By Daniel Wikinson

(excerpt)

...The reason so many people were killed in places like La Igualdad during Guatemala’s war was - according to the army’s apologists - that tough measures were needed to prevent a leftist revolution. The reason it was necessary to prevent a leftist revolution was - the high-minded would continue - that such a revolution threatened the cause of democracy in the region.

This explanation contained a basic contradiction. The first part implied that the victims were themselves revolutionaries: if there were many victims, it followed that there must have been many revolutionaries. Yet the second part implied the opposite: the revolution was anti-democratic. It did not have popular support. If the population could freely choose who would govern, it would not choose the revolutionaries.

The easiest way to escape this contradiction was simply to drop the part about democracy. And there were plenty of Guatemalans willing to do just that. But for those who did profess democratic values, the contradiction had to be addressed another way - by questioning the nature of the support that the revolution enjoyed. The revolution had lots of support, but it wasn’t genuine support.

There were several versions of this explanation. One was the claim that the supporters were misled and manipulated by outsiders - Cubans and later Nicaraguan Sandinistas. (This view echoed the claim that democracy couldn’t work in a country where the people were too ignorant to know when they’re being manipulated.) Another was that the support people gave the revolution was coerced by the guerrillas. And a third version was the "between two armies" thesis, which held that it was only in the face of a hostile military state that the population turned to the guerrillas for protection - and that the guerrillas purposefully provoked the state’s hostility in order to produce this result.

All these explanations served a political purpose. They shifted the responsibility for the killing from the main killers (the army) to their opponents (the guerrillas)...

Another way to tell the history is to catagorize the victims according to what caused their demise. The stories I heard with Bartolo fell into several categories.

There were the people who were denounced by army informants (as happened in El Reposo) and those who were denounced by neighbors who had themselves been abducted and gave the names under torture (in sort of a plea bargain arrangement, where the only ‘bargain’ available was a coup de grace).

There were the people who appear to have been denounced by plantations (the first being Juan Hernandez, who attempted to form a union in La Serena and was found with his head blown off under the bridge over the Naranjo River).

There were those who, in effect, denounced themselves by talking too much (drunks, usually, with the bad habit of speaking their minds in public, or worse, boasting of guerrilla affiliations, real or imagined).

Many were targeted because of their conduct: people who ignored the army’s prohibition on selling food anywhere but in town (like the itinerant merchant who kept peddling his wares and was found partially buried at the side of a back road); people who failed to comply with army orders in a timely fashion (like the administrator of one plantation who disappeared when he didn’t get around to clearing the underbrush out of a part of the plantation as instructed by an officer); and people who failed to pass information to the army. One young man had the misfortune of living on the road where an army tank was destroyed in a guerrilla ambush, and he compounded it by making two mistakes: not alerting the army of the guerrilla presence and not showing sufficient remorse when he told other people about what happened. He was shot in the head after having his eyeballs extracted and his tongue cut off.

And then there were many people who died when others used the war to resolve their own personal disputes. Some of these disputes involved land (like the man disappeared after his own daughters denounced him because they were eager to inherit his property); others involved adultery (like the man who denounced his neighbor, a long-time friend and fellow PGT militant, who was cheating on his wife).

Finally, there were cases of people who died because of their love for others. Such was the case of the two sisters, sixteen and seventeen, who refused to be separated from their father when soldiers came for him one night. The girls grabbed hold of him as he was dragged from their house and, unable to separate them, the soldiers took all three. The neighbors realized they weren’t coming back when they saw the officer who had taken them return, lone, in civilian clothes, and lay flowers at the door of the now deserted house. From a safe distance, they watched him weep, alone and inconsolable. Under the circumstances, who would dare console him?

*

The simplest way to tell this part of the history is with a list of La Igualdad’s dead and disappeared. Here’s what Bartolo’s list looked like:

Juan Hernandez

Juan Barrios

Herminia Santos

Emilio Ochoa

Ernesto Lopez

Bernardino Orozco Martinez[...]

Guadalupe Morales

Marco Antonio Cardona

Absalon Morales

Rolando Martinez

Salvador Lopez Garcia[...]

That’s seventy-four people killed during the war (and doesn’t include Sacuchum or the other communities on the mountainside). One or possibly two of them were killed by the guerrillas. The rest were killed by the army. None of them were combatants.

A similar history for the entire country of Guatemala would, according to the Truth Commission, list some two hundred thousand names. That list would be three thousand times as long as this one.

II

General Hector Gramajo summed up the history of the war like this: in 1981 the army had been worried the guerrillas might triumph; in 1982 they took care of the EGP (in the central and western highlands); in 1983 they took care of the ORPA; in 1984 they stopped worrying.

Gramajo had been in charge of the 1983 campaign against ORPA. And sitting in his office, with a tourist map of the country opened on his desk and a pencil in his hand, he explained how the campaign worked. "It wasn’t exactly a sweep. It’s not lining up and going into battle. Rather it’s establishing military bases to take charge of an area." He drew dots representing the military bases. "You see, the population doesn’t care about the - to use the key word - ‘paradigm’ of the subversives. They don’t care because it’s really a question of power. The one who influences them is the one with the power. So I imagine that the population is ambivalent because when you’re present you have power. When you’re absent, you don’t have power, and the others who are present have power. The population is between two fires. So they don’t have a clear definition."

Gramajo often referred to the guerrillas as "terrorists, " and when I asked him if this were just a rhetorical preference, he explained the distinction. "What is a guerrilla? I am armed and I live in the village. The village gives me food. The village gives me informers. The village gives me its children to become combatants. I am a guerrilla. The quality that makes me a guerrilla is that I am sustained by the population. In other words, it’s the population that goes to war. But if I have an armed band and I hide from the soldiers, I hide from the village, I hide from everybody, then I’m not a guerrilla, right? So that’s what happened. ORPA was a guerrilla army. But they drop down a category and become terrorists. The food doesn’t come from the village. Now they send the food in trucks, or rob it on the highway. They come down from the mountain and do terrorism - destruction of the symbols of power, such as the house of the landowner. It no longer matters what the population wants. Now it’s just terrorism."

*

Lico, the former ORPA commander, told me how the guerrillas experienced Gramajo’s campaign. "In 1983, the army came in with greater force," he recalled. "They began bombing us in January. And then they launched a large offensive with tanks and helicopters. Within six or seven months, the operational situation had completely changed. But the problem wasn’t the military confrontation. We didn’t lose that many in battle, and in ‘82-83 we received large numbers of companeros."

"The problem was food. During the stage of preparation, it had been fairly easy to get food in the communities. In the stage of fighting, it was more difficult, but still possible. There were many people who were happy to help us. The main difficulty then was just that the people were poor.

"In the year before the massacre at Sacuchum, Lucas had moved the camp up close to the town. After the massacre [of a large portion of the male population of the town], we had to change our form of supplying food, sending out small patrols to get a little here, a little there.

"Then the killings and disappearances began in the plantations. The army took drastic measures, controlling commerce and markets and products, and killing vendors. We couldn’t buy from anyone. So we had our collaborators make the purchases, and our patrols would later collect from them. But it was very dangerous work. There were two lines of operation. The first was from the woods to the towns. We worked there first, because it was closest to the woods. But when the killings started in this area, we had to move to the second line - from the towns down to the highway."

That would explain why the repression appeared to move downhill. Each time the army destroyed one group of collaborators, the guerrillas moved farther down the mountain to work with another. And when none were left, they were forced to turn to other measures, such as having large quantities of food brought in by cars from outside (which apparently is what Armando Tojil’s son was doing when he was caught and killed by the army).

"But it still wasn’t enough. A guerrilla force can’t grow if it doesn’t have the social base to sustain it. And the nucleus of people we had left wasn’t sufficient for our growth. The triumph of the revolution escaped us. We missed the grand opportunity, the moment of popular upsurge of 1981 - all the people we awoke in the first phase, so many people who collaborated, so many people who applauded, so many beautiful people!

"We weren’t able to channel this sympathy. And we couldn’t expect a massive uprising due to the people’s sympathy. What we had was spontaneous support, not organized support. Spontaneous support can’t withstand repression. We needed better organizing work. But we failed. It wasn’t that the work was intentionally neglected. The organizing work cost so many lives. The organizers in the communities were basically wiped out. So the commanders of the fronts had to take charge. And they were already too busy with their military tasks, with leading a large force, to be able to carry out the difficult work of organizing support within the communities.

"As a result, the organization became unbalanced. It grew in one area and not in the other. The military force kept growing, while the popular support diminished. We had a flood of combatants, even as the tide was already receding in the political work. Many times, due to lack of rations, we had to say, "Stop! No more recruits for now.""

In the end, it wasn’t only a matter of food, however. "A major part of the army’s campaign was to blame the guerrillas. So that people hated us, so that they erased us from their minds. And that’s why they promoted the Evangelical churches. The Evangelicals reject everything that’s political. They have a vertical relation with God - ‘el Senor and me’ - and nothing for the community. Many Evangelical churches appeared after the massacres. The preachers took advantage of people’s fear. They needled the pain of the people when they should have been more compassionate, more understanding.