Guatemala Journal
By Peter Lippman

Wednesday, March 15

I have arrived in Guatemala. This is my first time in this country, and my first time in Central America since I went to Nicaragua in 1986, exactly 14 years ago. The rain that fell all day yesterday in Seattle, leaving big puddles _inside_ my car, convinced me that it was good to go south.

I flew to Atlanta Georgia on the whim of my travel agent, and then back one time zone to Guatemala City. I think this is a first. I spent the whole long trip reading. I passed up a Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer film and then one with Susan Sarandon to read the Witness for Peace 1996 report on the Chixoy Dam, and then an update from last year by some Italians on the same issue.

The Chixoy Dam was Guatemala's showcase development project in the late 70s and early 80s, intended to solve the country's desperate energy problems and start Guatemala on the road to development. It was funded by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Instead, it put the country deeper in debt, enriched a series of brutal dictators, doesn't work well, and worst, resulted in the massacre of half the village of Rio Negro, people who refused to leave their ancestral home quietly. Around 1,500 Maya-Achi Indians were displaced, and almost 20 years later, have not yet received adequate restitution.

I am here to study what these people are doing about the plight they are in-how they have organized, where they are now, what their hopes and needs are. I am directed by my Advocacy Project coordinator Iain to, more or less, get under their skin. I have two weeks to do this, and then I will switch gears and participate in a delegation of activists from the U.S., organized by the North American Guatemala solidarity organization Nisgua. We will meet human rights activists from around Guatemala-labor activists, returned refugees, families of the disappeared, and others, to learn what they are doing. I am to write about all this.

The taxi driver's radio played Mexican music as he drove me to nearby Zona 11, where my host Cesar lives. Cesar, a professor of geography who made Guatemala's atlas in the 1970s, welcomed me into his brick and cinderblock house. Cesar is the husband of an American activist who lived in the region for 20 years. He was forced to leave the country in 1980, when a campaign of terror was underway against politically active professors.

Things are much calmer in this country now, the war having ended in 1996. But there are similarities with Bosnia. While the country is not partitioned, the military still rules behind the scenes, and impunity for the atrocities they committed during the 36-year war is all but total. The Advocacy Project, together with Rights Action, is starting a campaign against this impunity.

As Cesar led me upstairs to my bedroom, he locked an iron gate between the first and second floors of the house. I have been told not to wander the streets after dark. I took most of the money out of my wallet and put sani-wipe hand towlettes into it instead, so that any would-be pickpocket will at least get to keep his hands clean. Cesar's house is safe, though. Tomorrow I will meet Annie Bird, a local activist for Rights Action, who has been living here for 7 years.

In the news: The local paper says that the El Salvador elections resulted in mayoral victories for FMLN candidates throughout the country, as well as a plurality for them in the Parliament. This is a big surprise, at least to the newspaper and to me. We'll see if ARENA, right-wing party of assassins, gives them any leeway.

Friday, March 17

Much happened yesterday. It started out at breakfast with Cesar, served by his housekeeper Berta. While we ate and talked, her little black-eyed, two-year-old daughter Yuri stood by, about 5 feet from the table, staring somberly. My attempts to engage her were not successful.

We ate pureed black beans, eggs, and home-made corn tortillas. Cesar explained to me that the tortillas are made with lime, that is, calcium. But the factory-made ones that people buy in the city, and we buy in the U.S., do not use this ingredient. So women of the city get osteoporosis, while women of the countryside do not. Besides the nutritional value, the taste of home-made tortillas is such that after you eat them, you would never want to eat a machine-made one again.

Cesar is an intellectual somewhat of the traditional New Left. He quotes Chomsky and Marx, among other people. His extensive library contains C. Wright Mills, V. I. Lenin, Oscar Lewis, and Philip Agee, but also Tom Robbins, and a book, _How to Make Meetings Work_.  As we eat, we talk about diet, and how people in the U.S. eat in their cars, or standing up, or practically any way but a sociable way.

Cesar asks me whether I am a "_real_ vegetarian." I am not. He says he is: "I kill the animals and birds that bother the vegetables in the garden." But now, he has to avoid meat because of his ulcers. "The doctor found two ulcers in my stomach," he explains. "I used to have three ulcers: imperialism, the bourgeoisie, and the military."

Cesar is a geographer by training, but teaches mathematics and all the social sciences. By way of background on Guatemala he told me that around 40% of the population is urbanized, much of this as a result of the war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. Eighty per cent of the people live in poverty, and 40% in extreme poverty. The people living in the cities do not have the benefits of urban life, because electricity, and in many cases water supply, do not extend to the poor peripheries.  The population of Guatemala City is 2 million; of the whole country, 11.5 million.

I asked whether there were any reliable media in Guatemala. Cesar told me that all the media are owned by a Mexican company. He said that "U.S. imperialism controls Mexico, but Mexican imperialism controls Guatemala." Guatemala is very dependent on U.S. culture.

In early 1980, Cesar recounted, a campaign of selective assassination began in Guatemala. Indigenous leaders, union leaders, lawyers, and progressive professors were targeted. One hundred professors from the University of San Carlos were killed, and another 500 left the country. Cesar characterized this as very costly for the educational system of Guatemala, as fewer than half a per cent of Guatemalans finish college.  During the assassination campaign the regime published lists of those they intended to kill in the newspapers and over the radio.

Cesar received an average of 15 threats a day, and then left for a teaching position in Minnesota. He told me that the security services had 3,000 agents who covered their targets full time, watching their houses, following them to the market (for example, to see whether they were buying extra food for people underground or, if they were farmers, whether they were buying more nitrate, an ingredient in explosives, than needed to fertilize their own fields). These agents had training and manuals from the U.S. Army telling them how to torture and assassinate, how to destroy a progressive infrastructure.

Israel, Taiwan, and South Africa were closely involved in counter-insurgency training and support in Guatemala. This was especially true during the Carter presidency when aid from the United States was cut off due to human rights violations. Israel had ties with Guatemala going back to its formation in 1948-the Guatemalan ambassador to the United Nations was the one who moved that Israel be recognized.  With the change of regimes in Guatemala, Israel never reduced its support.

I asked Cesar's opinion of Portillo, the new president of Guatemala. He is a populist who has changed parties often. He was with the guerillas for a time, then with the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and now, the FRG, the right-wing party of Rios Montt.

Rios Montt was probably the most vicious dictator of Guatemala, who came in on a coup in 1982, and was ousted in a coup in 1983, but during that time managed to kill about 40,000 people. He is a born-again Christian with a solid following. He has been prohibited from running for president, but was elected to head the Parliament in the same elections that Portillo won.

Portillo is seen as a mystery now, because he has made all kinds of wonderful promises-to implement the 1996 peace accords, and to arrest the murderers of Archbishop Gerardi (in fact, he arrested some people quickly). He has also appointed some ex-guerrillas to his cabinet. But the common opinion is that he has made some kind of deal with Rios Montt, possibly involving a promise to Rios's prosecution.

A Ride to Town

Cesar gave me a ride down Avenida Bolivar into town, as he was on his way to teach a class.  Guatemala is a huge, flat city ringed by mountains several miles in the distance. If you are on the ground, you have no sense that there is a beginning or an end to the city, and almost no differentiation as you travel past block after block of colorfully painted but faded and dirty old auto-parts shops, carpentry shops, furniture stores, paint stores, tire shops, and music stores, and everything else an ordinary shopping neighborhood should have. 

We pass the main cemetery with its 12-foot-high walls. Cesar gives me a short lesson in Mayan history. The classic Mayan period was from 300 to 900 A.D. Then there was an invasion from the north, from Mexico. Cesar says, "All the barbarism comes from the north." A military caste took over Guatemala and the peaceful, priest-led societies fled for the hills. Cesar says, "So we have had a military dictatorship for a thousand years. The Spaniards came 500 years ago, and they were able to ally with some of the indigenous groups, to divide and conquer the rest."

I walk around the downtown area. All the shops and offices have metal gates on their doors. There are sharp metal spikes sticking out from the walls surrounding a parking lot. A barefoot bearded beggar sits in front of a Wendy's. The banks and post offices have metal detectors at their entrances. Young indigenous women, displaced from their villages, walk the streets, selling things, doing errands, dressed in their dazzlingly beautiful, hand-woven, hand-embroidered rural outfits. The beauty of their skirts, blouses, shawls, and sashes is in huge contrast to everyone else's dress, and to everything else in the flat, drab, dirty environment. I am amazed by the extraordinary beauty that ordinary people can create if they are left alone. I walk down the sidewalks, crowded by stands selling clothes and every kind of cheap trinket, people hardly able to pass, cars and buses spewing dirty exhaust all over everything and everybody. You have to get asthma and allergies here, and then choke and die. I am repelled by the ugliness that humans can create. I was told that Guatemala City is a place to get away from, and that I will do, early and often.

Christie from Nisgua told me on the telephone not to carry my passport into town-in fact, not to carry anything I don't want stolen. That doesn't leave much. I'm told not to wander out after dark, and if I need to go somewhere, to take a taxi. Common crime is a plague here, and people have adjusted to this fact. In today's paper I read that there were 1,500 reported incidents of violence so far this year, including over 200 murders. Men with guns stand in front of the shops and banks-pistols and single-barreled shotguns are the most popular. I don't see any of the short-barreled machine guns that are common in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

A woman with an orange and black hood over her face collects money for the "Huelga de Dolores." Cesar later explains to me that this is a student tradition going back a hundred years, where students create a parade on Viernes de Dolor, the Friday before Good Friday, and during this time they criticize the government in all possible. ways. This event is organized by ten elected students, one from each department of the university. They publish a one-time newspaper called "Don't Touch Us," in which they reveal all kinds of information about the corruption of the government. During the war the government tried to end this tradition. It seems they have infiltrated the students with provocateurs who are giving the students a bad image by beating up thieves before turning them over to the police. There have been graphic pictures of some of these beatings in the newspapers the last few days. The student leaders declared that they would no longer wear hoods while collecting money, in order to abolish the anonymity of the provocateurs, but this practice has not stopped.

I spent much of the day with Annie, one of the local staff members of Rights Action, a partner organization with the Advocacy Project for the work I am doing here. She has been here for 3 ½ years. For the afternoon and evening she bent my ear about all the particulars of the case I am researching, that of Rabinal. Rabinal is the municipality where Rio Negro and the Chixoy Dam are located, and it is also the name of the largest town in the municipality.

Annie is a great resource for me to start out with, as she knows all the details of the Rio Negro case. She described to me who the activists are, what they have done, when the exhumations started, what organizations were formed, who I should meet with, and what I should ask them. We decided that I would leave tomorrow for Rabinal, as my time is limited, and since I can't get anything done here on the weekend, I might as well travel and meet people up there.

One of the people I am to meet is Jesus Tecu. He survived one of the massacres of Rio Linda residents at age 10, after seeing his mother and baby brother killed. In 1993 he pressed for exhumations, and on the basis of a few positive identifications, he became the main witness at a trial of three paramilitary leaders. These people were convicted, and their appeal is now waiting Supreme Court consideration.

Jesus is a colleague of Carlos Chen Osorio, who is presently touring the United States to talk about the Rio Negro case. These two men and a few other people are leaders in the struggle for exhumations, prosecution of the war criminals, and restitution for the land that was submerged by the dam. It has been a long struggle, and it is not over.

I went for dinner and more talk at Annie's house in Zone 2, not far from the downtown office. The house is on a street with a couple of maquiladoras, or low-wage factories, also a university department. As we approached the house many young people, both students and workers, were leaving the street. Annie's house is protected by a high wall with coils of barbed wire on top.

This morning's talk with Cesar was further edification. He told me of the rich extended families in Guatemalan society, which had both guerrillas and military officers in the same family. Sometimes these people would fight against each other, and sometimes they would protect each other. Sometimes they couldn't. A professor colleague was receiving death threats, and Cesar told him to leave. He said, "No, my father is a colonel in the military intelligence." But the man was disappeared anyway.

Today I met with Rolando Alecio, an anthropologist who has studied the Rio Negro case. He explained to me how the violence affected the community. Rio Negro, Xococ, and the other nearby communities are full of people who are all related to each other. They all have the same several last names. The government had a plan to install Civil Defense Patrols (PACs) of 40 members in every single community in Guatemala. This was not possible, but they created one in Xococ. Some people joined under threat of death.

When the PAC of Xococ attacked Rio Negro, people were killing their relatives. The result of this further down the line is that there is continued mistrust and division in the communities. Often the army was able to manipulate the PACs to attack nearby communities by exploiting village politics, jealousy, petty land or property disputes, arguments over the ownership of a water source, and similar things.

Now, the organization Rolando works with is trying to help the people come to terms with their loss, and to figure out ways to do this. They try to get the victims to describe what happened to them instead of keeping quiet about it.

Saturday, March 18

I prepared to leave Guatemala City to travel to Rabinal, after one more breakfast talk with Cesar. He told me to "keep my mouth shut and my eyes and ears wide open." I had already been told by Annie to be careful at night in Rabinal, as there were "crime gangs" there. And I was aware that the people I wanted to see had enemies. So I was a little nervous.

I went to Zone 4 (Guatemala City is divided into 12 or 15 zones) to get a bus to Rabinal, north of here 5 hours in the department of Baja Verapaz. There are two kinds of buses, "Pullmans," that is, old Greyhound buses, and the "corrientes," also known as the "chicken buses," which are old school buses. I wanted a Pullman, as they don't stop for every swingin' hitchhiker on the road, but I got a chicken bus.

The bus was full of indigenous people, three to a seat. Very friendly. A young girl was carrying a big electrical fan. A man was carrying a package of one hundred eggs. Everyone and everything stuck out into the aisle, so there really wasn't any aisle, and passage was very rough. No one minded, though. At the front of the bus, as on most busses I've been on here, there were pictures of Jesus, appeals to "Bless this vehicle and the people in it," and advertisements for Crush soft drinks.

The windows were open and dust came in one and went out another. Through the windows I read graffiti: "FRG Assassins" (referring to the recently-elected ruling party),  "Monsignor Gerardi: Martyr for Truth" (referring to the Archbishop who was assassinated two years ago after releasing a damning, four-volume report on the atrocities committed during the war), and "Justice and Punishment for the Assassins." At the crowded intersections, indigenous women in their huipiles washed car windshields.

We made 18 turns before getting on a straight road out of town. This is underdevelopment. All of a sudden, at the northern edge of town, there was a huge gorge in the brown dirt, and you could see nature, and the scruffy suburbs. Warehouses, factories, and brown fields, a few trees, all hills.

Gradually the scenery opened up and became rural. We went higher and higher into the hills, and beyond the pines and some scrubby palms there were some real views of high distant mountains. Approaching La Cumbre, three hours north of the capital, I could see the misty high mountains of Alta Verapaz, further to the north. But I got off the bus and headed west into Baja Verapaz, towards the departmental capital of Salama (accent on the last syllable).

The bus descended into a warm green valley. Next to me sat an old man with only a few teeth, and a machete tied to his wrist. He mumbled to me the whole trip. At Salama a man wearing blue jeans, a white tee-shirt, a white straw cowboy hat, and two gold teeth got on the bus carrying two ice-cream cones that he wanted to sell to us. Someone bought them before they started dripping.

Leaving Salama we headed steeply up a high brown mountain. The driver turned up some noisy Mexican music, which helped distract me from the steep cliffs on either side of the bus. Soon we were on a dirt road that lasted most of the remaining hour to Rabinal. On that road, if another bus were approaching from the other direction, it was a close fit. Once we had to back up around a corner, and the bus leaned a good 20  degrees to the left. I tried to thing about other things.

Arriving in Rabinal, I parked my bag at a cheap hotel and went looking for Jesus Tecu Osorio. He is a local organizer and survivor of one of the Rio Negro massacres, on March 13 of 1982. On that date a large number of women and children of the village were taken into the hills and killed. This included most of Jesus's family. He was there with his little brother. As his mother was being taken away to be killed, she told him to take care of the baby brother. Soon the person who killed his family came back and said he was going to take Jesus home to work for him, but the baby was too young. He killed Jesus's brother with a machete, and took Jesus home. Jesus worked for him as a slave for two years. There were 18 young people who survived the massacre in this way. Some of them did not survive the ensuing period of forced work. Jesus was eventually released to a relative.

The displaced people of Rio Negro ended up in Pacux, a new neighborhood of shacks built outside of the small town of Rabinal. Instead of the promised restitution, they were forced into this "model village," or "pole of development," equivalent to the "strategic hamlets" implemented by our government during the Vietnam War. In other words, this was a place to keep the indigenous people under control, where they couldn't support the guerrillas, and where they were compelled to supply cheap labor to the landowners.

Fear of assassination, torture, and disappearance forced the people of Rio Negro, now in Pacux, to keep their mouths shut for a long time. But things calmed down somewhat in the later 1980s, and several people came up as leaders. Jesus was one of these. In 1993 he was over 20, and he filed a request for exhumation of the mass grave where his family was killed. Of dozens of corpses unearthed, a couple were positively identified. This, together with Jesus's eyewitness testimony, provided the concrete evidence necessary for a trial of three PAC commanders.

The fact that Jesus was willing to risk his life to bring these people to trial made a huge difference to the other survivors, not only of the Rio Negro massacres, but of dozens of other atrocities that had happened in the area. An association of victims was formed, and they agitated throughout the rest of the 90s for exhumations and trials. I went to Rabinal to learn about this work.

Rabinal is a town of 10 to 15 blocks in width and length. An imposing but slightly dingy white cathedral dominates the center, with a plaza in front of it. The houses are one-story high, of brick, cinderblock, or mud-brick, with stucco covering the bricks, or falling off. Here and there lounges a dog, a cat, a chicken, or a turkey. Only the several central streets are paved; the rest are dust generators. It seems to be the rule that as you descend from the highlands into a low valley, the climate changes and all is dry, all is dust. The Mayans say they are made of corn, and this I believe. But the astronomers say everything is created from dust, and this must be true also. There in Rabinal, the universe is starting to come apart again.

Not much was happening in the town as I shambled through on a hot Saturday afternoon. Nothing was left for sale at the market except for a few rancid french fries. I went to the legal clinic, or "Bufete Juridico Popular," to find Jesus. No one knew where the legal clinic was, at first-not even the six men who were sitting in front of it. Finally I convinced them to let me know where "Chus" (Jesus) was, and took a cab out to Pacux.

I asked the taxi driver if there were any security problem around Rabinal. He said that the kids from Rabinal go into "Guatemala," as he called the capital, and learn bad ways there. He said, "We're afraid to go there, too. When we arrived, we asked some kids at the first corner where he was, and they pointed behind us to a young man on a bicycle, wearing a baseball cap. I got out of the cab and met Jesus.

It was too late in the day to start interviewing, but Jesus walked me back to the town, wheeling his bike in front of him. He is 27 years old and about 5'3" in height. Jesus lead me through the cemetery on the way back, as it was cooler, because of the trees. Also, it was relatively free of the dust picked up by every passing car on the dirt road. Almost as an afterthought, Jesus directed my attention to a couple of monuments in the graveyard. One, about 10 feet tall, had colorful naïve paintings of the March 13 massacre: paramilitary soldiers wielding leading the women and children up a hill, then dead people lying on top of the hill, and mothers and babies hanging from a cross. A few words told the story of the massacre.

This is part of what the people of Rio Negro are fighting for: to "recover the memory"-the opposite of denial. Originally a small monument was built there, and someone quickly destroyed it. So they built two larger ones in its place. But there are many "secret" gravesites, and only a few monuments, to date. The people need to know where the remains of their loved ones are, so that they can bring this story to a close.

Jesus pointed out to me a long mound in the ground, maybe 50 feet long, stretching away from the monument. This is where the exhumed remains of the victims were reburied, presumably including his mother.

We walk the rest of the way into town. A girl of about ten is driving 6 or 8 head of cattle outwards with a short stick. I always wonder how one little human can manage such big animals. Some local women come our way, resplendent in their huipiles. They smile at Jesus. Ahead of us the cathedral is glowing in the setting sun, and people are tearing down their stalls at the market. We run into Cristobal Osorio Sanchez, another man from Rio Negro, who is the president of the Pacux development committee. About 40, wearing a leather cowboy hat and riding a bicycle, he speaks Achi (the language of the Rio Negro people and most of the other indigenous around here) with Jesus, and then we all arrange to meet up in Pacux the next day.

Back at the hotel I rested a spell in my room that was exactly the size of a jail cell, with a bigger bed, and slightly more relaxed discipline. I spent the evening talking to a woman from Guatemala City who was in Rabinal to take a census of widows and orphans for the University. She told me of the street children of the capital, who sniff paint thinner because they don't know what else to do. Some of these teenagers have babies, and they have them sniff thinner too, to keep them quiet.

In my room I read the "human rights" section in my Rough Guide. I tried to think about what it would feel like to be hacked up by a machete.

Sunday, March 19

I had a free morning, which was nice because it was market day. I sat in the sun on the steps of the cathedral watching people set up their stalls, watching folks come in from the surrounding villages. Lantana and bougainvillea bloomed among the stalls. High mountains ringed the town, only a few miles away. I tried to take the whole scene in, slowly.

The men were in jeans and plain shirts, most of them wearing cowboy hats of leather or straw, some with baseball caps, many with machetes in hand-tooled leather sheathes. They are thin, and the women are not. The women are short and colorful in their huipiles (embroidered and/or woven blouses) and cortes, the standard Guatemalan hand-woven material from the western highlands, that nearly all the women and girls in the market were wearing. They have a special way of wrapping the cloth so that it has two pleats in the front, and they tie it with a hand-woven belt. Most of the women and girls wore painted wooden or glass beads; some wore a cross, and many wore drilled silver coins. Roosevelt dimes are popular for this. The older women wear elaborate head-scarves, folded in special ways to both keep out the sun and balance a basket or other load. If a colorful hand-woven piece of cloth is not handy, a camouflage-pattern towel will do.

People sat around the edges of the market grabbing a snack, a mother nursing a baby. Scruffy little dusty dogs waited for scraps. A man led in a small horse carrying 40-odd melons, and unloaded them in front of me. A young man came by on a bike, carrying a baby in the front basket. Neither of them wore a helmet. The back of his t-shirt read, "Citizens Commission on Human Rights," with a telephone number.

Besides all kinds of local fruit and vegetables, here you could buy cassettes, clothing, straw hats, woven cloth, plastic buckets of many colors, ices, cinnamon, ropes, and hammocks. You could get a shoe shine. You could drink gloppy pink or white atol out of a yellow and red hand-painted bowl, carved from a gourd. I opted for a "licuado," kind of a fruit smoothie.

Nearby in the plaza a band tuned up. A guitar, drum, synthesizer, and vocalist who was endearingly never in tune with himself or anyone else. "Jesucristo ya vieeeeeneee...." It got old.

Friendly people, who always smile and wave, "Buenos dias," if you happen to make eye contact.

*

After the market I walked back out to Pacux to talk to Jesus. Cristobal did not show up, but that was all right. Jesus spoke to me for two hours as we sat leaning against the cinderblock community center, in the shade. He told me of the broken promises of INDE, the government's electrical agency that was supposed to give restitution for the land now under water. The people of Rio Negro were promised an equal amount of land, of equal or better quality. Instead of the 22.5 caballerias (110 acres each) they lost, however, they were given two caballerias in four fincas (farms) near Rabinal. Three of the fincas are unfarmable because they are too rocky and full of ravines. They were given title to these three, but not the other one. It took them 17 years to get more land, and last year they got five more caballerias, but 7 hours away, up in Alta Verapaz.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood of Pacux is not exactly livable. One- or two-room houses, practically huts, were built in a way that they are already starting to fall apart. Water is hard to come by, the roads are unpaved, and one third of the families' rights to reparations were not recognized by INDE, as the heads of their families had been killed (with the sponsorship of INDE). The list of grievances goes on. Work is scarce in Rabinal. Some people work in factories or as construction laborers or farmhands. But pay is only 15 to 20 Quetzales a day ($2.00-$2.50), and work is never steady. This is poverty. You can see it, and you can smell it. The kids are not getting enough to eat. This is why they end up in the city, sniffing thinner and washing car windows.

After talking to Jesus, I walk back to town. At a little stand in Pacux I buy a cool drink, the first of several, and the woman gives it to me in a plastic bag with a straw. I go back through the cemetery and take pictures of the monument to the victims of the March 13 massacre. Across the way kids from the town are playing soccer in a field, as if everything were normal. Maybe everything is normal.

*

In the evening I met the gringos-Sarah (not her real name), an anthropology doctoral field-worker from the U.S., and a couple from Belgium who were working in a cultural development program for the Mayans. They are trying to learn Achi. It sounds hard enough, because the verbs are object-specific. This means that each verb conjugation denotes not only the doer, but the object. So you would have "I see you" as one word, different from "I see him," or "I see them," and of course, different from "We see you," and so on.

The Belgians  told me that there is a "Mayan movement," a kind of cultural re-awakening among the indigenous population, but that it is not very strong in this area, in the eastern highlands. They hinted that there may even be an element of Quiche expansionism, referring to an ethno-linguistic group in the western highlands (Rigoberta Menchu, the activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is Quiche).

We discussed Rabinal municipality, and why it is so poor. All of Guatemala is poor, but this is apparently the poorest, or one of the poorest, municipalities in the country. It doesn't help that the poor roads make it unattractive for investment. The land is not very good, either. There are no big farms. People who want to make a factory will do it somewhere where they can buy and sell. The main export from the area is people.

Sarah was a gold-mine of information. Her area of study covers a large part of what I needed to learn, that is, how the local organizations are working to advocate for their needs and rights. She was able to explain to me history of activism in the area, coming out of the massacres when people were dispersed and terrorized, and how they gradually got back together and got organized.

I had heard a lot of disturbing information about splits in the communities, and Sarah was able to help me understand this. It did not help at all that people in the communities were forced to join the PACs ("Civil Defense Patrols") and kill each other, sometimes their own close friends and relatives. These people are still around, and some of them, the leaders of the PACs, justify their actions. They threaten the activists, as the consequence of the activism would be their punishment.

Jealousy, "envidia," is another strong component of the problem, as Sarah explained. People don't have much of anything. They have rotting wooden houses. So when they see that the leaders have full-time paying jobs, and can afford "block" houses (solid houses built from cinderblocks), they are susceptible to believing rumors that the ex-paramilitaries spread about the leaders profiting off their activism, and similar. All the people I talked to, however, played down the envidia and said that the community of Pacux is united, with only 10 or so people stirring up trouble.

It would be hard to pin a profiteering accusation on Jesus. He was the recipient of the "Reebok Human Rights Award" in 1998. This is an award that is given to human rights activists under the age of 30 in various countries. Jesus was taken on tour to some eastern cities of the United States in 1998, and then received a prize of $25,000, an unimaginable treasure in the villages of Guatemala. He put this money into a plot for Adivima, also into a foundation that currently supports 14 local students. Jesus has the same worn-out clothing as everyone else, and lives in the same kind of shabby shack as the other survivors. The only difference is that the front of his house is painted blue.

Talking to Sarah reminded me that the story of activism is always complicated, as in Bosnia. There is always dissent, possibility for opportunism, and much hinges on a few self-sacrificing personalities. Also, racism is a major factor, as Sarah pointed out. What I am seeing here is the concrete manifestation of racism. It is a huge problem, not only in the government that wants to exterminate the indigenous people, but also among the "Ladinos" (the name for the Latino/mestizo, Spanish speaking population), who want to help the Mayans. Sarah accused them of being condescending, careerist, and manipulative.

Monday, March 20

I didn't get much done this day. I traveled back over the mountain to Salama to meet with an activist who turned out to be busy. The rest of the day was similar. The sun took the top layer of skin cells off of my face. There'll be days like this.

I walked out to Pacux looking for Cristobal, who turned out to be in Salama. On the way back, some men were digging a grave in the cemetery.

Later I walked through town to try to look up Pedrina, another activist. On the way, I heard music, and the reverberation of the drumming told me that it was live music. This kind of thing always interrupts what I'm doing. I turned a corner to see what was happening. In front of a house/storefront there was a small crowd. A little pickup truck was full of white lilies. This could have been a wedding, but not on Monday.

Soon I saw activity in a garage that was part of the store, and loud brass music was coming from there. I went closer and saw that some men were slowly carrying a coffin out of the garage. They would take several very slow steps forward, and then a couple backward. The band, three trumpets, two baritones, a tuba, and a bass drum, were playing a beautiful slow, solemn air. They were remarkably in tune.

I heard screaming mixed with the music. When the coffin was finally all the way out of the garage, I saw a woman dressed in black, probably the widow, who was screaming and carrying on behind the coffin. Another woman in black was holding her up. This demonstration seemed to me to be part of a mourning ritual. The clothing advertisements and painting of Daffy Duck chasing Bugs Bunny were not in harmony with the situation.

The coffin was carried with the head a little higher than the feet. The pallbearers made a 360-degree turn in front of the garage, and then headed down the street towards the cathedral. I went the other way.

In the evening I got back together with Jesus, who described to me more of his work. In the morning I had ridden with him in a crowded truck he had borrowed from Sarah, to take eight women to Salama, to the municipal "Ministry of the Public." He was helping the women file a request for an exhumation. These were people from another village that had suffered a massacre 18 years ago. They know the site of the mass grave, and want it dug up. Since the first exhumation in 1993, there have been over 50 around the country, but only 6 or so in Rabinal.

Each of the women had to submit a declaration of what they knew. They were not nervous, even though they are faced with stonewalling and discrimination by the ministry. Jesus described the process as a "moral restitution."

Tuesday, March 21

It was my birthday. I treated myself by sleeping in until 7:30 (people get up early here), and acquiring an orange for breakfast. The day was also fruitful, as I was able to interview Pedrina, Sarah, and Cristobal.

Pedrina, together with Carlos Chen Osorio, is a leader of Adivima. She is not from Rio Negro, but from another village that suffered massacres. Pedrina lost most of the rest of her relatives, but her two children survived. Her husband was taken away one day and "disappeared." Pedrina lived on the south coast for several years after the "violencia," as they call it. This is relatively rich place where people from the highlands periodically go to make a little money.

Pedrina learned Spanish there. She worked cutting sugar cane and coffee, "like a man," as she said. (I have cut cane, and it's the hardest work I've ever done.) Pedrina returned to her village near Rabinal in the early 90s. Around the time of the first exhumations, she and Carlos started an organization of victims of the atrocities, that eventually became Adivima. This was part of an important opening for the victims, who after more than ten years were finally finding their voice. Adivima helps them request exhumations, file complaints against war criminals, organize demonstrations, call for memorial monuments, observe anniversary commemorations, and other things that end the silence and empower the struggle for people's rights.

This struggle goes on, and success is still far away. Only one trial has been held in Rabinal, and that case is still on appeal. There are still very real threats. Some people tried to kidnap Pedrina late last year, but her family was around to protect her. Later, someone shot into her house, hitting her son in the foot. In spite of all this, Pedrina goes on. She is friendly and good-natured in her corte and huipil, an easy interview, giving me information without my having to struggle to find out what is important.

Pedrina is only 35. She told me that it is common among her people for the women to marry between the ages of 15 and 18. She is a grandmother.

Later I returned to Pacux and found Cristobal. We sat in front of his house as he told me of his history and work. A couple of kids watched me curiously, one of them examining my cheap suede shoes, which probably cost what someone here could earn in two months.

I asked Cristobal how many relatives he had lost in the massacres. He counted in Spanish, "Uno, dos, tres...", thinking about each individual. It seemed to take forever, until he arrived at a figure of 28 people. Cristobal told me that he had left Rio Negro early the morning of the massacre to pick some corn. As he was returning, he met someone who told him what had happened. He dropped the corn and ran into the hills. He no longer had a wife. He lived in the woods for two years, with other refugees, eating roots and whatever they could find. If they lit a fire at night, the army would come after them. A lot of people hid like this, some for as much as five years. Some of the oldest and youngest died of the hardship.

Cristobal told me this story and said, "It is very hard for us to talk about this. We have a lot of pain and sadness in our hearts." He later remarried, and has four children now. As we spoke, his wife stayed inside. His house is distinguished by a poster of Portillo, the new president, on the front. I asked him if he liked Portillo. He said no, that one of the children had picked up the poster at a campaign meeting and brought it back because he liked it.

Cristobal is a modest man like all of the local people I have met. Sarah says that everyone in Pacux likes him. They elected him president of the local Committee for Improvement. He works to get INDE's promises of restitution fulfilled, to organize labor on the new finca in Alta Verapaz that was given to the Rio Negro survivors, and to develop that land. It's an uphill struggle.

I made an arrangement with Cristobal for him to find me someone to take me the next day to see the dam that flooded Rio Negro, and then I would meet Cristobal in Coban to go look at the new finca. When I found out I was leaving Rabinal, I decided I liked the place. The surrounding mountains are good, but especially I liked the poor but beautiful, dignified people. There was never a nervous moment there, in spite of all the admonitions. No one so much as looked at me sideways.

Talking to Sarah, I found out that the place blooms in the rainy season. When it pours in June and July, the corn shoots up suddenly until you can't see the houses.

Wednesday, March 22

Cristobal arrived early in the morning with his friend Roberto, who came to take me to see the dam. Cristobal was carrying his machete, as he had to go to work in Salama. We stood at the edge of Rabinal and caught a truck to Salama, and then Roberto and I headed north into the department of Alta Verapaz, higher into the mountains, towards the town of Coban. We stopped at Tactic (tok-TEEK), a small indigenous market town.

Roberto is another inhabitant of Pacux, formerly of Rio Negro, and a cousin of Carlos Chen Osorio. He told me that he is 29, and was eight years old when the massacres happened. The arithmetic doesn't work, but I didn't argue it. Roberto lost his father and three brothers in the massacres. His grandfather brought him up, and when he died, Roberto went to live with an uncle. He never went to school, but learned to read and to speak Spanish later, while growing up in Pacux.

Roberto told me that his grandfather wouldn't let him go to school, because she needed him to work around the house. He made "petates" (mats) in the summer, and then during the rainy season, he worked in a garden. Later, Roberto went to the south coast to earn a living. He remained there for 7 years, and came back in the mid-1990s.

Now Roberto works in a ceramics factory, lifting clay, making terracotta pots. He makes 20 Quetzales a day. I asked him if this was a decent wage. He said no, that 40 or 50 Quetzales ($5.00-$6.50) would be all right. I asked Roberto whether his family was participating in the development of the new finca. He said no, that his brother and sister did not want to because they did not have enough money to travel there. Roberto's sister washes clothes, and his brother is working on the coast. Roberto's wife makes embroidered items and sells them in the market.

To the Dam

In Tactic we hired a taxi to take us to see the dam. There was no other way. We drove down a bumpy, dusty dirt road for a half hour. The road was so steep and gravelly that it would be better to say we slid. We should have been in a four-wheel drive. As we descended the climate changed, heating up and drying up. The green of Alta Verapaz disappeared.

As we turned a bend dramatic distant mountain views appeared. We saw modes corn fields and coffee plantations, some fruit trees, almost no humans. The hull of an ancient truck rusted in the middle of a cornfield. A pair of women wrapped in pink and purple hand-woven cloth came out of a woods with firewood bundled on their heads. Nearby stood a couple of mud-brick houses. A roadrunner ("Correcamino") passed in front of us.

Presently we reached the entrance to the dam. We stood under the backside of the imposing structure, where the town of Puerto Viejo used to exist. Now there was nothing; just an INDE bus driver chopping some wood, and a young guard with a pistol, who did not want to allow me to enter the dam site. At this moment the driver discovered that he had a flat tire, and started to replace it. The guard asked if I was from the World Bank. I had to have a pass. There was nothing to do but leave. Later someone suggested that I should have slipped a 50 Quetzal note in with my identification, but it hadn't occurred to me.

We decided to try to get a pass. The local people and the residents of Rio Negro are allowed in whenever they want to go, but foreigners need to go through the appropriate channels. This involved driving/sliding back up the gravel road and going up to Santa Cruz Verapaz, a town further north of Tactic, where the regional INDE headquarters was located. This took about an hour.

We passed through a guarded gate and entered the INDE headquarters. The INDE grounds are like a campus, or a military residence. Here is the most orderly space I have seen in the country. The houses are prefabricated and look like cheap U.S. suburban homes, and the cars are clean and decent. We found the main office. To my amazement, getting the entry pass only took five minutes. I gave my signature to a clerk, didn't even have to show identification, and we were back on the road. In another country I can think of, this would have taken ten days, and it would have cost money.

We trudged back to the dam entrance. This time there was no hitch. We zigzagged up the backside of the dam to the top. What we saw was an immense artificial lake, several kilometers wide and many kilometers long. The amount of concrete used to hold it there could cover Philadelphia.

Steep mountains rise up directly out of the lake. The overwhelming picture is that of a moonscape. The mountainsides are bare, and they are eroding into the lake. It is unimaginable that some forestation effort could fix this. The lake is silting up. Barely fifteen years old, the dam is predicted to last for another 20 years. This is the project that will never pay for itself-not morally, and not economically.

We drove along a ridge over the lake and then descended to the lakeside. There were no other people in sight. A few fishing launches were tied up at the shore. Ten-odd cows lounged nearby. Several buzzards circled overhead. The taxi driver told me, "Here 54 people died in the course of building the dam. There is a monument to them over by the power plant." There is no monument to the hundreds of others, who were not killed by accident.

From here one can take a forty-minute boat ride to the far end of the winding lake, not visible from the dam. There stands what is left of Rio Negro, the part that is not under water. Seven families have returned to Rio Negro in recent years, and are trying to make a living there. Mostly they live off of fishing. Their houses are poor. If they had support, they could clear some land, build better shelters, and live better.

Rio Negro is difficult to get to. Unless I had caught a boat by chance, the only sure way to get there would have been to make an arrangement with someone from there who happened to be in town. That would involve bringing in a fuel supply to the dam, also. Another way to get there is to walk from the south, which is said to take seven to nine hours.

We drove out through a back route, passing some straw-thatched cabins on the way. The road was better, less dusty for having been less traveled. In Tactic I lunched with Roberto, and then we parted as I headed up to Coban, and he back to Rabinal.

*

In Rabinal I rested the rest of this day and the next, and attended to some correspondence. I met some gringos who had been staying in the country for 25 years, who are occupied in the tourist trade. They were pleasant and I had lunch with them. The subject of the dam came up. They knew a little about it, but couldn't agree on the date of its construction, even after I told them. They also expand to me that the PACs were "voluntary, people joined them to protect themselves from the guerrillas, and no one would ever kill their neighbors."

There is a lot these people don't know about the country they have adopted. The whole tourist world seems to revolve with precious little understanding of the history of this country. This is good for those who profit from it, but it doesn't help the indigenous people much.

In the news: The secretary-general of NATO declared that the people of Kosovo were simply going to have to stop fighting and work for reconciliation, or else. Rigoberta Menchu has filed a suit with the Spanish government, along the lines of the anti-Pinochet proceedings, to try Rios Montt and a handful of other ex-dictators and soldiers for war crimes. The connection with Spain includes the fact that a number of activists, including Rigoberta's father, were killed when they occupied the Spanish embassy during a protest, and the Guatemalan security forces burned it to the ground.

Some people are famous for being well-known, and renowned for being popular. It is curious how these people, actors especially, sometimes become statesmen, dignitaries, emissaries. It works because politics, after all, is acting. Ronald Reagan comes to mind, of course, because his acting career flourished after 1980.

You have the luck of the draw, and some of these players turn out to do good work. Edward James Olmos is another actor I never heard of, who has played some parts in some important cop shows. A Latino from L.A., somehow he became the UNICEF emissary to Central America. He visited Guatemala last week. The newspapers showed him traveling with Mrs. Portillo, the wife of the president, both of them hugging indigenous people.

Mrs. Portillo said, "It is a great honor for the country that people like Olmos are interested in our development." Why? But when Olmos left, he said something good: "There is much prejudice and discrimination" in this country, and an "incredible racism."

Through the news I also learned that two environmental activists were just killed, last Tuesday, in the eastern part of the country. These were people who were pressing claims against companies for forty "environmental crimes." They were shot while walking out of a restaurant after dark.

The country just held its "Miss Guatemala" contest, and selected a Ladina woman, tall, thin, white, and Barbie. What a shame that the country can't look inward and recognize the true beauty of its people.

Friday, March 24

I met Cristobal in the square of Coban early in the day to go up to the finca. With him were his wife Gabina, and a friend Mario, also of Rio Negro/Pacux. Gabina was carrying a bundle slung across her back in a piece of cloth, that looked like three cantaloupes. It turned out to be a three-month-old baby girl, Xandi (Shondi). Also with them was their 8-year-old son, whose name Cristobal pronounced as "Honi," and wrote "Jhony."

The folks had gotten up at 1:00 in the morning in Pacux to arrive in Coban by 7:00. Gabina and the kids had never been to the finca.

We caught a chicken bus north out of Coban. The paved road ended after a few miles, and the next hour was dust and gravel, through lovely hilly countryside. I sat with Mario, who told me that he is a member of the Rio Negro Improvement Committee, together with Cristobal. He traveled to several eastern U.S. cities 13 years ago with a development organization. Cristobal told me that he went to Geneva last year, under the sponsorship of Rights Action (the organization that the Advocacy Project is collaborating with here).

A salesman walked onto the bus and stayed there for the half hour it took to navigate out of Coban. He held up packages of pills and went into a lengthy discourse on their health benefits. Afterwards he walked through the bus showing them to each person. The pills were made in El Salvador. They were good for "neuralgia, anemia, and alcoholism." One woman bought a batch, to be taken three times a day.

All the passengers but me were indigenous. Cristobal explained that here they speak a different Mayan dialect, K'ekchi, that is not entirely mutually intelligible with Achi. The bus speakers played loud Mexican music as we looked through the windows at spectacular mountain scenery with "vertical farms" of coffee, cardamom, and a few bananas.

At the bottom of a hill we reached Cubil, a small market town of rusty tin-roof shelters, with a remote feeling. A man sat on a bench in front of one of the open-air cafes fixing a small engine. A couple of K'ekchi girls talked to Cristobal. He told me they couldn't believe I was from the U.S. Cristobal and I showed off our English for them: "How are yu? Ine fine." They were impressed. We caught a ten-minute ride up to the finca in the back of a "picop."

The finca of "Sahomax" is really quite a pretty place. It is good land, with cardamom trees already planted on it. There is an old ranch house there, with several rooms and a wrap-around porch, and there are a couple of workers' shacks. Probably there is enough space for four or five families to sleep indoors. But 63 families own this land, and are trying to work it now. When there is work to be done, the rest of the people sleep outside.

When we arrived there was only one family around. The mother was taking care of kids and cooking on an outdoor stove composed of two sheets of corrugated roofing spread across three overturned steel barrels. A pot stewed on a wood fire at one end of the platform, and a black kitten dozed in the ashes a few feet away. The mother meanwhile rolled out some tortilla dough on a stone table.

We took a walk through the land. The men showed me where they had, with the help of a local engineer, plotted out three roads and 63 lots for homes. From over the hill we heard the sound of a chainsaw. Someone was cutting much firewood. For now, this is the only way the community has of making an income, which they sorely need to pay for the cutting of more timber, with which they are making posts. There were piles of tamarind-wood posts, similar to mahogany, scattered around the plots.

These posts will be used next month, together with donated corrugated sheeting, to create shelters so that the families will have a place to sleep while they are planting. However, Cristobal told me that they need to be able to sleep indoors during the rainy season, to shelter themselves from mosquitoes that bring the dengue fever.

The community sold one harvest of cardamom in the year that they have owned the land, but they had to use the money to pay for pruning of the trees, as the former "patron" had left them unpruned. Cristobal told me that they did not plant corn last year, as they had nowhere to store it. They have been given good land with no way to develop it. Also, it is not sufficient for the whole Rio Negro community-especially with their big families. Mario, aged 45, has 10 children, from 4 to 24 in age.

We rode all the way back to Coban in the back of a pickup truck with solid railings built to hold onto. There were 16 or 17 men riding, with room for more. I saw some trucks that were probably carrying twice that number, with people literally hanging off the back of the truck. The trip was slightly grueling and dusty, but an intimate way to see the countryside.

At one point a man got on carrying a cardboard box. He opened it. The inside was insulated with newspaper, and then there was another box, and then another inside that. A cooler. In the innermost box was ice cream, and the man started scooping out cones of Neapolitan and selling them to the travelers.

In Coban I said goodbye to Mario and Cristobal and his family. Next day, I caught a Pullman Especial back to the capital.