Juan Manuel Gerónimo’s Testimony:
“We won’t be afraid. We will do this together. Because if we say that one person is in charge of this work, then we are just giving them a new martyr. But if we are all together, we can do this work. What we are doing is legal and the law isn’t going to put all of us in jail.” [from Sanford, pg. 39]
“We won’t be afraid. We will do this together. Because if we say that one person is in charge of this work, then we are just giving them a new martyr. But if we are all together, we can do this work. What we are doing is legal and the law isn’t going to put all of us in jail.” [from Sanford, pg. 39]
My unease reached its peak as I read a response to an article I linked to my Facebook page. I posted the link because for me it represented the challenges of trying to understand what is going on in Honduras. The response only confirmed my feelings of caution. I feel that recent history has taught us that the only way to respond to these situations is with aggressive rhetoric. But is that the best route to handling global crises? It becomes a battle of who is right and who is wrong (in the most simplistic sense of the word). Ultimately it turns into a desire to lay blame completely on one side in order to feel morally, dare I say, righteous, about taking the other side. But the history in Central America is terribly complicated and to try to make black and white distinctions is utterly impossible for me. The back and forth battle for power seems to swing wildly in nations struggling for political and democratic stability. Fragile governments struggling to gain autonomous momentum after years of colonization, political meddling, and economic turmoil. These battles do not erupt out of nowhere. There is a deep history and the U.S. is not an innocent bystander in all of this, which I believe raises the stakes of our response to these global events.
Buried Secrets: This brings me back to my research on the history of the civil war in Guatemala. That past is fraught with uncertainty about the truth of La Violencia—the genocide that was wielded upon the Mayan people in the 1980s and through the early 1990s. There are debates about whether or not the guerrillas were responsible for provoking the massacres committed by the army across numerous villages. There is a perspective, perpetuated by Robert Stoll (1998) and his critique of Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative of the civil war, which asserts that the Mayan people were victims in the middle of a battle between the government’s army and the guerrilla army. That both armies used the people for their own selfish ends and the people became victims of power plays.
Victoria Sanford, in her book, Buried Secrets, recounts the excavation of clandestine cemeteries from the civil war and the Commission for Historical Clarification’s (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico) search for who was responsible for the mass killings that took place in Guatemala during the civil war. The stakes of the right side of truth are high and can dictate public policy, political process, individual and community healing, and a host of issues for the nation. Because the stakes for truth are so high, it’s understandable that people would fight for their truth to be the truth of an event.
In their search for truth, the commission determined that the ‘two armies explanation’ asserted by Stoll for La Violencia is an inaccurate and incomplete explanation. In her book, Sanford provides a comprehensive explanation of the way in which the army enacted its terror of the Mayan people. She identifies seven phases of violence that constitute the “phenomenology of terror” (pg. 123) that occurred in Guatemala. These are: 1) premassacre community organizing and experiences with violence; 2) the massacre; 3) postmassacre life in flight in the mountains; 4) army captures and community surrenders; 5) model villages; 6) ongoing militarization of community life; and 7) living memory of terror (pg. 123). Within the phases of community surrender and the development of model villages, the army undermined the actions of the guerrillas and many innocent people, calling anybody who questioned the authority of the army ‘subversive’ and ‘guerrillas,’ which would lead to violent responses and fear among the people. As Sanford explains,
Social justice organizing was always met with accusations of leaders being ‘subversive’ or ‘guerrilla.’ These accusations heightened community fears of the army ‘ punishing’ them for these activities. Threats from military commissioners, sporadic army occupations of villages, and assemblies of civil patrollers at local army bases to denounce human rights activities reinforced ambient fear of the living memory of terror. It is within this memory that courageous community leaders came forward in the 1990s to demand justice. (pg. 144)
Ghosts of Coups Past: Military coups dominate the history of Central and South America, so it makes sense that to have the military forcibly remove President Zelaya from his home in the early morning of June 28 in his pajamas would bring back fears of that past. I can’t help but be reminded of President Arbenz in Guatemala being strip-searched in the airport before being sent off to Mexico. In the wake of his expulsion, Castillo Armas took control of the country and began the string of dictatorships that would rule over the country for decades.
Regardless of whether or not the military in Honduras was simply carrying out the orders of the Supreme Court and Congress, the image of that past cannot leave my mind. I wonder, even if they were trying to prevent Zelaya from democratically planting the seeds of a dictatorship, was it the best way to remove him? I can’t say, because I am not there and I only know what I’ve read on the situation. But I can’t help but feel the sharp pain of the deeper past in Central America and then the more recent 2002 Chávez debacle. And so I ask again, is aggressive rhetoric the best route to handling global crises such as these?
Reading academic books on Guatemala as I pour over news reports and blogs about the events in Honduras I find my skepticism grow. The search for truth is a process, especially when confronted with the histories and stories of people living through (or who have lived through) social upheaval and trauma. But people must decide on the truth after reading and researching events going on around them. Something I am working on at the moment. I just find in these moments that I’m unable to complete my thoughts. I’m unable to come to a final decision. Perhaps because so much is still unfolding—both in the news on Honduras and my research on Guatemala. This is particularly true with today's outbreak of violence as a result of Zelaya’s attempted return to Honduras. The one thing I am certain of is that we cannot be too hasty with our judgments and that in moments such as these I’m better at asking questions than coming to clear resolutions.
Works Cited:
- Sanford, Victoria. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Stoll, Robert. Rigobera Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.
