The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

300 genocide’s wake
distrust than ever,” Warren (1998:93) found in the village of San Andrés. Confidence
becomes the medium that encourages a fuller picture to emerge, that allows the
shards of shattered lives to be pieced back together.
How, then, does one conduct research on grief ? If terror continues to pierce the
grief, how does one enter that desperate place and then interpret what respondents
are saying? What methodology does one employ? Often, and in the case of
Guatemala with certainty, a respondent’s perception of the researcher influences, at
times determines, what is said. Given the apprehension peasants feel, the challenge
is to discover what people thought when the events were unfolding, and to understand
the factors that have molded current memory. In many Guatemalan villages,
diverse, often contradictory, memories coexist concerning relations with the insurgent
forces. What dynamics shape and reshape these multiple narratives? Over time,
memories of the same events sometimes evolve into mirror images of each other
when viewed from the recollections of those inside and outside the country.
Communities that have traversed the unimaginable and grieve in the aftermath
of the unspeakable, confront the past in varying ways. A central challenge is the
recovery of trust and, in particular, rebuilding it within the community. The absence
of trust cripples the present and hobbles the future. How does a society subjected
to butchery and forced to cower in the face of impunity change course? How
do people have confidence in legal institutions when they have seen these institutions
as either complicit with the agents of destruction or as decimated by them?
How do people participate in society and social institutions when the terror has
instilled a numbing silence? How do survivors deal with the weight of their guilt—
guilt for having survived, guilt for not having spoken out, guilt for having become
accomplices in the repression suffered by others, guilt for having carved for themselves
Una Vida Tranquila.
Resignation and passivity as a strategy for survival is a heavy albatross that
chokes the possibility of recovery. Everyone in this village experienced a tremendous
sense of guilt, fear, depression, loss, abandonment, despair, humiliation, anger,
and solitude. For some, deep religious faith was able to carry them through. For
others, even for some of the most religious, the blow was so devastating that it shattered
their faith in God. And, as the CEH observed, “the terror does not disappear
automatically when the levels of violence lessen, instead it has cumulative and
perdurable effects which require time, effort and experience of a new type in order
to overcome it” (CEH 1999a:tomo IV:15).
In some Guatemalan villages, the burden of the past has paralyzed the present.
They have retreated into passivity, conformity, and mistrust. A phantomlike omnipotent
impunity for those who perpetrated the massive terror grinds glass into
open wounds. No crime, no matter how excessive, no matter how cruel and degrading,
no matter how many times repeated, was ever punished. There were no
limits, there was no recourse, and the result is a profound sense of continued vulnerability.
If a society does not render a judgment and the truth is not declared,
communities understandably feel that the terror of the past could reoccur. There