Abstract
In December 1997, I assisted the FAFG in its forensic investigation of the April 1981 army massacre of civilians in Acul and its subsequent report to the Commission for Historical Clarification. To reach Acul from Guatemala City, you leave the noise and grit of the city by taking a scenic and winding four-hour drive through the green grass and red earth of the lowland mountains of Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché. You leave Santa Cruz on a dirt road. You drive for another hour or so, passing small communities of subsistence corn farming on a dirt road that covers everything with dust in the dry season. The looming purple and blue mountains in the distance suddenly appear closer as you reach the seemingly fertile oasis of Sacapulas and the river you must cross. If you are lucky, the bridge is not “out of order.” If you cannot use the bridge, then you look for the place where the river is widest and, if you are like me, you hold your breath when the water rushes over the top of your engine hood as you drive across the river.
We were forced to do it. We are full of fear. We are trembling while we are there.
—Don Sebastián
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Notes
Cultural Survival, “Counterinsurgency and the Development Pole Strategy in Guatemala,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1988): 11.
For more on model villages and poles of development, see Cultural Survival, “Counterinsurgency and the Development Pole Strategy”; AVANSCO, ¿Dônde esta el futuro? Procesos de Reintegración en Comunidades de Retornados (Guatemala City: Infopress Centroaméricano, 1992);
George Black, Garrison Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1984);
Chris Krueger and Kjell Enge, Security and Development: Conditions in the Guatemalan Highlands (Washington, D.C.: Washington Office on Latin America, 1985);
Luis Padilla, ed., Guatemala: Polos de Desarrollo—El Caso de la Desedtructuración de las Comunidades Mayas, vols. 1–2. (Mexico City: Editorial Praxis, 1988 and 1990);
James Painter, Guatemala: False Hope, False Freedom (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1987);
Rolando Alecio, “Uncovering the Truth: Political Violence and Indigenous Organizations,” in Minor Sinclair, ed., The New Politics of Survival: Grassroots Movements in Central America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995).
“Huipil”—blouse of intricately embroidered hand woven fabric. For a thoughtful analysis on the relationship between indigenous clothing and identity, see Carol Hendrickson, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
Bertolt Brecht, “Motto,” in Carolyn Forché, ed, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993): 51.
In its final report, the CEH listed the Acul massacre date as April 22, 1982, which is most likely a typographical error. A 1983 article reports the massacre as April 20, 1982 (See Allan Nairn, “The Guns of Guatemala,” The New Republic, [April 11, 1983]: 17), based on interviews conducted in 1983 with a survivor in an army relocation camp. Yet, all survivors interviewed during the FAFG investigation reported being in the mountains for at least two years prior to surrendering to the army. For the FAFG investigation, I interviewed forty-three massacre survivors and Carlota MacAllister interviewed thirteen. Our testimonies, gathered during the FAFG exhumation, consistently noted the date as April 1981, Apri121, 1981, or 1981. Acul massacre survivors also consistently said it happened the year before the massacre in Chel (April 3, 1982), and Chel massacre survivors consistently reported the date of the Chel massacre as taking place one year after the Acul massacre, offering 1982, April 1982 and April 3, 1982, as the date of the Chel massacre. Doña Magdalena reported her husband and son’s assassination by the EGP as having happened on April 12, 1981 and said that this took place the same year as the massacre (Acul testimony no. 3, 10 December 1997). Further, the April 1981 date of the EGP assassination was a marker of time also consistently used by other members of the community as taking place the same year as the Acul massacre. Significantly, testimonies consistently dated the Acul massacre as having occurred one week after the massacre in neighboring Cocop. The Cocop massacre is one of the few massacres recorded in the Nebaj Death Register (April 15, 1981) and notes the “assassination” of sixty-four men, women, and children—thus corroborating survivor testimonies of the 1981 massacre date. The human rights group GAM (Mutual Support Group) also reports the Acul massacre date as April 1981 (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo [GAM], Quitar el agua al pez [Guatemala City: GAM, 1996]; 53). Nunca Más reports the Acul massacre date as 1980 and 1982 but is based on interviews with only three witnesses
(Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala [ODHA], Guatemala—Nunca Más, vols. 1–4, Informé Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recupaeración de la Memoria Histdrica (REHMI] [Guatemala City: ODHA, 1998]: vol. 1, 53). These conflicting dates again raise the issue of the confusing puzzle created by genocide and indicate that the puzzle can best be reconstructed by collecting, comparing, and contrasting as much testimonial and archival information as possible. Based on the consistency of the dozens of testimonies of Acul and Chel massacre survivors, death register evidence and the recreation of a calendar of progressive army violence against Nebaj communities, I believe the April 21, 1981, date of the Acul massacre to be a positive date, not a probable date. The FAFG final reports to the CEH in 1998 and FAFG final reports to the Nebaj prosecutor in 1998 as well as the FAFG published version of these reports,
FAFG, Informe de la Fundación de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala: Cuatro Casos Paradigmaticos por la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Historico de Guatemala (Guatemala City: Editorial Serviprensa, 2000) also date the Acul massacre on April 21, 1981, and the Chel massacre as April 3, 1982.
See Laurence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies—The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Langer has written extensively about the relationship between the witness and the person giving testimony. His work studying Holocaust survivor testimonies on video revealed a number of interviewer/witnesses who sought to curtail continued testimony when it became discomfiting for the interviewer or failed to meet the interviewer’s expectation of “heroic memory.” Dominick LaCapra’s work on witnessing, trauma, and history indicates that a type of transference takes place between the interviewer/witness and the survivor. Moreover, he concludes that the form this transference takes has much to do with interpretation. See LaCapra, History and Memory. In addition to these authors, I am grateful to William Quick, Warren Sibilla, and the works of Carl Jung for helping me to reflect upon the influence of this transference in my writing and in my life.
Throughout the hundreds of testimonies, when survivors have sought to demarcate time, they have often done so with reference to twenty days. This reflects contemporary measurement of time with the Maya calendar, which is based on twenty-day cycles. For more on the Maya calendar, see Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folk-lore and Calendars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999);
Vincent Herschel Malmstrom, Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon: The Calendar in Mesoamerican Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); and
Marco de Paz, Calendario Maya: el camino infinito del tiempo (Guatemala City: Ediciones Gran Jaguar, 1991). See also
B.N. Colby and L. Colby, The Daykeeper: The Life and Discourse of an Ixil Diviner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), and
Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
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© 2003 Victoria Sanford
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Sanford, V. (2003). “It Fills My Heart with Sadness”. In: Buried Secrets. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973375_5
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