Voice Over 23

There is a modest little hotel in Guatemala City called the Phoenix that stirs now and then from the ashes of memory. It sits at the corner of Septima Calle and Septima Avenida, just down the street from the blue cement walls of the city police station, and a block or two from the beautiful palace, where, in 1976, the proxy government of the “six families” still sat enshrined. It is not a bad neighborhood, although the buildings have a well-worn look. And crime here during the day is rare, although ladies of the night sometimes pace the opposite sidewalk toward evening with a kind of weary majesty, turning their painted cheeks to catch the rays of the dying sun should your eye stray toward them. In quality, the Phoenix lies somewhere between the “pension” of the thrifty young traveler, and the “luxury” hotel accommodations favored by an older generation. Nevertheless, the rooms are clean, and the family that owns and runs the place is kindly and honorable. During the terrible days after the earthquake in February of ’76, they brought several carloads of blankets out to my village of San Ignacio to bring warmth to families with shattered houses who were shivering in the cold rains of spring.

During the Easter holidays of that same year, the owners of the hotel were taking care of two young boys, the sons of relatives, while their parents vacationed—as I recall—in Florida. To keep the boys out of harm’s way, they hired a series of tutors to come in and instruct the boys in a number of disciplines. I was hired to take the bus in from San Ignacio to give the young men a lesson in English over breakfast every day, over which we polished such gems as “Thank you very much for the orange juice,” and “The major exports of Guatemala are coffee and bananas.”

On one particular morning, as we ate eggs, black beans and tortillas, I had just been teaching them the verb in English “to shoot,” when a string of explosions echoed through the lobby from the intersection outside. Immediately, the boys leapt to their feet, and began to race to the front door. Wait!—I told them in Spanish—it is only firecrackers. Oh no, they explained exitedly, they knew what gunfire sounded like. They used rifles back at their parents’ ranch. They shot alligators on the banks of the river. What we had just heard was a machine gun, they told me with expert certainty. “In that case,” I told them sternly, faking a patron-like authority, “Your father would not permit you to go to the front door at this time!”

Reluctantly they sat. I rose, and walked through the silent lobby where the desk clerk had suddenly vanished from his post. Stepping out the front door of the hotel, I saw that the streets were virtually empty in all directions. Just a little past the center of intersection, not thirty feet from where I stood, a black limousine sat in the intersection, its motor idling, its windows powdered out in the morning sun. In the front seat the driver slumped—dead over the wheel. Two dead men lay sprawled In the back seat with fragments of glass sparkling on their clothes like diamonds. One was a heavy-set well-dressed man with a mustache, the other was the kind of clean-shaven young man you see accompanying the rich and powerful everywhere, standing by doorways with his back to the wall, hands resting on the weapons hanging from the strap around his neck—his eyes sweeping the street slowly back and forth, looking for danger. This one leaned in the far corner of the back seat as if he slept, his bloody face turned from the window. The automatic weapon stood cradled in his left elbow with his finger on the trigger, the barrel pointing to the roof as if in a last gesture of professional defiance. I remember thinking numbly that he must have had time to raise the weapon and release the safety—but not to fire.

A crowd swarmed quickly out of nowhere. Policemen poured out of the police station to take control of the area, and I retreated into the hotel where the boys chattered with excitement as they finished breakfast—something for which I no longer had an appetite. Later that night, at a local bar, I remember a British tourist complaining: “Those damn terrorists have completely destroyed my holiday!”

Whenever I remember that bloody morning near Easter, I always associate it, for reasons I cannot explain, with a dramatically different experience in that same spring that stood out in stark contrast, not just to the shooting, but to the whole dreadful aftermath of the earthquake. A week or two after the shooting I was conducting a small errand of mercy for the Canadian consulate, taking a cash donation up into the mountains above Itzapa to buy school supplies to be used in school houses that were being rebuilt up there following the big shake. Rather than rent a jeep, I decided to hike the ten miles or so up the mountain to the most recent building site. I got directions from one of the Canadian Catholic brothers in Itzapa who had played such a tremendous role in rebuilding that mountain town in the wake of the disaster. I began climbing the mountain at about ten in the morning. All day I walked in the hot sun, stopping only once at a tiny ranchero to lunch on sandwiches of white cheese between tortillas browned on the top of an oil drum over a fire in a cane hut where the smoke passed through the thatched roof without benefit of a chimney. I washed it down with two bottles of orange pop, like those I had seen tied to the end of strings, clinking unmelodiously as they bounced on the sides of donkeys returning from markets in the valley.

Some people thought the mountains were dangerous, but one of the Catholic brothers had told me it wasn’t so. You could drop your wallet on the path here and return days later to find it untouched. People here, he said, had temor de Dios, fear of God. As a volunteer for the Canadian consulate, I wore a red maple leaf on my collar and every one of the five peasants I saw on the path, stopped, and shook my hand, and thanked me for what the Canadians had done for Itzapa. As the day wore on and the shadows began to lengthen, I saw no more donkey or foot traffic. A mist hung over the green hilltops and valleys, and thick forest began to close around the path.

At about four in the afternoon I came around a bend in the path and saw a cliff, with sparkling water pouring out of it from high above, and pooling at a base under the trees. There, standing in a curved line stretching back from the pool, were perhaps twenty Indian women ranging from quite old to very young; all standing very upright; each one wrapped in a dowry of gorgeously woven red, yellow and purple cloth. Each one had a twist of colored cloth on the top of her head, and on top of that, balanced a tall pastel-colored plastic water jar that looked like a tall, double-
handled amphora. One by one, they walked slowly to the waterfall, filled their jars, replaced them on their heads, and walked off into the jungle.

I was extraordinarily hot and thirsty, and as I approached—the column froze— many of the women staring at me in astonishment. Someone like me was an unusual sight up there, and certainly not something they were expecting. I went to the back of the line to wait my turn at the waterfall, which caused them considerable amusement. They beckoned me forward insistently, and at their playful urging I went up to the cliff face and plunged my head and face into the rivulet of crystal clear water that poured off the rock. It was the coldest, most delicious water in the world. I drank deeply and splashed it on my face and chest. Now and then I would glance back at the line, and every time I did that, the women would wave and laugh at me, their colors and smiles bright in the falling sun.

Whenever I think of the killings in front of the hotel in the city, I think also of the women in the mountains above Itzapa, lining up by the little waterfall at the cliff face, working, laughing, filling their jars. And oddly enough, when I think of the women by the waterfall, I think of the men in the car, and I have often wondered why the memories, one terrible and one wonderful, should trigger one another. So much is different. One is about murder and death; one about life and laughter. One is urban, one rural. The men in the car were Ladino, servants of the powers that rule Guatemala City and the national economy. The women by the waterfall were Mayan people who comprise more than 80% of the population, and control almost nothing. Perhaps the link is that they are both emblematic of the mystery that is Guatemala for me: an “American land” that seems at times to be as distant from our lives as the surface of the moon.

It was many long months after I had returned to the U.S. before I was able to find out why those three men had died in the long black car at the crossing of the “sevens.” The well-dressed man in the back had just been awarded a safe political seat and a generous pension by Guatemala’s most right-wing political party, a party best known for overthrowing a democratically elected government in the fifties with the help of the CIA, and for helping to sponsor the death squads that had murdered many citizens in recent years, including many students and teachers at the University of San Carlos. The party, too extreme even by Guatemalan standards, no longer ruled, but still held considerable power. I also learned how the man had earned his pension. Once he had been a guerilla captain and had helped lead the struggle against the tyranny of the six families that rule Guatemala to this very day. In that capacity, it was likely he had killed both the innocent and guilty for “the cause.” Then he had changed sides, and for many years he had helped the army hunt down and kill his old friends under arms in the mountains. And then, just a little before Easter in 1976, he had been machine-gunned from the back of a motorcycle, in front of the Phoenix Hotel, within earshot of the Police Station, just three blocks from the National Palace. In the end he was caught in the net of violence he had woven throughout his life, taken just at the moment when he had truly begun to enjoy the fruits of his treachery—carrying his driver and bodyguard with him into oblivion as he had so many others.

If I had not looked into it, if I had seen only the consequences of this piece of
violence, I would never have understood that this crime was not an isolated horror, but a cameo in a much larger canvas of death and destruction. And I would never have understood that this crime—whoever committed it—almost certainly sprang from the heart of a struggle between a wealthy elite striving to preserve its privileges, and a people who dreamed of a quality of rights and a quality of life that in our own country we take fully for granted.

For many Guatemalans, the revolution only got serious after the quake of ’76. The poor saw how the rich lived when the walls came down. They saw how rich men got the bulk of the earthquake relief funds, and how the army looted foreign aid at the airports within the horrified sight of the diplomats of a dozen embassies. And it was after ’76, I have heard, that many of the Mayan people became active in the struggle to unseat the regime. For decades after the quake, a fierce war was fought in the highlands of Guatemala. The war in El Salvador made headlines here, but the Guatemalan war and the U.S. support of the regime was reported only in Europe and throughout the rest of the globe. Many of you have probably never heard of the Guatemalan war because the American media never seriously covered it. It was only when, near the turn of this century, the New York Times reported that half a million refugees had fled the Guatemalan highlands as a result of the conflict and were now living in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, that the American public was quietly informed that a serious, long-term conflict had taken place.

I think about how often, in our history, our leaders and our media fail to trust us, and rarely give us an understanding of the context for violence. Where it comes from, how it is nurtured, how it grows. How we might defuse its causes in the future while we police its terrors in the present. Instead the dissemination of such knowledge is treated as a lapse of security. Instead we are recruited into wars framed only in terms of “good vs. evil” in which the murder of innocent along with the guilty is perceived as an unavoidable necessity— and the cycle of violence begins again.

They say that finally, in recent years, a long-overdue peace has been established in Guatemala. For this I am grateful, but I do not believe that the long legacy of violence on either side will enhance its chances of survival. Then too—many inequities remain. Was a quarter century of murderous conflict really necessary to achieve these ends? As a former correspondent, I believe that if, in this country, we had taken the time to really understand what was happening in Central America— the wars there might have been significantly shortened. I think of Guatemala, the land of the quetzal—a bird that they say cannot live in captivity. I think of the men in the car, the women by the waterfall: the blood, and the water. A people whose world was hidden from us by our government, our media, and by an opaque yet bottomless belief in our own infinite and ineluctable goodness. And I wonder, as the world gets smaller and smaller each day, how many times we will go through this pattern of blindness? How many nations and peoples will remain invisible to us until their pain turns to violence, and their suffering becomes our own?

ronellis@hughes.net 04/17/08