Guatemala Accompaniment Project

Below is a letter from a friend who is in Guatemala doing an Accompaniment project.
She was one of the students that went on the 2 week educational seminar that i talk about earlier in my blog.
Her main job is supporting those Guatemalans who lost family in the genocide in the 80's...helping them safely testify without being persecuted by those in power who may not want to remember...

More information about the program can be found at
www.nisgua.org


Dear Friends and Family,

I visited a new community last month, an organized, hopeful place called Santa Maria Tzejá.
Twenty-six years ago today, one month before the army massacred the village of Cuarto Pueblo, soldiers marched into the nearby Ixcán town of Santa Maria Tzejá. Except for one woman, whom the soldiers raped and killed, all of the forewarned villagers had fled to the surrounding jungle, leaving the town deserted. Two days later, patrolling soldiers heard a dog bark in the jungle and came upon a pregnant mother, her baby, and two young boys. They opened fire on the family, and then threw a grenade on the remains. Soon after they came upon a second huddled family; another pregnant mother, her eight children, and their grandmother. The soldiers fired on the cowering group at point blank range, killing everyone except for the six-year old son, who witnessed the massacre from behind a fallen tree.
Artemio and Elena were hiding with their family in the rainforest when the patrolling army surrounded them. The terrified family fled and the military opened fire. Elena and her young children were captured; Artemio and the eldest daughter escaped and eventually made it to the refugee camps in Mexico.
In the weeks that followed, half of the village’s nearly 120 families fled across the border and into Mexico. Unlike Cuarto Pueblo, which was destroyed and completely deserted until the refugee return in 1994, forty families from Santa Maria Tzejá came under the control of the military and remained in the village. The town became a “model village”, a militarized community in which most males between the ages of 15 and 60 were forced to join civil self-defense patrols and daily life was tightly controlled.
After the military captured Elena, she was taken to the nearby military base and tortured. She would remain in the reorganized, army-controlled community of Santa Maria Tzejá for the next twelve years. She eventually remarried, believing her husband, Artemio, to be dead. Artemio, alive and in exile with the elder daughter, also thought his wife and children had died in the attack. An anthropologist traveling between the Maya Tecún refugee camps and Santa Maria Tzejá discovered that both had survived and carried tape recordings and photographs between the divided family.
After twelve years of separation and vastly different experiences, Artemio, along with the other refugee families, made the return home. He and Elena remarried. I don’t know what became of her second husband.
Today they have a young son and daughter and run a store in the reunified town’s center. Artemio keeps bees and Elena is active in the local women’s organization. An outsider, unfamiliar with Guatemala’s recent history, might never guess that this couple lived for over a decade believing that their fractured family and community would never be whole again. And in many ways, the community is still not whole; divisions and bitterness remain between those who fled to Mexico and those who remained under military control, the community cooperative is not the core it once was, and perpetrators of the massacre enjoy the impunity that reigns in Guatemala.
And yet, more than one hundred of Santa Maria Tzejá’s youth are studying at university, the elementary and high schools are completely staffed with local teachers, and Artemio and Elena laugh. A lot.
Once, after our meetings in Guatemala City, Kim and I accompanied Artemio on a buying trip for his store. We bused to what seemed like every market in the entire capital, loitering outside of storefronts and kiosks while Artemio smelled deodorants and held nail polish hues up to the light, two big sellers in the community. I stood in the bustling crowds and black clouds of bus exhaust, watching him haggle with the vendors, and felt hopeful.