Abstract
Witnessing is necessary not simply to reconstruct the past but as an active part of community recovery, the regeneration of agency, and to a political project for seeking redress through the accretion of truth.’ Local community initiatives for land rights, literacy, access to health care, education, and justice met with state repression but were not silenced by La Violencia. Rather, these initiatives were held in suspension until the community could reconstruct local memory in a public space. Reburial following exhumation did not draw a process to an end; it provided space for the redeployment of these local initiatives and it reinvigorated community mobilization for social justice—both of which had been suspended by fear. Just as institutional forgetting could not end community desires for justice, forgetting could not end fear.
We will never forget. What happened here is written in our hearts.
—Pablo
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Notes
See Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and Post-colony-African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998);
Linda Green, Fear as a Way of Life—Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
Judith Zur, Violent Memories—Mayan War Widows in Guatemala (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).
Veena Das, “The Act of Witnessing—Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity,” in Veena Das, Arthutr Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 221. I gratefully acknowledge Veena Das for her support and mentorship.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 37.
Victoria Sanford “The Silencing of Maya Women from Mamá Maquín to Rigoberta Menchtz,” Social Justice 27, no. 1 (June 2000): 128–156.
San Miguel was not the only community attacked by the army that day. On September 15, 1981, the people of Rabinal went to the plaza to celebrate Independence Day. The army had obligated everyone to participate and attend the Independence Day parade. Accompanied by judiciales, military commissioners, and civil patrollers, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd and killed some 200 people. See CEH, Guatemala Memoria del Silencio, vols.1–12 (Guatemala City: CEH, 1999), vol. 8:144.
Michel Foucault, Power and Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 79.
Martha Nussbaum, Upheaveals of Thought—The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 407.
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© 2003 Victoria Sanford
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Sanford, V. (2003). The Power Effects of Declaring the Truth. In: Buried Secrets. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973375_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973375_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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