The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

298 genocide’s wake
rorize or, if need be, annihilate Mayan communities. And it was the Mayan population,
as the CEH report documents, not simply the guerrillas, who became the
target. The early 1980s became the vortex of a genocidal storm. In the aftermath
of this maelstrom, the military sought to suture the wounds by establishing a new
version of the past by portraying the army as the savior from the guerrillas rather
than the perpetrator of unspeakable criminal acts. The language of the Cold War
remained after the fighting stopped—after the peace accords were signed in 1996,
after the Cold War itself slid into history. What Guatemalans are saying, however,
is that they have a right to know—a right to the truth.
Today, the community is seeking to come to terms with the past, not simply to
remain a victim of it. The collective memory of the village is in transition, burdened
by the legacy of military action but also shaped by the return of the refugees
from Mexico and informed by a more open national dialogue. Refugees returned
with a deeper awareness of their rights, developed in a more open atmosphere in
years of exile. The fuller national dialogue was enhanced by the negotiations leading
to the December 1996 peace accords, an amnesty, and a resultant national desire,
at times hesitant and still fearful, to come to terms with a bitter history.
One cannot look forward in Guatemala, however, without confronting the grief
of the past, and here the role of memory is crucial. Many scholars have written
extensively and eloquently about the need to recover the memory and interpret the
Mayans’ situation in the war (Hale 1997a, 1997b; Wilson 1991, 1995, 1997; Warren
1993; Green 1999; Nelson 1999). “In discrete and relatively brief moments, societies
in different parts of the world have developed an intense collective need to
remember their past as a precondition for facing the future,” Hale writes
(1997a:817). These scholars also recognize the complexity and difficulty of the task.
As anthropologist Kay Warren (1998:86) states, “La violencia gives a shape to memories
and to later experiences of repression.” Memory is tangled in trauma, and
unraveling the tangle is itself traumatic.
On one level, memory is individual, reflecting the struggle of individuals to deal
with what has taken place. “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument,”
Primo Levi (1988:23) tells us, expanding, contracting, filling in, obliterating,
and rearranging its silhouette. Following social and political turmoil, let alone
the unimaginable ravages of genocide, events are rethought and reorganized even
more rapidly. Those who fell under military control may not consciously be rewriting
the past, in their minds, but history is a remarkably heavy millstone to come to
terms with. Some “lie consciously, coldly falsifying reality itself,” Levi observed,
“but more numerous are those who weigh anchor, move off, momentarily or forever,
from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality. The
past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and tend
to replace them with others” (ibid.:27). Over time, if not challenged, the distinction
between the early and the later remembrance “progressively loses its contours”
(ibid.). It does not take much to reshape a suggested image: an omission here and
some embellishing there until a new picture emerges that mirrors the current con-