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Guatemala Update
GUATEMALA UPDATE - a reality check by Amanda Hale, Sept. 20, 2007
In August I travelled to Guatemala to visit with Mayan friends in their village, to meet with political activists and receive an update on Canadian gold and nickel mining in Guatemala, and to revisit some people and places who had become integral to my recently published novel, The Reddening Path. Following is a photo-journal of this journey:
[Background: Guatemala was invaded and colonised by the Spanish early in the 16th Century. The country proclaimed its independence in 1821, but real reform was not achieved until 1944 when a civilian was elected president. However, the reformist government was overthrown by a CIA backed coup in June 1954. An outbreak of protests against the new military-aligned government in March and April of 1962 marked the beginning of a 34-year civil war between leftist guerrilla groups and the government for control of the country. The Mayan people were caught in the middle and suffered the brunt of the violence and killings. The 1996 Peace Accord officially ended the civil war, but Guatemalans continue to suffer with an average of 16 murders daily, as well as disappearances, particularly of children, kidnapped for adoption, prostitution, or organ donation.]
"Anything vividly imagined becomes inseparable from reality"; - Wilder Penfield
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My first stop in Guatemala City, August 9, 2007, was at the FAMDEGUA office (Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala). Before leaving Canada I'd read on the internet about Wendy Mendez, a young woman who has become a militant leader, daughter of one of the many striving for social justice who disappeared during the 70's and 80's. My last visit to Guatemala had been four and a half years ago, researching for a novel about a Guatemalan adoptee returning to her birthland to search for her mother. In 1988 I had been there to paint a mural for the Grupo de Apoyo Mútuo, a human rights group assisting families of the detained and disappeared. I'd lived in the house of Don Herlindo and Doňa Ana and slept in the room of Irma Marilú, their daughter who had disappeared two years previously. Now, as I sat in the FAMDEGUA office, Irma's face smiled down at me from a wall of familiar faces, a community of the disappeared, kept alive by the tireless work of people like Aura Elena.
We have now completed 70 exhumations, she said. She travels all over Guatemala, from El Petén in the north, to Quiché, Huehuetenango, Rabinál, Cobán - areas where the Mayan people were massacred during the civil war, and continue to be killed, their names ticked off on blacklists of community leaders, but in lesser numbers and with no media coverage since the peace accord of 1996, which nominally returned Guatemala to a state of democracy. But in some places nothing changes, especially in Guatemala where 80% of the population is indigenous, where people live in harmony with the earth in a culture of subsistence farming; corn, beans and coffee growing on their doorsteps and as far as their patches of land extend before reaching the huge foreign-owned fincas (coffee plantations).
This time I noticed, for the first time, the face of Luz Haydée Mendez, leaping out from all the familiar faces. Luz was very beautiful, as is Wendy whose photograph I have seen in a Rights Action bulletin, passionate with intent, confronting the Guatemalan army on June 30th at the Day of the Army celebration. As a small child she'd witnessed the torture of her mother before she was finally taken - disappeared. A new generation has grown in Guatemala and now seeks justice for criminal acts against their families. In Guatemala when people fight back, el mano dura, a firm hand, the campaign slogan of the Patriot Party for the Sept 9 elections, can be expected to lash out, not for justice, but for silence - the ultimate silence of genocide. Indigenous people are problematic; they do not wish, as the CEO of one of the foreign mining companies operating in Guatemala suggested, to move beyond subsistence farming into a profit-motivated lifestyle. They wish to protect and conserve their land against the destruction wrought by mining methods which pulverize the earth and release heavy metals into their water.
These thoughts race through my mind as I sit there, surrounded, feeling afraid for Wendy Mendez. This is only the first day. Two weeks later, on my last night in Guatemala, an American woman who works with a human rights organization in the Capital tells me, We're always afraid, every day. Everyone who lives in Guatemala is afraid. Then she tells me about the murder, days ago, of the son of a prominent activist. I remember Béatriz Marroquin who was kidnapped and murdered on December 10, 1985, the eve of her departure to Canada to join her refugee husband, her machete-scored body dumped at the roadside, her hands cut off.
I am here to thank the women who helped me with research for my book, The Reddening Path, recently published and now awaiting a Spanish translation. Adoption is a hot topic in Guatemala. The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, an international legal document created in May 1993 through the Hague Conference on Private International Law, is scheduled to go into force in late 2007, countering the many illegal adoptions of stolen children who sell for $30-40,000 US. Regulation of international adoption varies hugely from country to country and in many of the poorer ones it is so ineffectual that criminals have infiltrated the system. Gangs provide children to alleged "would-be parents", who actually deal in organs, paedophilia, prostitution or child labour.
When you live the virtual life of the writer, living through your imagination, lacing it with factual information, by the end of the process you begin to doubt your own knowledge. I had to revisit these people, hear them tell the terrible stories once again. I had to stand in Parque Central and stare at the Palacio Nacional where my heroine Paméla's mother lives eternally with her General in a secret apartment.
I had to walk into La Catedral Metropolitana and find the Virgen del Socorro, a two foot wooden statue sequestered in a side chapel, a figure that accompanied Diego Velasquez, first Governor of Cuba, to the new world, was passed to Hernando Cortés to bless his route to Mexico and assist him in the conquest of the Aztec nation, and found her way to Guatemala in the hands of Pedro Alvarado. As I stare at the banal blonde figure I can barely believe in her journey, in the power invested in her.
When I was a child and "imagined"; something I was either laughed at or punished for "trying to get attention."; As I travel, verifying the experience embedded in my second novel, I track my doubts back to childhood where we still have no sense of boundaries, where the magical world of the imagination is not separate from the "real"; world. The doubts, the feeling of being "bad"; or "wrong"; - (what if the radio interviewer asks me to verify something and I can only cite my intuition; what if I can't remember where I got it but only that's it more real to me than what I ate for breakfast?) - must plague every writer, I think. We create from our inner worlds, and then we must go out into the world to verify, to compare, to walk the frontier between what are supposedly two separate countries, but in reality is one continuous flow of earth joined by rivers and geological strata descending miles into the earth, to a core of molten lava on which we float, the sky stretching billions of miles above to a place where time stops.
I walked to Casa Central, the orphanage where Paméla spent the first 9 months of her life. It is a convent which takes up a city block.
I look for the brass hand knocker with the ring on the 3rd finger. It's not there. I must have imagined it, to signal the status of convent without stating it. (Show, don't tell, the writer's dictum; trust your reader's intelligence). I enter the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal where MarÃa-Teresa, the Mother Superior, was found slumped on the steps leading to the altar after a long night's vigil. The Chapel is filled with light, a service in progress, nuns filling the pews. I take photos so that I know it is real.
In the park across from Casa Central the armless statue of 4 years ago has grown arms. The walkways are being dug up by men with shovels, exposing the dry red earth. I remember the exhumations.
In a cool flagstoned office in Zona 2, a young woman confirms everything I've read in my own house in Canada in the Rights Action bulletins. They say the genders learn differently - males intellectually, females sensually. I think of this as I watch Marta's facial expression, her gestures, as I smell the dusty office, feel the patch of warmth on my wrist from a shaft of light, as I hear her Spanish words and believe them finally.
After, drinking a Gallo in the Salon Reál of the Pan American hotel, hand-woven huipÃles (blouses) from all the different areas of Guatemala hanging from the balcony, the Mayan staff in traditional dress, I think of how the Government uses the indigenous people to promote tourism; the same people against whom they wage a war of genocide. The government is made up of Guatemalans backed by the CIA. At a certain point "backed"; becomes "controlled";. Interference is the thin end of the wedge, a wedge that enters the heart of the people and infects it. The Guatemalan army recruits Mayan boys and trains them to kill their own people. At root, violence is circumstancial. It can be internalized. We can all be reduced to an ultimate craving for survival for which no price is too high. The soul's attachment to the body is fierce. In a country where decades of genocidal massacre has taken place with impunity, a pattern is set, seeds are sown like the deathly corn seeds depicted on posters dotting the countryside, warning people against Monsanto's genetically modified corn-seed which will sterilize their own seed. In the poster skulls emerge from the corn-cob. In the Popol Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, the creation story tells how the first people were made from corn.
I sip my cold beer, slippery under my fingers, and Marta's words echo in her understated tone. The effects of the mining are poisoning the land. The animals are dying, birth defects are beginning to occur in both animals and humans, it is impossible to grow corn, beans. All the money from the mining is going to the US and Canadian mining companies. They mine for gold, for nickel, they have petroleum and hydro-electric projects on our land. All the petroleum is exported. In Guatemala there is a terrible shortage of gasoline, and it is very expensive.
I have learned from the Rights Action bulletins that in 2005, Canadian mining company Glamis Gold (now Goldcorp) prepared to begin operations at an open pit gold mine in the isolated communities of Sipakapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán in San Marcos, Guatemala. San Marcos Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini raised the concerns of the Mam-speaking residents over a mine using a water-based sodium cyanide solution to leach gold from tonnes of pulverized rock, and 250,000 litres of water an hour in a community already experiencing water shortages. They worried that pools of toxic water and over 25 million tonnes of waste rock left behind by the mine would continue to release heavy metals into the soil and water for centuries. An independent study confirmed the risks involved; risks the mining company repeatedly denied. Cyanide is a deadly toxin. Environmental experts report that the use of water-based sodium cyanide solution not only consumes huge amounts of fresh water, but also generates highly toxic by-products, including heavy metals such as mercury, lead and arsenic. Local protests have left two people dead and many injured.
In June of 2005, the Canadian parliament's standing committee on foreign
affairs and international trade concluded that, "Canada does not have laws to
ensure that the activities of Canadian mining companies in developing
countries conform to human rights standards, including the rights of workers
and indigenous peoples." The Canadian government rejected the committee's
recommendation to pass legislation to hold mining companies legally
accountable in Canada for human rights and environmental harm caused by
their operations across the globe.
In 2006 Goldcorp paid its former Chairman, Ian Telfer, $23,000,000. The Canadian mining company has open-pit, cyanide leeching gold mines in Guatemala and
Honduras that Rights Action grassroots partner groups are opposing. Documented harms and violations associated with the mines include water depletion and contamination, deforestation, forced evictions, repression (including killings) against community leaders protesting these violations.
The indigenous Q'eqchi' community of Barrio Revolucion, near Lake Izabal in north-eastern Guatemala, was among six groups evicted during three rounds of forced evictions in November 2006 and January 2007. Vancouver-based Skye Resources, which acquired the controversial property rights granted in the 1960s by a repressive military dictatorship to International Nickel Company (INCO), sought the evictions.
Skye Resources employees dismantled, destroyed and/or burned the homes of
hundreds of indigenous Q'eqchi' families in five communities. Accused of "squatting,"; the Mayan people said, "We are not invading the land. We are recuperating the land that belongs to us." They are concerned about the threat that the mine poses to the environment and their land rights. The UN-sponsored Truth Commission - part of the 1996 Peace Accord that officially ended Guatemala's civil war - demanded that indigenous communities with historical claims to land have the right to determine how it is used.
While there are also US and European mining companies operating throughout Latin America, Canada operates approximately 60% of world mining companies, and generates $40 billion annually. The Canada Pension Plan is a major investor in Goldcorp, and has invested in Skye Resources to the tune of approximately $8 million, making all recipients of CPP monies complicit in the environmental and human rights abuse consequences of this enterprise. For the most part, we do not even know that our money comes from a source that requires the eviction of people from their ancestral lands, the burning of their homes, the murder of their community leaders, the ruination of their breathtaking land, much photographed by eager tourists. We are shielded in our ignorance from outrage against this injustice.
My glass is empty, only a circle of condensation remains around the base. Marta had spoken of the growing militance of the Mayan people in the past 20 years, and how this is both a blessing and a sentence because it will draw a violent reaction. The Mayan people have traditionally been a peaceful people, like the Tibetans. It is a miracle that they have survived and continue to dominate by their presence in Guatemala. The indigenous populations of most Central American countries have been almost wiped out, often by a simple denial of their existence.
Before I left the Capital I visited Don Herlindo and Doňa Ana in Zona 14. Their grandsons are bigger and stronger than four and a half years ago, Rony the eldest a year away from qualifying as a lawyer. He was 4 years old when I lived in Herlindo's house. But Don Herlindo is frail, defeated, an old man suddenly at 72. On my last visit he'd been still vigorous and full of life, even though he'd wept as he'd spoken of Irma Marilú. Now he shows me the plaque that was awarded to Irma, all these years later, in recognition of her courage and of the unspeakable suffering of her disappearance, and a book honoring his daughter and her compaňeros, with a piece he's written about her disappearance. It was a Monday - he'd come home to find Doňa Ana crying because Irma hadn't come home the previous night. They'd thought she was asleep in her room, but I was to be the next one to sleep there, two years later, in the bed of a woman whose face I already knew from the gallery of disappeared posted in Toronto, but who I was never to know directly, only through her beloved father.
I will always remember Don Herlindo as he was 4 years ago, standing in the sunlight as we waved goodbye at the bus-stop, his broad Mayan face smiling and handsome, gilded with the grief of his daughter's absence. This time I left Zona 14 feeling sad, feeling that I would never see him again.
Next day I'm up at dawn to take Linea Dorado, a Mexican bus line bound for La Frontera in the northwest corner of Guatemala - the Highlands of Huehuetenango. Eight hours later we cross the Rio Selegua and I know we're close. This is the river where the tortured bodies of the local villagers were dumped by the army. Zoila told me how she'd gone to the shore of that river every day, looking for the body of her husband who'd been taken by the army. Miraculously Alejandro was released after 60 days of torture, and survived to escape to Mexico and, eventually, Canada, with his family. I get off at El Boqueron, 7 kilometers from the tiny village of Huixoc. The Mayan family I have known for 17 years, who live as refugees in Vancouver, are visiting their village. Zoila and her nephew Alfredo are waiting for me with a Toyota truck filled with villagers. All the vehicles in Guatemala are Toyotas, mostly pick-up trucks, and typically people travel standing shoulder to shoulder in the back. We pile in and laugh about the traffic in Vancouver where each vehicle holds a single occupant. I ride in front with Zoila and Alfredo, who is getting married at the weekend. He invites me to his wedding and asks if I will operate the video camera. He worked in Tennessee for four years with his uncle, he said, then came back and bought his Toyota supercab.
That night, as we sit in the smoke-blackened kitchen over tortillas and coffee, Francisco comes to visit. He introduces himself as Hernando Cortés and I am quick to introduce myself as Malinche. Everyone laughs. He shakes my hand when I say that I have known Ti-jax, Zoila's youngest son, since he was one year old. Ti-jax gives marimba lessons in the mornings to the children from the school across the road. Born in Canada, he's come home to learn about his culture, to meet his uncles and aunts and his many cousins. Almost everyone in the village is somehow related, by blood or marriage. Francisco is a master of the marimba. When he was a young man the army came and forced him to destroy his family marimba, the instrument he'd been playing since he was 5 years old. He is recently widowed, his wife and two sons dead in a road accident. Later, when Francisco has gone, walking down the muddy road into the darkness, Zoila tells me there have been 3 recent kidnappings of children in this area, that their bodies have been found decapitated. Everyone is afraid. She says if I need to go to the bathroom in the night I must wake someone to accompany me. We must all stay together, especially in the night. There are people in Guatemala who trade in human organs. The bodies of children are frequently found with their heart and lungs missing, liver, kidneys. We can't understand the decapitations - perhaps for the eyes, or for intimidation. Zoila says that when a woman gives birth now her family must move in and stay with her for many months because there are people who will steal newborns. Children disappear in Canada too, I think, for different reasons, different perversions.
I am a foreigner and thus safer here than the locals; I unravel and relax in the pure mountain air. We live in the clouds, breathing thin air, teetering on a ledge which plunges into the valley where a foreign-owned coffee finca carpets the land.
I visit the kindergarteners in the school across from us. They are enchanted with me, and I with them. They are learning Spanish and Mam, geometry. They teach me the names in Mam for circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, like the Guatemalan landscape, a patchwork of squares and rectangles dotted with waving corn, like the women's skirts, handwoven, moving with their bodies, patterned with language and earthforms. The older students are in another classroom learning to type, chewing gum and flirting with each other. I talk with the teacher, make arrangements with him to read a short section from my book the following week. Clara Luz, a teacher at the Huixoc school, is unable to work. Since the murder of her father she has been having seizures. She is the oldest of 6 children; her mother had to go to Mexico to find work. Four years ago she was a laughing teenager, now she has the gaunt haunted face of so many of the adults. Everyone is afraid. There is more news. A 16 year old boy was kidnapped from La Democracia, 15 kilometers away. A ransom was demanded but his family has no money. A finger was cut off and sent to his parents. Miraculously the boy has escaped and found his way home, but now the family has to go into hiding. They will flee to the city.
The place is a hive of activity - Zoila is in the kitchen talking with the teachers who are eating their midday meal, Natividad and Filiberto are tending their little store, selling chips, nuts, cola; Ti-jax is giving a marimba lesson to 4 teenagers, a woman is roasting coffee beans over a small fire on the concrete terrace where the land slopes upwards, thickly planted with coffee, beans, chile, towering over the tiny two-room house. Ti-jax has warned me about the spiky green caterpillars which stick to your skin and raise angry welts there. He shows me the thickly webbed hole in our bedroom wall where a tarantula lives.
A man from La Democracia is speaking to a group of women with babies and small children. He warns them against U.S. donations of broken corn kernels which they use to make atol, a thick sweet custard-like drink which everyone loves, especially the children. Cuban doctors working in Guatemala made an analysis of this corn and found it to be laced with birth control drugs. Don't use it, the man says, don't even give it to the chickens. Dig a hole and bury it. Protect your land. Grow your own food. ColectÃvo Madre Selva, a Guatemalan citizens' group, also examined a sample of seed sent as food aid and found three varieties of engineered corn banned by the EU as unfit for human consumption - Liberty Link produced by Aventis, and Monsanto's BtXtra and RoundUp Ready.
I return to the kitchen and sit with the teachers who are finishing their lunch. I ask Ana Elizabeth for her opinion on the upcoming election. Does Rigoberta Menchú stand a chance? Or is it really a contest between Colom and Molina? It doesn't matter who is President of Guatemala, she says, her eyes cold and clear, because the system corrupts everyone. Molina is a retired general, candidate for the Patriot Party, whose logo is mano dura, the hard fist approach to public security. He wants the already heavy army presence increased to clamp down on crime. The more moderate Colom, a businessman, is running for UNE, National Unity of Hope.
Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiche Mayan woman whose entire family was tortured and murdered during the civil war, is renowned for speaking out for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992; even that hasn't silenced her. But I had seen no propaganda billboards for her party in the Capital. Only as my bus travelled into the countryside, a couple of hours from the Capital, had I seen a billboard with the faces of Rigoberta and her running mate, Nineth Montenegro, a founding member of the GAM.
We all sleep together in a small room with an earthen floor, the marimba running the length of the wall. Sometimes there are only 3 of us, sometimes as many as 9. People come and go; Ana Elizabeth, Zoila's sister Julietta with her 3 daughters, Noelli, Haydée and Johana, Zoila's mother Marcelina from La Democracia, 13 year old VÃctor, a cousin, who I call "the Cuban"; because he talks so fast. There is comfort in our proximity, our shared dreams, our breath warming the cold night air. Generally a solitary person, I adapt quickly and sleep deeply. I am reading slowly, savoring Catherine Bush's The Rules of Engagement, the only english language book I have brought with me. It is perfect; the story of a woman who studies contemporary war and specializes in issues of military intervention. Studying violence, she holds herself apart from involvement until she is propelled forward by her own heart into the thick of it. But there is little time to read. On Sunday night, as we lie in our beds, Ti-jax tells me about a local man who habitually drank and beat his wife. Finally she got drunk herself and cut off his arm with a machete. Machetes are in every household in Guatemala, essential for work on the land. They divorced and he married her sister. The ex-wife came in the night as the man lay with her sister and killed her ex-husband with a machete. Their son came up behind her in the dark, trying to protect his father, and accidentally killed her with a blow to her back. There is a way to twist the machete, says Ti-jax, so that it delivers a flat blow, but he didn't twist it at the last minute so it sliced into her body. The boy was 15. He had a breakdown and his aunt looked after him. He recovered and later became a lawyer. He prosecuted a criminal in court and was killed by the man's friends. As his story ended we heard screams and crying outside - Julietta's voice, Zoila's quiet response. Immediately I thought of the 3 girls. Had one of them been kidnapped? It was a long sleepless night with Julietta crying in our room. An argument with her boyfriend. It wasn't the first time. The next day we took her and the girls with us for a trip to the Capital to pick up Alex, another of Zoila's sons, travelling from Canada. Angel, our driver, and his 17 year old son-in-law Nery, came with a red minivan and we had a 3 day road trip, taking turns sitting up front, the romantic music that Angel loves blaring in our ears.
Zoila is a Mayan spiritual leader; on the last day of our journey we drove to a remote spot where she led a ceremony for us all, high up in the middle of the milpa, (corn field), under a grandfather tree. A stoic ancestor, the tree stood majestic, supporting an abundance of parasitic life despite its own fragility. They have tried to cut down this tree many times, Zoila said, but it will not die. Under this ground where we sit there is a Mayan temple, long buried but still powerful. We had bought incense, herbs, candles, copal, and bright liquids for the ceremony in the market in Chimaltenango. We'd brought kindling wood thickly veined with sap to start the fire. We knelt and lay, then stood under a dramatic and constantly changing sky. All through our journey silent electrical storms had illuminated the night sky. We were travelling under a new moon, bright and sharp as a sickle. Sap-soaked wood fed the fire and the flames leapt for freedom, flashes of orange and blue, separating from the body of the fire, then leaping back to reunite with it. The wind kept coming up, soughing through the corn leaves, but the rain held off despite the threatening darkness of the heavy clouds, blue-gray like bruises.
On the way back to Huixoc Angel stopped near El Boqueron at the house of Angel senior and Consuelito, his mom. All the family greeted us - sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews. Coffee and sweet bread were brought on a tray and we stood around the rectangular courtyard, looking up at the balcony that ran around the second-floor, plants sprouting from the white-washed walls, springing from the earth all around us. Two pixie-like creatures with eyes round and dark as feral night creatures stared up at me - gimelas, girl-twins, Angel's nieces, their father recently dead in a road accident. The roads are dangerous in Guatemala and there's a lot of drinking; there are bandits, there's rubble from avalanches, there are steep drops from roads that curve like great serpents up and down the green-skinned mountains. As in many Guatemalan houses there are caged birds - chickens, doves, bright green parrots. I talked about the parrot Angel had bought at the roadside for his mother four years ago. They all looked at me blankly. Se murió, I said, it died, and they all began to laugh. I laughed too; we couldn't stop; something had broken and the laughter spilled. There is so much laughter in Guatemala, over very small things; it is always there hovering, ready to spill. Zoila has explained this laughter to me, how it comes without reason, is accepted without question, like poetry.
The next day we go to Huehuetenango with Angel and his wife Paty, to buy supplies for their tienda. Many people have small shops in their houses. Their two youngest sons come with us.
Angel accompanies Zoila and I to the bank. It is a long wait while the teller tries to sell her life insurance. It doesn't matter that you live in Canada, she says. When you die the insurance will pay for your body to be brought back to Guatemala. I am shocked when the guard hands a pistol to Angel as we leave. He shoves it into the waist of his pants and when we get back to his truck he throws it in the glove compartment. I hadn't seen him hand it over as we entered the bank. For a moment I had thought the guard was going to shoot him.
Saturday Zoila and I are up at 5 to go to the market in Colotenango with Angel and young VÃctor to buy turkeys for our birthday fiesta - Zoila, Marcelina, Alex and I are all Leos. Angel lifts the turkeys by their wings to test their weight. He can tell if they've been corn-fed, Zoila says. The big birds blink their eyes; jowly wattles shimmer red and irridescent blue from their throats, snoods of red flesh hanging over their beaks. Each bird is tied with a piece of twine around one leg. The chickens try to get away and are jerked back by the short twine, but the turkeys are stoic. As Angel drops a bird after testing its weight it stumbles and rights itself. Angel and Zoila keep walking. This part of the market is a huge open area, filled with livestock, all for sale, all being hefted and prodded. They finally agree on 2 birds and I pay, then young VÃctor comes with his sack and secures them. He is a beautiful boy with almond-shaped eyes and smooth brown skin - El Cubano, the fast talker. I think of MartÃn, the bastard son of Hernando Cortés and Malinche, his Aztec translator - the historical sub-plot of my novel - how MartÃn is taken from his mother as a very small boy, sent to Spain to be raised as a gentleman, the Indian trained out of him. When he returns to his birthplace as a man he sees himself reflected for the first time in his own people. He becomes involved in a plot against the Spanish governors, led by his legitimate half-brother, Cortés' heir. MartÃn is tortured, then banned from his country forever. He dies in battle, fighting for Spain.
Angel and Zoila are talking to some people. I walk away, up the steps to the main street, lined with stalls. There are displays of weaving, pottery, jewellery, plastic kitchenware, cooking pots, electrical gadgets - a myriad of blurred color. I sit on the warm stones of a low wall and photograph the market below.
I see VÃctor standing on the edge, the heaving sack nestled against his boots. Later we buy bags of vegetables and fruits for all the family - tomatoes, onions, cilantro, zapote, bananas, apples, 5 bags of rice . . . and the journey home to Huixoc, up the mountain. The turkeys scratch in the dirt in front of the house for a few hours before they are slaughtered. Everyone teases me about my gringa sentimentality, and I laugh and explain our distance from nature in my culture, how we buy our meat in sterile plastic packages from the supermarket. But I still feel like a traitor, complicit. I could have refused to buy the turkeys, but of course I could not, and anyway someone else would have killed them and eaten them. The old arguments. I am getting very close to the end of Catherine Bush's book, The Rules of Engagement, her heroine entangled in a web of personal and ethical conflict. I am with her, thinking of her, a secret life within me, waiting for a moment to finish the journey with her, not wanting it to end. This is what I remember of my relationship to books as a child - they were a refuge, a secret place all my own. I hope my books give refuge. Sometimes a direct conflict with the self is just too harsh. We need books in which to wage our personal battles, characters for us to live through and forgive.
Marcelina has been up since 4 a.m. making tamales for the wedding. The roof of Alfredo's family house has been transformed with white balloons, paper plates and ribbons.
Above the entrance is a large silver bell, like a piňata, filled with confetti releasing slowly as it swings gently in the wind. Marcelina takes my hand and marches me and Johana to the back where we settle ourselves with our gifts - I've bought a large cooking pot for the couple - and wait for the ceremonies to commence.
Above us a series of tarps flap in the wind, filling with air and gusting upwards as though they would carry the entire house with all the guests across the valley. They start to come loose and the men scrabble to tighten the flimsy ropes. It does indeed rain at intervals and the tarps leak. But first we troop down the road to the bride's house, next to the church. Alfredo and Johana, his fiancée, are Catholic - no Mayan ceremonies here. When we return to the roof-top 3 men, accompanied by a synthesizer keyboard, sing dreary Christian songs. It is a solemn affair, and still no marriage ceremony. First we must eat, says an enthusiastic MC. We troop downstairs, all the women wearing their trajes, traditional Mayan clothing, the men in dashing sombreros and cowboy boots. There is a huge vat of chicken in tomato sauce, great mounds of rice, piles of tortillas and a thick, sweet, rice-milk drink. Natividad is in the kitchen moving slowly back and forth, loading paper plates, graceful as like a dancer, while Marcelina darts around serving everyone with the heaped plates. Both wear aprons over their beautiful dresses, gifts from Canada brought by Zoila. You have to take your aprons off today, I'd said, for the wedding. But they'd shaken their heads and wagged their fingers at me. Finally, after 3 relays of food, the wedding ceremony took place, then there was a receiving line for us to kiss the bride and groom and present our gifts. There were tears for the death of Alfredo's father, and the bride tried to smother her yawns. It had indeed been an exhausting day, then Ti-jax and I went home with Angel and his family to the village of Isnul across the valley, where we watched The War of the Worlds and fell asleep in the middle of a very bad Mexican movie.
Sunday was our birthday fiesta. When we arrived back at Huixoc in the afternoon the turkeys had been transformed into a large pot of meat floating in a rich sauce. They fed the family and all the neighbours who came for the fiesta, including Francisco who came with two marimberos.
You don't need to invite people to a party in Guatemala. When they hear the music they come, clusters of women approaching shyly - buenas tardes, buenas tardes - accepting drinks of cola in recycled votary candle glasses; groups of men striding up the steps, accepting a Gallo with a nod. The dogs lay around still recovering from their feast of chicken bones from the wedding, distended bellies rumbling and gurgling; Tarzán wouldn't even raise his head at the offer of a tortilla. Zoila took my hand and led me in a slow swaying dance to the hypnotic marimba music. Soon everyone was dancing - old Filiberto, despite protestations about his knees, his back, his feet; Marcelina swaying in her apron, dancing with her grandsons.
Even shy Fedelino, emboldened by the beer, began to dance, stopping frequently to mop his sweating brow. Elvira came with Clara Luz and 2 more of her daughters. Alex and Ti-jax went up on the roof with their cousins to set off the fireworks. The music continued late into the night, even after the rain started and we'd hauled the marimba inside. Then we heard tires spinning, a revving engine, and finally, gunshots, which at first we thought were more fireworks, but it was Angel shooting at the stars after too many beers.
Next day I returned to the Capital. I was flying out on the 22nd. Everyone piled into Angel's truck to see me off and we headed for El Boqueron to pick up the bus. Marcelina rode up front with mel, cradling the chicken Zoila had bought for her.
On the night of the 21st I tried to phone Don Herlindo a couple of times but there was no answer. Strange, I thought, they're always home. Here in my house in Canada, on September 3rd I received an e-mail from Rony telling me that Don Herlindo had passed away on August 22nd.
Less decisive were the election results of September 9th, Colom receiving 28% of the votes, Molina 23%, (and Rigoberta Menchú only 3%), requiring a runoff on November 4. There have been 50 deaths so far during the campaigning as the drug barons try to force their candidates into office. "The worst political violence since the end of the civil war,"; Reuters reports, "The country is awash with guns and police are widely viewed as inept.";
In August I travelled to Guatemala to visit with Mayan friends in their village, to meet with political activists and receive an update on Canadian gold and nickel mining in Guatemala, and to revisit some people and places who had become integral to my recently published novel, The Reddening Path. Following is a photo-journal of this journey:
[Background: Guatemala was invaded and colonised by the Spanish early in the 16th Century. The country proclaimed its independence in 1821, but real reform was not achieved until 1944 when a civilian was elected president. However, the reformist government was overthrown by a CIA backed coup in June 1954. An outbreak of protests against the new military-aligned government in March and April of 1962 marked the beginning of a 34-year civil war between leftist guerrilla groups and the government for control of the country. The Mayan people were caught in the middle and suffered the brunt of the violence and killings. The 1996 Peace Accord officially ended the civil war, but Guatemalans continue to suffer with an average of 16 murders daily, as well as disappearances, particularly of children, kidnapped for adoption, prostitution, or organ donation.]
"Anything vividly imagined becomes inseparable from reality"; - Wilder Penfield
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My first stop in Guatemala City, August 9, 2007, was at the FAMDEGUA office (Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala). Before leaving Canada I'd read on the internet about Wendy Mendez, a young woman who has become a militant leader, daughter of one of the many striving for social justice who disappeared during the 70's and 80's. My last visit to Guatemala had been four and a half years ago, researching for a novel about a Guatemalan adoptee returning to her birthland to search for her mother. In 1988 I had been there to paint a mural for the Grupo de Apoyo Mútuo, a human rights group assisting families of the detained and disappeared. I'd lived in the house of Don Herlindo and Doňa Ana and slept in the room of Irma Marilú, their daughter who had disappeared two years previously. Now, as I sat in the FAMDEGUA office, Irma's face smiled down at me from a wall of familiar faces, a community of the disappeared, kept alive by the tireless work of people like Aura Elena.
We have now completed 70 exhumations, she said. She travels all over Guatemala, from El Petén in the north, to Quiché, Huehuetenango, Rabinál, Cobán - areas where the Mayan people were massacred during the civil war, and continue to be killed, their names ticked off on blacklists of community leaders, but in lesser numbers and with no media coverage since the peace accord of 1996, which nominally returned Guatemala to a state of democracy. But in some places nothing changes, especially in Guatemala where 80% of the population is indigenous, where people live in harmony with the earth in a culture of subsistence farming; corn, beans and coffee growing on their doorsteps and as far as their patches of land extend before reaching the huge foreign-owned fincas (coffee plantations).
This time I noticed, for the first time, the face of Luz Haydée Mendez, leaping out from all the familiar faces. Luz was very beautiful, as is Wendy whose photograph I have seen in a Rights Action bulletin, passionate with intent, confronting the Guatemalan army on June 30th at the Day of the Army celebration. As a small child she'd witnessed the torture of her mother before she was finally taken - disappeared. A new generation has grown in Guatemala and now seeks justice for criminal acts against their families. In Guatemala when people fight back, el mano dura, a firm hand, the campaign slogan of the Patriot Party for the Sept 9 elections, can be expected to lash out, not for justice, but for silence - the ultimate silence of genocide. Indigenous people are problematic; they do not wish, as the CEO of one of the foreign mining companies operating in Guatemala suggested, to move beyond subsistence farming into a profit-motivated lifestyle. They wish to protect and conserve their land against the destruction wrought by mining methods which pulverize the earth and release heavy metals into their water.
These thoughts race through my mind as I sit there, surrounded, feeling afraid for Wendy Mendez. This is only the first day. Two weeks later, on my last night in Guatemala, an American woman who works with a human rights organization in the Capital tells me, We're always afraid, every day. Everyone who lives in Guatemala is afraid. Then she tells me about the murder, days ago, of the son of a prominent activist. I remember Béatriz Marroquin who was kidnapped and murdered on December 10, 1985, the eve of her departure to Canada to join her refugee husband, her machete-scored body dumped at the roadside, her hands cut off.
I am here to thank the women who helped me with research for my book, The Reddening Path, recently published and now awaiting a Spanish translation. Adoption is a hot topic in Guatemala. The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, an international legal document created in May 1993 through the Hague Conference on Private International Law, is scheduled to go into force in late 2007, countering the many illegal adoptions of stolen children who sell for $30-40,000 US. Regulation of international adoption varies hugely from country to country and in many of the poorer ones it is so ineffectual that criminals have infiltrated the system. Gangs provide children to alleged "would-be parents", who actually deal in organs, paedophilia, prostitution or child labour.
When you live the virtual life of the writer, living through your imagination, lacing it with factual information, by the end of the process you begin to doubt your own knowledge. I had to revisit these people, hear them tell the terrible stories once again. I had to stand in Parque Central and stare at the Palacio Nacional where my heroine Paméla's mother lives eternally with her General in a secret apartment.
I had to walk into La Catedral Metropolitana and find the Virgen del Socorro, a two foot wooden statue sequestered in a side chapel, a figure that accompanied Diego Velasquez, first Governor of Cuba, to the new world, was passed to Hernando Cortés to bless his route to Mexico and assist him in the conquest of the Aztec nation, and found her way to Guatemala in the hands of Pedro Alvarado. As I stare at the banal blonde figure I can barely believe in her journey, in the power invested in her.
When I was a child and "imagined"; something I was either laughed at or punished for "trying to get attention."; As I travel, verifying the experience embedded in my second novel, I track my doubts back to childhood where we still have no sense of boundaries, where the magical world of the imagination is not separate from the "real"; world. The doubts, the feeling of being "bad"; or "wrong"; - (what if the radio interviewer asks me to verify something and I can only cite my intuition; what if I can't remember where I got it but only that's it more real to me than what I ate for breakfast?) - must plague every writer, I think. We create from our inner worlds, and then we must go out into the world to verify, to compare, to walk the frontier between what are supposedly two separate countries, but in reality is one continuous flow of earth joined by rivers and geological strata descending miles into the earth, to a core of molten lava on which we float, the sky stretching billions of miles above to a place where time stops.
I walked to Casa Central, the orphanage where Paméla spent the first 9 months of her life. It is a convent which takes up a city block.
I look for the brass hand knocker with the ring on the 3rd finger. It's not there. I must have imagined it, to signal the status of convent without stating it. (Show, don't tell, the writer's dictum; trust your reader's intelligence). I enter the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal where MarÃa-Teresa, the Mother Superior, was found slumped on the steps leading to the altar after a long night's vigil. The Chapel is filled with light, a service in progress, nuns filling the pews. I take photos so that I know it is real.
In the park across from Casa Central the armless statue of 4 years ago has grown arms. The walkways are being dug up by men with shovels, exposing the dry red earth. I remember the exhumations.
In a cool flagstoned office in Zona 2, a young woman confirms everything I've read in my own house in Canada in the Rights Action bulletins. They say the genders learn differently - males intellectually, females sensually. I think of this as I watch Marta's facial expression, her gestures, as I smell the dusty office, feel the patch of warmth on my wrist from a shaft of light, as I hear her Spanish words and believe them finally.
After, drinking a Gallo in the Salon Reál of the Pan American hotel, hand-woven huipÃles (blouses) from all the different areas of Guatemala hanging from the balcony, the Mayan staff in traditional dress, I think of how the Government uses the indigenous people to promote tourism; the same people against whom they wage a war of genocide. The government is made up of Guatemalans backed by the CIA. At a certain point "backed"; becomes "controlled";. Interference is the thin end of the wedge, a wedge that enters the heart of the people and infects it. The Guatemalan army recruits Mayan boys and trains them to kill their own people. At root, violence is circumstancial. It can be internalized. We can all be reduced to an ultimate craving for survival for which no price is too high. The soul's attachment to the body is fierce. In a country where decades of genocidal massacre has taken place with impunity, a pattern is set, seeds are sown like the deathly corn seeds depicted on posters dotting the countryside, warning people against Monsanto's genetically modified corn-seed which will sterilize their own seed. In the poster skulls emerge from the corn-cob. In the Popol Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, the creation story tells how the first people were made from corn.
I sip my cold beer, slippery under my fingers, and Marta's words echo in her understated tone. The effects of the mining are poisoning the land. The animals are dying, birth defects are beginning to occur in both animals and humans, it is impossible to grow corn, beans. All the money from the mining is going to the US and Canadian mining companies. They mine for gold, for nickel, they have petroleum and hydro-electric projects on our land. All the petroleum is exported. In Guatemala there is a terrible shortage of gasoline, and it is very expensive.
I have learned from the Rights Action bulletins that in 2005, Canadian mining company Glamis Gold (now Goldcorp) prepared to begin operations at an open pit gold mine in the isolated communities of Sipakapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán in San Marcos, Guatemala. San Marcos Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini raised the concerns of the Mam-speaking residents over a mine using a water-based sodium cyanide solution to leach gold from tonnes of pulverized rock, and 250,000 litres of water an hour in a community already experiencing water shortages. They worried that pools of toxic water and over 25 million tonnes of waste rock left behind by the mine would continue to release heavy metals into the soil and water for centuries. An independent study confirmed the risks involved; risks the mining company repeatedly denied. Cyanide is a deadly toxin. Environmental experts report that the use of water-based sodium cyanide solution not only consumes huge amounts of fresh water, but also generates highly toxic by-products, including heavy metals such as mercury, lead and arsenic. Local protests have left two people dead and many injured.
In June of 2005, the Canadian parliament's standing committee on foreign
affairs and international trade concluded that, "Canada does not have laws to
ensure that the activities of Canadian mining companies in developing
countries conform to human rights standards, including the rights of workers
and indigenous peoples." The Canadian government rejected the committee's
recommendation to pass legislation to hold mining companies legally
accountable in Canada for human rights and environmental harm caused by
their operations across the globe.
In 2006 Goldcorp paid its former Chairman, Ian Telfer, $23,000,000. The Canadian mining company has open-pit, cyanide leeching gold mines in Guatemala and
Honduras that Rights Action grassroots partner groups are opposing. Documented harms and violations associated with the mines include water depletion and contamination, deforestation, forced evictions, repression (including killings) against community leaders protesting these violations.
The indigenous Q'eqchi' community of Barrio Revolucion, near Lake Izabal in north-eastern Guatemala, was among six groups evicted during three rounds of forced evictions in November 2006 and January 2007. Vancouver-based Skye Resources, which acquired the controversial property rights granted in the 1960s by a repressive military dictatorship to International Nickel Company (INCO), sought the evictions.
Skye Resources employees dismantled, destroyed and/or burned the homes of
hundreds of indigenous Q'eqchi' families in five communities. Accused of "squatting,"; the Mayan people said, "We are not invading the land. We are recuperating the land that belongs to us." They are concerned about the threat that the mine poses to the environment and their land rights. The UN-sponsored Truth Commission - part of the 1996 Peace Accord that officially ended Guatemala's civil war - demanded that indigenous communities with historical claims to land have the right to determine how it is used.
While there are also US and European mining companies operating throughout Latin America, Canada operates approximately 60% of world mining companies, and generates $40 billion annually. The Canada Pension Plan is a major investor in Goldcorp, and has invested in Skye Resources to the tune of approximately $8 million, making all recipients of CPP monies complicit in the environmental and human rights abuse consequences of this enterprise. For the most part, we do not even know that our money comes from a source that requires the eviction of people from their ancestral lands, the burning of their homes, the murder of their community leaders, the ruination of their breathtaking land, much photographed by eager tourists. We are shielded in our ignorance from outrage against this injustice.
My glass is empty, only a circle of condensation remains around the base. Marta had spoken of the growing militance of the Mayan people in the past 20 years, and how this is both a blessing and a sentence because it will draw a violent reaction. The Mayan people have traditionally been a peaceful people, like the Tibetans. It is a miracle that they have survived and continue to dominate by their presence in Guatemala. The indigenous populations of most Central American countries have been almost wiped out, often by a simple denial of their existence.
Before I left the Capital I visited Don Herlindo and Doňa Ana in Zona 14. Their grandsons are bigger and stronger than four and a half years ago, Rony the eldest a year away from qualifying as a lawyer. He was 4 years old when I lived in Herlindo's house. But Don Herlindo is frail, defeated, an old man suddenly at 72. On my last visit he'd been still vigorous and full of life, even though he'd wept as he'd spoken of Irma Marilú. Now he shows me the plaque that was awarded to Irma, all these years later, in recognition of her courage and of the unspeakable suffering of her disappearance, and a book honoring his daughter and her compaňeros, with a piece he's written about her disappearance. It was a Monday - he'd come home to find Doňa Ana crying because Irma hadn't come home the previous night. They'd thought she was asleep in her room, but I was to be the next one to sleep there, two years later, in the bed of a woman whose face I already knew from the gallery of disappeared posted in Toronto, but who I was never to know directly, only through her beloved father.
I will always remember Don Herlindo as he was 4 years ago, standing in the sunlight as we waved goodbye at the bus-stop, his broad Mayan face smiling and handsome, gilded with the grief of his daughter's absence. This time I left Zona 14 feeling sad, feeling that I would never see him again.
Next day I'm up at dawn to take Linea Dorado, a Mexican bus line bound for La Frontera in the northwest corner of Guatemala - the Highlands of Huehuetenango. Eight hours later we cross the Rio Selegua and I know we're close. This is the river where the tortured bodies of the local villagers were dumped by the army. Zoila told me how she'd gone to the shore of that river every day, looking for the body of her husband who'd been taken by the army. Miraculously Alejandro was released after 60 days of torture, and survived to escape to Mexico and, eventually, Canada, with his family. I get off at El Boqueron, 7 kilometers from the tiny village of Huixoc. The Mayan family I have known for 17 years, who live as refugees in Vancouver, are visiting their village. Zoila and her nephew Alfredo are waiting for me with a Toyota truck filled with villagers. All the vehicles in Guatemala are Toyotas, mostly pick-up trucks, and typically people travel standing shoulder to shoulder in the back. We pile in and laugh about the traffic in Vancouver where each vehicle holds a single occupant. I ride in front with Zoila and Alfredo, who is getting married at the weekend. He invites me to his wedding and asks if I will operate the video camera. He worked in Tennessee for four years with his uncle, he said, then came back and bought his Toyota supercab.
That night, as we sit in the smoke-blackened kitchen over tortillas and coffee, Francisco comes to visit. He introduces himself as Hernando Cortés and I am quick to introduce myself as Malinche. Everyone laughs. He shakes my hand when I say that I have known Ti-jax, Zoila's youngest son, since he was one year old. Ti-jax gives marimba lessons in the mornings to the children from the school across the road. Born in Canada, he's come home to learn about his culture, to meet his uncles and aunts and his many cousins. Almost everyone in the village is somehow related, by blood or marriage. Francisco is a master of the marimba. When he was a young man the army came and forced him to destroy his family marimba, the instrument he'd been playing since he was 5 years old. He is recently widowed, his wife and two sons dead in a road accident. Later, when Francisco has gone, walking down the muddy road into the darkness, Zoila tells me there have been 3 recent kidnappings of children in this area, that their bodies have been found decapitated. Everyone is afraid. She says if I need to go to the bathroom in the night I must wake someone to accompany me. We must all stay together, especially in the night. There are people in Guatemala who trade in human organs. The bodies of children are frequently found with their heart and lungs missing, liver, kidneys. We can't understand the decapitations - perhaps for the eyes, or for intimidation. Zoila says that when a woman gives birth now her family must move in and stay with her for many months because there are people who will steal newborns. Children disappear in Canada too, I think, for different reasons, different perversions.
I am a foreigner and thus safer here than the locals; I unravel and relax in the pure mountain air. We live in the clouds, breathing thin air, teetering on a ledge which plunges into the valley where a foreign-owned coffee finca carpets the land.
I visit the kindergarteners in the school across from us. They are enchanted with me, and I with them. They are learning Spanish and Mam, geometry. They teach me the names in Mam for circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, like the Guatemalan landscape, a patchwork of squares and rectangles dotted with waving corn, like the women's skirts, handwoven, moving with their bodies, patterned with language and earthforms. The older students are in another classroom learning to type, chewing gum and flirting with each other. I talk with the teacher, make arrangements with him to read a short section from my book the following week. Clara Luz, a teacher at the Huixoc school, is unable to work. Since the murder of her father she has been having seizures. She is the oldest of 6 children; her mother had to go to Mexico to find work. Four years ago she was a laughing teenager, now she has the gaunt haunted face of so many of the adults. Everyone is afraid. There is more news. A 16 year old boy was kidnapped from La Democracia, 15 kilometers away. A ransom was demanded but his family has no money. A finger was cut off and sent to his parents. Miraculously the boy has escaped and found his way home, but now the family has to go into hiding. They will flee to the city.
The place is a hive of activity - Zoila is in the kitchen talking with the teachers who are eating their midday meal, Natividad and Filiberto are tending their little store, selling chips, nuts, cola; Ti-jax is giving a marimba lesson to 4 teenagers, a woman is roasting coffee beans over a small fire on the concrete terrace where the land slopes upwards, thickly planted with coffee, beans, chile, towering over the tiny two-room house. Ti-jax has warned me about the spiky green caterpillars which stick to your skin and raise angry welts there. He shows me the thickly webbed hole in our bedroom wall where a tarantula lives.
A man from La Democracia is speaking to a group of women with babies and small children. He warns them against U.S. donations of broken corn kernels which they use to make atol, a thick sweet custard-like drink which everyone loves, especially the children. Cuban doctors working in Guatemala made an analysis of this corn and found it to be laced with birth control drugs. Don't use it, the man says, don't even give it to the chickens. Dig a hole and bury it. Protect your land. Grow your own food. ColectÃvo Madre Selva, a Guatemalan citizens' group, also examined a sample of seed sent as food aid and found three varieties of engineered corn banned by the EU as unfit for human consumption - Liberty Link produced by Aventis, and Monsanto's BtXtra and RoundUp Ready.
I return to the kitchen and sit with the teachers who are finishing their lunch. I ask Ana Elizabeth for her opinion on the upcoming election. Does Rigoberta Menchú stand a chance? Or is it really a contest between Colom and Molina? It doesn't matter who is President of Guatemala, she says, her eyes cold and clear, because the system corrupts everyone. Molina is a retired general, candidate for the Patriot Party, whose logo is mano dura, the hard fist approach to public security. He wants the already heavy army presence increased to clamp down on crime. The more moderate Colom, a businessman, is running for UNE, National Unity of Hope.
Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiche Mayan woman whose entire family was tortured and murdered during the civil war, is renowned for speaking out for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992; even that hasn't silenced her. But I had seen no propaganda billboards for her party in the Capital. Only as my bus travelled into the countryside, a couple of hours from the Capital, had I seen a billboard with the faces of Rigoberta and her running mate, Nineth Montenegro, a founding member of the GAM.
We all sleep together in a small room with an earthen floor, the marimba running the length of the wall. Sometimes there are only 3 of us, sometimes as many as 9. People come and go; Ana Elizabeth, Zoila's sister Julietta with her 3 daughters, Noelli, Haydée and Johana, Zoila's mother Marcelina from La Democracia, 13 year old VÃctor, a cousin, who I call "the Cuban"; because he talks so fast. There is comfort in our proximity, our shared dreams, our breath warming the cold night air. Generally a solitary person, I adapt quickly and sleep deeply. I am reading slowly, savoring Catherine Bush's The Rules of Engagement, the only english language book I have brought with me. It is perfect; the story of a woman who studies contemporary war and specializes in issues of military intervention. Studying violence, she holds herself apart from involvement until she is propelled forward by her own heart into the thick of it. But there is little time to read. On Sunday night, as we lie in our beds, Ti-jax tells me about a local man who habitually drank and beat his wife. Finally she got drunk herself and cut off his arm with a machete. Machetes are in every household in Guatemala, essential for work on the land. They divorced and he married her sister. The ex-wife came in the night as the man lay with her sister and killed her ex-husband with a machete. Their son came up behind her in the dark, trying to protect his father, and accidentally killed her with a blow to her back. There is a way to twist the machete, says Ti-jax, so that it delivers a flat blow, but he didn't twist it at the last minute so it sliced into her body. The boy was 15. He had a breakdown and his aunt looked after him. He recovered and later became a lawyer. He prosecuted a criminal in court and was killed by the man's friends. As his story ended we heard screams and crying outside - Julietta's voice, Zoila's quiet response. Immediately I thought of the 3 girls. Had one of them been kidnapped? It was a long sleepless night with Julietta crying in our room. An argument with her boyfriend. It wasn't the first time. The next day we took her and the girls with us for a trip to the Capital to pick up Alex, another of Zoila's sons, travelling from Canada. Angel, our driver, and his 17 year old son-in-law Nery, came with a red minivan and we had a 3 day road trip, taking turns sitting up front, the romantic music that Angel loves blaring in our ears.
Zoila is a Mayan spiritual leader; on the last day of our journey we drove to a remote spot where she led a ceremony for us all, high up in the middle of the milpa, (corn field), under a grandfather tree. A stoic ancestor, the tree stood majestic, supporting an abundance of parasitic life despite its own fragility. They have tried to cut down this tree many times, Zoila said, but it will not die. Under this ground where we sit there is a Mayan temple, long buried but still powerful. We had bought incense, herbs, candles, copal, and bright liquids for the ceremony in the market in Chimaltenango. We'd brought kindling wood thickly veined with sap to start the fire. We knelt and lay, then stood under a dramatic and constantly changing sky. All through our journey silent electrical storms had illuminated the night sky. We were travelling under a new moon, bright and sharp as a sickle. Sap-soaked wood fed the fire and the flames leapt for freedom, flashes of orange and blue, separating from the body of the fire, then leaping back to reunite with it. The wind kept coming up, soughing through the corn leaves, but the rain held off despite the threatening darkness of the heavy clouds, blue-gray like bruises.
On the way back to Huixoc Angel stopped near El Boqueron at the house of Angel senior and Consuelito, his mom. All the family greeted us - sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews. Coffee and sweet bread were brought on a tray and we stood around the rectangular courtyard, looking up at the balcony that ran around the second-floor, plants sprouting from the white-washed walls, springing from the earth all around us. Two pixie-like creatures with eyes round and dark as feral night creatures stared up at me - gimelas, girl-twins, Angel's nieces, their father recently dead in a road accident. The roads are dangerous in Guatemala and there's a lot of drinking; there are bandits, there's rubble from avalanches, there are steep drops from roads that curve like great serpents up and down the green-skinned mountains. As in many Guatemalan houses there are caged birds - chickens, doves, bright green parrots. I talked about the parrot Angel had bought at the roadside for his mother four years ago. They all looked at me blankly. Se murió, I said, it died, and they all began to laugh. I laughed too; we couldn't stop; something had broken and the laughter spilled. There is so much laughter in Guatemala, over very small things; it is always there hovering, ready to spill. Zoila has explained this laughter to me, how it comes without reason, is accepted without question, like poetry.
The next day we go to Huehuetenango with Angel and his wife Paty, to buy supplies for their tienda. Many people have small shops in their houses. Their two youngest sons come with us.
Angel accompanies Zoila and I to the bank. It is a long wait while the teller tries to sell her life insurance. It doesn't matter that you live in Canada, she says. When you die the insurance will pay for your body to be brought back to Guatemala. I am shocked when the guard hands a pistol to Angel as we leave. He shoves it into the waist of his pants and when we get back to his truck he throws it in the glove compartment. I hadn't seen him hand it over as we entered the bank. For a moment I had thought the guard was going to shoot him.
Saturday Zoila and I are up at 5 to go to the market in Colotenango with Angel and young VÃctor to buy turkeys for our birthday fiesta - Zoila, Marcelina, Alex and I are all Leos. Angel lifts the turkeys by their wings to test their weight. He can tell if they've been corn-fed, Zoila says. The big birds blink their eyes; jowly wattles shimmer red and irridescent blue from their throats, snoods of red flesh hanging over their beaks. Each bird is tied with a piece of twine around one leg. The chickens try to get away and are jerked back by the short twine, but the turkeys are stoic. As Angel drops a bird after testing its weight it stumbles and rights itself. Angel and Zoila keep walking. This part of the market is a huge open area, filled with livestock, all for sale, all being hefted and prodded. They finally agree on 2 birds and I pay, then young VÃctor comes with his sack and secures them. He is a beautiful boy with almond-shaped eyes and smooth brown skin - El Cubano, the fast talker. I think of MartÃn, the bastard son of Hernando Cortés and Malinche, his Aztec translator - the historical sub-plot of my novel - how MartÃn is taken from his mother as a very small boy, sent to Spain to be raised as a gentleman, the Indian trained out of him. When he returns to his birthplace as a man he sees himself reflected for the first time in his own people. He becomes involved in a plot against the Spanish governors, led by his legitimate half-brother, Cortés' heir. MartÃn is tortured, then banned from his country forever. He dies in battle, fighting for Spain.
Angel and Zoila are talking to some people. I walk away, up the steps to the main street, lined with stalls. There are displays of weaving, pottery, jewellery, plastic kitchenware, cooking pots, electrical gadgets - a myriad of blurred color. I sit on the warm stones of a low wall and photograph the market below.
I see VÃctor standing on the edge, the heaving sack nestled against his boots. Later we buy bags of vegetables and fruits for all the family - tomatoes, onions, cilantro, zapote, bananas, apples, 5 bags of rice . . . and the journey home to Huixoc, up the mountain. The turkeys scratch in the dirt in front of the house for a few hours before they are slaughtered. Everyone teases me about my gringa sentimentality, and I laugh and explain our distance from nature in my culture, how we buy our meat in sterile plastic packages from the supermarket. But I still feel like a traitor, complicit. I could have refused to buy the turkeys, but of course I could not, and anyway someone else would have killed them and eaten them. The old arguments. I am getting very close to the end of Catherine Bush's book, The Rules of Engagement, her heroine entangled in a web of personal and ethical conflict. I am with her, thinking of her, a secret life within me, waiting for a moment to finish the journey with her, not wanting it to end. This is what I remember of my relationship to books as a child - they were a refuge, a secret place all my own. I hope my books give refuge. Sometimes a direct conflict with the self is just too harsh. We need books in which to wage our personal battles, characters for us to live through and forgive.
Marcelina has been up since 4 a.m. making tamales for the wedding. The roof of Alfredo's family house has been transformed with white balloons, paper plates and ribbons.
Above the entrance is a large silver bell, like a piňata, filled with confetti releasing slowly as it swings gently in the wind. Marcelina takes my hand and marches me and Johana to the back where we settle ourselves with our gifts - I've bought a large cooking pot for the couple - and wait for the ceremonies to commence.
Above us a series of tarps flap in the wind, filling with air and gusting upwards as though they would carry the entire house with all the guests across the valley. They start to come loose and the men scrabble to tighten the flimsy ropes. It does indeed rain at intervals and the tarps leak. But first we troop down the road to the bride's house, next to the church. Alfredo and Johana, his fiancée, are Catholic - no Mayan ceremonies here. When we return to the roof-top 3 men, accompanied by a synthesizer keyboard, sing dreary Christian songs. It is a solemn affair, and still no marriage ceremony. First we must eat, says an enthusiastic MC. We troop downstairs, all the women wearing their trajes, traditional Mayan clothing, the men in dashing sombreros and cowboy boots. There is a huge vat of chicken in tomato sauce, great mounds of rice, piles of tortillas and a thick, sweet, rice-milk drink. Natividad is in the kitchen moving slowly back and forth, loading paper plates, graceful as like a dancer, while Marcelina darts around serving everyone with the heaped plates. Both wear aprons over their beautiful dresses, gifts from Canada brought by Zoila. You have to take your aprons off today, I'd said, for the wedding. But they'd shaken their heads and wagged their fingers at me. Finally, after 3 relays of food, the wedding ceremony took place, then there was a receiving line for us to kiss the bride and groom and present our gifts. There were tears for the death of Alfredo's father, and the bride tried to smother her yawns. It had indeed been an exhausting day, then Ti-jax and I went home with Angel and his family to the village of Isnul across the valley, where we watched The War of the Worlds and fell asleep in the middle of a very bad Mexican movie.
Sunday was our birthday fiesta. When we arrived back at Huixoc in the afternoon the turkeys had been transformed into a large pot of meat floating in a rich sauce. They fed the family and all the neighbours who came for the fiesta, including Francisco who came with two marimberos.
You don't need to invite people to a party in Guatemala. When they hear the music they come, clusters of women approaching shyly - buenas tardes, buenas tardes - accepting drinks of cola in recycled votary candle glasses; groups of men striding up the steps, accepting a Gallo with a nod. The dogs lay around still recovering from their feast of chicken bones from the wedding, distended bellies rumbling and gurgling; Tarzán wouldn't even raise his head at the offer of a tortilla. Zoila took my hand and led me in a slow swaying dance to the hypnotic marimba music. Soon everyone was dancing - old Filiberto, despite protestations about his knees, his back, his feet; Marcelina swaying in her apron, dancing with her grandsons.
Even shy Fedelino, emboldened by the beer, began to dance, stopping frequently to mop his sweating brow. Elvira came with Clara Luz and 2 more of her daughters. Alex and Ti-jax went up on the roof with their cousins to set off the fireworks. The music continued late into the night, even after the rain started and we'd hauled the marimba inside. Then we heard tires spinning, a revving engine, and finally, gunshots, which at first we thought were more fireworks, but it was Angel shooting at the stars after too many beers.
Next day I returned to the Capital. I was flying out on the 22nd. Everyone piled into Angel's truck to see me off and we headed for El Boqueron to pick up the bus. Marcelina rode up front with mel, cradling the chicken Zoila had bought for her.
On the night of the 21st I tried to phone Don Herlindo a couple of times but there was no answer. Strange, I thought, they're always home. Here in my house in Canada, on September 3rd I received an e-mail from Rony telling me that Don Herlindo had passed away on August 22nd.
Less decisive were the election results of September 9th, Colom receiving 28% of the votes, Molina 23%, (and Rigoberta Menchú only 3%), requiring a runoff on November 4. There have been 50 deaths so far during the campaigning as the drug barons try to force their candidates into office. "The worst political violence since the end of the civil war,"; Reuters reports, "The country is awash with guns and police are widely viewed as inept.";
Submitted on November 7, 2007 in By David.
