Copyright

Introduction: “Tenemos que Tomarnos de las Manos”[1]

“Por el amor de Dios he podido hacer esto” states Luisa as she sat tall with elegant posture, a piercing glow in her eyes.[2] She spoke to me about her leadership in the community after her husband and brothers were murdered. She is on the board of a war widows’ organization, she is a health promoter and a birthing assistant, and she has raised her children alone since 1982.

Luisa is one of 60,000 women widowed during the Guatemalan government’s counterinsurgency campaign of the early 1980s. She is one of 10,000 women who have participated in collective efforts to expose the violence of the armed conflict that devastated their lives, families, and communities.^[3] Primarily Maya communities were affected and Maya women were widowed because the overwhelming majority of the counterinsurgency operations took place in the rural highlands where 70-90 percent of the population is Maya.

Since the end of this period, known as la violencia (1978-1983), Maya war-widows such as Luisa, from Guatemala’s rural highlands, have emerged as a major force in the exposure of human rights abuses and as advocates of Maya women’s rights.[4] They have taken the public stage as an organized voice. Groups such as the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (National Widows’ Coordinating Committee, CONAVIGUA) and the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Support Group, GAM) have had a visible impact on Guatemalan national life. These women have found that through collective action they are able to foster positive change for their children and for their communities. It remains a great irony that, as some of the women themselves observe, a brutal war can foment such an inspired struggle for human and women’s rights.

The organizations these women have formed and the projects they have carried out play a critical role in these women’s recovery from la violencia. Through an analysis of oral narratives that I collected in Guatemala from women whose husbands and children were killed during this period, I argue that the women’s organizing became a gender-conscious struggle that caused the women to become more politically engaged, to see themselves as powerful social and political actors advocating human rights and women’s rights, and to help them recover from the violence that destroyed their communities and killed their family members. Their mobilization is an important step towards gaining wider citizenship for women in Guatemala, particularly Maya women. Using the women’s stories, this thesis seeks to give voice to the trajectory of these women’s lives, including how la violencia affected them and how they have dealt with its effects. My emphasis is on the women’s processes of collective recovery and self-redefinition after la violencia. Through their organizing, the women have done everything they could, in spite of the limitations posed by danger and discrimination, to contest their oppression and demand accountability from the Guatemalan state.

Their collective efforts are creative forms of inscribing historical memory as well as strategies of survival as they attempt to piece their lives back together in the wake of la violencia. It is significant that women’s voices and actions not only recount the past, but that their refusal to accept collective oblivion also functions as an important means of individual and collective healing. The women’s collective struggles reveal and commemorate an impressive legacy of resistance and the important role that women have played in the refusal to let this past go uninscribed. Women’s voices, which have not historically been part of public discourse in Guatemala, have been at the forefront of the exposure and denunciation of these brutalities. If it were not for the efforts of civilians such as these women, this period of Guatemalan history would remain in silence.

In addition to the women’s organizations, two reports that document the atrocities during the entire length of the 36-year civil war have been released in light of the fact that the military and successive governments since this period have resisted exposing the extensive brutalities of la violencia. As a result of the 1996 peace accords, the Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (Historical Clarification Commission, CEH) and the Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory, REMHI) projects, which are discussed below, were formed and have played major roles in the recovery from the war.

Before la violencia the women lived in constant discrimination and subordination as “economically poor” “indigenous” “women” in a society in which those three “categories” were systematically oppressed by the state. They had experienced subtle forms of brutality; their children died from malnutrition and the hardships of abject poverty. Between 1978-1983, the violence of the exclusion from basic rights took on new dimensions. Among others, the regions of El Quiché, Baja Verapaz, and San Marcos were the focus of military brutality that included massacres, burned villages, rape, torture, kidnappings and disappearances, and prolonged repressive military presence. During this 5-year period CEH estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 children lost at least one parent; and that 20 percent of these lost both.[5] Disappearances and massacres became the norm. The women lived in constant fear. To a great extent, through the policy of forced recruitment commonly known as the civil patrols, men from predominantly Maya villages were forced to be the murderers in their own communities. In the wake of la violencia, the women saw their lives, families, and communities destroyed. They stood alone in the ruins ostracized as war-widows.

Gradually, as they persevered through illness and depression, they began to find ways to piece their lives back together. La violencia had changed everything; they were now heads of households and they had survived unimaginable brutality and horror. In their new roles how would they continue to survive?

Those that formed women’s organizations such as CONAVIGUA, began to develop new roles in their communities and forge new paths for Mayan women in Guatemala. They pushed the boundaries of political and social participation and discovered their power and potential in new arenas. As they look back, they see that they have changed and that they have played a major role in changing their communities as well. Many seem to like how they feel in their new roles. They are advocating for rights they know had been unjustly denied them and they are helping to recover and consolidate this history. The rebuilding process had turned out to be a positive transformation; they have made strides, such as advocating Maya women’s rights, that they do not intend to lose. They have built new lives out of the loss, destruction, and isolation exacerbated by the armed conflict.

Organization of the Thesis

Chapter One describes Guatemala’s historical development, with attention to the deeply embedded racism and oppression that became more accentuated during la violencia. The second part of the Chapter delineates the structural conditions of the women’s lives and details the specific histories of each of the regions the women are from: Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, the “Ixil Triangle,” and several regions in the department (state) of San Marcos. Chapter Two begins with an analysis of the strategies of terror used by the Guatemalan army to repress the predominantly Maya highland communities during la violencia. The army’s tactics had gender-specific characteristics. I illustrate how Maya women were treated. The second part of the Chapter describes the immediate effects of the counterinsurgency violence on the women in light of how they were debased. They constituted a new social category in their communities as war-widows: they suffered various unexplainable illnesses, they could not openly mourn nor have a burial for their disappeared family members, and they had dreams that seemed to try to explain the disappearances of their husbands. Chapter Three analyzes the relationship between memory and testimonial narratives. How the women remember la violencia and how they tell their stories of the period play important roles in the women’s survival strategies and healing processes. The women’s testimonial narratives have also been important contributions to the recovery of history. Chapter Four describes the work of the women’s organizations, their achievements and goals. I explore possible reasons why there has been less organizing in San Marcos. In light of these varying degrees of mobilization, the second part of the Chapter considers the women’s collective action within a feminist framework that helps explain the limitations and possible ramifications of the women’s organizing. In Chapter Five I conclude that the women who organized have reaped significant personal and communal benefits that have aided their recovery process and have begun to expand the parameters of women’s participation in Guatemalan society.

Illustration 1: Map of Guatemala

Method and Description of Fieldwork

I sought to gain a sense of how la violencia affected the women’s lives and how they have coped in the aftermath. Over a period of five weeks in June and July of 1998, I interviewed twenty women who were widowed during la violencia in the Guatemalan departments of San Marcos, Baja Verapaz, and El Quiché. These departments were primary targets of the military’s campaign of terror. They were, and still are, home to a majority of Maya people who, in spite of centuries of oppression, continue to speak Mayan languages and retain some cultural autonomy.

This thesis profiles the voices and experiences of fifteen of the twenty Maya women I interviewed.^[6] I give a glimpse into the women’s worlds using their own descriptions of experiences of a particular time and place. As a collector and translator of the women’s oral testimonies, I hope to bring others closer to a sense of these women’s perceptions and experiences, of their emergence as political and social actors. I do not seek to give a definitive representation of these women’s lived realities. I speak in solidarity with the women’s efforts to expose this history with the inclusion of their voices. Pedrina and Gomercinda were especially emphatic about the importance of their stories being heard by people in my country.

These women’s experiences exemplify a range of experiences of military aggression, and they demonstrate a diversity of forms and degrees of organizing. During the early 1980s period of intensified brutality, the military’s tactics of repression differed in each region and in each community. The types of violence suffered by each community affected the level of organizing in the villages. In some communities there has been no formal organizing by women. In others, widows have started organizations, with varying degrees of success. In the communities where women have organized, I found that the women have reached an understanding of what happened during la violencia, they feel empowered by their experiences of mobilization, they are more confident, they have learned that as women they should have equal rights to men and ladinos, they have been able to begin to come to terms with the past, and they are moving forward with their lives. In the communities where there has been no organizing or presence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) assisting in the recovery from the war, the women are much more reticent to talk to outsiders and, from what they told me, they also still live with great fear.

As I sat with the women in the informal settings of their kitchens, outside on the ground, or on a patio, we talked about their lives. Often I did not ask specific questions. There was a kind of fluidity to our conversations that may be too tightly bound by the words “testimonio” or “oral narrative.”

Our very different cultural, social, linguistic, and economic backgrounds certainly played a role in our conversations. I cannot claim to have transcended certain cultural boundaries that lie between us or to have reached some definitive understanding of their worlds. As an interpreter of the women’s recovery from la violencia, it is important to take on the challenge of trying to bridge our different realities and hear their stories. Spending time with them and hearing about the world through their descriptions is a rare and privileged opportunity. The transcribed testimonies presented throughout this study are the closest way to bring their stories to others. As Ricardo Falla, deeply faithful Guatemalan Jesuit priest and anthropologist, states: “testimonios are an annunciation of life...they proclaim that the power of death can and is overcome by the power of life.”^[7]

My taped conversations with the women took place either in their homes or at the offices of the widows’ associations. Often, we met more than once. In addition to the interviews, I spent time with the women in their homes and communities over a period of a few days. Upon my return to the University of Texas, I transcribed the interviews and translated the sections that appear in the thesis. With the exception of one, the women’s last names have been ommitted by their request.

Particularly in San Marcos, the women did not speak openly about their experiences of the atrocities. This was due in part to the fear instilled in them by the military. Daily life during la violencia was filled with uncertainty. The army appeared to arrive randomly and accused and punished individuals and communities of subversion. In some places, such as Chajul, the military installed a base, making the army a constant presence. Many people, fearing for their lives, remained silent and did not move freely in and beyond their villages. Understandably, today, many people are reluctant to tell their stories.

Due in part to the degree and kind of NGO presence as well as the type of violence perpetrated in each community, people responded to my presence in diverse ways. At one extreme are communities such as Bullaj that are particularly isolated and have had minimal contact with NGOs that have helped people understand the violence and recover from it. There, as Carmen asserts, the fear remains quite strong. “No queremos hablar con alguien de lejos como Uds. porque no queremos que entra otra vez el político, el problemas. No queremos morir.”[8] In Sacuchum Dolores, however, where GAM came to speak with the families of victims, Gomercinda offered: “Gracias a Ud. que nos está viniendo a visitar...para tomar nuestras necesidades...nuestras penas. Que siga adelante.”[9] And in Rabinal, where the NGO presence has been strong and active in helping people recover from the war, many women are comfortable sharing their stories.

In San Marcos, my visits with women were facilitated by Gregorio Macario, who is Mam Maya. Macario, longtime activist in the struggle for justice for the Maya, was a national investigator in San Marcos for the CEH (Historical Clarification Commission) and a founder of the REMHI (Recovery of Historical Memory).

My work in the municipal center of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz was aided by Joan Williams, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Psychology who is working with the village of Chajul’s women’s association profiled in this thesis. Upon Joan’s suggestion, I contacted the Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial (Work Group on Community Studies and Psychosocial Action, ECAP), an NGO that operates out of Guatemala City and works with the widow’s association based in Rabinal.^[10] ECAP’s director, Rolando Alecio, and I met and discussed ECAP’s work in Rabinal before I went to Baja Verapaz to meet with the war-widows.

Joan also facilitated my work with women in El Quiché. While in the village of Chajul I stayed with the family with whom Joan lived. The mother of the family, Ana, is one of the founders of Chajul’s women’s association.

Although not all of the women’s stories are in this thesis, the insights gained from all twenty of the interviews inform my findings and arguments. I profile the following Mam Maya women from San Marcos: Gudelia and Gomercinda of Sacuchum Dolores; Mercedes, Octavia, and María from San Miguel Ixtahuacán; and from three neighboring villages (Bullaj, 30 de septiembre and Monte Cristo) in a remote corner of San Marcos near the Chiapas, Mexico border, Carmen, María, and Máxima.

In Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, I interviewed three Maya Achí women, two of whom are profiled: Luisa and Pedrina. They are two of the 7-member directorate of the Asociación de Viudas, Viudos, y Huérfanos Ajmab in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz (Ajmab Men and Women Widows and Orphans Association), formed in 1994. Luisa is from Panacal, a neighboring village in the Rabinal municipality.

The five Maya Ixil women from Chajul, El Quiché are members of the Maya Ixil women’s organization, of the “New Dawn,” Asociación Maya Ixil AK’SAQB’EB’AL. The four women who met with me from the directorate, chose to speak with me as a group. The narrative I have from them, therefore, is a group discussion and centers primarily around their work in the Association instead of their individual lives. In addition to this interview, I have included Rosa’s story. She and I met separately; she is a member of the association, but is not on the directorate.

In San Marcos, I visited three different mountainous regions. For the most part there has been very little organizing among women in these communities. It is not clear why there has been much less mobilization by women in these villages; however, I suspect that it has to do with the type of violence that took place in these communities (ie. selective as opposed to massacres), scarce presence of NGOs, less access to other parts of the country, particularly Guatemala City, and diminished maintenance of Maya dress and language.

In Sacuchum Dolores, San Marcos some of the widows have wanted to organize and a couple of them traveled to Guatemala City on two occasions to attend GAM meetings. They have grown discouraged, however, and have not continued going to the GAM meetings or trying to organize the women in their village. In San Miguel Ixtahuacán, there is a women’s group that, in addition to other projects, teaches artisan production and crop diversification. In Bullaj, Montecristo, and 30 de septiembre, in a remote region near the San Marcos-Chiapas border, no women have attempted to organize.

Bullaj and the surrounding aldeas (villages), in the district of Sibinal, are located high in the mountains near the Chiapas border. It is the most remote of the communities I visited, much more isolated than either Rabinal or Chajul. It is a four-hour walk to transportation on the Mexican border or an 8-hour walk to Sibinal. Few NGOs have attempted to work there and none have succeeded, whereas in both Chajul and Rabinal, foreign missionaries and non-governmental organizations have been present for some time.

In Bullaj, Feliciano, who lives with his family in the neighboring village of San José Santa Rita, accompanied me to meet the women but did not sit with us while we spoke. While I was interviewing Francisca, not only had many persons gathered around, but two men took Feliciano aside and told him I must leave. In spite of Feliciano’s efforts to explain to them who I was and that I was not affiliated with the guerrillas, the government or anyone else, they told him that I must leave.

As we were returning to Feliciano’s village with his 12-year old son, he told me what the men had said. At first, I was not sure of the seriousness of the threat. It quickly became clear to me, as Feliciano retold how the conversation had unfolded with the men, that he was concerned. As Feliciano explained to me: “En Bullaj--en toda esta zona--la gente no quiere que nadie se mete con ellos. No quieren saber nada de lo que pasó ni ningún tipo de organización de afuera.”[11] The communities are isolated, uninformed, and live in fear. Based on their experience, most outsiders do put their lives in danger.

Feliciano, who had been a campesino organizer in the 1970s and had begun to organize campesinos again since the peace accords, had not struck me as one to become easily alarmed. Although we had only spent one day together, we had walked hours together during which time he spoke almost without pause about the history of his area and the current climate there. He warned me that the women would be very reserved with me and might not be willing to talk. He also told me his personal history of activism and he described the experience of being kidnapped and tortured for three days in 1982 by the local military commissioner, Marco.

Marco was also responsible for the death of Máxima’s husband. As Feliciano and I hiked out of the area the following morning, among the people we encountered and stopped to chat with en route was Marco himself, accompanied by his two teenage daughters. After we moved on, I asked who the man was and Feliciano explained to me how he must be cordial with Marco and how he has decided that in this case, it is best that justice be left in the hands of God.

In Guatemala City, I visited the national headquarters of CONAVIGUA. The spacious office, purchased for the organization by a Danish NGO, is only a few blocks from the National Palace.

I met twice with Carmen Cumez, Kaqchiquel Maya from the majority Maya Department of Chimaltenango and CONAVIGUA directorate member. Cumez’ narrative--as are the other women’s--is woven throughout the text. Cumez speaks about CONAVIGUA’s work as well as her own life story.

The following chapter helps to contextualize the women’s stories by giving an overview of Guatemala’s historical development. I demonstrate how the racism and oppression that lie at the core of Guatemalan history were accentuated during la violencia and have consistently informed the structural conditions of the women’s lives.

Chapter 1: Historical Background: “Somos Discriminadas Por Ser Mujer, Por Ser Pobre, Y Por Ser Indígena”[12]

Although the Guatemalan armed conflict lasted approximately four decades, this thesis focuses on the most brutal period of the conflict; la violencia (1978-1983), when the “Guatemalan State committed fully 82 percent of rural murders for the entire 36 years,” of which the vast majority were Maya victims. [13] In order to understand the role these women have played in Guatemalan history and to identify the structural conditions that help contextualize their testimonies, an overview of Guatemala’s historical development follows.

Guatemala, the size of Ohio, is home to roughly ten million persons, over half of whom are Maya Indians who speak twenty-two different languages. The Country has historically been divided over three major issues that are inextricably linked; land, labor and race/ethnicity.

Guatemala’s economic base is agricultural and it has the most unequal land distribution in Latin America.^[14] In the department of El Quiché, where over 90 percent of the population is Quiché-Maya, over 70 percent of arable land has historically been owned by 2 percent (primarily ladinos) of the population.[15] Large fincas in the coastal region that grow and export coffee, cotton, bananas and sugar cane are owned by a small number of ladinos and international companies whose primary labor source is Mayas.

This nation of only 42,000 square miles is sharply divided geographically and culturally. The rugged western highlands are home to more than half the Mayas; 90-99 percent of inhabitants of this region are Maya.^[16] Subsistence farming is crucial to their survival, both culturally and economically. The lowlands and coastal lands support the export-crop plantations. In part due to this extremely unequal distribution of natural resources, Guatemala has been identified as a country in which “violence is...institutionalized.”^[17]

The majority of Maya families cannot subsist on what they grow, many migrate seasonally to work for minimal wages on the coastal plantations. The roads and trails between the mountainous regions and the Pacific lowlands are steep and rugged. In spite of the inhospitable terrain, many Mayas, around 1900, began to make the seasonal trek to work on the ladino-owned coffee, sugar cane, and cotton plantations. The loss of land has steadily increased due in part to the encroachment of oil drilling, logging, mining, and hydroelectric development.[18] It is not uncommon now for entire families to migrate seasonally to the fincas. Not only is the bus trip (or hike) a long one, but the living and working conditions on the plantations are brutal. Malaria and pesticide poisoning threaten the workers’ health.

As Richard N. Adams and Carol A. Smith, among others have shown, land as well as one’s local community form integral parts of Maya ethnic identity. The seasonal migrations of family members and entire families disrupts local community life in the highlands. Due to the fact that economic, familial, and cultural survival are inextricably linked, the migrations have heightened the challenge of survival for the Maya.

Guatemala has a war torn history between ladinos and Mayas which has been identified as a “tradition of conquest.”[19] It began with the deaths of somewhere between seventy to ninety percent of the indigenous Mayas upon the arrival of the Spaniards in 1524.^[20] The kingdom of Guatemala, which included all of Central America and Chiapas, became independent of Spain in 1821. Since that time Guatemala’s dominant classes have sought to “de-Indianize” the country. As Smith notes, the state has tried to get the Maya to take on “ladino norms of language, dress, and sexual conduct--not in order to accept them as equals but to deal with them as part of the overall race-class-gender hierarchy rather than as a separate cultural system.”^[21] This centuries-long tension between resistance and dominance helps explain the brutal character of the period of la violencia.

As Adams states, the historical relationship between Mayas and ladinos can be understood as one of “mutual deep fear” in which “each of the parties deeply fears the potential violence and terror that can be practiced by the other.”^[22] The Guatemalan State has never been able to fully control the indigenous populations, nor has it been able to usurp Maya identities and incorporate them into a Guatemalan national identity. The Maya’s book of counsel, the Popol Wuj, for example, is the source of the Mayan world view, and although many Maya are Catholic or Evangelical, many are also firmly rooted in the belief system and vision of the Popol Wuj. However, the ladino-controlled state has never legitimated the Mayas as distinct ethnolinguistic groups in its laws and constitutions.[23]

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Pacific lowland region was developed as Guatemala’s agricultural export base and Mayas began to be forced into debt labor on the coastal plantations under President Justo Rufino Barrios. During this time United States interests expanded in Guatemala and by the 1930s, the United Fruit Company (UFC) had a virtual monopoly on Guatemala’s ports and railroads as well as substantial control of the country’s economy with banana production.[24] The UFC and other plantation owners profited from the Mayas who, by law and out of economic desperation, were the exploited labor that migrated to work the plantations.[25]

A brief period of relative progress for the Maya in Guatemalan history began in the early 1940s and has come to be called the “ten years of spring.” It began in 1944 with an indigenous revolt helped overthrow military dictator Jorge Ubico who had been in power since 1931. During the most democratic decade in Guatemalan history, educational and land reforms were instituted under President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1945-51) and President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951-54). Unions were organized and strengthened, wages increased significantly, social programs were instituted, and schools and hospitals were built. The Arbenz government established the agrarian reform program that began to give back some land to the Maya and ladino peasants.[26]

In addition to increased organization by unions and students during this more democratic period, ladina women’s mobilization was formalized. Elisa Martínez de Arévalo was honorary president of the Democratic Women’s Union and she was instrumental in helping literate (ie. ladina) women win suffrage in 1945. María Cristina Villanova, Arbenz’ wife, helped form the Guatemalan Women’s Alliance.[27]

This ten-year window, however, was soon to end. The United States was concerned about the Soviet Union’s ties with the Arbenz government. In addition, Arbenz’ land redistribution program had begun to affect U.S.-owned banana company holdings while reforms to improve the conditions of urban-workers and peasants threatened the Untied States’ cheap plantation labor.

In 1954, the Arbenz government’s steps toward a more democratic state abruptly ended when a CIA-sponsored military coup overthrew Arbenz and brought Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to power. Castillo Armas halted many of the social and economic reforms Arévalo and Arbenz had instituted. After Castillo Armas’ assassination in 1957, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a supporter of Castillo Armas, was elected president. Catholic Action (begun in 1948) promoted an Orthodox Catholicism in rural areas where there were no priests. This movement sought to establish social control and quell mobilization by the Maya and ladino peasants. Local community members were trained as catequistas (religious educators). A decade later, however, catequistas were increasingly perceived as revolutionary leaders (many were active in peasant organizing) and were targeted for harassment and disappearance. In addition to multiple military takeovers and fraudulent elections since 1954, Guatemala has known continuous unrest and violence toward its majority Maya population.

Like in many other Latin American countries in the early 1960s, Guatemalan revolutionary groups began to gain strength. In 1962, the revolutionary group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces, FAR) first emerged in the eastern department of Zacapa led by junior military officers who opposed Ydigoras. The FAR was the “military wing” of the Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT).[28] In 1963, Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia became president in a coup. In 1966, a civilian president was elected due to increasing pressure to have the appearance of a civilian government in order to receive United States Alliance for Progress funds. During Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro’s administration, Central America’s first death squad was formed, La Mano Blanca under the leadership of the “ultraconservative” Movimiento Liberación Nacionalista (MLN) founder, Mario Sandoval Alarcón.[29]

Guatemala’s 1960s revolutionary mobilization was not based in indigenous struggles. It was led by ladinos focused on class issues and did not mobilize a significant segment of the Maya. Beginning in the 1970s, however, Maya revolutionary thought became more organized. The Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) began to organize in 1972 and by the mid-1970s, The Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA), a primarily Maya group, mobilized.^[30] Efraín Bamaca Velásquez, now often referred to as Comandante Everardo [31], was instrumental in the mobilization of ORPA.

The February 1976 earthquake which devastated hundreds of rural communities, helped to further organize people in the rural areas. The popular “multiethnic” organization, Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC) formed in 1978 in the western highlands.[32] The CUC, of which Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú is a member, carried out a highly successful plantation strike that, according to Beatriz Manz, temporarily paralyzed the sugar cane harvest and won a 200 percent raise in the daily minimum wage.^[33]

This same year, 1978, General Fernando Romeo Lucas García came to power in fraudulent elections and initiated the most brutal period in Guatemalan history since the conquest. This period of heightened fear, known as la violencia, was a military counterinsurgency campaign that lasted through 1983. Although the mass killings by the Guatemalan State increased under President General José Efraín Ríos Montt, Lucas García began the “scorched earth” campaigns in the predominately Maya highland regions, destroying entire villages, such as Panzós, Alta Verapaz in 1978. As Kay Warren argues, “la violencia was a manifestation of unresolved tensions in Guatemalan racism” that have been at the “heart of the 470-year history of plantation economics.”^[34] Interpreting the brutality of this period is only possible by understanding how embedded racism is in the country. An armed conflict that was supposedly between the guerrilla forces and the Guatemalan military, was also a campaign to remind the Maya of their “conquered status” in Guatemalan society.[35] Not only did the military eradicate the guerrillas, but they also solidified their social and economic control of the Maya.

The intensified selective killings began in the late 1970s when Maya and ladino union members, peasants, students, and journalists organized strikes and demonstrations. Thousands were killed in the wake of workers’ strikes on fincas and in the U.S franchise Coca-Cola bottling plant. Between 1976-78, 168 cooperative and village leaders were killed in the department of Quiché alone.^[36] Among hundreds of other incidents of selective killings during the late 1970s and early 1980s, La Esperanza Cooperative leader, Rosa Aguayo, was killed by the military in 1976; Maya and ladino demonstrators occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City were burned alive there in January 1980 by the military. Prominent feminist activist and writer Alaíde Foppa was disappeared; Adelina Caal (Mamá Maquín), leader of the Panzós demonstration was killed; and Irma Flaquer, journalist and founder of the National Human Rights Commission was disappeared.[37] During this same period, the revolutionary forces took responsibility for a number of high profile killings, including the murder of a notorious landowner in El Quiché.

The guerrillas did not have the resources, nor did they constitute a large enough force to be able to protect the civilians. Given the fact that the army saw the civilians as the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam, it is plausible that, as Falla notes, the “rebels’ main contribution in defending the people was to convince them of the need to hide from the army to avoid being massacred.”^[38] The Army also feared that the guerrillas had caused the Maya to be “carried away by subversion.” [39] In defense of the counterinsurgency “cleansing” campaign, therefore, Defense Minister Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales states that the death and destruction waged on Maya communities were the “unfortunate but necessary consequences” of destroying the guerrillas.[40] Communities in El Quiché, Baja Verapaz, and San Marcos, among many others, were allegedly providing food and supplies to the guerrillas. The military, therefore, began by killing community leaders and eventually razed entire villages, burned crops, and carried out massacres in an attempt to dry up the guerrilla’s “sea”. As noted in State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection, “in battling insurgency, state forces used indiscriminate terror almost exclusively in isolated Maya peasant communities, directed at times at merely potential bases of rebel support.”[41] In support of Falla’s observation that the “counterinsurgency was...given specific characteristics by the racial and ethnic conflict between the ladino army and the indigenous communities,”^[42] Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer found that at least 81 percent of the victims (for which ethnicity is known) killed during this time were indigenous.[43] This systematic state violence that overwhelmingly attacked unarmed civilians calls attention to the fear and hatred embedded in Guatemalan society that the military has helped to perpetuate.[44]

Between 1978 and 1982, while General Romeo Lucas García was in power, community, religious, guerrilla, and other organizational leaders were murdered. This selective violence was particularly felt in the regions where the EGP and ORPA had mobilized, such as El Quiché and San Marcos respectively. Under Lucas García, corpses were often left lying by the road or in other highly visible places, instilling a sense of fear. Such selective murders sent a message to the people that popular organizing would not be tolerated. For example, Catholic Action workers who were teaching literacy in both Spanish and Maya languages in the rural areas were considered subversives and became military targets. In 1976, Maryknoll missionary William Woods was killed, as were a number of priests and church activists in El Quiché. These killings and his own near death led Bishop Juan Conadera Gerardi temporarily to close the churches in El Quiché in 1980.[45] Also in 1980, ORPA, EGP and the Armed Revolutionary Forces (FAR) came together and formed the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). The URNG, however, did not become cohesive until 1982.

In 1982, Lucas García, who had lost significant military support, was replaced by General Angel Aníbal Guevara, who was immediately overthrown by José Efraín Ríos Montt in a military coup. Although his rule lasted only eighteen months, he initiated and oversaw the darkest period in Guatemalan history. State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection, notes that “security forces under Ríos Montt were responsible for 43 percent of the state killings...committed during the entire 36-year armed conflict.”[46] On the other hand, killings committed by the guerrilla insurgency forces during the 36-year armed conflict, reached an estimated 3 percent.[47]

By the time Ríos Montt was in power, the URNG was a united opposition force that fought the Guatemalan military for the next fourteen years and ultimately negotiated an end to the war with the Government in 1996. The URNG also became an official political party in 1998.

The generalized violence which included the most extensive village massacres and village burnings occurred during 1982 and 1983 under Ríos Montt. Approximately 440 villages were destroyed during this time.^[48] The military and the government sought to “destroy all forms of economic autonomy in the Indian communities...annihilate the guerrilla organizations...and consolidate military control over the population.”^[49] The majority of the rural highland communities were not involved in the insurgency groups, yet they were the vast majority killed. As Handy notes, their deaths were not a result of a civil war, they were the result of “a “government counter-insurgency program that attacked the very basis of Guatemalan peasant life.”^[50]

In 1982 the military, under Ríos Montt, began to form the Civil Patrols (Patrullas de autodefensa civil, PACs): forced recruitment of highland Maya men to patrol their own communities, and, according to the military, to “participate in the eradication of the guerrilla movement.” The civil patrols helped to minimize the possibility that these men would join the guerrillas.^[51] An Army of 40,000 grew to 1 million when the army came in to villages and homes putting a gun to people’s heads so that they would join.^[52] David Stoll suggests that the implementation of the PACs also served to extend the responsibility for the killing; Maya village members were sometimes ordered to kill their fellow villagers.[53] This military strategy contributed to community fragmentation and took advantage of existing local conflicts. The boundaries between murderer and victim became blurred as villagers were partly to blame for the death and destruction.[54] Military Commissioners, such as Marco, (see Introduction) were also local men who served as a form of localized Army control.[55]

During this period the military created “model villages” to which Mayas were forcefully displaced. Through a program known as “frijoles y fusiles” (guns and beans), Mayas were given food if they relocated to these military-controlled villages. Due to the widespread killings of Maya men, by 1983, 20 percent of the families in Chimaltenango were headed by widows. In Chuabaj Grande, a town of 240 families, fifteen of the twenty-five families that survived were headed by widows.^[56]

Defense Minister General Oscar Humberto Mejías Víctores took power in another military coup in August 1983 that lasted until January 1986. Although the violence began to decrease, “disinformation” about the state violence and “war-propaganda” were pervasive. In a March 1985 broadcast, Mejías Víctores stated: “to take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared in a subversive act.”[57] At the same time the military elaborated on the need to end the economic poverty of the majority of Guatemalans and that the counterinsurgency had been necessary for the “pacification” of the nation.[58] In 1986 the military allowed a civilian, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, to assume the presidency and improve Guatemala’s international image. Although state killings continued during these years, there was some loosening of the repressive grip.[59] A slight political opening contributed to the increased visibility and emergence of popular organizations, which, among other tasks, worked to expose what had happened during la violencia. However, as Mejías Víctores’ statement makes clear, organizations that expose the human rights abuses and search for disappeared loved ones was a dangerous activity.

Nonetheless, in 1984, GAM emerged, headed by a ladina widow, Nineth Montenegro de García, whose activist husband had been killed by the military. In 1988, two more important human rights groups emerged, both primarily Maya: CONAVIGUA, the largest widow’s and women’s association in the country, and the Consejo de Comunidades Etnicas Runujel Junam por el Derecho de los Marginados y Oprimidos (Council of Ethnic Communities ‘We are all Equal’ for the Rights of the Marginalized and Oppressed, CERJ) which was established in the highlands to help communities resist the forced recruitment of men into the civil patrols.[60] In spite of the slight political opening, however, during a one-week period in 1990, kidnapping attempts were made against fifteen CONAVIGUA members.

In 1991, the URNG, President Jorge Serrano Elías’ government and the military, met to consider peace negotiations. The two women who attended were Rosalina Tuyuc, who is Kaqchiquel Maya and founder of CONAVIGUA, and María Teresa Aguilar. They pressed for the support of refugees and women widowed by the war.

The following year Rigoberta Menchú, Quiché Maya and narrator of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her exposure of human rights abuses in Guatemala. Within several years two more organizations of Maya widows formed; the Asociación Maya Ixil AK’SAQB’EB’AL (Maya Ixil Women’s Association of the New Dawn) in Chajul, El Quiché and the Asociación de Viudas, Viudos y Huérfanos Ajmab (Ajmab Women and Men Widow’s and Orphan’s Association) in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz.

In 1993, President Serrano Elías, who lacked sufficient support from Congress, decided to take dictatorial power and soon thereafter, having lost much support, stepped down. Ramiro de León Carpio finished Elías’ term. In 1995, during Carpio’s presidency (1993-1996), the government, the URNG, and the military met again unsuccessfully to negotiate for peace. Within a year, however, on December 29, 1996, an agreement was reached. The Peace Accord was signed by the Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen Government (1996-present), the military, and the URNG (National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unit).

There are clauses in the Accords that for the first time in Guatemala’s history recognize autonomous indigenous identities and rights. Whether they will be implemented as law remains to be seen. The Accords gave amnesty to those responsible for the repression.[61] The Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (Historical Clarification Commission, CEH) was also formed as part of the peace agreement. The three-member directorate, Otilia Lux de Coti, prominent Mayan educator in Guatemala City, Christian Tomuschat, German United Nations Ombudsman and Guatemalan Lawyer Edgar Balsells headed a United Nations sponsored project that resulted in the collection of 7,200 (collective and individual) oral testimonies from survivors.

Although the majority of killings and disappearances occurred between 1978-1983, throughout the 36-year armed conflict (1960-1996), an estimated 80,000 women were widowed; 200,000 persons were killed and disappeared; 100,000-200,000 children orphaned; one million internally displaced and over 200,000 forced to flee to Mexico and the United States.^[62]. Due to the fact that the peace agreement gave amnesty to those responsible for the repression and killings and the CEH was not allowed to give names of those suspected of extra-judicial killings, critics of the Law of Reconciliation state that without proper justice, Guatemala cannot heal from its past. Although the peace accord has ended the outright war, amnesty for aggressors and the allowance of continued impunity suggests that significant steps toward a more just society will only come slowly. As Schirmer notes, “even if the Accords are implemented and verified by constitutional and legislative reform, they do not sufficiently restructure the State to rid Guatemala of military hegemony.”[63]

Two high profile human rights activists and truth seekers were assassinated in the spring of 1998. Bishop Juan Conadera Gerardi was killed two days after he presented the 1,400-page REMHI report, which included close to 7,000 testimonies of survivors.^[64] Less than two weeks after Gerardi’s death, the Mayor of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Luis Yat Zapeta was assassinated at his home.^[65] Zapeta, a Mayan himself, had also been a supporter of human rights and was active with the Maya people of the primarily Maya department of El Quiché. GAM stated in response to Zapeta’s death, that “this assassination seeks to generate a climate of insecurity and breakdown, avoiding a fulfillment of the peace accords and above all the construction of democracy and free social participation.”^[66] It is commonly believed, but not yet proven, that the army intelligence branch “G-2” is responsible for the continued extra-judicial killings. As Schirmer notes, the “centralization of command within army intelligence” since the Accords has not meant the “diminishing of the powerful autonomy of La Dos” [G-2], but rather the perfecting of its “clandestine functioning…for the purposes of improving the…control and elimination of Opponents of the State.”[67]

The CEH report, released on February 25, 1999, attributes 93 percent of the killings to the military and 3 percent to the guerrillas. Prior to the report’s release, in the summer of 1998, a consortium of Maya organizations requested that the CEH report specifically recognize the massive killings, disappearances, and kidnappings of Mayas during the armed conflict as “Ethnocide and Genocide” and the rape of thousands of Maya women by the army as a specific “weapon of war.” They also requested an end to impunity and the creation of an International Penal Court to try those responsible.[68]

The CEH’s nine-volume 3,400-page report, which was presented to the Guatemalan government in a public ceremony at Guatemala City’s national theater on February 25, 1999, also includes State Department reports and Guatemalan military documents. Although both the U.S. government and the Guatemalan military refused to turn over many materials, some documents were successfully declassified.[69] Although it was not allowed to name those responsible for the killing, the report developed a list of names of those disappeared and killed.[70] Reportedly, since the release of the CEH document, members of FAMDEGUA, the organization of families of the detained and disappeared, as well as members of EAFG, the team of forensic anthropologists who are exhuming mass graves left from the violence, have been harassed by soldiers.

In addition to the fact that Amnesty International felt that Guatemalan president Arzú should have received the CEH report directly at the National Theater presentation rather than have his Secretaria de la Paz (Official of the Peace), Raquel Zelaya, receive the report on stage, the International Human Rights organization recommended that the government pay reparations to the victims, begin an investigation of those suspected of complicity, and implement an exhumation program.[71] The CEH report came out in Spanish and has only been translated into one Mayan language.[72]

As the recent killings and death threats demonstrate and given the fact that the “counterinsurgency structures are incorporated into the very heart of the State,” violence is a way of life for many, racism is embedded in Guatemalan society, and nothing close to democracy has ever existed, peace is at best precarious and challenging impunity will not come easily.[73] What seems to be underway, however, is the very important step of unburying and forming a collective memory of this brutal past. This national history must not be censured. And thousands of civilians have worked to get the stories told. As Iliana Waleska Pastor, head of the Inter-American Development Bank’s Guatemala office suggests, “(i)t is important to remember that the signing of the peace does not signify the end of Guatemala’s problems, but the beginning of the process of solving these problems.”^[74]

Thousands are now in the process of rebuilding their lives. As Lynn Stephen notes, the process of “rebuilding from the devastating effects of war will take longer and require more resources than did surviving during the war itself.”^[75] In addition to petitioning for the exhumation of mass graves, how people remember this past and giving oral testimonies of what they experienced have been two important aspects of the healing process.

Although women have been largely absent from documented Guatemalan history, due in part to the lack of documentation on women’s activism, their invisibility should not be mistaken for a lack of participation. Since la violencia, women’s participation as political actors has increased dramatically. CONAVIGUA founder, Rosalina Tuyuc is now a member of congress and Maya women have been active in unprecedented numbers exploring ways in which to unbury the past and rebuild their lives and communities.[76]

Structural Conditions of Maya Women’s Lives in the Highlands

Maya women’s daily lives in the rural highlands are labor intensive, leaving little time for activities outside the household demands. They have less access to resources such as food, health care and education, than any other sector of Guatemalan society. Most girls never complete primary school. They generally get married between the ages of 15-18 and move in with their husband’s family until he inherits a plot of his own. Women can also inherit land, although it is less common.

Women’s primary tasks are domestic, such as making meals, caring for the children, and washing clothes. As the Women’s International Resource Exchange states, “eighty percent of Guatemalan households lack drinking water, electricity and other basic utilities. Water [and] firewood...for cooking must be brought from elsewhere, and laundry is done at the river" or in wash basins.[77] Many women also weave for personal use or to sell to other community members, and some women make artisan products that they sell at the market in larger towns. Often women work in the fields as well, taking the products to sell at the market. They usually either walk a number of miles to the bus bound to the market or they walk all the way to the market. The bus ride may take several hours. Women carry the produce, and sometimes also a child, on their backs. Additional children often accompany them.

Most households own or use a small plot of land on which they grow maize, the staple of the diet. Some plots may contain small crops of beans or vegetables as well. Many women also do some of the planting and harvesting on small owned or leased plots. Due to the fact that the plots generally do not sustain families, members of most families have traveled seasonally for years to the coastal plantations to pick cotton, sugar cane, or coffee. The wages earned help supplement a family income that provides a subsistence lifestyle. When women do seasonal work on the coastal plantations, however, they generally earn half a man’s wage and sometimes they must carry their child on their back as they work.[78]

The loss of family members due to la violencia has caused increased migration to the lowlands. This strains the family unit and the ability to get tasks of daily survival accomplished in the highlands. Children are even less likely to be able to attend school if the family needs their labor. Many also get sick from diseases such as malaria in the lowlands, and some die. This increased inability to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy further challenges the resilience of the Maya people. Maya cultural survival has traditionally been directly connected to the ability to maintain distinctive communities and a life rooted in the land. As Smith asserts, "they have experienced a direct assault on their way of life as a whole, an assault that has done more to break down local autonomy and corporate community boundaries than earlier forms of repression."[79]

As GAM asserts, the majority of highland Mayas do not have access to the services of infrastructure, health, and education.[80] Guatemala has the highest illiteracy rate in Latin America for women and the highest mortality rate for mothers in Central America. The average number of children per mother is 5.8. And, according to Black, 80 percent of children suffer from malnutrition and 50 percent of children die before the age of five.[81] As a result of widowhood from la violencia, however, the women’s living conditions worsened.

The women became even more economically desperate and they suffered deep emotional scars. Alcoholism (previously rare for Maya women), child abuse, illness, and depression became much more prevalent. The formation and continued presence of the women’s groups have provided a space in which the women can come together and give each other support, realize their shared needs and concerns, and garner the motivation to pursue a collective struggle for their rights and an end to impunity. In addition, the women’s groups provided a kind of solace particularly in the absence of an opportunity to mourn their dead and bring closure to the violence they survived. The kinds of violence the women experienced and witnessed (both directly and indirectly) meant that they could not give their loved ones a proper burial either because they did not know where the bodies were or if they were even dead or because it was too dangerous to show their connection to the dead. They could not speak openly about the past and they could not mourn openly in their villages.

Regional Histories: San Marcos, Ixil Triangle, & Baja Verapaz

The regions where the women I interviewed live are culturally, geographically, and historically distinct. La violencia was felt differently in each region.

San Marcos

In the department of San Marcos, I visited women in three different areas, all of which are mountainous and remote. Although I discuss the specific types of violence in each community, the region as a whole has some similarities. As REMHI and CEH investigator, Gregorio Macario states,

en toda la zona de Tajumulco [a volcano] muchos se exiliaron a México y muchos no han vuelto. Toda la zona de San Marcos ha sido muy aislada--las organizaciones no sabían de la violencia que se vivió allí y casi no han llegado a explicarles qué pasó. Pero a la vez fue una de las zonas de mayor y primera organización al nivel de la guerrilla. Por eso también fue una de las zonas más afectadas por la violencia.[82]

Carmen, Francisca and Máxima are from the region of Sibinal in the far western part of the department. Their cluster of villages, 30 de septiembre, Bullaj and Montecristo, are a four-hour walk from the border with Chiapas, Mexico, and an 8-hour walk from Sibinal--the municipal center. The Suchiate River runs through the valley of this mountainous region. The closest transportation is in Sibinal or Unión Juarez, Chiapas.

To the north of the villages is Volcán Tacaná, rising to 4092 meters, and to the southeast is Volcán Tajumulco, at 4210 meters. On the steep slopes of this rugged country people grow coffee and subsistence amounts of corn. Mangoes and bananas are available seasonally. Due to the steep grade of the terrain, erosion is a problem. The continual production of coffee has depleted the nutrients in the soil, reducing productivity.

Popular organizing in the San Marcos region dates from 1952. Local residents benefited from the land redistribution program under Jacobo Arbenz’ government. Beginning in 1966, the Guatemalan Worker’s Party (PGT) became active in the region, followed by the FAR (Armed Revolutionary Forces). By 1972, many persons from these two parties became part of ORPA (Organization of the People in Arms).

By 1980, ORPA occupied the slopes and foothills of Volcán Tajumulco, including the village of Sacuchum Dolores, home to Gudelia and Gomercinda. ORPA operated its radio station, La Voz Popular, from the foothills of Volcán Tajumulco. The broadcasts functioned as a revolutionary voice, transmitting ORPA’s messages in Spanish, Quiché, and Mam--the language of the Maya in this region.

The killings and burnings were most extensive in this region during 1980-1984. Bullaj, Montecristo, 30 de septiembre, and María Cecilia experienced the violence through the presence of the military, the civil patrols and ORPA in 1982. According to Feliciano, the army first arrived in María Cecilia and dropped some bombs. Houses were burned and people died. In the other villages, many of the houses were looted and burned, animals stolen and crops burned. People fled further into the mountains and north to Mexico.

The army was apparently responsible for the majority of the destruction, although ORPA had some responsibility as well. The civil patrol recruits were ordered to carry out some of the kidnappings and killings. Men who were suspected community leaders or guerrilla sympathizers were kidnapped. Carmen, Francisca, and Máxima’s husbands were kidnapped while en route to Unión Juarez or Sibinal. As Feliciano recalls: “Mataban a gente en el camino. Mucha gente murió.”[83] People returned to the villages when they thought the “bulla se había pasado.”[84] But, he continues, “daba miedo y pedimos a Dios que nos amparara el camino. La gente se enfermaba mucho. Después de unos tres meses nos sentimos más tranquilos, pero tardó la bulla.”[85] Carmen, Francisca, and Máxima have never found the bodies of their husbands or come to know what exactly occurred. This type of violence, described in Chapter 2, has been labeled “forced disappearance”^[86] and “selective violence.”^[87]

In a slightly less remote part of the department of San Marcos live Gudelia and Gomercinda in the village of Sacuchum Dolores. In this mountainous region south of Volcán Tajumulco, they grow mostly corn. Many villagers trek seasonally to pick coffee on the coastal plantations.

The generalized violence in Sacuchum Dolores began on January 3, 1981 at 6 a.m., 3,000 military troops arrived in the village. They forced all the villagers to go to the auxiliatura (central village office). As Gudelia states, “dijeron que se iba toda la gente para allá y como nosotros no pensábamos que eran sus pensamientos, ¿verdad? Y allí empezaron a escoger a la gente.”[88] They lined up women, children, and men and selected 52 individuals who were taken by hooded men into the kitchen area where they were interrogated. By 6 p.m., the remaining villagers were sent home. As Gudelia remembers, the soldiers told them, “ya nadie va a tener luz ni nadie va a estar caminando. ¡Váyanse!”[89]

The unlucky 52, including two teenage girls, were taken to another town where they were tortured as a way to try to get information about the “guerrillas” and to break them down psychologically. Some died at this point and the girls were repeatedly raped. Clubs stuffed in their vaginas, the girls died. Gudelia waited for her husband. Two days passed and she had her son go to the auxiliatura and inquire. Her son found no one, and crying, he reported to his mother: “En un costal que habían bastantes sombreros y súeteres y gorros.”[90] Gudelia then decided to go herself. “Fui...que él me da un informe, que yo me iba para San Pedro a solicitar a mi esposo...y ellos me dijeron que no porque es el gobierno que está mandando. Decía que esperemos, que esperemos nada más.”^[91]

Within the next few days, the bodies were found in two mass graves on the hillside in front of Gudelia’s house; the hillside where she collects firewood. The bodies were “todos torturados, amarrados con un lazo, torturados con un palo, otros macheteados, otros quemados.”.[92] Gudelia identified her husband and her fifteen-year-old brother-in-law. They took the bodies to the morgue in San Marcos. Soon after, Gudelia brought him back and reburied him in the Sacuchum cemetery. And then, she tells me, “Mis hijos ya no tenían padre.”[93]

Octavia, María, and Mercedes are from the area around the municipal center of San Miguel Ixtahuacán in northern San Marcos. San Miguel is in one of many valley communities in mountainous northern San Marcos. The women’s husbands, suspected community leaders and catequistas,^[94] in addition to eight others, were kidnapped by the G-2 (military intelligence unit) one-by-one early in the morning on April 10, 1983. The women have never come to know what happened to them and where their bodies were left. As in the case of the other San Marcos communities, the army’s goal was to destroy local community leadership, eradicate ORPA and its supporters, and leave the survivors steeped in fear. This terror has been an effective means of dividing the community and keeping people from organizing.

As Macario notes, the kidnappings in San Miguel had the following character: “Fue un secuestro particular de los líderes catequistas y de la cooperativa. Fueron desaparecidos.”[95] His description of how the community was affected follows:

Ha quedado un ambiente de falta de resolución--todo ha quedado como suspendido porque la gente no entiende bien lo que pasó. Nunca pudieron recuperar los cuerpos ni la historia de a donde llevaron a los secuestrados. Los hijos de los que fueron secuestrados han quedado en la pasividad--desorientados--sin ninguna orientación. Viven con un temor que casi ni se reconoce como fuera de lo normal ahora. Viven con una incertidumbre y un silencio lo no resuelto del pasado. No han reparado o recuperado este pasado, esta historia. No han organizado. No han conquistado nuevos espacios. No han creado una nueva política con intereses comunitarios sino con intereses personales o individuales. [96]

This lack of closure does exist to a certain extent in all the areas hardest hit by the counterinsurgency campaign; however, as Macario describes, it seems to be worse in San Marcos. This may be due in part to the relative remoteness of the region combined with the fact that there has not been a disarmament of the military commissioners. Many, such as Commissioner Marco (see Introduction), in the Sibinal region of San Marcos, remain powerful. There is evidence that in some rural areas, the “web of commissioners and [civil] patrols…has merely been shifted from an officially recognized ‘grouping’ to an unofficially recognized one.”[97] Where armed control persists, so does repression; fear is close to the surface. In addition to these factors, other possible reasons for the varying degrees of closure in the communities are discussed in Chapter 2.

Ixil Triangle, El Quiché

The Ixil Triangle is high in the Cuchumatanes mountains in northern El Quiché. Some of the most extensive and brutal generalized army violence was carried out in the Ixil region where 90 percent of the 60,000 people are Maya-Ixiles.[98] At least 100 of the 440 villages that were razed by the army under Ríos Montt were in this area.[99] Chajul, one of the Triangle’s three municipal centers, is home to Rosa and the directors of the Asociación Maya Ixil AK’SAQB’EB’AL (Maya Ixil Women’s Association ‘The New Dawn’).

The EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) began to develop a support base in the region in the early 1970s and in 1976, the military established a base in the area.^[100] From this point on, the Ixil Triangle was in the midst of constant conflict between the vying forces of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In 1980, the Army instituted “Operación Ixil” which was designed to bring the region under its control. Not only would they attack any suspicious guerrilla activity, but they would control all human services, such as health clinics, as well as transportation and communication.^[101] As was Rabinal, Chajul was targeted for the military’s “Operación Ceniza” under Lucas García and “Victoria 82” under Ríos Montt. These heightened repressive tactics sought to effectively wipe out all insurgent activity and submerge the civilian population in a state of terror. Psychological, as well as physical, social, and economic warfare was waged against the Maya-majority Ixil Triangle.

According to Rosa,

(l)os soldados vino a secuestrar a mi papá aquí en la casa...porque él lo dieron permiso a sus hijos a vivir con los guerrilleros. Tres días estaba afuera--después lo dejaron salir. En el ‘80 ya los soldados empiezan a secuestrar y muchas personas ya ni duermen bien. Y muchos salieron a los huacales a dormir...y las mujeres ya no hablan...y cuando entra la tarde ya no hay ninguna persona caminando en la calle...(p)ero los patrulleros caminando por las calles...(m)uchas personas los mataron...los colgaron, un lazo en el pescuezo y los tiran abajo y allí se mueren--y hasta mujeres matan y patojos--nada más echan la culpa--pero es inocente la gente pero piensa ¿por qué?^[102]

Her husband left to go fight with the guerrillas when she was pregnant. She was threatened by the military during his absence.

Mandaron con una señora a avisarme: ‘Ud. va a ser listo porque ellos van a quemar su casa de su papá...(v)as a estar aquí, no vas a salir.’ Le avisé a mi papá y dije que los soldados van a venir a llevarme a mí. Si ya llegó mi día para morirme pues, pero mi papá estaba preocupado. Mi hermana estaba cuidando a mi hijo....(s)i Dios va a permitir de vivir a mi hijo...Pero no vino, total, están pasando los patrulleros en la noche, pero no llegó.[103]

Another villager came to tell Rosa the patrols were going to kidnap her and again she spent the night terrified, but no one came. After going to talk to the villager who had given her the news he said the patrols had given him, she went to the military base. The “Capitán” told her: “No vamos a matar a Ud. Todavía no ha llegado su día.”[104]

Rabinal, Baja Verapaz

Like Rosa, Luisa and Pedrina came close to losing their lives. Like Rosa, they also witnessed extensive atrocities in their villages. Luisa and Pedrina are members of the Coordinadora de Viudas, Viudos, Huérfanos Desplazados Maya Achí (Maya Achí Coordinator of Women and Men Widows’ and Displaced Orphans’) in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz.

Rabinal is located in the western part of the department of Baja Verapaz in a valley below the Chuacús mountains which reach up to 2,500 meters. As in the San Marcos communities and in Chajul, much of the soil has become minimally productive and most plots are on sloped and uneven ground. Deforestation in Rabinal has become a concern, as people rely on firewood to cook their meals. The burnings carried out by the Army in the early 1980s have exacerbated this problem.

Rabinal is home to many Maya Achí who make up 82 percent of the population.^[105] It is estimated that between 15-20 percent of the Rabinal population was killed by the military in the early 1980s.^[106] A primarily rural population, the Maya Achí generally have small plots of land on which they grow corn, and to a lesser extent, beans and other produce. As in El Quiché and San Marcos, for years Rabinal inhabitants have made the seasonal trek to work on the coffee, sugar cane and cotton plantations, as they are unable to survive on what their land produces.

Popular organizing in Rabinal also had some of its roots in the Local Agrarian Committees that were formed as part of Arbenz’ agrarian reform program of 1952. The FAR (Armed Revolutionary Forces) was active in Rabinal in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) became a mobilizing force. As Rolando Alecio states, however, “Rabinal was not a conflict zone and...the guerrilla organizations were not strong in the area...(C)ommunity organizations, not guerrilla insurgency, were the real targets.”^[107]

In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were numerous development programs and cooperatives, some of which had been promoted by foreign missionaries. According to Alecio, there were eighteen strong cofradías (religious brotherhoods) in Rabinal, as well. Many rural communities as well as the urban trade-union movement became more organized quickly after the extensive destruction wrought by the 1976 earthquake. Thousands lost their homes and were without food and water. The Guatemalan government was completely unprepared to deal with the level of need that resulted from the disaster. Rural organizations mobilized rapidly to try to help their communities. The timing was oddly positive. Due to extensive destruction in rural areas, local groups organized and were later more prepared to take on struggles such as the resistance to the Chixoy Dam that was going to take land away from many people. The CUC (Committee for Peasant Unity) also helped in the struggle against the dam’s construction. As Alecio states, “(o)pposition to the dam was seen as a pro-guerrilla movement and Río Negro and the municipality of Rabinal suffered severe repression at the hands of the Army and the Army-directed civil defense patrols.”^[108] Although they put up a strong defense, the dam was built.

Between 1980-1983, the Army and its civil patrols committed at least 19 massacres in the Rabinal region, with an estimated number of dead reaching more than 2,000.^[109] The absurdity of it all was beyond words. As Pedrina states: “lo que pasó es una cosa muy rara, que nunca hemos visto durante toda la vida.” In a community of roughly 23,000, the majority of whom are Maya Achí, it is estimated that between 4,000-5,000 were killed during the early 1980s in the Rabinal area and 1,000 women were widowed.^[110] In addition to the fact that an exceptionally high number of women were killed during this time in Rabinal [111], women were routinely harassed, raped, and tortured.^[112]

Luisa’s husband and three brothers were killed in a massacre of residents of numerous villages, including her village of Panacal, which is a three-hour walk from Rabinal, the municipality. Luisa is one of 48 women who were widowed by the September 20, 1981 massacre that took the lives of approximately 200 residents. She describes a series of massacres that took place in her area.

Cuando fueron a matar a las personas nosotros sufrimos mucho...Primero pasaron el veinte de septiembre y después cuando llegar el cuatro de diciembre del año ‘81. El tres de diciembre vinieron aquí al pueblo--llamaron a todas las aldeas, los patrulleros, los comisionados, todas las mujeres y los niños los trajeron hasta aquí en el pueblo. Los quieren matar a todos pero nos dan libertad. Dijeron que era paz--que ya no hay muerte y son mentiras y en la tarde mataron a una mujer allí en Siruaco y a dos personas las mataron el 3 de diciembre y al segundo día todas las aldeas de Panacal se recogía en sus casas--los amarraron y los golpearon con palo y con garrota y con machete y con cuchillo llevaron. Nos quedamos acá porque si salimos nos morimos. Sólo a los hombres los llevaron el 4 de diciembre del ‘81. Tercera masacre. Cuatro masacre fue el 2 de enero. Llegaron el ejército a preguntar a los hombres si están en las casas y ya no están. Dicen a nosotros que los llevaron pero nosotros no sabemos a donde se fueron. Después de ese masacre siguen los patrulleros. Llegan a las casas, vigilar las casas, vigilar si hay gente allí. Pero nosotros no tenemos gente porque nuestros maridos y mis hermanos se fueron.[113]

As was the case in the San Marcos communities and in Chajul, neighbors and even family members sometimes became each other’s victims and victimizers through the use of the civil patrols.^[114] As the GAM report states, “(e)n Rabinal, por lo general, las masacres fueron ejecutadas por civiles, incorporados a las PAC, en combinación con unidades compuestas por elementos uniformados del ejército.”^[115]

In Rabinal, Chajul, Sacuchum Dolores, Bullaj, Monte Cristo, and San Miguel Ixtahuacán, the destruction that occurred in the early 1980s forced everyone into silence and a state of terror. As the GAM report states, the

matanzas colectivas e indiscriminadas, además del exterminio físico de la población, perseguirían la destrucción de aspectos más profundos y vitales para la comunidad, como la estructura comunitaria, los elementos de unidad étnica, los valores culturales, la identidad comunitaria, así como la dignidad humana y con ella el proyecto vital, personal y colectivo.^[116]

Given that these communities already lived at a level of subsistence with severely limited access to such basic human rights as health care and education, it is not difficult to imagine the devastating effects of the counterinsurgency violence on the Maya. A “tradition of conquest” was perpetuated during la violencia in which the army used gender-specific strategies to terrorize the women. The following chapter explores how, as war-widows, the women faced a new set of challenges, including exacerbated economic harship and social isolation.

Chapter 2: Immediate Effects of La Violencia on the Women: “Fue Como una Plaga que Vino”^[117]

The social, cultural, and economic consequences for the Maya communities were augmented by the level of fear in which people lived during the early 1980s. The military’s counterinsurgency campaign instilled an environment of fear that paralyzed and penetrated Maya communities throughout the highlands. In addition to an analysis of the strategies of terror used by the army, this chapter evaluates the immediate effects of la violencia on the women, including their new status as war-widows, the illnesses they acquired, the denial of an opportunity to give their deceased a proper burial, and the dreams they had.

The army’s strategies of terrorizing people were an effective means of silencing, repressing, and controlling Maya communities. The implementation of civil patrols, the seemingly random and arbitrary accusation of guerrilla involvement, and the army’s attacks on individuals and communities, accounted for the major ways in which the state imposed its racist counterinsurgency campaign. In State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection, the authors note that the “security forces often went beyond simply killing their victims.” They committed “overkill:”

additional indignities on someone who is in the process of being killed or who is already dead…[such as] burning or mutilating a corpse, decapitating a corpse after death, shooting bullets into a body already killed by stabbing, [and] raping a victim before killing her.[118]

The result was a “convivencia pseudo-normal”^[119] in which people lived in constant fear. As the grave marker of the Río Negro massacre in Rabinal reads: “el ejército y miembros de las PAC de Xococ asesinaron de manera salvaje 70 mujeres y 107 niños y niñas.”[120] The wording emphasizes that they were not just killed, but killed in a savage manner. The photograph of the reburial site (see Illustration 3) depicts children with their heads cut off and placed in trees.

The testimonies in the REMHI report, those in Falla’s book, and my interviews all describe the military’s horrifying ways of instilling fear in the Maya communities. They burned and tortured men, women, and children. They hung corpses from trees. They cut off people’s heads and threw them in the river. They raped women. They ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women. They locked up children only to kill them later. They dumped disfigured bodies in churches and schools. Each community has the same story and a different story of state violence.

The military sought to gain social and psychological control of the rural indigenous populations. The state, which continues to fear the Maya due to the level of their cultural resistance to assimilation, is insecure about the fact that it has not been able to fully control the Maya. [121] Terrorizing communities was a way to curb support of the guerrillas who the military thought were mobilizing the rural areas and getting food and shelter from them as well. It was a way to remind the indigenous people of their inferior status, to repress them further in an effort to bring the Maya under complete economic and social control.

The women were violated in ways that specifically targeted them as female, both sexually and culturally. As Lykes notes, “(u)nder conditions of...state-sponsored violence, violence against women takes on additional dimensions of horror.”^[122] They were often threatened, kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the military. This seems in part due to the fact that, as Ana Isabel García and Enrique Gomariz state, “(l)a violencia sexual suele ser parte de un secuestro o una tortura, incluso en los casos donde el objetivo de la represión era el varón.”[123]

Falla notes that after women were captured and raped by the soldiers, they were sometimes forced to cook and clean for them.^[124] This gender-specific violence served to not only perpetuate the fear, but it was also another way to humiliate and break the women down psychologically and physically. By invading homes, women’s bodies, and women’s work, the military demonstrated that its control was complete; they dominated the most intimate spaces of the women’s worlds.

Luisa describes an example of one of the ways in which the private sphere was no longer a safe place during la violencia. “Dormimos en las casas por parte de los matadores...siempre llegue [llegan] los matadores en la noche a violar las mujeres y por eso juntamos en un lugar...mucho sufrimiento pasamos.”^[125] In addition, out of fear, the women kept the children silent throughout the night, by putting their hands over their mouths.

Public and private spaces had been conflated; the army invaded the very core of the private realm. All people and places were subject to violence. As Mercedes’ account illustrates, this was a highly effective means of instilling fear. She recounts what began as a normal early Sunday morning:

Al principio fue como que--nadie lo sabía--estaba esperando una nena. Yo me levanté y cambiaba el bebé. Un año tenía. Yo me levanté y lo cambié. Después me dijo: “Dame el nene aquí.” Yo le dí el nene. “Veníte, mi hijo,” dijo “acostemos nosotros y que se vaya tu mamá.” Dijo él así, mi esposo. Yo, como antes no había agua potable sino que en el pozo. Entonces agarré dos tinajas y me fui al pozo. Entonces llené las tinajas y traje una en la cabeza y el otro lo traía así. Y que estaba bien de madrugada.

But then she heard something strange and she stopped to listen:

Entonces que se oye--entonces yo me paré--uno iba caminando para la casa y otro iba para arriba. Es un camino grande para otra aldea. Entonces me paré a escuchar y oí voz de un hombre. Entonces yo me quedé viendo--que si iban detrás de mí. Entonces yo me fui algo ligero porque fue un día domingo. Una mi cuñada--iba al mercado a vender--entonces ella estaba preparando--estaba en el corredor cuando yo llegué allí arriba.

She thought the men were visitors, so she said to her sister-in-law:

váyanse a preparar allá adentro…entonces yo le dije a mi cuñada, “entráte adentro que ya vienen unas gentes.” Se entró adentro y yo llegué al corredor y bajé las tinajas cuando entran y esos no eran visitantes. Eran--como se le llaman--del ejército--nada de “con permiso”--entraron no más. Como la cocina estaba así en frente y el cuarto así. Entonces--eran tres--se fuese uno atrás de la casa--y el otro entró así en medio de la cocina y el cuarto. Ese uno entró de una vez adentro y el otro se quedó en el corredor. Ese que se quedó en el corredor entró adentro en la cocina y tomó un vaso de café así en la mesa. Y empezó a tomar café y el otro agarró la tinaja de agua y empezó a tomar agua. Y yo iba a entrar adentro como yo no sabía que era el objeto de ellos. Yo me iba a entrar, pero: “No se mueve de allí Señora.” Entonces yo no me moví. También mi cuñada iba a entrar en el cuarto, pero: “Deténgase allí.” Entonces nosotros dos nos quedamos.

After the soldiers ordered Mercedes and her sister-in-law not to move, not to enter the bedroom, they demanded of the two women:

¿Dónde está el hombre? Entonces él oyó esa voz y levantó la cabeza para ver. Entró ese Señor y le preguntó: “¿Cómo se llama?” Entonces él explicó su nombre y “levántese,” le dijo. Se levantó y se vistió y ya iba a agarrar la camisa para ponerse la camisa, pero: “está bien así.” Entonces lo sacó para afuera y lo embrocó. Entonces: “Levántate,” le dijo. Se levantó. “Y te vas a ir con nosotros para el pueblo,” le dijeron a él. Él dijo, “bueno.” Iba a venir sin zapatos, sin camisa, sólo con playera. Una playera roja. Y entonces, me dijo él: “traéme las chancletas,” porque mi cuñada rápido se fijó. Mi hermano no puede caminar así sin zapatos, le dijo mi cuñada. Entonces: “¡tráigame sus zapatos!” Pensaba que sólo para un mandado era. Y de repente ya no aparecieron.

And her husband was gone.

En ese momento nosotros no nos dimos cuenta que si ellos iban a volver o ya no iban a regresar. Cuando vino mi cuñado--como había ido a cuidar a los animales allí en otra casita--entonces explicamos qué había sucedido. Y nos dimos cuenta después que también habían llevado a otros dos y mi esposo tres y aquí cinco con el esposo de Octavia y otro Señor y otros dos--y todos se fueron al mismo instante.

After talking with other women friends in town, Mercedes realized that the soldiers had taken more than just her husband.

Se llevaron a 8 personas en el mismo momento. Y no me recuerdo si a los tres años más o menos se trajeron otros tres. Por total serían 11 personas aquí en San Miguel. Y en otro lugar llevaron a unos profesores. Y así estuvo. Y fue grande ese dolor. Toda la gente decía que yo de mi esposo lo sabía, pero la verdad que yo no lo sabía. Desesperada estaba--sentía algo triste él antes de que lo llevaron. ¿Qué tengo yo, me decía? Pero como uno no es sabio. Si no supiera uno qué es lo que va a suceder, pero como nada, pues, saber decía yo. Pero él siempre sentía algo y ¿por qué será? Yo soñaba después. A veces él estaba en la cama. Y pensábamos que iba a regresar. Mi suegro me decía que hay que tener confianza. Pero ¡¿qué sí?! Durante 16 años. Nada. A los 10 años dejé de esperarlo. Ahora ya no.^[126]

Not only did the military completely invade the most intimate realms of the private sphere—the bedroom and the kitchen—but the unprecedented, seemingly indiscriminate and arbitrary use of violence, the attack on community leaders, and the existence of the civil patrols, helped create environments void of trust and safety. The military’s justification was that it was necessary to eradicate the guerrilla threat. Anyone who lost a family member, therefore, was instantly suspected of guerrilla involvement. As Warren notes, the arbitrariness of power meant that

(t)here was no way of knowing if one might become a target of surveillance...and what might be considered evidence of subversive or collaborationist intentions...or whether a trip to the fields or the market would result in being caught in someone’s sweep.^[127]

Although the vast majority of people killed were not connected with the guerrillas, the military’s discourse of guerrilla eradication meant that people never knew the truth.

The fear produced by the inability to understand what had truly occurred provoked the disintegration of communities. Victims and victimizers have to coexist due to the fact that many of the civil patrols and military commissioners continued to live in their villages after the violence. As Pedrina states, “nos encontramos con ellos en la calle y allí nos quedan viendo, nos maltratan y un montón de cosas…nos dicen.”[128] Moreover, the members of the civil patrols were often themselves both victims and victimizers.

It was no longer safe to associate with someone who had lost loved ones; they may well be affiliated with the guerrillas. If such an affiliation resulted in death, people were forced to deny their connection with each other. This fostered silence. It also denied people the possibility of mourning their lost loved ones. Not only was it often impossible to locate the bodies, but in the cases where people knew where their loved ones had been buried, they could not publicly acknowledge their connection. People could not talk with each other openly about the loss, nor could they have a proper burial. In addition, people often lied about the causes for the absence of family members.

Macario, in his report to the CEH, argues that the communities suffered the psychological effects of fear, isolation, sadness, and silence. In the case of the communities in San Marcos, he found that people have not organized themselves again for fear of reprisal and that people have suffered from guilt for the loss of loved ones. Lykes’ observation augments Macario’s discussion of the climate in many communities that suffered la violencia.

Terror’s destructive forces affect community and culture, not only internal individual well-being...terror not only destroys the present and forces a rethinking of the past, but it deeply threatens the future through its destructive effects on the next generation’s capacity to affirm aspects of their cultural life.^[129]

Gudelia and Rosa talked about how the military ordered everyone to remain in their homes after sundown. There was the possibility of kidnapping, or being taken to the nearest military base by the civil patrols if one were caught in the street after dark. Rosa recalled how “ya cuando entra la tarde ya no hay ninguna persona caminando en la calle--nada más cerrado en la casa.”^[130]

Even if the military had not given explicit orders to stay in one’s home, many did so anyway out of fear. Carmen P. recalls that after her husband was disappeared, she stayed in her house much of the time, “por mucho miedo.”[131] As Luisa notes, this added to the difficulty of feeding one’s family. Due to the fact that the “gentes matadoras” (“killers”) were keeping guard in the area, the women were scared to go out and collect firewood. It was therefore sometimes impossible to build a fire and make tortillas. The consequences of not being able to make tortillas is significant, given that maize makes up 70 percent of the diet. In addition to the fact that food was scarce, the women’s abilities to feed their children were further hampered by the fear of being kidnapped if they went to the fields or the town to locate scarce food.

Some of the women’s husbands, in fact, were kidnapped and disappeared as they walked to town or to the fields. Carmen P’s husband, for example, was disappeared while on a trip to San Marcos. Carmen, Rosa, Luisa and Pedrina discuss how often women would gather in one home or in a common location with their children and spend the nights together. Not only did this serve to provide increased emotional security, but it may well have also decreased the likelihood of their being harassed and/or raped by the military or the civil patrols, when their husbands were no longer present.

Carmen stated that she and the other women in her community slept together “bajo el monte.”^[132] Pedrina, as did Rosa, recalled how some women left their homes and went to live in the mountains and others “se quedaron en las casas de las otras y al amanecer se iban a sus casas.”^[133]

In addition to the women’s limited mobility and their efforts to protect themselves and their children by sleeping together and keeping their children silent, they also had to refrain from talking about the violence that had occurred in their communities. As Gudelia recalls, the guerrillas, the “gente del monte,” “decían que no contaban nada porque si ellos contaban también ellos se iban a morir.” “Entonces,” she states, “la gente tenía ese temor. No contaban nada. No decían nada.”^[134]

Luisa and Pedrina also recalled their silence. According to Luisa, “sabemos donde están los restos pero...no dicen porque tienen miedo. A los tres años poquito poquito dicen pero a la mera hora no dicen nada nada. No dicen si murió los demás hombres, que pasó, nada...(c)allados quedaron.”^[135] Luisa and Pedrina could not tell their children what had really happened to their fathers until after “la bulla se había pasado.^[136]

Gudelia remembered that she could not let people know that she was from Sacuchum Dolores when she went to work on the cotton plantation with her children. She states:

Pero no contábamos nosotros allá porque...como oyeron lo que pasó aquí...y...los finqueros decían que todos eran guerrilleros. Entonces yo cuando llegaba allá y me preguntaban de dónde era yo decía que era de otra aldea porque si no me daban trabajo.^[137]

As a result of the violence, therefore, the hardship of the women’s lives gained dimensions of strife heretofore unimaginable. The fabric of their family and community life had been undermined. As Carmen C. asserts, Maya women have historically been triply marginalized. “(S)omos discriminadas...en el trabajo, en todo...por ser mujer, por ser pobre, y por ser indígena.”[138] These conditions only worsened as a result of the traumatic events of la violencia. As Green argues, the “women have never recovered from their experiences of fear and repression; they continue to live in a chronic state of emotional, physical, and social trauma.”^[139]

Status as War-Widows

The women suddenly had to find the means to feed their families as single mothers. This challenge was complemented by another, equally challenging predicament: they were not supported in the traditional, socially-sanctioned way that communities support widows. Many of the women did not receive economic and emotional help from their villages and their extended families. Due to the complex, seemingly arbitrary, and confusing nature of the violence, many villagers were too afraid to reach out to these war-widows. These women, therefore, fell outside the socially-legitimated “category” of “widow” in the traditional sense, a culturally and historically sanctioned role. Suddenly, these women occupied a new space in their communities, one that marginalized them in yet another dimension, and one which had no previous definition in their communities. The women’s mere existence as war-widows stigmatized them. They were (and continue to be) a constant reminder of la violencia. The challenge to forgetting due to the women’s presence in the community, contributed to the ways in which they were perceived as a threat to both the army and community members, such as the civil patrols. In addition, the military’s fabricated truths and the local military commissioner’s role in helping to perpetuate the lack of reliable information and sense of fear, helped establish the stigma that was attached to being a war-widow.[140] For all of these reasons, the women were ostracized by their communities.

Under normal circumstances, the widow’s families would step in to help them survive economically until they remarried and if their deceased husbands had land, they could inherit it. After la violencia, however, so many men had been killed that families could not make up for the loss of labor so readily. In addition to the fact that there were not enough men to work the fields and to travel to the coastal plantations, the stigma attached to the status of being a war-widow caused some families to distance themselves from the women.^[141]

Because the military did not account for the deaths or disappearances of the men who had been killed, the deceased were not registered dead in the town records. Widows, therefore, not only had difficulty remarrying, but also obtaining the titles to their husbands’ plots of land.[142] Many of the men’s bodies, in fact, have not been found. The majority of the mass graves that dot the countryside have not been exhumed, although over the past couple of years more graves are being dug up.

In many cases, therefore, the villagers have been denied the opportunity to know for certain that their loved ones are dead and to mourn and bury them. Not only has this hampered the women’s ability to obtain land or remarry in order to lessen their economic strife, but it has also caused great emotional distress. The widows and the communities have not been able to bring closure to the deaths of their loved ones and fulfill traditional burial rites. The result is that the war-widows have

neither...been able to take on the traditional status of widowhood or move on to a new status which has meaning...[They] have suffered a double dose of liminality, not knowing whether they are wives or widows.[143]

This new form of womanhood has not only resulted in a set of post-violencia effects that are specific to their position as war-widows, but it has also contributed to the women’s need to find survival strategies that fit their new identity, such as the widows’ organizations. This support system, which has also meant the emergence into new areas of public life, as discussed in Chapter 4, has had very positive effects for the women. Particularly for the women who did not remarry, the war-widow’s survivorship, as Zur and I both found, “increased their self-esteem.” They are the heads of households and they are more involved in public life. [144] The war-widows who did not remarry, in fact, “implicitly contest and challenge the male construction of the female role.”[145] In their new and expanded roles, these war-widows have come together around their common predicament. This has given them strength, new vigor, and has helped them become a social and political force. Being single heads of household has given many of the women the increased freedom to engage in politicized activities outside the home.[146]

However, the organizing did not begin immediately following the violence. In the aftermath of the massacres, women and children particularly suffered.^[147] They lacked adequate food for their families, they no longer had the income generated by their deceased spouse, they lived in fear of more violence, and they lived ostracized as widows of supposed subversives. Their roles multiplied and they were socially isolated.

As Zur and I both found, the women talked about the loss of their husbands especially in terms of the loss of their economic contribution to the household.^[148] Many women recalled their suffering in terms of a shortage of food and the challenge of supporting their families alone. According to Luisa, for example,

(c)uando estaba mi marido, vivimos bien...porque..ellos [él]...se van [va] a trabajar, a comprar maíz…(d)espués quedamos...a buscar pisto para comida de los patojos...(q)uedamos nosotros sufriendo con las familias...(n)o dan trabajo a las mujeres. Una mujer no aguanta el trabajo como los hombres.^[149]

In addition to their domestic tasks, such as cooking, washing, collecting firewood, and looking out for the children, the women had to work the land to produce the corn that they would later grind.[150] As María stated, "he hecho trabajo de hombre y mujer,"[151] and as Gudelia recalled: “yo me cargaba la carga de un hombre.”[152] Among the ways in which the women supplemented the family income in the absence of their husbands was wage labor on the coastal plantations for a few months at a time. Octavia washed other families’ clothes, Luisa grew onions and sold them at the market, and Pedrina and Mercedes worked in Guatemala City as domestic servants. Rosa began working for a small wage in the library that the Chajul women’s organization is developing. Notably, some of the women already did wage labor before their husbands died in addition to their domestic tasks. Maria, for example, was a bread maker, which she came to rely on even more heavily as a war-widow.

In most cases, the women’s children contributed significantly to sustaining the family, whether through doing the necessary tasks of daily living or by earning a wage outside the home. Many of the women, however, have also made concerted efforts to keep their children in school even though it has compromised the children’s immediate contribution to the household economy and it is difficult to afford notebooks and clothing. For the most part, children go to school somewhat regularly in addition to working.[153] The ages and marital status of the women’s children also had a significant impact on the kinds of contributions their children made to the household economy. In the case of Gudelia, for example, immediately following the disappearance of her husband, she traveled with her young children to a coastal cotton plantation and they picked cotton. Now, however, her sons, married and in their early 20s, have managed to buy their mother a motorized corn grinder. For a small fee, women get their corn ground at her home and Gudelia does not need to do additional labor outside the home.

Especially given their increased work load, it is all the more striking that women chose to organize. Those that found organizing worth the extra burden of the triple jornada (triple workday) are often also the ones that did not remarry. The women’s organizations and the women’s positive self-image, however, became more apparent after some years had passed.

Exacerbation of Common Illnesses Attributed to La Violencia

In addition to the economic strain, the emotional trauma, and the overwork, there were other very negative immediate effects of the violence. Immediately following the deaths or disappearances of their husbands, many of the women suffered from illnesses, such as alcoholism, depression, susto, and dolor de corazón (heartache) as a result of the violence. In reference to the Maya widows she worked with, Green states that “the invisible violence of fear and terror becomes visible in the suffering and sicknesses of the body, mind, and spirit of the widows.”^[154]

The women’s “bodies have become repositories of the painful experiences they have been unable to articulate as a result not only of being silenced but also because of the non-narratability of atrocious experiences.”^[155] The pain is both psychological and physical, housed in the body and expressed by the body because language and custom give no adequate way to express verbally the pain the women experienced. Instead, the various types of pain and illness must be read as “expressions of the rupture of the intricate and immediate connections between the body, mind, and spirit.”^[156]

The women’s forced private suffering revealed itself through the illnesses they spoke of having as a result of the death or disappearance of their husbands. The women’s bodies became the receptacles of memory as well as the visible signs of the past, making it impossible to forget what had happened..[157]

As Green notes, their suffering cannot be categorized as simply “manifestations of clinical syndromes or culture-bound constructions of reality is to dehistoricize and dehumanize the lived experiences of the women.”^[158] The body is both the site of pain, the tool of expression, the source of reproduction, and the contested site (meeting place) of both the public and private worlds that have been invaded by la violencia. Their bodies and minds were, on the one hand, the only place of privacy and refuge for them during and after the violence, and at the same time their bodies were a site and source of pain.

Due to rape, overwork, and lack of food, their bodies would not let them forget what had happened. As Green notes, the

women have come to represent the horror they have witnessed through their bodies, and as such, pain and suffering expressed through illness become a powerful communicative force. Their voices may be silenced by fear and terror, but the body itself has become the site of social and political memory.^[159]

Words and descriptions that can adequately explain or do justice to the horror witnessed and the feelings and experiences that resulted from the violence are hard to find. As noted by Cienfuegos and Monelli, (t)he more intense the horror suffered, the greater the difficulty in expressing it with words.”^[160] These women, however, over time, found ways to express their suffering and survivorship. The means they chose, not surprisingly, directly corresponded to their lived experiences at the time. Common illnesses such as susto, nervios and dolor de corazón, became even more prevalent among the war-widows.

Many of the women spoke of having susto for extended periods after their husbands were killed or disappeared. The literal translation in English is scare, fright or shock. This is an apt illustration of what occurs: the victim goes into a state of shock and her pulse becomes quite slow. Most of the women spoke of having suffered from susto after the kidnapping, death, or disappearance of their husbands.

According to Elba Marina Villatoro, “el agente causal puede ser cualquier elemento externo que induzca a un choque emocional,”^[161] such as being very upset by something, having an unexpected or frightening experience, or an encounter with a “persona poca grata.”^[162] Traditionally, it has also been caused by a bad surprise, envy, or “evil eye” (mal de ojo). Although these causes speak to the lived experiences of the women, susto in the cases of these war-widows, is “situational” in that it must not be divorced from the specific context of la violencia that caused their susto.^[163]

The symptoms the women described in conjunction with having susto correlate with the symptoms identified by Villatoro. They include the loss of appetite, lack of interest in one’s surroundings, including work, community and family, difficulty sleeping, having strange dreams, and not producing breast milk.^[164] Zur and I both found that the women spoke of sadness, loss of appetite, and stomach pain, in addition to other ailments, after witnessing the violence and losing their husbands.[165] Octavia, for example, spoke of the fear she felt, how she stopped eating, and how she suffered from susto.

The following description by María, illustrates the connection between susto, lack of milk production and despair as a result of the her husband’s kidnapping. “Me puse a llorar. Ya no me acordaba yo de nada, ya ni comer...me puse delgada y yo lo estaba mamando a mi chiquitillo...ni chichi yo tenía, ni leche, nada...sin hacer nada yo. Sólo llorando estaba yo.”^[166] She then spoke of another of her sons who died at the age of eight soon thereafter. After taking him to hospitals in Guatemala City (an 8-10 hour bus ride) and in Quetzaltenango (a three-hour bus ride), she states that it was determined that he had died of susto. “Tal vez se asustó cuando se fue su papá,” she affirms.[167]

Mercedes states that after her husband was taken she was sick with susto for five years. “[M]ucho trabajo y la tristeza,”[168] she recalled. During this time her young son washed her clothes and cooked.

Susto was also described to me in Guatemala as an illness of low self-esteem, which can be understood in terms of levels of resistance. Some people may be particularly susceptible at certain moments. When a weak spirit or soul comes into contact with a stronger one, the weaker becomes submissive and gives in to the stronger one. The person with the weaker spirit becomes nervous and gets susto.

The following is Macario’s description of the treatment for susto. His mother, who is a curandera in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, San Marcos, applies this cure for those suffering susto:

La medicina que la curandera le da le eleva, por prestarle atención, le anima su espíritu. Es una curación que dura 15 días. El susto se cura con otro susto. La impresión se cura con otra impresión. La curandera mastica la cura y la escupe sobre los lugares donde las venas están mas cerca de la superficie de la piel--como en las canillas, la cara, la nuca--los lugares del pulso para asustar/impresionar al espíritu de nuevo. Se hace tres veces durante los 15 días. Durante ese tiempo la persona sólo tiene que comer cosas calientes, no puede tocar cosas frías. Así no puede lavar y todos tienen que estar ayudándola durante ese tiempo como no puede trabajar. La enferma no sabe cuando la curandera va a llegar a escupir. Ella está masticando y preparando la cura en la estufa y de repente va y escupa sobre la persona cuando no se da cuenta.[169]

Although the treatment is not as elaborate and the illness is not considered as fatal as susto, Carmen and Luisa affirm that some women also suffered from nervios. Zur states that this symptom describes “behaviours ranging from epileptic type fits to more subtle sensations like the throat becoming thirsty...[for] liquor.”^[170] Carmen, for example, as she spoke of her life after her husband was kidnapped, said that she suffered from “enfermedad de los nervios.”^[171] She felt that “me agarraba todo”[172] and people gave her susto. Luisa also spoke of suffering from nervousness after her husband was killed. In her state of sadness, in which she had no desire to do anything, no appetite, and she wanted to die, she bought some pills that were supposed to help her nerves. She found, however, that the best remedy was natural, made from, among other things, Santo Domingo leaf. She stated, “yo tomaba esos, así hacen las otras mujeres también.”^[173]

These descriptions not only highlight some of the ways in which the women’s suffering manifested itself, but also the methods the women found to express what they had suffered. As mentioned above and as Zur also notes, “(v)ictims could not find thought categories for their experience; since neither culture nor experience provides structures for formulating massive acts of aggression, survivors could not articulate their experiences to themselves.”^[174]

Women have also suffered from alcoholism as a result of the violence. Zur observed that since la violencia, “(r)egular drinking to escape grief and other suffering is fairly common among women.”^[175] Alcoholism was uncommon among Maya women previous to the violence. Although none of the women whom I interviewed admitted to drinking, one of the women had been drinking prior to each of the three times I visited her.

No Proper Burial; No Grieving Process

Linked to the illnesses that the women suffered as a result of the violence and the economic distress, was the lack of any way to grieve the loss of their loved ones and come to closure about the past. All of these factors were manifestations of the kind of immediate impact the violence had on the women’s lives. Most women have never been able to find the corpse of their deceased, let alone observe a proper burial. As Zur notes, “death in the abstract can never be as convincing as the body of dead kin.”[176] Being denied this “ritual” makes it “difficult for the bereaved to bring out emotions and concretize them when there is no corpse over which to articulate and give form to their feelings.”^[177]

According to the Maya, survivors are not only needed to help the dead soul move into the afterlife, but they also need to assure the dead that they are not forgotten.[178] The death ritual involves washing the dead person’s clothes and body, and redressing them, thereby obeying a cleansing and purification process before the funeral procession. Sometimes the heads are wrapped and valued possessions may be placed in the grave.[179]

But after la violencia, the survivors were not able to obey the death ritual. They also had no physical place to go to, such as a grave marker, to take candles or flowers on occasions such as Día de Todos Santos (All Saints Day). Without these socially sanctioned opportunities to honor and mourn their dead loved ones, survivors are “unable to forget...left in a liminal state of living death, haunting the living and threatening society with further death.”^[180]

As Pedrina affirms, the exhumations and reburials of three mass graves in Rabinal have helped to give the war-widows an open grieving process and resolution to the deaths of their husbands. “A través de las exhumaciones ellos se sienten mejor porque ellos ya saben que sus esposos se están yendo a un cementerio legal. Y ellos pueden ir a visitar, pueden ir a rezar.”[181]

Dreams

One of the ways in which some women seemed to deal with not knowing what happened to their husbands and not having a legitimate mourning process, was through dreams. Carmen recalled that during the first couple of years after her husband was disappeared, she waited for him, and he often “presented himself” in her dreams, as she describes it.[182] Octavia had vivid dreams before and after her husband was kidnapped in which he appeared to her and they spoke. In retrospect, she felt that she was receiving important messages about her husband’s destiny and his predicament. About a week before her husband was kidnapped, Octavia had the following dream early one morning after her husband had left to do his civil patrol shift.

(E)ntró en la puerta--como su suéter era rojo--me fui a recostar con los pies en mi cama--pero yo sentir un peso que se fue encima de mis pies así--y yo vine por jalar mis pies pero no podía, no podía. Y él estaba allí contra la pared. Y digo: “Corrá, corrá, levantáte, es tarde!” Pero él ya había salido. Ya después, me levanté, a ver si había llegado pero pues estaba en el pueblo. Que solo ocho días faltaban que se fuera. Yo lo vi--pero como que era persona que se recostó en mis pies. Un hombre. Y yo dije tal vez era su espíritu--con su suéter y todo. Y después le dije a él. Y él me dice, “saber que estás pensando.” “Ten cuidado,” le dije, “peor que te vas a morir.” Pero él no lo pasó a creer. Que a los ocho días cuando se lo llevaron. Era su destino, dije yo. Porque dice mucha gente--si está metido en algún político--mejor váyanse--pero no tengo nada--pero mira Jesús que se crucificó por nuestras culpas, por nuestros pecados. Peor si yo soy pecador. Si me vienen a traer, voy a cumplir. Yo soñé que él ya empezaba a preparar. Yo creí que su espíritu que iba a preparar. Porque me dijo en el sueño que esos hombres no lo habían ganado a él. Se fue pues, preparado. Pensé tal vez su espíritu está limpio y todo. Eso es lo que yo siento.[183]

Octavia’s dream not only illustrates how the dream was preparing her for what was to occur, but also reflects the mental process she was going through after he had been kidnapped and disappeared. She was trying to come to terms with the loss, find consolation, and understand what had happened and why. According to Colby’s research in the Ixil region, “(d)reams are the medium...to receive instructions and messages from the supernatural power...(i)f danger threatens a family, various members may dream about the possible causes.”^[184]

After the soldiers took Octavia’s husband she said that she frequently dreamed that he had returned. In one dream he came into the room and they had a conversation.

Yo miraba que su ropa venía en puro remendadillo, puro roto tenía sus pantalones...’¿Que ha habido?’ Dice. Y yo: ‘sí y ¿a dónde fuiste?’ ‘Ahhh...verán que esos hombres que me iban a ganar a mi, no me ganaron.’ ‘Y Georgino, ¿cómo es su tío y el otro señor?’ ‘No’ dice, ‘él si ya se quedó todavía.’ Entonces yo dije que ya va a venir tal vez. O tal vez ese día lo mataron.[185]

As seems common in human experience, the dead appear in dreams as if they were a ghost or a spirit. This experience, however, also perfectly describes the status of the “disappeared” in the lives and minds of the people and communities (the war-widows, for example) who live with the unexplained absence of their family members. No one knows where they are or if they are alive or dead. Zur notes that

(t)he armed forces literally expelled people from the world of the living but, as death was not expelled, the spirits cannot be disposed of--they form a new sort of patrol, becoming another terrifying presence, persecuting the living just like the local jefes.^[186]

Particularly in the first couple of years after the women lost their husbands, it appears that dreams served an especially important role as a survival strategy. The dreams, perhaps on a more subconscious level, help the women to come to terms with the unresolved, unexplained violent events that transformed their lives. The dreams, therefore, offer a kind of solace. They give explanations, perhaps even answers where there are none, they bring some resolution where there is none.

In sum, the women had no substantial support network or source of consolation during la violencia. The army’s counterinsurgency campaign intended to make the women’s ability to survive as difficult as possible and it was successful. But the war-widows would not be conquered. In spite of illnesses, economic hardship and social isolation, the women survived. And, not only did they survive, but they found powerful and effective means of survival and recovery that ultimately had a significant impact on their own lives, on their communties, and on Guatemala’s official history. Little did the military know that it had actually helped, rather than hindrered, Maya women’s emergence into Guatemalan political life.

The following chapter illustrates how memory and the oral testimony work together and provide the women with an important recovery strategy that ultimately helps place the women’s voices in official history.

[1] “We Must Join Hands.” Pedrina’s transcribed oral narrative. See Appendix D.

[2] “It is because of God’s love that I have been able to do this.”

^[3]These numbers are estimates based on the numbers given to me by the members of the organizations I interviewed during my fieldwork. See also Jennifer Schirmer, “The Seeking of Truth and the Gendering of Consciousness: The CoMadres of El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA Widows of Guatemala,” inVIVA: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America, eds., Sarah A. Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood (London: Routledge Press, 1993); and Cathy Blacklock states that it is more likely that CONAVIGUA mobilizes somewhere around 2,000 women even though they claim a membership of 10,000. “Contesting Democratization in Guatemala: Women’s Political Organizations and Human Rights” (Ph.D. diss., Carleton University, 1996), 342.

[4] The period between 1978-1983 is not always identified so specifically, however.

[5] See Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak and Herbert F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection (New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999), 87.

^[6] Eleven of the narratives are from individual interviews with the women. The other four are from a group interview with members of the women’s association in Chajul.

^[7] Ricardo Falla, Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala 1975-1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 164.

[8] “We don’t want to talk with someone from far away like you all because we don’t want politics to get in the way again, the problems. We don’t want to die.” Author’s note: Most of the women are not native Spanish speakers. I have chosen to leave the women’s oral narratives in their original grammatical form.

[9] “Thanks to you who is here visiting us…to consider our needs…our losses. May you go forward.”

^[10] ECAP seeks to help community members identify the problems they face as a result of the violence and find their own solutions. Among ECAP’s work is an ongoing mental health project with the Maya widow’s association in Rabinal. Through group activities, they help survivors gain a context in which to understand what occurred during la violencia and how it affected them. The NGO plans to train community health and education promoters to facilitate self-help groups and reflection groups in Rabinal.

[11] “In Bullaj—in this whole area—people don’t want anyone to mess with them. They don’t want to know anything about what happened and they don’t want any type of organization coming in from the outside.”

[12] “We are discriminated against for being women, for being poor, and for being indigenous.” Carmen’s transcribed oral narrative, Appendix C.

[13] Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection (New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999), 49. The armed conflict has often been referred to as a “civil war.” This is misleading due to the fact that “State policy of systematic violence for the last four decades overwhelmingly against unarmed civilians has few parallels given its length, dimensions, and extreme cruelty in Latin America.” Jennifer G. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 263.

^[14] Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 178.

[15] Nancy J. Black, “Anthropology and the Study of Quiché Maya Women in the Western Highlands of Guatemala,” in LUCHA: The Struggles of Latin American Women, ed. Connie Weil. (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute Inc., 1988), 86.

^[16] Ibid., 85.

^[17]Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1984), 240.

[18] See Carol A. Smith, "The Militarization of Civil Society in Guatemala: Economic Reorganization as a Continuation of War," Latin American Perspectives 17 (Fall 1990): 13.

[19] Richard N. Adams, “The Conquest Tradition of Mesoamerica,” The Americas 46 (October 1989), 124.

^[20] Black, 81.

^[21] Carol A. Smith, "Race-Class-Gender Ideology in Guatemala: Modern and Anti-Modern Forms," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995), 741.

^[22] Adams, 124.

[23] As discussed below, however, the 1996 peace accords include provisions to recognize the Maya as autonomous ethnolinguistic groups. But these measures have yet to be made law.

[24] Handy, 77-101.

[25] Ibid.

[26] See Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1991), 116, 126-7; and Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 236-8.

[27] Miller, 116, 126-7, 132-33.

[28] In 1972, “remnants of the FAR were reincarnated as the…Guerrilla Army of the Poor…(EGP).” When the FAR reemerged it was in the northern departments of Alta Verapaz and Izabel. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 17.

[29] Alarcón’s party was founded in 1954. Strong evidence shows the CIA was involved in financing his activities. Ibid., 21, 215.

^[30]ORPA was over 90% Maya. See Handy, 249.

[31] He was Jennifer Harbury’s husband. Harbury, a Unites States lawyer who met Everardo while living in Guatemala, has worked tirelessly to expose the CIA’s knowledge of human rights abuses against him. Her case will be heard by the Inter-American Court in Costa Rica. Harbury has published two books on the topic: Searching for Everardo and Bridge of Courage.

[32] Ball, Kobrak, Spirer, 22.

^[33] Beatriz Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 14.

^[34] Kay B. Warren, “Interpreting La Violencia in Guatemala: Shapes of Mayan Silence & Resistance,” in The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations, ed. Kay B. Warren (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 26.

[35] Adams, “The Conquest Tradition,” 123.

^[36] Handy, 244.

[37] Ball, Kobrak and Spirer, 83. Only months before her murder, Foppa had done a radio interview in Mexico City with three Maya women members of the CUC. See Women’s International Resource Exchange, 31.

^[38] Falla, 60, 127. Estimates suggest there were approximately 3,000 guerrillas.

[39] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 57.

[40] Ibid., 57. General Gramajo was Defense Minister between 1987-1990.

[41] Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer, 91.

^[42] Falla, 186.

[43] See Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer, 89.

[44] See also, Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 263.

[45] See Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 130.

[46] Ball, Kobrak and Spirer, 38.

[47] See “The Relaease of the Truth Commission Report, Guatemala: ‘Memory of Silence.’”Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA UPDATE: Special Issue, (Washington D.C.) 25 February 1999; and Mireya Navarro, “Guatemalan Army Waged “Genocide,’ New Report Finds ,“New York Times, 26 February 1999. The executive summary of the Truth Commission Report can be obtained through the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) online at http://hrdata.aaas.org/ceh/

^[48] Falla, 8.

^[49] Jonas, 150.

^[50] Handy, 252.

^[51] Jonas, 150.

^[52] See Joel A. Solomon, Institutional Violence: Civil Patrols in Guatemala 1993-1994 (Washington D.C.: Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, 1994).

[53] David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 115.

[54] For more on the civil patrols, see Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer; and REMHI report: Guatemala: Nunca Más, available online. Site last visited 11/5/98: www.guateconnect.com/odhagua/infremhi/default.htm

[55] The Commissioners had initially been enlisted by the Army as recruiters and spies in the 1960s as part of a program to militarize the rural areas. See Linda Buckley Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 250.

^[56] Handy, 277.

[57] Miller, 11.

[58] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 58.

[59] For information of state killings during these periods and level s of press reporting on the events, see Ball, Kobrak and Spirer.

[60] Jennifer G. Schirmer, “The Seeking of Truth and the Gendering of Consciousness: The CoMadres of El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA Widows of Guatemala,” inVIVA: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America, eds., Sarah A. Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood (London: Routledge Press, 1993), 54. According to Schirmer, CERJ organized 6,000 who refused to patrol.

[61] For exact wording of Article 5 of the Law of National Reconciliation., see Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 265.

^[62] Judith N. Zur, Violent Memories: Mayan War Widows in Guatemala (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 76-77. For a break-down of numbers killed under each president and by each type of perpetrator, see Ball, Kobrak and Spirer; and Centro Internacional para investigaciones en derechos humanos--CIIDH--y el Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo--GAM--, Quitar el Agua al pez: análisis del terror en tres comunidades rurales de Guatemala (1980-1984) (Guatemala: CIIDH & GAM, 1996), 46; and Recuperación de la memoria histórica (REMHI) and Comisión de Esclarecimiento histórico (CEH) reports.

[63] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 274. For more on the Guatemalan military’s continued power and influence in the justice system, see Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project.

^[64] Gerardi was bludgeoned to death by one man in his carport on April 26, 1998.

^[65] He was killed on the evening of May 6, 1998 in front of his wife and children by five masked men who shot him four times.

^[66]NISGUA, Washington D.C., nisgua@igc.apc.org (7 May 1998).

[67] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 266. According to the Army’s Thesis of National Stability, Opponents of the State include NGOs working in rural areas, the leaders of the Pan-Maya movement, and so on. See Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 273.

[68] Mario Rivero, “Exigen Incluir Delitos de Genocidio y Etnicidio,” El Gráfico (Guatemala City), 2 July 1998.

[69] Both the CEH and REMHI were “denied access to the secret files of the G-2” for example, according to Rigoberta Menchú. See Jo-Maire Burt and Fred Rosen, “Truth Telling and Memory in Postwar Guatemala: An Interview with Rigoberta Menchú,” NACLA Report on the Americas 32 (March/April 1999), 7.

[70] Claire Cromie, “Guatemala: The Law of Reconciliation,” Mesoamerica 16 (March 1997): 3. As Commission directorate member Otilia Lux de Coti states, they were not allowed to be “either judges or hangmen.” Larry Rohter, “Guatemalan Human Rights Group Tracing Abuses in War,” Central America NewsPak 12 (31 March 1997): 6; and Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project. For more on the CIA’s ongoing relationship with Guatemalan Army Intelligence see Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 266.

[71] The exhumations that have been done to this point have been carried out by the Equipo Antropológico Forense de Guatemala (EAFG) which is an internationally-funded NGO based in Guatemala City. The Forensic Anthropologists are not paid.

[72] It is also currently being translated into English, German, Italian, French, and Japanese. I believe that the Maya language was K’iché.

[73] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 258. As Schirmer notes, “[U]nless the…army intelligence…is made fully accountable for its past and present crimes and forced to rigorously comply with its own self-proclaimed allegiance to…democratic freedoms and human rights, their repressive habits of mind, and hegemonic power within a State of their own crafting will continue to haunt Guatemalans into the twenty-first century, managing a violence that is democracy only in name,” 274.

^[74] Edward Hegstrom, “Guatemala tallies the Steep Price of Postwar Recovery,” Central America NewsPak12 (3 February 1997): 8.

^[75] Lynn Stephen, ed. and trans., Hear My Testimony: Human Rights Activist from El Salvador, Maria Teresa Tula (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 232.

[76] In April 1999, two Mayan women won a “landmark ruling” that allows students to wear traditional dress to school rather than the school uniform.

[77] Women’s International Resource Exchange, We Continue Forever: Sorrow and Strength of Guatemalan Women (New York: Women’s International Resource Exchange, 1983), 4.

[78] See also Zur, 127-43.

[79] Carol A. Smith, "The Militarization of Civil Society in Guatemala: Economic Reorganization as a Continuation of War," Latin American Perspectives, 17 (Fall 1990), 34.

[80] GAM, 19.

[81] Black, 81.

[82] “In all of the Tajumulco region many went into exile in Mexico and many have not returned. The San Marcos regions has been very isolated—the organizations [MINUGUA, FAMDEGUA, CEH, REMHI] did not know about the violence that they experienced there and almost none of them has gone out to explain to them what happened. At the same time, with regard to the guerrillas it was one of the most organized and earliest organized regions. Also, because of this, it was one of the regions most affected by la violencia.” Report submitted by Gregorio Macario to CEH and REMHI and incorporated in the published reports.

[83] “They killed a lot of people on the trail. A lot of people died.”

[84] “The commotion had died down.” Author’s note: “la bulla” is a commonly used term to refer to the period of la violencia.

[85] “It made you scared and we asked God to watch over our journey. People got sick a lot. After about three months we felt more at ease, but the commotion lasted awhile.”

^[86] “Informe de Contexto,” Oficina de Enlace, San Marcos, prepared for CEH report.

^[87] See Robert M. Carmack, Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis.(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

[88] “They told everyone to go there and since we did not realize what their plans were, right? And there they began to choose people.”

[89] “Now no one will have light and no one will be out walking. Get out of here!”

[90] “Off to one side there were quite a few hats, sweaters, and caps.”

^[91]“I went…so he would give me a report, and that I was going to San Pedro to ask for my husband…and they told me no because it is the government who is giving the orders. He said we should wait, that we wait and nothing more.”

[92] “All tortured, tied with a knot, tortured with a stick, others hacked up, others burned.”

[93] “My children no longer had a father.”

^[94] Catequistas are religious education leaders.

[95] “It was a selective kidnapping of the religious and cooperative leaders. They were disappeared.”

[96] “There has been no resolution—the atmosphere is one in which everything seems suspended because the people do not understand well what happened. They were never able to recover the bodies or the history of where the abducted were taken. The children of those abducted have remained in total passivity—disoriented—without any direction. They live with a fear that is almost not recognizable as anything out of the ordinary now. They live in an uncertainty and a silence due to the unresolved nature of the past. They have not repaired or recovered this past, this history. They have not organized. They have not conquered new spaces. They have not created a new political ideology with community-oriented interests, but rather with personal or individual interests.”

[97] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 270.

[98] Manz, 97.

[99] Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 56.

^[100] GAM, 52.

^[101] GAM. 53.

^[102] “The soldiers came to abduct my father here in the house…because he gave his children permission to live with the guerrillas. Three days he was away—then they let him go. In ’80 the soldiers had begun the abductions and many people could no longer sleep well. And many went out to the fields to sleep…and the women no longer talk…and when evening comes there is no longer anyone walking in the street..but the patrols walking in the streets…many people were killed…they hung them, a knot around their neck and they throw them down and there they die—and they even kill women and children—they simply blame somebody—but the people are innocent but they think why?”

[103] “They sent a woman to tell me: ‘You must be ready because they are going to burn your father’s house…you will be here, you won’t leave.’ I told my father and I told him that the soldiers were going to come and get me. If my day had come to die well, but my father was worried. My sister was taking care of my son…if God is going to allow my son to live…but they did not come, in the end, the patrols pass during the night, but they did not arrive.”

[104] “We are not going to kill you. Your day has not come yet.” Rosa’s transcribed oral narrative, Appendix B.

^[105] Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (EAFG), Las Masacres en Rabinal: Estudio histórico-antropológico de la masacres de Plan de Sánchez, Chichupac y Río Negro (Guatemala City: EAFG, 1995), 24.

^[106] Rolando Alecio, "Uncovering the Truth: Political Violence and Indigenous Organizations," inThe New Politics of Survival: Grassroots Movements in Central America, ed. Minor Sinclair (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 26; and GAM, 49.

^[107] Alecio, 26-7.

^[108] Alecio, 26.

^[109] EAFG, 175.

^[110] Alecio, 26; and EAFG, 159, 287; and GAM, 68.

[111] The massacre at Río Negro on 13 March 1982 consisted of 70 women and 107 children. The civil patrols from the neighboring village of Xoxoc and the army were responsible.

^[112] See GAM, 72.

[113] “When they went to kill people we suffered a lot…First the September 20 [massacre] and then when December 4 of ’81 arrives. The 3^rd of December they came here to the town—they called all the villages, the patrols, the [military] commissioners brought all the women and the children here to town. They want to kill everyone but they set us free. They said it was peace—that there was no more death and they are lies and in the afternoon they killed a woman in Siruaco[?sp] and on the 3^rd of December they killed two people and on the second day all the villages around Panacal stayed in their houses—they tied them up and they hit them with sticks and with clubs and with machetes and with knives they had with them. We stayed here because if we left we would die. They only took the men on the 4^th of December of ’81. Third massacre. The fourth massacre was on the 2^nd of January. The army arrived and asked the men if they are in their houses and they aren’t anymore. They tell us that we took them but we don’t know where they went. After that massacre the civil patrols come. They arrive at the houses, watching the houses, watching to see if there are people in them. But we don’t have anyone because our husbands and my brothers had gone.”

^[114] See Alecio, 33.

^[115] GAM, 73.

^[116] GAM, 39, “collective and indiscriminate massacres, in addition to physical extermination of the population, pursued the destruction of the most profound and vital aspects of the community, such as the community structure, the elements of ethnic unity, cultural values, community identity, just as it did destroyed human dignity and with that the personal and collective living environment.”

^[117] “It was like a plague that came.” Gudelia’s transcribed oral narrative.

[118] Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak and Herbert F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection (New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999), 71.

^[119] “pseudo-normal community environment.” Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), Quitar el agua al pez: análisis del terror en tres comunidades rurales de Guatemala (1980-1984) (Guatemala City: Centro Internacional para investigaciones en derechos humanos--CIIDH-- y Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo--GAM--, 1996), 71.

[120] “The army and members of the Xococ [neighboring village] civil patrols brutally assassinated 70 women and 107 boys and girls.”

[121] See also, Chapter 1.

^[122] M. Brinton Lykes, Mary M. Brabeck, Theresa Ferns, and Angela Radan, “Human Rights and Mental Health Among Latin American Women in Situations of State-Sponsored Violence,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 17 (1993), 527.

^[123] Ana Isabel García y Enrique Gomariz, “Las mujeres definen el futuro,”América Central hacia el 2000: Desafíos y opciones, coord., Edelberto Torres-Rivas (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1989), 148, “(s)exual violence tends to be part of a kidnapping or torture, even in those cases where the object of repression was the man.”

^[124] Ricardo Falla,Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala 1975-1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994),132.

^[125]”With the time of violence...the killers always arrive at night to rape the women...therefore we gathered in one place…we suffered a lot.”

^[126] At first it was like—no one knew—I was expecting my baby girl. I got up and changed the baby. He was one. I got up and changed him. Then he told me: ‘Give me the baby here.’ I gave him the baby. ‘Come here, my son,’ he said ‘we will go to sleep and your mother can leave.’ That is what he said, my husband. I, since there used to be the well rather than potable water. So I got two jugs and I went to the well. So I filled the jugs and I brought one on my head and one I carried like this [shows how she carried it with her hand]. And it was really early in the morning [pre-dawn]. So what do you hear but—so I stopped—one was walking toward the house and another was going up above. It is a big path that goes to another village. So I stopped and listened and I heard a man’s voice. So I kept watching—to see if they were behind me. So I went quickly since it was a Sunday. My sister-in-law—was going to the market to sell—so she was getting ready—she was in the entry when I got up there and I said to her: ‘you all go inside to get ready,’ because I thought they were visitors, so I told my sister-in-law ‘go inside because some people are coming.’ She went inside and I got to the entry and I put the jugs down and when they enter they are not visitors. They were—what do they call them—from the army—nothing like ‘excuse me’—they just came in. Since the kitchen was there in front and the bedroom there. That one—there were three—went to the back of the house—and the other went in between the kitchen and the bedroom. That other one went right into the kitchen and had a cup of coffee that was on the table. And he began to drink the coffee and the other grabbed the jug and started drinking water. And I was going to go inside since I didn’t know what their intentions were. I was going to go inside but: ‘Don’t move from where you are, Ma’am.’ So I didn’t move. My sister-in-law was also going to come inside the bedroom, but: ‘stay there.’ So the two of us stayed where we were. They said: ‘Where is the man?’ So he heard that voice and lifted his head to see. The man came in and he asked him: ‘What is your name?’ So he said his name and ‘get up,’ he told him. He got up and got dressed and he was about to pick up his shirt to put on his shirt, but: ‘it’s fine like that.’ So he took him outside and he put his head to the ground. So: ‘Get up,’ he told him. He got up. ‘And you are going with us to town,’ they told him. He said, ‘fine.’ He was going to come without shoes, without a shirt, only his undershirt. A red undershirt. And so, he told me: ‘bring me my slippers,’ because my sister-in-law quickly noticed. My brother can’t walk like that without shoes, my sister-in-law said to him. So, ‘bring me his shoes!’ I thought he was only going on an errand. And suddenly he didn’t come back. At that moment we didn’t realize if they were going to come back or not. When my brother-in-law came—since he had gone to take care of the animals at the other little house—so we explained what had happened. And we realized later that they had also taken another two and my husband was three and here five with Octavia’s husband and another man and two other men—and they all left at the same time. They took eight people at the same time. And I don’t remember if it was about three years later that they brought another three. Total that would be eleven here in San Miguel. And in another place they took some teachers. And that’s how it was. And the pain was huge. Everybody was saying that I knew about my husband, but the truth is I didn’t know about it. I felt total desperation—he was a bit sad before they took him. ‘What did I do?’, he would say to me. But since one isn’t wise. If you don’t know what is going to happen, but since nothing, well ‘who knows’ I would say. But he always felt something and why would that be? I dreamed afterwards. Sometimes he was in the bed. And we thought he was going to come back. My father-in-law would say to me that I should have hope. And what for?! For 16 years? Nothing. At 10 years I stopped waiting for him. Not anymore.

^[127] Kay B. Warren, “Interpreting La Violencia in Guatemala: Shapes of Mayan Silence & Resistance,” The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations, ed. Kay B. Warren (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 48.

[128] “We run into them in the street and they stare at us, they mistreat us and say all sorts of things to us.”

^[129] M. Brinton Lykes, “Meaning Making in a Context of Genocide and Silencing,” Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, eds., M.B. Lykes, A. Banvazizi, R. Liem, and M. Morris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 173.

^[130] “Once evening arrives no one is on the streets--just closed up in the house.”

[131] “due to a lot of fear.”

^[132] “in the mountains.”

^[133] “they stayed in other women’s houses and at daybreak they returned to their houses.”

^[134] “mountain people,” “they would say not to let on to anything because if they {the townspeople} did, they would also die.” “So, people had that fear. They did not let on to anything. They did not say anything.”

^[135] “we know where the remains are but...they don’t say because they are scared. Three years later they say a little little bit but at the time they don’t say anything. They don’t say whether or not the rest of the men died, what happened, nothing...they remained silent.”

^[136] “the noise had passed.” Many people referred to la violencia this way.

^[137] “But we did not let on to anything there because...they had heard what had happened here...and...the plantation owners said that everyone was a guerrilla. So when I go t there and they asked me where I was from I said that I was from a different village because if not they would not give me work.”

[138] “we are discriminated against…at work, in everything…for being women, for being poor, and for being Indian.”

^[139] Linda B. Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994), 246.

[140] Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (EAFG), Las Masacres en Rabinal: Estudio histórico-antropológico de la masacres de Plan de Sánchez, Chichupac y Río Negro (Guatemala City: EAFG, 1995), 287-88.

^[141] Judith N. Zur, Violent Memories: Mayan War Widows in Guatemala (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 127-137.

[142] See EAFG, 284.

[143] Zur, 128.

[144] Ibid., 150-1.

[145] Ibid., 149.

[146] See, Chapter 4.

^[147] See also Lykes, “Human Rights and Mental Health,” 529. The REMHI document also reports that the war-widows were especially in need of psychological and social support. See “Los Datos” in the section on “Consecuencias familiaries:” Online Site last visited 5 November 1998: www.guateconnect.com/ohhagua/infremhi/default/htm

^[148] Zur, 134.

^[149] “when my husband was here, we lived well…because…they…go to work, to buy corn.” “[A]fter we were left to find money to feed the children, our families suffered, women aren’t given work. A women can’t endure work like men can.”

[150] Women typically help in some aspects of agricultural production, but are not primarily responsible.

[151] “I have done men’s and women’s work”

[152] “I carried a man’s load.”

[153] In the cases of the women I interviewed their daughters have been in school, however I imagine there is discrepancy and that more boys are consistently in school than girls.

^[154] Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” 247.

^[155] Zur, 213.

^[156] Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” 249.

[157] The symptoms resemble post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. See Adrianne Aron, Shawn Corne, Anthea Fursland, and Barbara Zelwer, “The Gender-Specific Terror of El Salvador and Guatemala: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Central American Refugee Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 14 (1991): 37-47.

^[158] Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” 247.

^[159] Ibid.

^[160] Ana Julia Cienfuegos and Cristina Monelli, “The Testimony of Political Repression as a Therapeutic Instrument,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 53 (January 1983): 51.

^[161] Elba MarinaVillatoro, “Las Cuatro Enfermedades Populares de Mayor Incidencia en Guatemala,” n.p., 88, “the cause can be any external element that induces an emotional shock.” For additional information see Arthur J. Rubel, “The Epidemiology of a Folk Illness: Susto in Hispanic America,” Ethnology 3 (1964).

^[162] Villatoro, 97, “not a very pleasant person.”

^[163] Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” 248.

^[164] See Villatoro, 88.

[165] See Zur, 212-216.

^[166] “I started to cry. I didn’t remember anything anymore, didn’t even eat...I became thin and I was breast feeding my little one (boy)...I didn’t even have a breast, not even milk, nothing...I didn’t even do anything. I was just crying.”

[167] “maybe it really upset him [he got scared] when his father left.”

[168] “a lot of work and the sadness.”

[169] “The medicine that the healer gives her lifts her, because she is being paid attention to, it lifts her spirit. It is a 15-day cure. The susto is cured with another susto. The impact is cured with another impact. The healer chews on the cure and spits it on the places where the veins are closest to the surface of the skin—like the back of the knees, the face, the neck—the places where you can feel a pulse to shock/alarm the spirit again. This is done three times during the 15 days. During that time the person is only to eat hot things, they can’t touch cold things. So they can’t wash and everyone has to be helping her during this time since she can’t work. The sick person doesn’t know when the healer is going to show up to spit on her. She is chewing and preparing the cure on the stove and suddenly she will go and spit on the person when they don’t expect it.”

^[170] Zur, 212.

^[171] “illness of the nerves.”

[172] “everything was closing in on me.”

^[173] “I took those as did the other women.”

^[174] Zur, 161.

^[175] Ibid., 212.

[176] Ibid., 206.

^[177] Ibid., 190, 212.

[178] Ibid., 193, 201.

[179] Carol Hendrickson, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 141.

^[180] Ibid., 224.

[181] “As a result of the exhumations they feel better because they know that their husbands are going to a legal cemetery. And they can go visit, they can go pray.”

[182] “Él se presentaba en mis sueños.”

[183] “He came in the door—as his sweater was red—I went to rest with my feet on my bed—but I felt a heaviness that came on top of my feet like this—and I went to pull at my feet but I couldn’t, I couldn’t. And he was there against the wall. And I say: ‘Run, run, get up, it’s late!’ But he had already left. Then later, I got up, to see if he had arrived but he was in town. It was only eight days later when they took him. It was his destiny, I said. Because a lot of people say--- if they are involved in something political—it is better that they leave—but I didn’t do anything—and look at Jesus who died for our faults, our sins. It is worse if I am a sinner. If they come to get me I will do as they say. I dreamed that he had already begun to get ready. I believed that his spirit was preparing. Because he told me in the dream that the men hadn’t beat him. Well, he went prepared. I thought that maybe his spirit is cleansed and everything. That is what I feel.

^[184] Benjamin N. Colby and Lore M. Colby, The Daykeeper: The Life and Discourse of an Ixil Diviner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 51.

[185] “I saw that his clothes were all worn out and patched, his pants were in rags. What’s been going on, he says. And I: “yes and where did you go?” Ahhh…you’ll all see that those men that were going to beat me, didn’t beat me. And Georgino, how is your uncle and the other man? No, he says. He did already stay there still. So I said [to myself] that he was going to come back soon maybe. Or maybe they killed him that day.”

^[186] Zur, 224.

Abstract

List of Illustrations

Introduction: “Tenemos que Tomarnos de las Manos”[1]

Organization of the Thesis

Method and Description of Fieldwork

Chapter 1: Historical Background: “Somos Discriminadas Por Ser Mujer, Por Ser Pobre, Y Por Ser Indígena”[12]

Structural Conditions of Maya Women’s Lives in the Highlands

Regional Histories: San Marcos, Ixil Triangle, & Baja Verapaz

San Marcos

Ixil Triangle, El Quiché

Rabinal, Baja Verapaz

Chapter 2: Immediate Effects of La Violencia on the Women: “Fue Como una Plaga que Vino”^[117]

Status as War-Widows

Exacerbation of Common Illnesses Attributed to La Violencia

No Proper Burial; No Grieving Process

Dreams

Abstract

List of Illustrations

Introduction: “Tenemos que Tomarnos de las Manos”[1]

Organization of the Thesis

Method and Description of Fieldwork

Chapter 1: Historical Background: “Somos Discriminadas Por Ser Mujer, Por Ser Pobre, Y Por Ser Indígena”[12]

Structural Conditions of Maya Women’s Lives in the Highlands

Regional Histories: San Marcos, Ixil Triangle, & Baja Verapaz

San Marcos

Ixil Triangle, El Quiché

Rabinal, Baja Verapaz

Chapter 2: Immediate Effects of La Violencia on the Women: “Fue Como una Plaga que Vino”[117]

Status as War-Widows

Exacerbation of Common Illnesses Attributed to La Violencia

No Proper Burial; No Grieving Process

Dreams

Chapter 2: Immediate Effects of La Violencia on the Women: “Fue Como una Plaga que Vino”^[117]