Living with legacy of this dirtiest of dirty wars

[Judi Lynn]

The Irish Times - Saturday, September 10,
Living with legacy of this dirtiest of dirty wars

MARY BOLAND in Quetzaltenango

IN THE lush highlands of southwestern Guatemala, where coffee plantations roast in the shadows of Tajumulco Volcano, Central America’s highest peak, the afternoon silence is occasionally broken by the creak of a rocking chair, a hummingbird’s whirr, or the sleepy whimper of the resident dog. Whispering students conjugate Spanish verbs to the rhythm of their swaying hammocks. Others attend classes with local teachers in palm-thatched, windowless huts.

Such an idyllic pastoral scene, where the only apparent danger is posed by pesky mosquitoes that work silently and leave bites that itch for months, belies the campaign of slaughter, rape and village burnings – carried out in these very mountains – that led to the setting up of this small, non-profit Spanish-language school outside the town of Colomba, and its sister establishment some 30km away in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second city. “We started up so that we could tell the world about what happened to the communities near our schools and across Guatemala – the torture, the rape, the genocide of a people,” says Carlos Sanchez, who founded the Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco de Español in 1988.

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René Leiva Cayax (29) and Danilo Alvarado (32), who were close friends of Sanchez’s, were kidnapped within days of each other in October 1987, then tortured and murdered. Cayax, an agronomy student at the University of Quetzaltenango, and Alvarado, a father of two and an agronomical engineer associated with the university, had both campaigned alongside other staff and students for human rights and democracy for Guatemala, a country then wracked by civil war.

The conflict, in which state forces were pitted against leftist rebels, has been called the dirtiest of Latin America’s dirty wars. Between 1960 and 1996, under various administrations, more than 200,000 people – the vast majority of them Mayans – were murdered or “disappeared”, and up to one million people were displaced. A UN-sponsored commission found at least 90 per cent of the killings were carried out by the state’s military forces or by paramilitary death squads. Mayan villages where rebels were suspected of hiding out were looted and burned and their inhabitants raped and slaughtered as part of the state’s counter-insurgency strategy, designed in accordance with the pronouncement of military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who held power from 1982-83: “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” It was a strategy that culminated in acts of genocide, the UN commission concluded.

More:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0910/1224303851328.html