On 9 September 1979 my brother was kidnapped. It was a Sunday, and he’d gone down to another village–he worked in other villages as well as his own. His name was Petrocinio Menchú Tum–Tum is my mother’s name. Well, my brother had a job to do. He was very fond of organizing work. So he went round organizing in various places, and the army discovered him and kidnapped him. After 9 September my mother and the rest of us began to worry. At that time–and I still thank God they didn’t kill all of us–my mother nonetheless went to the authorities to enquire after him. If they kill me because of my son, she said, let them kill me. I wasn’t there at the time; I was in Huehuetenango when my brother was captured. They say that the day he fell, my mother was at home and my other brothers were not far away. Mother went into the village to find out where her son was, but nobody could give her any news of his whereabouts. However, he had been betrayed by someone in the community. As I said before, there are people who’ll turn their hand to anything when you least expect it. Out of pure necessity, often they’ll sell their own brothers. This man from the community had been a compañero, a person who’d always collaborated and who had been in agreement with us. But, they offered him fifteen quetzals–that’s to say fifteen dollars–to turn my brother in, and so he did. The army didn’t know who he was. That day my brother was going to another village with a girl when they caught him. The girl and her mother followed along after him. From the first moment they tied his hands behind his back, they started to drive him along with kicks. My brother fell, he couldn’t protect his face. The first part of him to begin to bleed was his face. They took him over rough ground where there were stones, fallen tree trunks. He walked about two kilometres being kicked and hit all the time. Then they started to threaten the girl and her mother. They were risking their lives by following my brother and finding out where he was being taken. Apparently they said to them: ‘Do you want us to do the same to you, do you want us to rape you right here?’ That’s what this thug of a soldier said. And he told the señora that if they didn’t go away they’d be tortured just like he was going to be because he was a communist and a subversive, and subversives deserved to be punished and to die.
It’s an unbelievable story. We managed to find out how he died, what tortures they inflicted on him from start to finish. They took my brother away, bleeding from different places. When they’d done with him, he didn’t look like a person any more. His whole face was disfigured with beating, from striking against the stones, the tree trunks; my brother was completely destroyed. His clothes were torn from his falling down. After that they let the women go. When he got to the camp, he was scarcely on his feet, he couldn’t walk any more. And his face, he couldn’t see any more, they’d even forced stones into his eyes, my brother’s eyes. Once he arrived in the camp they inflicted terrible tortures on him to make him tell where the guerrilla fighters were and where his family was. What was he doing with the Bible, they wanted to know, why were the priests guerrillas? Straight away they talked of the Bible as if it were a subversive tract, they accused priests and nuns of being guerrillas. They asked him what relationship the priests had with the guerrillas, what relationship the whole community had with the guerrillas. So they inflicted those dreadful tortures on him. Day and night they subjected him to terrible, terrible pain. They tied him up, they tied his testicles, my brother’s sexual organs, they tied them behind with string and forced him to run. Well, he couldn’t stand that, my little brother, he couldn’t bear that awful pain and he cried out, he asked for mercy. And they left him in a well, I don’t know what it’s called, a hole with water and a bit of mud in it, they left him naked there all night. There were a lot of corpses there in the hole with him and he couldn’t stand the smell of all those corpses. There were other people there who’d been tortured. He recognized several catechists there who’d been kidnapped from other villages and were suffering as badly as he was. My brother was tortured for more than sixteen days. They cut off his fingernails, they cut off his fingers, they cut off his skin, they burned parts of his skin. Many of the wounds, the first ones, swelled and were infected. He stayed alive. They shaved his head, left just the skin, and also they cut the skin off his head and pulled it down on either side and cut off the fleshy part of his face. My brother suffered tortures on every part of his body, but they took care not to damage the arteries or veins so that he would survive the tortures and not die. They gave him food so that he’d hold out and not die from his wounds. There were twenty men with him who had been tortured or were still undergoing torture. There was also a woman. They had raped her and then tortured her.
As soon as she heard, my mother got in touch with me and I came home. My brother had been missing for three days when I got home. Most of all it was a matter of comforting my mother, because we knew that our enemies were criminals and, well, we wouldn’t be able to do anything. If we went to claim him, they’d kidnap us at once. Mother did go, the first days, but they threatened her and said that if she came again she’d get the same treatment as her son was getting. And they told her straight out that her son was being tortured, so not to worry.
Then, on 23 September, we heard that the military were putting out bulletins around the villages. They didn’t come to my village because they knew the people were prepared, ready for them at a moment’s notice. In other villages, where we also had compañeros, they handed out bulletins and propaganda announcing punishment for the guerrillas. Saying they had such and such a number of guerrillas in their power and that they were going to carry out punishment in such and such a place. Well, when we got this news–it must have been about eleven in the morning, I remember, on the 23rd–my mother said: ‘My son will be among those who are punished.’ It was going to be done in public, that is, they were calling the people out to witness the punishment. Not only that, a bulletin said (we’d managed to get hold of a copy) that any who didn’t go to witness the punishment were themselves accomplices of the guerrillas. That was how they threatened the people. So my mother said: ‘Come along then, if they’re calling out everyone, we’ll have to go.’ My father also came home at once, saying it was an opportunity we couldn’t miss, we must go and see. We were in a frenzy. My brothers arrived. We were all together at home, my brothers, my little sisters, Mother, Father and me. We were preparing the midday meal when we heard the news and we didn’t even finish preparing it or remember to take a bit of food to eat on the way. We just went.
We had to cross a long mountain ridge to get to another village–Chajul, where the punishment took place. Mother said: ‘We’ve got to be there tomorrow!’ We knew it was a long way off. So we set out at eleven in the morning on the 23rd for Chajul. We crossed long stretches of mountain country on foot. We walked through some of the night, with pine torches, in the mountains. About eight o’clock the next morning we were entering the village of Chajul. The soldiers had the little village surrounded. There were about five hundred of them. They’d made all the people come out of their houses, with threats that if they didn’t go to watch the punishment they’d suffer the same punishment, the same tortures. They stopped us on the road, but they didn’t know we were relatives of one of the tortured. They asked us where we were going. My father said: ‘To visit the saint at Chajul.’ There’s a saint there that many people visit. The soldier said: ‘No chance of that, get going, go over there. And if you get there, you’ll see that no-one leaves this village.’ We said, ‘All right.’ About twenty soldiers, it must have been, stopped us at different points before we reached the village. They all threatened us the same way. They were waiting for the men whom they hadn’t found when they emptied the houses, in case they’d gone to work, to make them come back to the village to see the punishments.
When we reached the village there were many people who’d been there since early morning: children, women, men. Minutes later, the army was surrounding the people who were there to watch. There were machines, armoured cars, jeeps, all kinds of weapons. Helicopters started to fly over
the village so that the guerrilla fighters wouldn’t come. That’s what they were afraid of. The officer opened the meeting. I remember he started by saying that a group of guerrillas they’d caught were about to arrive and that they were going to suffer a little punishment. A little punishment, because there were greater punishments, he said, but you’ll see the punishment they get. And that’s for being communists! For being Cubans, for being subversives! And if you get mixed up with communists and subversives, you’ll get the same treatment as these subversives you’ll be seeing in a little while. My mother was just about a hundred per cent certain her son would be amongst those being brought in. I was still not sure, though, because I knew my brother wasn’t a criminal and didn’t deserve such punishments.
Well, a few minutes later three army lorries came into the village. One went a little ahead, the middle one carried the tortured people and the third one brought up the rear. They guarded them very closely, even with armoured cars. The lorry with the tortured came in. They started to take them out one by one. They were all wearing army uniforms. But their faces were monstrously disfigured, unrecognizable. My mother went closer to the lorry to see if she could recognize her son. Each of the tortured had different wounds on the face. I mean, their faces all looked different. But my mother recognized her son, my little brother, among them. They put them in a line. Some of them were, very nearly, half-dead, or they were nearly in their last agony, and others, you could see that they were; you could see that very well indeed. My brother was very badly tortured, he could hardly stand up. All the tortured had no nails and they had cut off part of the soles of their feet. They were barefoot. They forced them to walk and put them in a line. They fell down at once. They picked them up again. There was a squadron of soldiers there ready to do exactly what the officer ordered. And the officer carried on with his rigmarole, saying that we had to be satisfied with our lands, we had to be satisfied with eating bread and chile, but we mustn’t let ourselves be led astray by communist ideas. Saying that all the people had access to everything, that they were content. If I remember aright, he must have repeated the word ‘communist’ a hundred times. He started off with the Soviet Union, Cuba, Nicaragua; he said that the same communists from the Soviet Union had moved on to Cuba and then Nicaragua and that now they were in Guatemala. And that those Cubans would die a death like that of these tortured people. Every time he paused in his speech, they forced the tortured up with kicks and blows from their weapons.
No-one could leave the meeting. Everyone was weeping. I…I don’t know, every time I tell this story, I can’t hold back my tears, for me it’s a reality I can’t forget, even though it’s not easy to tell of it. My mother was weeping; she was looking at her son. My brother scarcely recognized us. Or perhaps…My mother said he did, that he could still smile at her, but I, well, I didn’t see that. They were monstrous. They were all fat, fat, fat. They were all swollen up, all wounded. When I drew closer to them, I saw that their clothes were damp. Damp from the moisture oozing out of their bodies. Somewhere around half-way through the speech, it would be about an hour and a half, two hours on, the captain made the squad of soldiers take the clothes off the tortured people, saying that it was so that everyone could see for themselves what their punishment had been and realize that if we got mixed up in communism, in terrorism, we’d be punished the same way. Threatening the people like that, they wanted to force us to do just as they said. They couldn’t simply take the clothes off the tortured men, so the soldiers brought scissors and cut the clothes apart from the feet up and took the clothes off the tortured bodies. They all had the marks of different tortures. The captain devoted himself to explaining each of the different tortures. This is perforation with needles, he’d say, this is a wire burn. He went on like that explaining each torture and describing each tortured man. There were three people who looked like bladders. I mean, they were inflated, although they had no wounds on their bodies. But they were inflated, inflated. And the officer said, that’s from something we put in them that hurts them. The important thing is that they should know that it hurts and that the people should know it’s no easy thing to have that done to your body.
In my brother’s case, he was cut in various places. His head was shaved and slashed. He had no nails. He had no soles to his feet. The earlier wounds were suppurating from infection. And the woman compañera, of course I recognized her; she was from a village near ours. They had shaved her private parts. The nipple of one of her breasts was missing and her other breast was cut off. She had the marks of bites on different parts of her body. She was bitten all over, that compañera. She had no ears. All of them were missing part of the tongue or had had their tongues split apart. I found it impossible to concentrate, seeing that this could be. You could only think that these were human beings and what pain those bodies had felt to arrive at that unrecognizable state. All the people were crying, even the children. I was watching the children. They were crying and terrified, clinging to their mothers. We didn’t know what to do. During his speech, the captain kept saying his government was democratic and gave us everything. What more could we want? He said that the subversives brought foreign ideas, exotic ideas that would only lead us to torture, and he’d point to the bodies of the men. If we listened to these exotic slogans, he said, we’d die like them. He said they had all kinds of weapons that we could choose to be killed with. The captain gave a panoramic description of all the power they had, the capacity they had. We, the people, didn’t have the capacity to confront them. This was really all being said to strike terror into the people and stop anyone from speaking. My mother wept. She almost risked her own life by going to embrace my brother. My other brothers and my father held her back so she wouldn’t endanger herself. My father was incredible; I watched him and he didn’t shed a tear, but he was full of rage. And that was a rage we all felt. But all the rest of us began to weep, like everyone else. We couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe that had happened to my little brother. What had he done to deserve that? He was just an innocent child and that had happened to him.
After he’d finished talking the officer ordered the squad to take away those who’d been ‘punished’, naked and swollen as they were. They dragged them along, they could no longer walk. Dragged them along to this place, where they lined them up all together within sight of everyone. The officer called to the worst of his criminals–the Kaibiles, who wear different clothes from other soldiers. They’re the ones with the most training, the most power. Well, he called the Kaibiles and they poured petrol over each of the tortured. The captain said, ‘This isn’t the last of their punishments, there’s another one yet. This is what we’ve done with all the subversives we catch, because they have to die by violence. And if this doesn’t teach you a lesson, this is what’ll happen to you too. The problem is that the Indians let themselves be led by the communists. Since no-one’s told the Indians anything, they go along with the communists.’ He was trying to convince the people but at the same time he was insulting them by what he said. Anyway, they lined up the tortured and poured petrol on them; and then the soldiers set fire to each one of them. Many of them begged for mercy. They looked half dead when they were lined up there, but when the bodies began to burn they began to plead for mercy. Some of them screamed, many of them leapt but uttered no sound–of course, that was because their breathing was cut off. But–and to me this was incredible–many of the people had weapons with them, the ones who’d been on their way to work had machetes, others had nothing in their hands, but when they saw the army setting fire to the victims, everyone wanted to strike back, to risk their lives doing it, despite all the soldiers’ arms…. Faced with its own cowardice, the army itself realized that the whole people were prepared to fight. You could see that even the children were enraged, but they didn’t know how to express their rage.
Well, the officer quickly gave the order for the squad to withdraw. They all fell back holding their weapons up and shouting slogans as if it w
ere a celebration. They were happy! They roared with laughter and cried, ‘Long live the fatherland! Long live Guatemala! Long live our president! Long live the army, long live Lucas!’ The people raised their weapons and rushed at the army, but they drew back at once, because there was the risk of a massacre. The army had all kinds of arms, even planes flying overhead. Anyway, if there’d been a confrontation with the army, the people would have been massacred. But nobody thought about death. I didn’t think that I might die, I just wanted to do something, even kill a soldier. At that moment I wanted to show my aggression. Many people hurried off for water to put out the fires, but no-one fetched it in time. It needed lots of people to carry the water–the water supply is in one particular place and everyone goes there for it–but it was a long way off and nothing could be done. The bodies were twitching about. Although the fire had gone out, the bodies kept twitching. It was a frightful thing for me to accept that. You know, it wasn’t just my brother’s life. It was many lives, and you don’t think that the grief is just for yourself but for all the relatives of the others: God knows if they found relatives of theirs there or not! Anyway, they were Indians, our brothers. And what you think is that Indians are already being killed off by malnutrition, and when our parents can hardly give us enough to live on, and make such sacrifices so that we can grow up, then they burn us alive like that. Savagely. I said, this is impossible, and that was precisely the moment for me, personally, when I finally felt firmly convinced that if it’s a sin to kill a human being, how can what the regime does to us not be a sin?
I, Rigoberta Menchu Page 23