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The following is a story that I wrote about the Guatemalan Civil War for Cafe Abroad Magazine to be published in their April 2008 edition. My intention was to write the story from the perspective of a women whom I will call La Profesora, who grew up right in the think of the conflict and eventually fled Guatemala as a refugee. Read the full Interview with La Profesora here.
The year was 1980.
Guatemala was in the middle of a civil war between government forces
and guerrilla organizations that lasted for nearly four decades, and
claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, peasants,
revolutionaries, soldiers, fathers, brothers, and friends. Hundreds of
indigenous villages were razed to the ground, their inhabitants either
killed or moved into internment camps, Guatemala City became a
war-zone, and military hit-squads wrought terror across the land.
Throughout all of this, La Profesora was but a young university student
tentatively stepping through a maze of kidnapping, assassination, and
war.
“In that year . . .[the anti-communist purge] hit the
university. Every day you would just come to school and it would be
just like, “Who did they . . . kill today,” La Profesora spoke to me in
Costa Rica nearly thirty years after she fled Guatemala as a refugee. I
was speaking with her so that I could gain an insight into the
Guatemalan civil war that went beyond the facts and figures of the
antiquated historians and the dust covered government archives. I
wanted to hear the story of what life was like during this brutal
conflict that raged across an entire country for nearly forty years. I
wanted to hear her story.
La Profesora complied with my
request with a nod of her head and a pat on my shoulder, and then dived
into a tale that lead me through the horrors that she lived daily as a
young university student in a war torn Guatemala. Her speech was
eloquent, her words filled with fire, and her short, compact body gave
way to giant eyes of pure passion and deep knowledge. With notebook,
pen, and voice recorder in hand, I eagerly listened to every word that
came out of her mouth as she told me her story:
La Professora
was born into a Guatemala that was rife in the middle of a brutal civil
war that played itself out across every sphere of society. Some of her
earliest memories were of the military rushing into her home and
rifling through her family’s possessions- searching for any small sign
of dissidence- and of the fear instilled by a nationwide curfew. “I
still recall us rushing back home in my dad’s car because curfew was
just about to start, and the tension of that, and seeing the military
cars patrolling. . . It was intense.”
At the beginning
of the civil war, Guatemala was under the supreme control of the
military dictator, General Ydígoras Fuentes, whose claim to power clung
to the shirt-tails of the U.S. sponsored coup of 1954. Fuentes was a
big supporter of U.S. corporate and cold war interests and ruled with
the iron hand of a dictator. This placed the peasants and common people
of the country in a very compromising position from which they rebelled.
Guerrilla
organizations soon sprang out of multiple sectors of society and they
took to the hills in a dire attempt to combat the Guatemalan government
and save their own lives. La Profesora explained to me that, “95% of
the guerilla movement was composed by indigenous people . . . They just
knew they needed change. They lived in huts, you know, and they were
just out in the mountains with very small plots of land. They can
barely grow anything anymore, the land is exhausted . . . their kids
die of diarrhea and diseases that can be controlled.” Under these
circumstances, a vehement uprising rose out of the mountains and
jungles of Guatemala.
As these guerrilla battles escalated
through the years, the military began a scorched earth policy designed
to starve out the revolutionaries by removing any sources of civilian
support. The government ravaged the Guatemalan countryside without
regard for who was, or was not, involved with the guerrillas. They
burned down villages and destroyed agricultural fields. Thousands upon
thousands of civilians were murdered by these sweeps of terror, and the
rest were herded into internment camps- referred to officially as
‘modal villages’- or forced to join government militias. As La Profesora explained, “So they put them all [the civilian survivors
whose villages were destroyed] together in a town that is square with
military posts on each side, and to go in and out you had to have a
card. If the military found you out up in the mountains and you didn’t
have that card with a permit that said you could be out there, they
would shoot you. So the whole area was militarized. It was war.”
Countless innocent civilians whose only drive was to farm their fields
and better their lives were indiscriminately shot down, or were
forcibly disinterred in ‘model villages,’ as the military proclaimed
supreme control of the countryside.
As she told me this I could
not help thinking how this happened in an age of global communication,
the United Nations, and NGOs. “Unfortunately,” La Profesora began,
“Guatemala and all of Central America got stuck in the middle of the
cold war. . . Wealth distribution is amazingly unfair . . . So the
needs were there and people wanted change, but anything that sounded
like change or challenged the status quo was immediately labeled as
communist. And the moment you were labeled communist it meant that you
could get killed, and so what? You know, it was as easy as that.” These
last words resonated through the room, as well as my consciousness, for
a few moments after they were spoken, as I knew they were delivered
from the roots of sincerity.
La Profesora went on to tell me
about how the government proliferated a wave of terror- a nerve war-
through the entire population, and how the people of Guatemala were
intimidated and even terrified into a sweet show of obedience. “Lots of
people were killed. People that were in my [university] organization-
we worked with kids a lot, and also with farmers- some of them were
disappeared. They just dragged them out of a bus, a public bus. . .
There was this guy that studied architecture, and they just dragged him
out of his house. You know, it was night time, they opened his door
with an ax and just dragged him out in front of his family. There were
also two guys on a public bus, and they just dragged them out and they
were heard from never again. Guatemala at this point has more than
40,000 disappeared, and that was the way they disappeared: a van would
pass by . . . and they would drag you into the back.” With
gestures of exasperation La Profesora continued, “You know what they
would do with some of the students that they captured? They would go
and throw their corpses on the campus, completely tortured, as a way of
terror. They were saying, ‘This is what is going to happen to you.’”
I
then asked La Profesora how this wave of terror affected her and her
family personally, and how she ended up a refugee in Costa Rica. With
hardly a pause she spoke words that rattled my bones: “My family wasn’t
effected directly.” she told me, “It was more my husband’s family,
because they killed his brother trying to find him. So it was a really
hard blow because it also had a lot of guilt in it. You know, it was
like, ‘Why didn’t they kill me, why did they have to kill him?’ And so
that was when we left the country, and we decided to come here to Costa
Rica.”
La Profesora and her husband managed to gain refugee
status with the high commission of the United Nations for refugees, and
escaped from Guatemala in 1980. For twenty years she did not return to
her homeland, and she is only now beginning to rediscover Guatemala.
For all of the terror and horrors that plagued La Profesora’s early
life, she still holds her people in high regard, as she gently
explained how, “. . . it has been a long process to re-heal Guatemala.
Because Guatemala is a beautiful place, [the] people are really
beautiful and sweet that I’m rediscovering.” But she left me with a
warning that, “the conflicts are there, you know, because the causes
that brought people to participate in a war are still there.”
The
government that wrought these atrocities over the country is still in
power today. In the last elections in November the liberal parties only
took a combined 3.6% of the vote. “ Now that says a lot ,” La Profesora
explained, “That says that people don’t want war, they don’t want
anything radical . . . They don’t want war ” But this fact shows
clearly that the nerve war, the fear that the government has instilled
in its people to avoid anything progressive, still continues
today.
As I sit here, snug within the walls of
Global College’s Latin American Center, I must think about what it
would be like to have to study while a war rages on outside. How could
I concentrate on a university curriculum with bombs going off, with
people around me being tortured, and with the ever present knowledge
that I, myself, could be next on the chopping block: to be hunted down,
captured, and slaughtered without warning. This is what La Profesora
had to contend with as a university student in Guatemala, as she boldly
stood amongst the ruins of a country in turmoil. Hers is a story of
massacre and revolution, of oppression and revolt, of the well-fed and
the hungry, and what it means to be caught in the ever wavering center
of civil war.
Photographs from Guatemalan Civil War
Read the full Interview with La Professora
Return to
Vagabond Journey Travel Articles
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Wade
P. Shepard has
been on a continuous vagabond journey around the world for more
than eight years- over thirty countries on five continents. He has
wandered into the outback of Mongolia, lived in a monastery in Tibet,
ate a puppy in China, danced with mystics in India, thought he was a
gardener in Ireland, braved the souqs of North Africa, and got really
lost in Patagonia. Throughout all of this, he has been working
diligently on
his travelogue at,
www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue and his website Vagabond Journey
at, http://www.VagabondJourney.com,
as well as pawning off various travel articles to unsuspecting magazines for food.
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