Field Reflections from Guatemala, May-June 2008

By: Carla Suarez, PCD Research Intern

 

During the past two months, I have been working in Guatemala trying to examine if and how social fabric has been rebuilt in post-conflict communities in the Ixcan and Ixil regions of the Quiche Department. An important yet difficult moment of my research occurred during one of my first key expert interviews where I was told that: “Reconciliation is not possible in Guatemala. How can people reconcile when the government has never apologized or been brought to justice? We don’t like to use that word here.”[1] Although this was a slightly discouraging way to begin my work, I realized that this in itself is an important finding when studying transitional justice. It was only as I began to work and live in a community in the Ixil region that I was able to contextualize and understand what was really behind such a statement.

 

The Ixil region, consisting of Nebaj, Cotzal, Chajul, was one of the most affected areas during the armed conflict. The Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), a guerrilla group, began to organize and mobilize its support base from this region. The Guatemalan Government responded with extreme force and began its scorched earth policies against indigenous communities. The community that I worked in, similar to many others in that area, experienced several military raids and attacks. The most memorable attack occurred when community members were forced into the Catholic Church and told by the army whether they were going to go to heaven or hell. Those that were told that they were going to hell were massacred in front of the community after they had to dig their own grave. Sixty-four people died that day. Following this, the entire community fled and hid in the mountains nearby. Although the majority of people in the Ixil region took refuge in the mountains (some for longer periods than others) they were all automatically considered to be supporters, collaborators, and/or participants of the guerrilla.

 

In efforts to destroy this actual or potential guerrilla base, Rios Montt passed an Amnesty Law offering official pardon to anyone who was hiding in the mountains. While many people returned voluntarily, many were also forced to leave the mountain, usually by their own family members and/or neighbours. As one respondent noted: “Once we came back to Nebaj the military would ask us many questions. You always had to tell the truth, they would know if you were lying. They knew everything. They would then make us go back to our hiding spot in the mountain and force us to bring back everyone else that was hiding.”[2] What happened if they didn’t want to come back with you, I asked. “They had no choice. They had to come back with us whether they liked it or not. We had guns then and we would mistreat them if they refused. They knew us, anyways, they were our family members or our neighbours that we had to bring back to town.”[3] This intimate level of violence produced rigid power structures and hierarchies in the communities that have been difficult, if not impossible, to erase.

 

Upon return to Nebaj, Montt began to create ‘model communities’ where people coming down from the mountain were forced to build and settle in certain communities that were previously destroyed by the military. A series of new and old inhabitants were inserted into these new closely knit communities. The military used a lottery system to divide up the land, which has resulted in serious community tensions and resentment. Those that received less favourable land, such as smaller lots or land that is on a hill instead of a flat area, have never forgotten about their losses. Ironically, most continue to blame the guerrilla for their losses, even though it was the massacre that drove people away from their community. As one respondent told me, “if it hadn’t been for the guerrilla, the army would have never come to our community. It was because of them that we had to abandon our land …”[4] Those who gained favourable land during the process, however, are also not at peace. Many of them told me that they were fearful that “they”(the orginal land owners) would reclaim their land. It was under this historical context that I began my work in a community in Nebaj.

 

In order to understand the politics of reconciliation one has to unravel a series of webs, and even then it is often difficult to discover the ‘truth’ since talking to certain people means that you can no longer talk to others in the community. In a place where victims and perpetrators continue to live side-by-side, one has to be careful not to be seen talking or interacting with ‘the enemy’ although this can sometimes be unavoidable. Ethical dilemmas in field research appear when one is least expecting them. While working in this particular community in Nebaj, I interviewed both the perpetrator and victim of torture. I did not plan for this; it was near the end of my work in this community that I put these puzzle pieces together.

 

Jacinto and Tomas[5] are two neighbours in a community of roughly 150 inhabitants in Nebaj. Jacinto was one of the first people I interviewed. The mayor introduced me to him as one of the ‘most important leaders’ of the community. Jacinto and I talked for many hours in his house. Although he spoke quite openly about the armed conflict, it was clear that he only liked to engaged certain topics that made him feel comfortable. In fact, he completely avoided some of my questions. I could tell that he understood my questions, but he did not want to answer them. This is when I learned to listen to the silences during my interviews. Some silences are so loud that they are hard to ignore.

 

Jacinto has extensive knowledge about both the strategies and weapons that were used by the guerrilla and the army. At certain points, he even liked to re-enact combat scenes. His family was comparatively rich to the rest of the community. He had three cows, a horse and a red pick-up truck; most people have chickens and turkeys, if they are lucky. Perhaps what was most surprising about Jacinto was the way he distanced himself from the conflict. He always spoke about incidents and events in third person, something that had never occurred in my previous and later interviews. His personal silence left me very intrigued. 

 

The following day I meet Tomas. Unlike Jacinto, Tomas was very nervous as he spoke to me. His hands and legs were constantly shaking, and although the interview was held in the private setting of his house, he continuously looked around the room as he spoke, as if he was waiting for someone to come in through the front door. Despite this anxious environment, Tomas disclosed very intimate moments about his life. Tomas could vividly remember the armed conflict - he could recall names, dates, numbers, years, things that most people I spoke with could not recall. Every memory he shared contained so much detail that it felt like I too had been there. He told me about how he had been recruited when he was young and how he jumped through the ranks and became a guerrilla leader. Given his involvement with the guerrilla in that area, he has been blamed and criticized for the massacre that took place in the community. Although it was the army that was responsible for the massacre, many people in the community told me that if it hadn’t been for the guerrilla, if they hadn’t come around here, the army would have never come and killed them. Tomas has also come to internalize that guilt and responsibility for the community massacre. Life in the guerrilla, however, was also very difficult for Tomas.

 

At the beginning of our second interview Tomas asked me; “Do you really want to know everything that happened? Even if it involves me killing other people?” It turns out that there was a conflict between Tomas and other guerrilla members, and he killed three of them. Tomas was expelled from the guerrilla and shortly after was captured by the military. He was brought to Nebaj and was tortured for three weeks in the military base by his neighbour Jacinto, who I later learned had also been in the guerrilla, although at that particular point he was leader of the Patrullas de auto-defensa civiles (PAC).

 

To this date, almost a decade since the peace agreements have been signed, Jacinto continues to publicly harass, embarrass, and intimidate Tomas. He refers to him as a rebel, even though at one point Jacinto had also belonged to the guerrilla and even though at the en Tomas also became part of the PAC in his community. Although it has been a few years since he has been directly threatened, the possibility of this threat is always haunting Tomas and his family. Reconciliation in this environment is difficult to initiate and foster. “How can I begin to think and process reconciliation, if I can’t live in peace?” Tomas asked me when I dared to bring up the subject.[6]

 

Power structures that were imposed by the army continue to influence the every day activities of this community; this continues to manifest the same fears, and tensions that were experienced during the war. Despite this, I admired how well community members have been able to cope with these dynamics. Under this environment, maybe all we can ask for is communal co-existence? Perhaps it is time that we begin to de-romanticize the concept of reconciliation. The transitional justice literature often expects, and in some ways, demands that ‘reconciliation’ to be the end result of its main mechanisms and processes. At the community level, however, I found that these external interventions were seldom conceptualized in this way. It is not surprising that they were also limited in producing this type of impact. 

 

Shortly after my work in this community, I began to reflect on the earlier comments made by that key informant. I decided that the analysis made is fairly shortsighted. Reconciliation is not only difficult to achieve at the national level, but how do we conceptualize and practice this at community level? The literature on transitional justice has a series of definitions and associations with the word ‘reconciliation’, these include, forgiveness, telling truth, justice, repentance, harmony, etc. I saw none of these acts in this community, but at the same time it would difficult to expect any of these.

 

How does reconciliation work in the case for Jacinto and Tomas who both played foul roles during the armed conflict? Perhaps when supporting opposing sides and in different ways, but at the end of the day they are both perpetrators of human rights abuses. Do perpetrators reconcile with other perpetrators? Is one perpetrator guiltier than the other? All of these questions complicate the notion of reconciliation.

 

Given these complexities, I began to wonder whether it is better to keep some silences in order for community members to co-exist in a place where horrible things occurred at a very intimate level. If this is true, then we as social science researchers need to reflect about our roles in post-conflict settings. In some ways, our interests, our presence, and our conversations in post-conflict communities remind the community members of their silences. In fact, us asking about their lives during and post conflicts make these silences more noticeable.