskets, we put her in a box and buried her on Sunday. Many people came afterwards, but a lot didn’t come at all because it was a crime and nobody wanted to get involved in case the authorities accused them as well. We knew the landowners were capable of anything.
The mayor arrived on Monday. It was the first time that I felt, well, I don’t know how to explain–like an invalid. I couldn’t do anything. Just before the mayor arrived, the landowner talked to him and they were laughing. We didn’t understand what they were saying. They didn’t ask us to tell them what had happened, when it had happened, or at what time. Nothing. The mayor arrived as if it was nothing at all, and calmly went away again. They put the bodyguard into prison for fifteen days, just to smooth things over, so our people would say nothing. After fifteen days, he went back to work. Every time I remember it I get the same feeling. The first time I picked up a dead body. All in pieces. For about six years afterwards perhaps, I dreamed about Doña Petrona. There wasn’t a single night I didn’t feel I’d dreamed about Doña Petrona. For a long time I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking about her.
XXI
FAREWELL TO THE COMMUNITY: RIGOBERTA DECIDES TO LEARN SPANISH
‘Our people will never be scattered. Our destiny will triumph over the ill-fated days which are coming at a time unknown. We will always be secure in the land we have occupied.’
—Popol Vuh
My father came out of prison in 1977. He used to come and visit us now and again but, as I was saying before, he could no longer walk along the paths or travel by bus. He had to go across the high mountains to reach our house because the army or the landowners would see to it he was killed. That same year he joined the CUC. It was just being formed. Actually, the CUC already existed as an underground organisation but it came out into the open in May 1978, when it was strong enough. My father was with many compañeros, with Emeterio Toj Medrano and others who’ve since been murdered, and some who are still alive. They began to think about the future of the CUC and what its objectives were. But the government wouldn’t recognize the CUC, so it had to be a spontaneous organisation and a clandestine one at the same time. Later on we joined it too, first as helpers and then as members.
So my father came home in 1978, and I went home too. That’s when we said goodbye. Those were the last moments our whole family spent together. It was the time when my father might never get home again. He was already a wanted man. Although he used to come furtively sometimes, it was getting too risky for him to continue. In addition, one of my brothers was in danger. That was my little brother, the one who was burned to death. He’d been a catechist since he was a child too and he’d become secretary to our community. I don’t mean secretary in the sense of a grand person who can read and write, but someone who put into practice the little he had learned. We arrived at the village. All our neighbours were overjoyed, because we hadn’t been back for such a long time. They said they were going to have a village fiesta and get out all the Maya instruments we kept in our villages. The tún, the sijolaj, the chirimía, the marimba. They had a fiesta. They invented a special fiesta because those weren’t times for ceremonies. Nor were they times for fiestas. They said it would be a fiesta for saying goodbye to us, because they thought the day would come when we wouldn’t see each other again. Many of them had already gone off to fight in the mountains. Some had come down and were present then. It was a great honour for the community.
The fiesta began. We were the guests. I remember we had it in the house which had for so long been used for our meetings.
We all sat in there. The Guatemalan Indian custom for a very important fiesta is to make atol and tamales, and it’s the only time we eat meat. The whole village contributed a pig. They killed the pig. We made food for everyone, and then, quite late, about seven or eight o’clock, the music began. In my village they always set off bombs that they make themselves out of gunpowder. I’d forgotten about those bombs. It’s a very old custom. It’s in a mortar–you put it in a mortar and light the fuse. The bomb shoots up and explodes with a loud bang. When we started practising self-defence, we sometimes used to use these bombs to throw at the army. We made a lot of bombs to set off that night. It was a real party, with dancing. When midnight came, a lot of people danced. That’s another custom in our community: that when a fiesta is rather special for us, we wait until midnight to celebrate. Midnight because, as our forefathers say, that’s when we say goodbye to the old day and the new day begins. It meant a lot to the community, that midnight celebration, and it gave us a moment at midnight to express a little of what we felt and thought about our community. The fiesta began, we ate until nearly midnight and around half past eleven we were given a chance to speak. My father spoke. He said he felt very happy to be leaving the community and going to other areas, because now in our community the children were mature and could look after themselves. Now he was needed to educate other children, in other places. ‘I may not return, so you must take care of yourselves,’ he said. That was his farewell. And my mother said, ‘I am here now, but I feel that I’m needed in other areas.’ Each one of us said our farewell to the community. They all cried and sometimes they laughed because they were happy but couldn’t express their joy. My father was very happy. He said that a man’s head wasn’t just for wearing a hat (we Indians all wear hats). It wasn’t only for a hat but was for thinking about what the community should do to try and change things, and for that change to bring about other changes in society at every level. We wanted change so that we could express our feelings and conduct our ceremonies again the way we used to, because at that time there was no possibility of doing so. My father spoke a lot and he said goodbye to us in front of the community because he was going to one area, I had to go to another, and my mother to another again. We would all be scattered, so that if I was caught I wouldn’t be able to tell where my parents were. It was very hard for us to think of our father and mother in one area and their children in another. But that was our reality and we had to accept it. So our father began to say goodbye. I remember him saying: ‘My children, from now on the people will be your father. The enemy will perhaps take our small lives, but we must try to protect them and defend them to the last. But if there is no other way, have faith and hope in your father the people, because the people will look after you as I do.’ My father often used to say: ‘I didn’t do enough for you because I had to nourish the INTA, because the INTA sapped all my strength, because the landowners were threatening us. I was not to blame. They were to blame. It is right to tell our people this, it is our small contribution.’ Then my father told us girls who weren’t married that we had absolute freedom to do as we wished, that we should be independent, and give everything we could to the struggle without anyone behind us ordering us about or forcing us to do anything. He said he gave us total freedom, but that he would like us to use that freedom for the good of the people, to teach the people what he had taught us. He said: ‘They can kill me, but they can’t destroy my children. And if they kill any of you, I will carry on until my last moments.’ It was a very sad farewell.
I, Rigoberta Menchu Page 20