The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in guatemala 293
The only survivor was a six-year-old boy who ran and hid behind a tree, a silent
witness to the bloodletting that destroyed the only world he knew.
When news of the massacre reached the hiding places of those who had escaped,
the stunned villagers took further precautions to save their lives—among
them the gruesome task of killing their own dogs, about fifty in all. There is no
doubt that the army would have slaughtered every villager had they found those
who had eluded them—as they did in nearby villages days before and days after
this massacre. After several months in hiding, more than half the families made the
arduous and emotionally devastating journey to find refuge in Mexico, where they
stayed for more than a decade. The army eventually placed those who remained
behind—about fifty families—under military control, literally on the ashes of the
original village, and brought in new peasants to occupy the lands of those in refuge.
Santa Maria Tzejá was part of the much larger tragedy endured in Guatemala.
Governments, at various times and in various places, have unleashed statesponsored
terrorism across a wide swath of territory, at times engulfing a region or
even drenching an entire nation in blood. On occasion the intensity, extent, and
purpose of the violence is so extreme that it becomes genocide. In Guatemala, the
Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)—as the Truth Commission is officially
called—was created in June 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords between the
Guatemalan government and the umbrella group of insurgent forces, the
Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). “Truth commissions are born
of compromise between two extremes: institutional justice vs. silence and sanctified
impunity,” Amy Ross (1999b:39) observes. There was little equivocation, however,
in the commission’s conclusions. In a stunning judgment, the CEH charged
the Guatemalan military with genocide: “[T]he CEH concludes that agents of the
State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried
out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of
Mayan people” (CEH 1999b:41). According to its findings, 83 percent of the victims
were Maya. “After studying four selected geographical regions,” the commission
concluded “that between 1981 and 1983 the Army identified groups of the
Mayan population as the internal enemy, considering them to be an actual or potential
support base for the guerrillas, with respect to material sustenance, a source
of recruits and a place to hide their members.” Based on that assessment, “the
Army, inspired by the National Security Doctrine, defined a concept of internal
enemy that went beyond guerrilla sympathizers, combatants or militants to include
civilians from specific ethnic groups” (ibid.:39).
As if to confirm the charge, a spokesman for the regime of de facto president
General Rios Montt confided the military’s thinking to an American journalist in
the summer of 1982. “The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators, therefore,
the Indians were subversives, right? And how do you fight subversion? Clearly,
you had to kill Indians because they were collaborating with subversion. And then
they would say, ‘You’re massacring innocent people.’ But they weren’t innocent.