The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in guatemala 301
is no closure and no sense of justice. The past lurks in the present and threatens to
overwhelm the future.
But even in a culture of silence, quiet voices challenge themselves and others to
speak out. Villagers in Santa Maria Tzejá began to view their silence as making
them accomplices. Silence affirms—as the terrorist state expects—that nothing
indeed has happened and binds the murderers and the survivors into a depraved
covenant. The unspeakable horrors this village suffered should logically throttle any
progress, optimism, energy, confidence, enthusiasm, ambition, or collective action
(political or social). Yet this extraordinary community has become a model of success,
an engaged population that is looking onward with confidence—not by avoiding
the nightmare that took place but, on the contrary, by facing it head on.
Through human rights workshops, speaking about the past, and engaging with it,
they have moved forward and are determined—despite all the continued threats
and attacks—not to move one step back. Key to this process is the public nature of
their grieving: sharing the grief, hearing each other, receiving responses and reactions
to their deep pain. This open grief allows for reciprocity and that, in turn,
links the individual to the collective process of coping with fear, stress, and recovery.
Also important has been a past of participatory experience and a venue to participate
publicly—a strong community experience infused with democratic practices.
The result is a process of private suffering, public grieving. The public space
unveils pathways not always available in other villages that enable individuals to
better cope with private wounds.
Nonetheless, the process of healing will take time. Ramon, a former combatant
with the guerrilla forces, emphasizes the psychological scars of the war: “We
were left psychologically wounded as a result of the war. It will take a long time to
achieve an emotional stability.” A Maya-K’iche’ man, so poor he lacked land of his
own in the village, recalls the decision he made when captured at the age of thirtytwo
and taken to be tortured at the military base. He had made up his mind not
to collaborate with the army, not to provide any information. “I thought, no, I
would rather just die by myself, why should I kill my brothers? I didn’t even think
of my family, I forgot, so let them kill me, I thought.” I ask him how he felt when
he left the army base after four months. “One leg was totally swollen, I couldn’t
walk. My feet were totally swollen,” he recalls with a pained look twisting his features.
“I only wanted water. My family and I were thrown in a thick forest, without
food, nothing.” Leandro was told he could not go back to his destroyed village
because that was “a red zone, we could not cultivate there.” He says he was devastated
and demoralized. The physical pain and damage bled into the psychological
wounds. In the beginning, it was not simply the terrible, debilitating physical
pain that was immobilizing, he recalled, but rather the desire to live had seeped out
of him. He says his wife began to cut wood and work so they could survive in the
wasteland in which they had been dumped. He just sat there cowering: devastated,
humiliated, and without energy or will. Hope for recovery was derailed because
the military ordered him to appear at the army base—the same place where he had