by W. E. Gutman
“Sit in the shade, rest.” A cooling breeze wafts through the foliage. I shut my eyes briefly. I reopen them. Bending over me, a young boy -- one of many lookouts posted strategically along the way -- hands me a grimy tin cup filled with water of very dubious origin. I cringe.
“Don’t worry. It’s well water.”
It’s the cup I worry about but I drink anyway.
*
Waist-high in a field of yellow and blue flowers, we proceed under a merciless sun. On either side, as far as the eye can see, green meadows and fertile pastures stretch from ravine to towering escarpment. But the meadows are fallow and not a single beast can be seen grazing the rich grasslands. Suddenly, several bursts of gunfire shatter the silence and reverberate from peak to peak. Glancing at each other knowingly, Adám and Paulino quicken their pace. I try to keep up.
*
In the one-room adobe schoolhouse, an elder learns the ABC. He strains against the darkness and the dancing shadows as shafts of light dart through an opening cut into the mud wall. The heat and the humidity are oppressive.
My eyes adjust to the dim light and I spot Don Crescencio. He must have wings, I muse. There are a dozen men and women, all sitting stone-faced on crude wooden benches, their arms folded upon rough-hewn school desks that have seen better days. Don Crescencio rises and introduces me. Everyone looks at me with a mixture of lethargy and circumspection. Mesmerized, several children, barefoot and forever wiping the amber slime that oozes from their noses, peer through the doorway at the bizarre gathering.
Don Modesto García Oaxaca, the El Carisalon tribal chief, speaks first. He tells of his people’s wretched “vida de subsistencia,” of periodic famine, of disease, of broken government pledges to protect against police brutality, to silence threats by landowners, to counter the demented claims of title to wells and acreage by Guatemalan ranchers, to defend against intimidation by the dreaded Cobra Commandos.
Tribal counselor Juan Manuel Mansia agrees. “We’re in a no-win situation. Japan donates a million dollars to help us. The money evaporates in a bureaucratic maze and none of us ever sees a centavo. We ask for an audit but all we get from the government is double-talk and more empty promises. Meanwhile, the cattle people are out to rob us of our lands -- at the point of a gun if need be.”
José Alberto Martínez, another counselor adds: “A sinister argument being advanced to justify the expropriation of our lands is that we -- the Maya -- are Guatemalan and therefore not entitled to our lands. History and legal documents prove otherwise. Yes, Copán was founded by Maya from the north but our families have lived here in Honduras for generations. Yet, most of our lands are occupied by Ladino cattle ranchers, tobacco and corn farmers, and coffee growers.”
Dario Fo, the Italian satirist, calls expropriation “a euphemism for thievery.” I quote Fo but no one laughs. In lean times, the obvious is a superfluity. The others speak out.
“Look at us.”
I too sit on a hard wood bench, further traumatizing a sore rear-end, but I look, transfixed, at the unadorned face of poverty -- abject, all-encompassing. I look at frail men and women in tatters, disquiet and despondency adding age to their years. Everyone is coughing. Coughs give way to uncontrollable spasms. Spasms yield thick secretions that are unceremoniously regurgitated on the schoolroom’s dirt floor. Could it be tuberculosis?
*
A visiting professor from the National Teaching University reads from the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, a document outlining the inalienable rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. Ratified by Honduras in 1994, the compact states that native people are entitled to possess lands they have lived on and, if insufficient for their needs, to acquire new ones. As with other covenants entered into by Honduras, ratification is a perfunctory formality devoid of guarantees.
“What rights?” exclaims the old man who is learning to read. “So long as we depend on the government, the only right we have is to be poor, ignored, marginalized, lied to, harassed and killed.”
The truths Don Crescencio had asked me to convey scream at me: alienation, insecurity, fear, bitterness. Four hundred people live in El Carisalon; one hundred and fifty are children, naked, wallowing in mire or hanging at the breasts of pregnant mothers. Disease, despondency and humiliation fester in a setting of idyllic beauty, all suffered with equal doses of numbing apathy and resentment, endured with God’s help and, when God is not looking, with the shaman’s incantations and the otherworldly exhalations of burning copal, the ceremonial aromatic resin used as incense by the Maya and said to please their gods.
*
Photographing the women and children becomes a science, a marriage between patience, opportunity and luck.
“The women are timid, the children wary,” I remark.
“They are,” says Don Crescencio. “Too many stories about abductions by gringos.”
“But these stories are false.”
“I know. But the others believe.”
“Why don’t you tell them the truth?”
“It’s better this way. It keeps the community on its toes.”
Taking photos is also an intrusion, a breach of privacy -- a threat. Photos rob people of their soul. Thus purloined, the soul wanders aimlessly after death, forever lost in a two-dimensional abyss from which no one can escape.
*
“Chronic bronchitis, dengue fever, diarrhea, dysentery.” Don Crescencio enumerates the scourges as we begin our slow descent toward the well. “Cholera is never very far. We need more potable water. We need latrines, health centers, nurses. There’s no money for doctors and, when there is, we can’t afford to buy medicines. We need to educate the adults. The beautiful land you see around is mostly fallow. There’s no money for seeds. Tools are scarce. We’re afraid to work the fields. We’re shot at almost every day from the higher elevations. We’re exposed, vulnerable. You will tell the word, won’t you? And you will tell those who want to help us to keep away from government agencies, go-betweens, negotiators. We yearn for self-empowerment, not charity. International aid makes for great headlines but it leaves the legitimate recipients holding an empty bag. Help the people at the bottom. One by one. Hamlet by hamlet. Directly. The shortest distance between two points,” Don Crescencio reminds me, “is a straight line. Any other path is the Devil’s geometry.”
*
It is the fate of Mayan ghosts to roam among the living, unseen and aloof but not unfelt. If you know how to listen, you can hear their ageless lament. Wafting on the wings of a sudden gust, their whispers echo through the giant old trees, causing leaves to shiver, grackles to shriek and take flight, heads to turn and eyes to wander as if roused by some strange and irresistible call. Soon the breezes subside. The rustling ceases and a deafening stillness descends. It’s been twelve centuries since the last sacrificial victim was decapitated on a temple terrace and its headless body hurled onto the plaza grounds below. An air of deep melancholy now hangs like a shroud over the ancient valley.
Before me, relived in cryptic iconography and faded hieroglyphics is the colossal spectacle of genius exhausted, splendor humbled, enlightenment dimmed by a headlong rush toward cultural extinction. Conflict, ferocious blood-letting rituals, an obsession with death, overpopulation, deforestation, hunger, disease -- all conspired to bring to a close an epoch of fabled artistic expression and agonizing self-inquiry. The meteoric magnificence of the Maya is chronicled in the lichen-covered tabernacles, in the austerity of age-worn temples and ball-courts, in the enigmatic stares of petrified kings and demi-gods. The calamity that befell this city-state is witnessed in the bleak anonymity of unfinished stele and abandoned stonework that lay scattered on the forest floor. Spectral vestiges of a powerful dynasty that began with Yax K’uk Mo in the fifth century C. E. and ended in flight and dispersal four hundred years later, they may also be seen as a metaphor to the passion and the agony of a dispirited and leaderless posterity -- the modern-day Maya.
How mu
ch do these time travelers have in common with their fabled forefathers and what sort of future awaits them?
*
Flashes of anxiety and circumspection dance in Ernesto Súchite’s steely eyes. Nervous energy animates his stride. Diminutive, almost frail, endowed with sharp Maya features, he speaks softly, with a passion born of misery endured, hopes dashed but not surrendered. A respected tribal counselor, he has taken on a desperate and costly mission: to give slain Cándido Amador’s work legitimacy and continuity by helping buoy the ethnic identity and destiny of his people.
Every Sunday Súchite, fellow advisors and dozens of men and women from outlying communities, converge on Rincón Del Buey, outside Copán, to discuss perennial concerns: health care, sanitation, education, irrigation, political representation. The small, austere structure where they assemble was built with Japanese funds. Benches, wobbly chairs and tables were also donated. In one corner of the room, stacked from floor to ceiling, are unopened sacks of colza and yellow corn, cooking oil from the European Union, huge bags of refined U.S. rice and flour, and crates of canned Norwegian mackerel in tomato sauce.
I ask one of the men about the mackerel. He wrinkles his nose, shrugs his shoulders and bares a toothless smile. Charity has its incongruous side. Marshmallows were once delivered to famine-ravaged Biafra.
The Maya are having a tough time preserving their culture, upholding their rights. Linked by a common ancestry and memories of a shared historical past, they derive dignity from their roots but they have drawn no strength from them. Powerless against acculturation, ill-equipped to take part in let alone survive the caustic crucible of Honduran politics, they feel cast out.
“Ours is a rudderless vessel on a stormy sea,” says Súchite. “incapable of charting its own course; denied safe passage on a route accorded indigenous people by international statutes. The government disregards repeated appeals for compliance on non-negotiable issues such as land, water rights, education and health. Pleas for protection from expropriations, threats, intimidation and increasing violence, including assassination, fall on deaf ears. And when we mention culture, identity and tradition we’re denounced as anarchists. We have two choices: sit still, wither and perish, or drift toward assimilation.”
*
More than anything, it’s the absence of a source of ethical authority -- other than the loose tribalism that still binds them as a people -- that has led the Maya to feel abandoned. One might have expected them to find such guiding light in religion or at the hands of an honest and enlightened state. Force-fed and socially coercive, alien and antagonistic to their ancestral beliefs and practices, the white man’s religion offered neither redemption nor emotional fulfillment. Instead, it estranged the greater Maya family from its past, discredited its history, disparaged its customs. Consigned to a spiritual twilight zone, they are now aliens in their own land.
God must be an equal-opportunity fraudster; he deceives everybody.
“For its part, the state has been unresponsive at best, hostile at worst,” says my friend, Adalid Martínez Perdomo, a social scientist and author. “By misrepresenting or dodging the life-and-death issues facing the Maya, the state has provided an ideological justification for dominance.”
Parallel but culturally incompatible societies can never merge. They are doomed to coexist, for a time, in mutual distrust and antipathy. Only assimilation, an ethnic adulteration forced by the strong upon the weak, can ever raise coexistence to full societal coherence -- but at a heavy price. For the Maya, as is the case among thinning aboriginal groups worldwide, assimilation is another word for ethnic suicide. It is the very inevitability of this somber course that has the Maya scrambling to delay it. Like their ancestors, they witness the sum and substance of their peoplehood grinding to a stupefying halt. Tinged with perceptible horror, the passion and the agony that is their lot are indelibly etched in their inscrutable gaze. As Charles Gallenkamp writes in Maya:
“The Maya remain suspended between two contrasting worlds ancient and modern -- clinging stubbornly to threads linking them to remote depths of antiquity, to those unfathomed mysteries buried in the shattered jungle-shrouded cities of their ancestors.”
WHO KILLED CÁNDIDO?
“Their work was to bring disaster upon men,
as they were going home, or in front of it,
and they would be found wounded,
stretched out, face up, on the ground, dead....”
-- The Popol Vuh
Wafting over the denuded carcass of this formidable Mayan city-state of yore is an immense pall of silent desolation. Scarred by time and neglect, jealous of the past, unwilling to bare their cryptic soul, Copán’s temples and stele, sacrificial altars and mausoleums preside in mute stupefaction over barren esplanades and dusty plazas once teeming with life.
It is in the shade of a centenarian tree overlooking the ball court, and under the watchful eye of several Maya lookouts posted strategically nearby, that Juan, a trusted informant, asked to meet me. Juan is not his real name. There’s a price on his head. He knows too much but several visits with his people and two exposés I published in Honduras, he affirms, attest to my loyalty and discretion.
“Secrets, like rumors, have a long shelf life,” Juan quips as he surveys the landscape below. Mixing metaphor and gruesome actuality, he adds, bowing his head, “and the truth is always the first casualty. Its remains are hastily buried. So it was with Cándido.”
A symbol of ethnic pride revived, Cándido Amador Recinos, the charismatic Maya tribal counselor, knew he was a marked man. His activism and fiery rhetoric had earned him countless enemies. Unheeded, subtle hints gave way to explicit warnings. Warnings turned to threats. Cándido first confided in the council of elders. He then shared his fears and suspicions with the leaders of a federation of indigenous groups.
“Cándido told me that several wealthy landowners in the Copán River valley, “had vowed to kill him,” Juan whispers in my ear, a slight quiver in his voice. He named names.
Someone did. On April 12, 1997, as night draped the village of Copán in a mantle of darkness, Cándido, a champion of Indian rights and a rising star in the Maya leadership, was brutally, senselessly murdered on his way home from Copán to the neighboring community of Corralitos. Unsolved and unpunished, his assassination would plunge indigenous communities under a pall of fear and suspicion. In galvanizing Honduras’ ethnic minorities, the crime -- one of many against indigenous leaders -- also put an end to decades of silence, irresolution and self-restraint. Cándido’s death had re-awakened tribal pride, buoyed ethnic unity and fed a tide of resentment and impatience against Honduras’ arcane justice system. Frequent and increasingly large demonstrations in Tegucigalpa, added both substance and poignancy to their collective plight. They also helped expose the nation’s sluggish civil and human rights apparatus.
Born in 1958 in a hamlet a few kilometers from Copán, Cándido spent much of his childhood in Morazan, a town in the northern department of Yoro, where his parents had moved in search of work. Cándido was a good student. Focused, quick-witted and inquisitive, he’d taken an early interest in his people, past and present. After graduating, he returned to Copán and went to work at the Archeological Institute as an antiquities restoration technician.
It was in 1995 that the Maya, spurred by the energetic Cándido, began to organize and formulate strategies that clearly infuriated the local power structure: The restitution of lands from which his people had been displaced or coerced to sell; ethnic selfhood through political empowerment. In August 1995, Cándido attended his first intertribal meeting. His dynamism soon earned him a full-time seat in the elders’ council, and he resigned from his job at the Archeological Park. A year later, he represented the Maya during a demonstration by members of the eight Honduran indigenous tribes. Dubbed “Our Roots,” the gathering was sponsored by a government agency charged with channeling foreign aid to impoverished indigenous communities. Publicly, Cándido called the rally
“a meaningless government self-promotion ploy.” In private, he accused the agency of skimming large sums of money.
“The media were misinformed or bribed,” Juan alleged. “Cándido was not slain on the outskirts of Copán, as reported.” He was killed at or near the home of a landowner [later referred to as the “prime suspect” in the presence of three accomplices -- an artist specializing in cheap replicas of Mayan inscriptions; a cattle rancher; and a tour-guide operator. Evidence of a fifth accomplice, as yet unnamed, would eventually surface. All were alleged to have been paid by the prime suspect and others angered by the Maya’s claims to their lands.
According to Juan, Cándido’s lifeless body was then removed and dumped on the road to Corralitos, where he was found. Two days later, Eduardo Villanueva, a district attorney in charge of ethnic affairs, discovered blood and hair evidence at the prime suspect’s home. It is believed that Villanueva withheld this evidence. I later spoke to Villanueva. He admitted to have held on to crucial details, contending that he was awaiting the results of an FBI forensic exam. An FBI source familiar with the case declined to confirm or deny Villanueva’s claim. Villanueva refused to reveal what had drawn him to the prime suspect’s home in the first place and the FBI agent in charge would not say why a U.S. domestic spy agency had taken an interest in a crime committed on foreign soil.
It would later be alleged that Villanueva had only gathered evidence found near the door of the prime suspect’s home. “Had he gone inside and inspected the rest of the house, he would have found more clues. But, as soon as Villanueva left the house, domestics hurriedly mopped the floors and tidied up the premises. Several people heard Cándido’s screams. He was begging for his life.”