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Observations in Guatemala: Massacres, Poverty and Dow

By Evan B. Douthit

[Evan Douthit, a VVAW member in Chicago and editor of Central America News Update, recently spent ten days in Guatemala. The following are his impressions.]

The first impression one has when flying into Guatemala City is how familiar everything seems. I had not expected to find Guatemala City to be so "American". I found out soon enough that this was one-sided. Once away from the more modern, built-up sections of Guatemala City, one could see the differences between the city and the countryside, between the rich part of the city and the poor areas, between the Indian and non0indian populations. (50% of the populations is make up of Mayan Indians.)

Four out of the five Guatemalans live in with poverty, or extreme poverty, according to UN figures. Three out of five cannot read. Two out of five are unemployed or underemployed. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in Latin America. 75% of the land is owned by 10% of the farmers while 60% of peasant families lack any land at all. The country is deep in a terrible economic crisis caused by the world collapse of commodity prices and heavy foreign debt.

We saw results of this crisis and desperation as we drove along the roads. Small peasant plots were being pushed up mountain slopes, almost up cliffs, in an attempt to grow corn, so that peasants would be able to have something to eat, in reckless disregard for the environmental consequence. Signs of deforestation could be seen almost everywhere. (One ultra-rightist analyst even admitted to us that parts of the east near the Atlantic coast have been turned to desert!)

An article in the Mexican press recently told how peasants have been fined hundreds of dollars for cutting wood for their cooking fires while the army often burns down entire mountains and dumps large amounts of herbicides on the forests in pursuit of guerrillas. Meanwhile, industrial loggers often destroy entire forests of immature trees in order to reach the few stands of mature, marketable wood.

Everywhere we went there were soldiers, often teenagers, carrying galil assault rifles. The guerrilla war in Guatemala is healing up again. The army says they won the war, but they are asking for more US military aid. One million peasants are forced by the army to take part in "Civil self-defense" patrols. Peasant organizers told us that the peasants want out of the patrols, because they cannot afford to lose so much time from trying to earn money. But when they try to stop patrolling they are threatened by the army. People still remember the genocide of the early years of the eighties, when the early years of the eighties, when 200 villagers were wiped off the map by the army, and tens of thousands killed. Since 1960 some 100,000 Guatemalans have been killed and 38,000 disappeared. 40,000 Indians took refuge in camps in Mexico to escape.

The guerrillas say there can be no military solution to the problems of Guatemala, and have called again and again for negotiations, and in 1987 they met with the government in Madrid, and recently they met in Costa Rica with the National Reconciliation Commission. But the army has ordered the government to break off talks.

Though the scale of the killing has declined, massacres are still carried out. Twenty-two peasants were murdered near the town of Augucate days before we arrived. People still disappear frequently, and bodies are found with marks of torture.

Trade unionists, peasant organizers, and political analysts told us that there has been a significant change since a "technical coup" was "failed" on May 11 of 1988. Since then there has been a narrowing of the political spaced afforded to legal dissent and opposition, and violence has increased. No one thought that President Cerezo has any power now, or that things have reached bottom. The question seemed to be whether the killing would get as bad as it was in the early eighties.

Father Andre Giron, a priest who heads an organization of 200,000 landless peasants on the southern coast, had received more than threats. In October the army attempted to kill him. One of his bodyguards was killed after 30 soldier blocked the road he was driving down and opened fire on him. Afterwards the military claimed it had not been them and that it had been guerrillas to tried to kill Father Giron. Furthermore, the army claimed that the guerrillas had attacked Giron. Furthermore, the army claimed that the guerrillas and attacked Giron by "mistake" because Giron is an ally of the guerrillas!

Meeting with Giron in his parish near the coast, the father scoffed at the army claim. "I know who tried to kill me. I saw them with my own eyes," he told us. He thanked us for coming pointed out that whenever Americans came to visit people in his position that it helps to protest such people. "Reports are now going out everywhere that you have come here," Father Giron told us in perfect English, which he learned while studying in the US in the 60's. He worked with Dr. Martin Luther King then and had been deeply moved and inspired by King's non-violence and civil disobedience.

The next day we drove down to the ocean and passed thousands of cotton workers walking to work. Simply looking at the migrant workers we understood why a government official told several of our group that they would like to get rid of the cotton plantations "since they only bring misery." Among the workers were hundreds of children. There was no doubt in our minds that they were not going with their parents into the field just to keep them company, that it was just another manifestation of the child labor that we saw everywhere.

Guatemala City, as noted, at first seemed to be very American. The streets are crowded with vehicles, including diesel buses producing some of the worst pollution I had ever seen. Half a mile from out hotel in downtown where there was a ravine. In this ravine was a shanty town where thousands lived in shacks. Even in the downtown area one would occasionally pass homes thrown together out of scrap wood and metal by squatters.

We visited one of the "colonias" on the outskirts later on. It was one of the better colonias. It had water available, and people had some electricity, There, packed in, thousands lived in shacks with dirt floors and tried to survive. There was a small school built by the residents, which was supposed to serve thousands of school age children. At the local "church" the community organizer told us some of their needs: clean water, sewage systems, family planning so that single women unable to afford even the most basic housing would not have to try to raise eight or more children. The government was nowhere to be seen in this barrio.

We visited the Petrosteel factory, which had been occupied for a month by striking workers. The company had refused to negotiate, and since then we learned that the strike had been declared "illegal" by the government, which strips the strikers of even the little protection they have under the law. As we walked through the factory we say bags of vinyl from DOW, Union Carbide and EXXON. We also visited Ninth de Garcia Montenegro, the leader of the Mutual Support Group, GAM. Her husband, a trade union organizers, was disappeared eight years ago. She organized the relatives of other disappeared into GAM to demand justice and an accounting. They were preparing a demonstration for that weekend to protest the massacre at Aguacate and to demand that it be investigated and the real killers be punished.

The Guatemalan army security forces claim to be representing Western values and civilization in the fight against anarchy, but days before the army formally turned over power to Cerezo in January 1986, they passed a law giving all soldier amnesty from prosecution for any acts they had committed. There have been almost no prosecutions of human rights violations.

And that is where the situation remains today. A powerless civilian government, an army and death squads that kill and disappear with impunity, a desperately poor and terrorized population, and a smoldering guerrilla war that threatens to engulf the entire country, while US corporations are everywhere.

—Evan B. Douthit