The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

296 genocide’s wake
and continue today—let alone what those years would hold. I knew immediately
that I had entered an unusual community, but I didn’t realize right away the ways
in which that community would become part of my life.
On that first trip, the dense green canopy of the virgin rain forest still surrounded
the village. Conditions were harsh and resources meager when I arrived, but the
spirit was remarkable and the enthusiasm infectious. It had taken a grueling hike
on a jungle path over the rough terrain to get there, but it turned out to be far harder
emotionally to leave. During the 1970s, I was amazed at the village’s success and
spirit and all too aware of the encroaching military. I remembered those dreams
in the mid-1980s as I walked over the ashes of what the army had incinerated and
then watched the slow, demanding process of rebuilding. I traveled back and forth
between the village and the refugee camps in Mexico, often providing the only
source of news between families torn asunder by events, carrying photos I took,
carefully folded letters, cassette tapes, and treasured keepsakes. In the 1990s, the return
of the refugees from Mexico once again offered a moment of hope in a context
of continued apprehension.
Prior to the January 1970 morning on which the first pioneers set off to establish
the village, generations of highland peasants had been losing ground as cornfields
were divided and divided again and as land became exhausted and eroded. Economic
desperation in their highland ancestral homes made peasants ever more dependent
on wage labor in the sprawling southern-coast plantations. There, mostly
Mayan laborers cut sugar cane, picked coffee, and harvested cotton, toiling for low
pay in slavelike, disease-ridden conditions. For many, the lack of land and the
dreaded plantation labor conspired to create a spiral of desperation where the harder
one worked, the further one sank. Following the overthrow of the democratically
elected Arbenz government in 1954, a succession of generals, either in the presidential
office or controlling it, made reform impossible and land reform, in particular,
a dangerous subject. Under those circumstances, the forgotten, dense, isolated
rain forest in the north offered the tantalizing hope of land at the same time that it
posed seemingly insurmountable challenges.
The social and political problems of the village, and Guatemala more generally,
were framed by the Cold War (Immerman 1982; Schlesinger and Kinzer 1982; Mc-
Clintock 1985; Gleijeses 1991). A rich ethnographic literature has explored issues of
cultural identity and transformation in the context of village life in Guatemala (Brintnall
1979; Warren 1978, 1992; Nash 1967; Melville and Melville 1971; Falla 1978;
Annis 1987; Smith 1984, 1990; Adams 1970; Berryman 1984; Watanabe 1992). Less
explored has been the experience of the Mayans during the past two decades, which
has been so shaped by conflict and traumatized by atrocity (Stoll 1993; Falla 1994;
Manz 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1995; Wilson 1995; Nelson 1999; Green 1999). Without
question, the Cold War has provided the dominant context of contemporary
Guatemala, but it is important not to overstate its role. The Cold War exacerbated,
rather than created, the social, class, and ethnic tensions that have racked the country.
The army and the economic oligarchy seized the opportunity of the Cold War