Poli Sci/Hist 233: Guatemala

This morning we returned to Jilotepeque to meet Don Andres and assist the exhumation process. Previously, we had planned to spend the entire day at an indigenous rights festival in Comalapa. However, the class decided it was more important to return to visit don Andres and show our support for him.

When we arrived, he greeted us with tears in his eyes. Giving each of us a big hug, he told us that he had been unable to sleep the night before. Throughout the morning, we learned more about the lives of the daughters and grandchild of Don Andres that were ended abruptly by the uniformed perpetrators.

One night, over 20 years ago, members of the Guatemalan army intruded into the house of Don Andres’s oldest daughter. She was 26 back then and had been married for a year and a half and had an 8 month old baby. On that night, her 13 year old sister had visited and was staying overnight as well. The intruders killed the two daughters and the grandchild by choking them with a rope.

Their bodies were found and buried by the husband. Since then, her husband has disappeared and Don Andres strongly believes that it was the army that kidnapped and murdered him as well.

This was not the end of Don Andres’s misery. Two of his sons were later kidnapped and are now presumably dead. Don Andres’s youngest daughter does not even remember what her two older sisters and brothers looked like.

Although Don Andres was able to find the remains of his two daughters, the fate and whereabouts of his two kidnapped sons are yet unknown and this continues to hurt this 82 year old man everyday. Our class decided to donate portion of the fund we have raised from the Haverford community to assist Don Andres.

On our way to festival site in Comalapa, we passed by a cemetery. The wall of the cemetery was decorated with murals depicting the hardships that the Guatemalan indigenous population had to endure; ranging from the “internal armed conflict” to the recent earthquake.

We arrived at the gathering site for the indigenous rights/commemoration festival. The gathering site was a former military base in which 216 bodies were exhumed. This site was where the largest number of bodies was found and because many of the victims were from other parts of the country, it was very difficult to identify them through traditional methods which relied solely on personal testaments. As a result, DNA testing has been incorporated into the exhumation process and today, it has become far easier to identify the victims.

At our arrival, we were welcomed by both the Comalapa town council and CONAVIGUA, the widows association of Guatemala. Despite the horrific tragedy that struck them, the widows of Comalapa organized themselves into a support group and provided both moral and physical support to its members. They have also actively engaged the national government to recognize and compensate for the atrocities that were committed during the “internal armed conflict”

After members of CONAVIGUA sang us songs dedicated to their loved ones lost during the “internal armed conflict” we were presented with T-shirts by Heidi Jutson HC’06 and workers of “Just Apparel” a project dedicated to changing the labor conditions of Guatemala by providing fair wages to its workers.

The final segment of the day was the musical and artistic performance by the indigenous community. Artists from various communities both celebrated the rights of the indigenous population as well as commemorated the appalling losses they suffered during the period of the armed conflict.

March 13, 2008

Andy and Kate

After such a long day yesterday in the capital, everyone was very happy to have the morning off today. Everyone slept in and most went shopping for handicrafts in Antigua, while others stayed in with breakfast and a book. At around noon, we all headed onto the bus to go see an exhumation that FAFG (the forensic anthropologists that we visited yesterday) was doing today.  Exhumations are very important for the reconciliation and healing process, as it allows victims to give a final and dignified goodbye, while revealing a truth that is often still being silenced.

When we got to the site, some students were surprised, as the only thing that suggested that this was a crime scene was the two cops some yards off.  Instead, the exhumation was being conducted openly by anthropologists and community members, with many neighbors periodically stopping by.

Very soon upon arrival we were introduced to Don Andres, an elderly man looking for the two daughters and one grandchild that he lost in 1982. Informed by neighbors that his family might be here, he contacted FAFG to start the exhumation process. He received us very warmly and invited us to pick up a pick axe and a hoe to look for his family.

Many students joined in the exhumation process, digging holes over a meter deep, always looking for soil disturbances, such changes in soil color and consistency; these qualities that can, even 26 years later, indicate a grave. After much digging, there was some excitement—an area of looser, lighted soil had been found.

At that point the hired workers from the community began to do the vast majority of the digging.  With Haverford Students jumping in to clear our the hole of the soft dirt before the workers began picking at it again.  At the time that this was going on everyone began to gather around the hole that had been started by Haverford Students and had now become the space where everyone gathered expectantly to find the bodies of Don Andres’ family members.

The workers continued to touch the soil every once and a while and it continued to stay soft in the hole that we had uncovered. After many minutes of us gathering around that hole, they found it.  Aqui esta! What they had found was the clothing of one of the victims with her corpse underneath.  It was difficult for all of us to be gathered around and to know that we had found the bodies of Don Andres’ family which had been brutally killed by the Military over twenty-five years ago.

When Don Andres approached the grave and saw the clothing he could not hold back his tears.  Tears for his two daughters, and a granddaughter killed at the age of four months. Innocent victims of an armed conflict that created almost 500,000 Don Andres’s and left innocent people dead, innocent people who had no ties to the insurgency, but happened to be of the indigenous race and were therefore annihilated.

Don Andres had been carrying the pain that he expressed today for twenty five years, and for the first time in twenty five years he was able to see the tangible evidence of his children.  With that context in mind we have a glimpse as to why his reaction to seeing a tiny piece of fabric resulted in sobs of sadness.  Don Andres received support that day from everyone gathered around that grave, but as soon as the evidence was found because of the time the grave had to be sealed and work would begin again on the following morning.  As the grave was sealed off by the members of the forensic lab we finally got a sense of what it meant for all of us to be there.

Anita approached Don Andres and with a hug that we have often seen her give to the young children of the communities around Satiago Atitlan he continued to sob in her arms, and then this small elderly man looked up at Anita and asked her if we were coming back tomorrow.  She looked at him and asked if he would like us to come, and without hesitation he answered yes.  It seems remarkable that Don Andres and his family would be so willing to have us join in, in such a painful and personal experience, but the way we conducted ourselves as people that day and the help that we provided him in his time of grief provided the environment for us to be invited back.

As we were leaving the grave site a few of us approached the anthropologists and their remarks were very interesting.  They talked about the labs, the first being the traditional forensic lab that we had been in yesterday, and the second being the lab that we had been in today.  They said that the latter tugs at all of your emotions, and puts into a setting that one can understand all of the people that the armed conflict in Guatemala continues to affect.  It is this kind of event that finally provides family members with closure, but there continue to be thousands and thousands that either haven’t found their family members, or have no idea what was done to them, and they have to continue to live on.

Michael and Fabrizio
March 12, 2008

For me, one of the most moving experiences today was visiting FAFG, the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. One of the Haverford graduates that has been accompanying us on the trip, Jen Trowbridge ’04, works in the lab. She introduced us to the other anthropologists and we got to see the different skeletal remains that the lab is currently working on. Basically, the bodies that they exhume are at the request of families who have not yet found the bodies of their loved ones who had been disappeared. The anthropologists dig to exhume the remains of these people in order to give closure to the crimes that were committed and so that the victims’ families to honor the death. Seeing the bones that had been exhumed and having the anthropologists show us where and how the victims had been macheted really had an impact on me. I didn’t want to touch the bones. The death and atrocities felt very close. They were mostly working with the skeletons of children and Anita pointed out very powerfully that this was really evidence of the genocide. The fetus remains that we saw were not child soldiers. The body of the pregnant woman was found in a ditch with several other women. There was one skeleton in particular that they believed was of a twenty-six year old woman. They showed us where her murderers had tried to decapitate her and how the blows must have been very hard because it broke through the toughest part of the skull. Part of the back of her head had fallen off. In the moment, I was shocked by the proximity of the violence. It is difficult for me to imagine what motivates such ruthless violence. After some distance and reflection, I was led to think more about this question, especially in the context of the other experiences that we have had throughout the trip and especially today, for example, the presentation that we were given by the military earlier in the morning. I thought a lot about the complete and utter desperation caused by years of inequality and stolen opportunities that created a culture that normalized violence during the civil war. In this context, it became clearer to me that there are different levels of responsibility for the violence- the people who are physically perpetrating it and those who create the circumstances that naturalize the perpetration of violence. Thinking about this, it was particularly devastating to hear the lines of the military institution that played down accusations of racism and denied the necessity of looking at the institutions’ past responsibility in the conflict. Throughout the whole trip, we have all had many conversations about the continuing disparities. One of the guerrillas we talked to over the weekend told us that he felt like they had lost the war because there were still elites who owned all the land while the majority of people have close to nothing. Seeing this continuing disparity on an institutional level during the military presentation was both saddening and frustrating. I think throughout the trip we have become more and more aware of the obstacles confronting this country in moving past the conflict. The amount of stimulation my mind received today is going to require many weeks of processing. Its been one of the most emotionally challenging days of my life. We began by going to Guatemala City to the Ministry of Defense. The trip was long and early. We were invited in to a large conference room. Their were several army officers and commanders that they claimed were diverse in rank, and experience. Some were generals, others were colonels, others were privates. Some came from before the war and others came in to the army after it. There weren’t any indigenous soldiers present at least from what I could see. So much for diversity. They gave us a few presentations. There was one on the conflict and another on reconciliation. The word genocide never came up once. There idea of reconciliation was forgetting the past and moving forward. Fabrizio asked about the role of racism in the conflict. He asked: how could the process of reconciliation occur with out addressing the racism in Guatemala against the Guatemalan people, the Mayan people? How could reconciliation happen with the power in the hands of so few? They replied that the racism was was exaggerated, that racism came from the Mayan populations towards each other, that racism doesn’t really exist. They sounded like Haverford students talking about race. I remembered the Mayan women, the widows we met yesterday. I asked a question on behalf of them. “Part of reconciliation is rebuilding trust. Yesterday we met a group of Mayan women who all lost their husbands, many lost their children at the hands of the Army. These women were not part of the Mayan elite, they were thankful to us for giving them a few pieces of clothing. They cannot escape their past because it haunts them everyday of their lives. What has the army done and what does it plan to do to rebuild that trust?” Answer: more bs. They danced around the question even more. They talked about how everyone suffered during the war and not just the Mayans. They talked about how the key to reconciliation was development. They talked about development a lot. They talked about Mayans joining the Army and making general. Their answer was basically that Mayans should join the army. I wondered to myself, the entire time they were answering, whether they actually believed what they said. They all stood up straight and spoke loudly and aggressively when they answered. They might have seemed confidant in their answers if I wasn’t so cynical at this point. To me it seemed they were over compensating with the way they spoke, with their power point presentation on the conflict and on reconciliation. I don’t know if I was more angry at their answers or amused at their efforts to avoid actually answering the questions. They just refused to acknowledge their actions. They refused to acknowledge their murders, their kidnappings, their genocide. How can this country move on with so little acknowledgment, with so little dignity left? I will add more later about our visit to the human rights activist we met.

Samee and Ilana
March 11, 2008