Reading My Way Through Guatemala....

“If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.”
— Eduardo Galeano

So, I haven’t written much in the past few days. I’ve felt a bit blank and tentative with my thoughts. This largely because I have been spending time reading about Guatemala’s history. I’ve been consumed by books to try to explain the poverty, the cynicism toward the government, the civil war, the alcoholism, the widespread corruption, the police with machine guns who I was told were largely useless. I want to understand why things are the way they are. I want a context in which to locate my experiences. I suppose that is me typified. Resort to books when I can’t understand what is going on around me. It is a coping mechanism for me. I have no idea what I’d do if I couldn’t bury myself in books. Researching things is like working on a large puzzle, putting pieces together from different books and different stories, and various other sources of information, trying to see the bigger picture. I have an affinity for the discovery process—and the big picture.

Agrarian Reform and Silence
It was after the man in that small warm room at The Dreamer Center finished talking about his experiences in the civil war that questions started to come to me. I wanted to ask much more than I knew I should. One question, though, inspired shared humor between the three people presiding over the talk that day. They exchanged sort of knowing glances that people share when they are asked a question that either has an obvious answer or that reflects the naiveté of the question-asker. Needless to say, I felt silly, because it was a question that was not obvious to me. And I wasn’t asking it naively, although it may have come out that way. I knew the question might not be possible to answer. What I wasn’t expecting was such a certain response.

I asked them if there were people or groups out there currently working against the corruption of the government. Resistance groups or parties? I mean, what I did know about Guatemala at that time was that the civil war was largely between a militant government and militant government resistors.

After a pause, I received essentially the answer of no and that people are too afraid to do such things. This was followed by discussions about how there are high numbers of vigilante-style justice tactics, because the government and police do not truly help its people. The corruption is widespread and everyday folks must take care of themselves. They explained that the peace treaty of 1996 was only paper and very little else. There was also an assessment that civil war is more than likely to break out again. It is only a matter of when. All this leads to contradictions that I couldn’t resolve in my mind and I didn’t feel comfortable pressing the issue. Why were they so quick to say there were no counter groups out there? If they are predicting civil war to erupt again, who are the groups/factions inciting it? Perhaps, these, too, are naïve questions.

But the questions continue to perplex me, especially as I continue to read about the recent history of Guatemala (the last 100 years or so). Currently, I’ve been reading two books, which have been helping me understand a little bit more. Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer and Silence on the Mountain by Daniel Wilkinson. These books have given me a few more pieces to the puzzle.

Agrarian Reform: Decree 900, The Agrarian Reform Bill of 1952. This seems to be a significant moment in Guatemalan history and marks both the pinnacle of the October Revolution of 1945 and the descent of its hope. The October Revolution in 1945 ousted General Jorge Ubico and set the stage for a democratic government under Dr. Juan José Arévalo. According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, Arévalo had four priorities for he six year term: “agrarian reform, protection of labor, a better educational system and consolidation of political democracy” (37). Arévalo made great strides in his six years in office, but his larger goals of change—particularly agrarian reform—were left to the next democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. It is Arbenz who put Decree 900 into the books and it is he who would experience the repercussions of this legislation. The Agrarian Reform Bill set out to redistribute uncultivated lands that were in the hands of a very small elite—including United Fruit Company (U.S. owned). According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, at the time Arévalo took office in 1945, 2% of the landowners held 72 percent of the land (38). So, Arbenz’s goal was to enable Guatemala to move out of its plantation system and into a modern capitalist state. He also wanted to take if from a semi-colonial economy into an independent nation in a way that would raise the standard of living for all folks (see Schlesinger and Kinzer, 52). The upper class and the U.S. was less than happy with Arbenz, though. And his government was not without controversy. The specter of communism would rear its ugly head, giving the U.S. an excuse for intervention. Between the communist fear and the desire to protect U.S. corporate interests in Guatemala (United Fruit Company), the Arbenz administration—with its agrarian reform—was up against incredible odds.

As I read Bitter Fruit, I assumed the time of Decree 900 would be glorified in Guatemalan history as a key moment in which the people would hold on to for hope. The feeling I had as I started reading was that this was a book for people in the U.S. to know our role in the breakdown of the Guatemalan democracy, specifically-- and more broadly, the U.S.’s role in Central American politics. I assumed this history would be well versed in contemporary Guatemala. At this point, I’m not sure if it has been forgotten or it is just not talked about. Two entirely different things.

Silence: I then started reading Silence on the Mountain. I was only part way into Bitter Fruit, but I wanted to understand more than the broader political history. This book is an oral history that tells a story similar to Bitter Fruit, but tells it from the point of those affected by that history. This book provided the human nuances of the Agrarian Reform Bill and the overthrow of Arbenz—and their lasting impact on the country. Wilkinson did much of his research for the book in the early and mid-1990s when the civil war was still going on. The author is an American—a graduate of Harvard.

He met the inspiration for his research, César, while visiting a plantation. César grew up on a plantation and introduced Wilkinson to the Agrarian Reform. According to Wilkinson, university students like César were aware of the reform’s significance on Guatemala. In fact, he told Wilkinson that to understand the war in Guatemala, he needed to understand Agrarian Reform. This was the beginning of what would be a nearly obsessive journey to understand the reform’s impact on plantation workers and other everyday Guatemalans—not just those politically active. César had wanted to write a history of the Agrarian Reform for his thesis in agronomy, but was not allowed to by the faculty at the university. So every time he saw Wilkinson, he would say to him “Go find out what happened with their lands after the Agrarian Reform and you’ll understand the frustration that fueled the war. (9). Wilkinson realized that César was not challenging him, but asking Wilkinson to do the study that he wasn’t able to do himself.

But when Wilkinson went out to talk with people on plantations about Agrarian Reform, nobody seemed to remember it. Getting the vague response of saber (who knows) every time he asked about that time in history. Arbenz appeared to be little more than a footnote in their descriptions. It exemplified collective amnesia—but it was hard to decipher if it was that people didn’t know or didn’t want to speak of that time.

But, I told myself, he interviewed these people during the civil war, so of course many people would be fearful to speak about anything controversial or that might put their families in danger. What about now, though? I remember the folks at that center telling us that people are no longer afraid to speak about the war. But I wonder if they speak of Agrarian Reform. I wonder how they understand and talk about it in relation to the civil war and its aftermath? The students in César’s era knew about it, but what about now?

So many questions. What is the legacy of the silence? As Wilkinson continued, he realized that the silence—or secrecy—of the people was not merely a “necessity, it had been a virtue. And for the first time it occurred to [him] that people who told [him] ‘nothing happened’ had actually taken satisfaction in the exercise of that virtue” (235). I can’t help but wonder if it is a continued virtue. I also wonder if a society that has been built on fear and secrecy for so long can overcome that silence. Can fear be overcome in less than a generation?

Agrarian Reform: But we in the U.S. are fantastic at forgetting, too. And we are often privileged enough to remain ignorant of the things our nation does to enable us to continue to live this good life. For example, what are we willing to remember about our role in the coup that removed Arbenz from office? The demise of Agrarian Reform was not the result of the self-implosion of a corrupt government. Thanks to U.S. intervention, the Arbenz administration collapsed. According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, so did democracy. Arbenz was publicly renounced and humiliated through a variety of propaganda tactics orchestrated by the Dulles brothers under Eisenhower’s presidency. Part of “Operation Success” included ousting Arbenz, replacing him with the U.S. supported "Liberator," Castillo Armas.

Perhaps, it would be comforting to say that the U.S. stayed out of Guatemalan affairs after that, but it did not. Reading Bitter Fruit, all I could think of was the disastrous precedent it set in motion. It seems after that time, the government’s ability to regain stability and the trust of its people never found solid footing. One dictator after the next; one coup after the next. It was disheartening reading the spiraling cycle of violence that followed the demise of the Arévalo and Arbenz era. The military dominated the country and as Schlesinger and Kinzer comment, “the intention of the military leaders was essentially to destroy the political center. Anyone not supporting the regime was almost by definition leftist, and therefore an enemy. The military apparently believed that eliminating the center precluded the possibility of a moderate government, therefore leaving the citizenry the sterile choice between a revolutionary Communist regime and the existing military dictatorship” (251). There was only black and white and no room for the subtle shades of gray that give breath to real life.

Silence: Wilkinson pursued through the silence he encountered on his journey through Guatemala. He listened to the silence. Allowed the silence to persist. Silence is a significant theme of social trauma. Social trauma is by no means a phenomenon only found in Guatemala. Nor is it something new to me, considering it’s my primary area of research. What was new to me was the way I experienced it when I was in Guatemala. My obsession has been with the Vietnam War and its impact on cultural structures in the U.S. and Vietnam. And I experientially live that impact (at least on the American side). I have only read about the social trauma in places like Argentina, Germany, Armenia, and other nations.

Yes, I visited Germany and several concentration camps, so I went beyond books in that context. But Guatemala was different. Unlike the disconnected tours in the concentration camps, I saw trauma's echoes in ways that have emotionally attached themselves to my conscious/conscience. There was an emotionality that I linked in to. It’s hard to explain, but in some ways it’s like you’re seeing the effects of that past lived out in the lives of the children, mothers, men—all that I was introduced to in Guatemala. And things about those experiences were frighteningly familiar, which made them entirely palpable. As I go back in my mind to those ten days, I think about what wasn’t spoken in the stories we heard. I think about the things I didn’t see when I was there. I’m still waiting for the holes in the puzzle to start to tell another story. Galeano’s quote seems all too relevant: “If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.”

Agrarian Reform: The history between the U.S. and Guatemala needs to be remembered from both sides. Agrarian Reform wasn’t about attacking a particular corporation. It was about a country trying to gain autonomy over its resources. For Arbenz, it wasn’t about taking the land away from the rich and giving it to the poor. It was about creating a viable and sustainable system for his country. But the history of colonization proved challenging to overcome. As Schlesinger and Kinzer comment, the current state of Guatemala (at least at the time this was written) was worse than what had existed prior to the October Revolution. Over 30 years of civil war and political instability wreaks havoc on the economy and culture of a nation—not to mention what it does to its people.

And where do we in the U.S. locate our relationship to Guatemala? As the Dulles brothers were celebrating their victory and Arbenz was humiliated and exiled from his country, what happened to the people? What happened to Guatemalans? And did any of it really matter to Americans?

Silence: I wish I could convey what I gained from these books. It seems all I could really talk about is the content of each book, but there’s more to it than that for me. It’s the books in the context of what I saw when I was in Guatemala. Pieces of the puzzle fitting together, but the articulation not there yet. I wish I could convey the mood and the energy of sitting in a room with a person telling their story, plugging into something larger that is so present, yet inarticulable. All I have right now, though, is the outline of an image. The colors and nuances of the picture are intangible and fluid. And I’m yet again learning how to accept ambiguity as clarity, waiting for the shifting images to tell me something else, something different.

César, Wilkinson’s point of contact, made an important point to him. Wilkinson asked how he was supposed to write the story of this history of Agrarian Reform if nobody could remember or were willing to speak of that time in history. Wilkinson lamented that it wasn’t the same as archaeologists excavating bodies; memories are not tangible. Bodies don’t lie and distort the past. Wilkinson was sure he’d never get the full story. César’s response echoes in my mind, “’forensics never get the full corpse, do they?’ He had a point. What they got was decayed. Sometimes, it had been mutilated beyond recognition. ‘But it still tells them something, right?’” (21) The closest I can come to try to convey this process is when I was interviewing soldiers with PTSD and the dance we would perform as they talked about their war experiences. Often we talked in bits and pieces. We would talk about their job, their duties. We would talk about those duties as a doctor might talk about a surgery. Great detail about the specifics; the feelings behind the actions left silently lingering in that thick surface description of a seemingly sterile task. The story seemingly beyond recognition. But the stories were there if you waited and listened. Really listened. Nothing is ever what it seems.

We tell stories for many reasons. We want to remember. We want to find resolution. We want to be whole again. We want people to know that real life is far more complex than a reform bill or a coup. That lives circulate beneath all of that. People are affected. People have a lot to say—even if they don’t say anything all.

Works Cited:
Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer: Bitter Frut: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Wilkinson, Daniel. Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.