Of course, it was the start of a new commitment too, it was to commit ourselves more deeply to our work. The ceremony ended with many tears from our community, our neighbours, our uncles and aunts, and our cousins. It was also a farewell to many of the community because many elders, many of the men, had to go up into the mountains. They couldn’t live in the village because their lives had been threatened, and the village considered them important people who could contribute to the change. Even if they are not there when victory comes, through their example many others will be. So we had to say goodbye to many people that night. It wasn’t only us. The next day my father left for El Quiché and I stayed at home for another week. I remember it was the last time my brothers and sisters and I were together. Eight days later I left for another area on a specific task for the CUC. My job was to organize people. I had to learn Spanish and to read and write. At the farewell fiesta I decided to do many things and, in fact, I began to get them under way.
XXII
THE CUC COMES OUT INTO THE OPEN
‘They’ve always said, “Poor Indians, they can’t speak,” so many speak for them. That’s why I decided to learn Spanish.’
—Rigoberta Menchú
When General Kjell came to power, he set the agrarian reform in motion. But first he set his electoral campaign in motion. The landowners on the south coast forced many of the peasants to vote for Kjell. The overseers made them. They said anyone who didn’t vote would be thrown out of work. It was the same as it had always been, but before I didn’t understand. Kjell campaigned in the provinces and the municipalities, and I remember him coming to Uspantán at that time. It was a Sunday and we were in the town. Kjell talked a lot about giving us bread and sharing out the land. They have to say bread, they can’t even say tortilla. Most of them don’t know what Indians eat. We eat maize and vegetables, our food is the tortilla. But they, when they come to the countryside, they offer us more than tortillas, they offer us bread. Yes, they were going to give us bread, health services, schools, roads and a whole load of things they told us about then. And land. They told us: ‘The land is yours.’ That is, from then on, we would own the land. That was in 1974. And so, many people voted at that time. I didn’t vote because I was still a minor but my parents, my brothers and sisters, even my mother, voted, believing that it was true, that this would solve our problem.
After Kjell took power, he began to divide the land into small plots. What happened was that the struggle had previously been between the finca owners and the communities. I already told the story of how they took our land away. But when Kjell came to power, he solved that problem by dividing our lands into small plots and saying we were the owners. Oh yes, that man was more intelligent than the previous ones. He gave each neighbour a plot. We all had our own plots. Our plots measured one manzana.
Soon enough he started getting money in other ways. That’s when they set up the INAFOR (Instituto Nacional de Forestación de Guatemala: Guatemalan Forestry Commission), an institution looking after trees and forests in Guatemala. What were we going to do then? I remember that my father and all of us were very worried. We couldn’t cut down trees because we each had our own plot and no-one could go outside his plot. We had to apply to a judge for permission to buy so many trees through a letter to the INAFOR. Each tree cost five quetzals. And we used practically to eat wood–we have no stoves, no gas, nothing. Many of the peasants cut trees down and the INAFOR arrived and took them prisoner because they’d killed a tree. That was when our big problems with the land division started in the Altiplano. But there were also big problems in the fincas when Kjell came to power, as we shall see. In the Altiplano, especially in the region of El Quiché where the CUC was born, most of the peasants began to unite and protest against the INAFOR and the agrarian reform because it tried to divide us. We survive because of our communities. Even though the government or the foreigners, whoever it is, divides our land up to keep us separate, the community knows that it must live in a communal way. So what we did in our village was to set aside an area to grow our maize and an area for our animals, even though the agrarian reform had allocated us our own plots. We decided to put them all together in spite of the sub-divisions–the ones they imposed on us.
Many peasants started protesting about this, and about the bad conditions in the fincas as well. Labourers were brutally treated in those days, and once people had begun protesting about the agrarian reform, they also found reasons to protest about other things. They had the law. And we were so humble. But the answer they gave us, well, it wasn’t very humble. We wrote documents and sent letters signed by the whole community to the INAFOR begging them, apologetically, to let us cut down trees to be able to eat. The INAFOR said ‘no’. We had to pay for them. What made us really angry was that in my village we had two large trees and when we asked the INAFOR for permission to cut one down, they made us beg for permission, and still pay for it. But when big businessmen come to cut, I don’t know, huge quantities of wood to sell, to export, of course they were free to cut five hundred, six hundred trees. This made our people even more conscious of their situation. We collected signatures to send a protest to the president of the republic and ask him not to leave us without wood. There was no reply. We protested against our little plots; we wanted to grow crops on our own land but not have it divided up. We had no reply to that either. That’s when the peasants, most of us, went down to the coast. The majority of people from the Altiplano had to go to the coast because there we earned a little money. We couldn’t use the wood and we had nothing to sow. Many, many people went down to the coast.
When nearly all the people from the Altiplano had gone to the coast, there were unemployment and sackings there because the finca owners could impose whatever conditions they fancied. Since there were so many people looking for work, the landowners had no problem getting rid of two hundred, three hundred peasants at the same time. Others were waiting to do the work. Then they began to mistreat the peasants as far as food was concerned. They fed them when they wanted to, and when they didn’t want to, they didn’t. Ill treatment in the fincas was more open and widespread now. That’s how the CUC began to form as such. It organized the peasants both in the Altiplano and on the coast. It wasn’t a formal organization with a name and all that: more like groups of communities, at the grass roots, that sort of thing. The time came when the CUC asked for legal status; it asked the president to recognize it as a union which defended peasants’ rights. But the government did not reply–it did not accept the CUC’s representativity as an institution defending peasants’ rights. Nevertheless, the CUC went on with its work. It said, well, if they don’t recognize our organisation legally, it’s they who make us illegal. And the CUC worked clandestinely. The repression of its leaders began, especially in El Quiché. They started picking up the CUC’s organizers.
Kjell left the presidency in 1978 and Lucas García took over. Lucas, well, he did the same thing. He came to the villages in the different regions and offered us everything. He offered us roads, schools, teachers, doctors, etc., just as Kjell had. But the people didn’t believe him at all. Because they’d received nothing. We said: ‘They come with more lies, they’re still liars.’ And no-one wanted to vote. But behind the promises were threats; they said that if we didn’t vote, our villages would be repressed. The people were forced to vote. All the same, most people spoilt their votes; that is, they put in blank votes or voted for everyone. The votes were void. So Lucas came to power.
But before that, under Kjell, there was a massacre of one hundred and six peasants in Panzós, an area of Cobán. It was the 29th of May, 1978. Panzós is a town where they discovered oil and began throwing peasants off their land. But since the peasants didn’t know where to go, they all came down in an organized fashion with their leaders. They were Kekchi Indians and the army massacred them as if they were killing birds–men, women and children died. Blood ran in the main square in Panzós. We felt this was a direct attack on us. It w
as as if they’d murdered us, as if we were being tortured when they killed those people. It all came out in the newspapers. But nobody paid much attention, they were more interested in the government which had just come to power. So the story died. Nobody was interested in the death of all those peasants. The CUC condemned this act, and that’s when it was recognized under the name of Comité Unidad Campesina, as an organization defending peasants’ rights. Our objectives were: a fair wage from the landowners; respect for our communities; the decent treatment we deserve as people, not animals; respect for our religion, our customs and our culture. Many villages in El Quiché were unable to perform their ceremonies because they were persecuted or because they were called subversives and communists. The CUC championed these rights. It came out into the open. Then the repression against it began. We held a huge demonstration to herald the CUC with the participation of Indian men, women and children, although the CUC also recognizes that it is not only Indians who are exploited in Guatemala but our poor ladino compañeros as well. The CUC defends all peasants, Indians and ladinos. And within the framework of the organization, we began having contacts between ladinos and Indians.
So the CUC comes into the open; it calls strikes, demonstrations and demands for a fair wage. We obtained a wage of three-twenty quetzals. That was the bare minimum, really. For a family which has to feed nine or ten children three-twenty is not a fair wage. The finca owners said yes. They signed an agreement to pay a minimum wage of three-twenty quetzals. They agreed. It was a victory for us obtaining three-twenty but, in practice, the landowners didn’t pay that. They kept on paying their peones the same: one-twenty quetzal. What the landowners actually did was to supervise the work more closely, raise the work quotas and, at the same time, charge for every tiny error the peasants make. Now we couldn’t let even the tiniest fly alight on a leaf, or walk on it, because we’d have to pay for the plant. This was very hard for the peasants. We kept up our demands but we didn’t know how to act. It was a bitter blow when our first compañeros fell. But we carried on working.
It was in 1978, when Lucas García came to power with such a lust for killing, that the repression really began in El Quiché. It was like a piece of rag in his hands. He set up military bases in many of the villages and there were rapes, tortures, kidnappings. And massacres. The villages of Chajul, Cotzal and Nebaj suffered massacres as the repression fell on them again. It fell above all on the Indian population. Every day new clandestine cemeteries, as they call them, would appear in different parts of the country. That is, they’d kidnap people from a village, torture them, and then some thirty bodies would appear in one place. On a hillside for example. Then they’d tell the people to go and get their relatives there. But they didn’t dare look for the bodies because they knew they’ll be taken away too. So the bodies just stayed there. Then what they did was dig a pit for the bodies and put them all in: so it was a secret cemetery. About this time, the peasants joined up with the industrial workers and the unions. There was a miners’ strike in Ixtahuacán in 1977. It was a workers’ strike and agricultural labourers and industrial workers were all mixed up on the march. The last strike we had was a big one, very big. It was the strike of seventy thousand peasants organized by the CUC on the south coast.
When I joined the CUC in 1979, I was given various tasks to do and I became one of the organization’s leaders. I travelled to different areas and slept in the houses of different compañeros, and what I found most distressing was that we couldn’t understand each other. They couldn’t speak Spanish and I couldn’t speak their language. I felt so helpless. I’d ask myself how was this possible? It’s a division which they have kept up precisely so that we Indians cannot unite, or discuss our problems. And how effective a barrier it has been! But I understood why now. I began learning Mam, I began learning Cakchiquel and Tzutuhil. I decided to learn these three languages as well as Spanish. I didn’t speak very well. Oh, I made so many mistakes! And of course I couldn’t read or write, so learning Spanish meant listening and memorizing, like a cassette. The same with the other languages; I couldn’t write them either. So for a while I got everything mixed up. Learning to read and write, learning Spanish and three other languages–and my own as well–was all very confusing. I began to wonder whether it wasn’t better to learn first one and then another. Since Spanish was a language which united us, why learn all the twenty-two languages in Gautemala? It wasn’t possible, and anyway this wasn’t the moment to do it.
It was at this period that I was travelling all over the place. I also went down to the coast. I had some political work to do, organizing the people there, and at the same time getting them to understand me by telling them about my past, what had happened to me in my life, the reasons for the pain we suffer, and the causes of poverty. When you know there is work to do and you are responsible, you try and do it as well as you can because you have suffered so much and you don’t want your people to go on suffering. I knew all the contacts, and I had many jobs to do; carrying papers, machines, leaflets, texts for teaching people. I remember that the texts for learning Spanish and learning to read and write were full of drawings, figures and designs. That is, it wasn’t only writing because writing didn’t mean much to me and I didn’t understand what it said. At the same time, I was going to a convent where the nuns taught me to read and write. They also taught me Spanish. As I was saying before, not all priests are people who can’t see the reality and suffering of the people. Many of them love the people and, through this love for the people, they love each one of us and help us show our people the way. I have many good memories of many nuns who have helped me. They took me by the hand like a child who, well, who needed to learn many things. And I was anxious to do my best, to learn a lot. Because I believe my life has taught me many things but human beings are also made to learn many more. I learned Spanish out of necessity.
XXIII
POLITICAL ACTIVITY IN OTHER COMMUNITIES. CONTACTS WITH LADINOS
‘We have revealed our secrets to those who are worthy. Only they should know the art of writing and no-one else.’
—Popol Vuh
We went on organizing our people in 1979. I remember that I hadn’t heard anything of my parents since the farewell in the community. I didn’t know where they were. They had no news of me either. We didn’t see them for a long time. I went to the fincas, I went to other areas, but I couldn’t go back to my village because I was a fugitive like my parents. We lived with other people, with compañeros from other Indian groups, and with the many friends I made in the organization. It was almost as if I were living with my brothers and sisters, with my parents. Everyone showed me so much affection. So we organized the majority of workers on the south coast, in the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations. And they agreed to carry on the political work when they returned to the Altiplano so that everybody would be organized. Most of the workers were Indians and poor ladinos, and we didn’t need to hold courses explaining the situation since it was all around us. Our work went very well. And soon there just wasn’t enough time for everything; we had to rush from one place to another, carrying documents, carrying everything. The reason for this was so that others wouldn’t put themselves at risk; we were already in danger, the enemy knew us. I travelled from region to region, sleeping in different houses.
All this gave me a lot to think about, a lot, because I came across the linguistic barriers over and over again. We couldn’t understand each other and I wanted so much to talk to everybody and feel close to many of the women as I was to my mother. But I couldn’t talk to them because they didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. So I said: ‘We can’t possibly go on like this. We must work to help people understand their own people, and be able to talk to one another.’ From then on I concentrated on getting to know my compañeros closely and teaching them the little I knew, so that they too could become leaders of their communities. I remember we talked of many things: of our role as women, our role as young people. We a
ll came to the conclusion that we hadn’t had a childhood, nor had we ever really been young because, as we were growing up we’d had the responsibility of feeding little brothers and sisters–it was like having a lot of children ourselves. I sometimes stayed with other Indians in their houses.
I, Rigoberta Menchu Page 21