Blending in Maya Culture to Build a New Guatemala

OAXACA, MEXICO — The guerrilla commanders’ arrival in war-torn Guatemala from Mexico two weeks ago to sign “a firm and lasting peace” abounded in mixed metaphors as much as in official ceremony. The graying comandantes were greeted in Guatemala City’s airport by marimba music and armed escorts supplied by the military who had defeated them. The musicians belonged to indigenous Maya communities decimated by the 36-year-long conflict. Among the greeters was Nobel Peace-Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu Tum, who lost her parents and two brothers to the army before she helped organize a campesino movement whose numbers swelled the emotional reception. “Welcome companeros,” Rigoberta called out, as tears ran down her cheeks.

Notable by his absence was the son of Guatemala’s other Nobel laureate, writer Miguel Angel Asturias. Rodrigo Asturias, known by the nom de guerre Gaspar Ilom, was the founder of one of four organizations whose 3,500 combatants composed the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. Asturias’ absence was blamed on a disaffected fellow comandante, who disrupted the peace negotiations by kidnapping an 86-year-old millionairess and holding her for ransom. Asturias is known to object to the general amnesty provision of the peace accords that exempts army officers responsible for more than 90% of the estimated 150,000 missing and murdered Guatemalans, and the 1 million Mayas uprooted from their villages and forced into internal exile or abroad.

Accompanying the guerrilla commanders was Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who has lived in exile in Mexico for more than 40 years. Monterroso is best known for the shortest fable ever written: “And when he (she) awoke, the dinosaur was still there.” A journalist asked Monterroso if the dinosaur was still there when he woke up. The diminutive, elfin-eyed fabulist took a sharp look around, and replied, “Still.”

Behind the somber trappings of a signed peace, the dinosaur of Guatemala’s recent past remains very much alive. The statistics that planted the seeds of armed rebellion include a poverty rate of 80% in a population of 10.5 million, where a tiny minority of criollos (European descendants) and ladinos (mestizos) still controls more than 70% of the arable lands. Other horrendous disparities leap up when comparing war casualties--less than 100 guerrilla fighters and 2,000 military dead, while 440 villages were razed by the military’s scorched-earth policies.

A different story is unfolding in the rise of an older, pre-Columbian Guatemala after centuries of isolation. “Guatemala profunda,” the mystical, agrarian, remarkably resilient community of 6 million Mayas who bore the brunt of the war, has seized the initiative in the postwar conciliation and reconstruction. The day before the signing of the last accord, Maya sorcerers prayed for peace in ancient capitals destroyed by the conquistadors. And last week Menchu was to accompany the returned guerrilla comandantes to conduct healing ceremonies in “zones of conflict” where most of her fellow Mayas were killed.

Most astonishing was the installation in front of the national palace of a “palo volador,” a 100-foot highland pine pole from whose crest two Maya flyers dressed as angels or monkeys dive and gyrate, head down, from the end of a rope, twisting upright just before they hit the ground. The ceremony, performed on feast days in remote Maya villages, dramatizes a scene from the sacred “Popol Vuh,” in which heroic twins descend to the underworld to conquer and banish the lords of death.

It will take far more than costumed flyers spiraling down from a pole to heal the wounds of Central America’s longest and bloodiest war. And yet, the active participation of Maya communities distinguishes this from other short-lived democratic aperturas in this century--most notably the “Guatemalan Spring” of 1944-54, brutally aborted by the CIA intervention that overthrew the elected progressive leader Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

The challenges faced by the confluence of “Guatemala profunda” and historic Guatemala are enormous, but war weariness and longing for peace carry a commensurate weight. And they are already birthing a third Guatemala, one not deterred by horrendous casualties or years of recrimination and bitterness that lie ahead. If, as history has proven, the bitterness of ladinos descended from the rapes of indigenous women by conquistadors is a bottomless abyss, the bitterness of Maya communities that have lost so much more is a sea that can renew in ways that confound us all.

Guatemala’s leaders include powerful Maya women such as Menchu, the Guatemalan Widows’ Coordinator Rosalina Tuyuc and ladino heroines like Helen Mack Chang, who pierced the military’s centuries-old shield of impunity. She pursued the prosecution of her sister’s assassin, Army specialist Noel de Jesus Beteta, until he was convicted, sentenced and jailed. Whatever happens in coming months, as the army presumably returns to the barracks and disarmed guerrilla leaders run for office, the Guatemala rising from the ashes of this horrendous war will never regress--as happened after previous aperturas in 1944, 1966 and 1986--to the status quo ante.

Also playing a key role as protagonists and unlikely allies are two former sworn enemies, both ladinos. The government’s chief peace negotiator Gustavo Porras, a former militant with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, underwent a change of heart in the mid-’80s, when he realized the only way out of the conflict was to build a bridge between military reformists and moderates among his guerrilla comrades.

Porras found an astute ally in newly elected President Alvaro Arzu, a pragmatic businessman with an instinct for building consensus. Porras’ military counterpart is Otto Perez Molina, a “young Turk” army officer appointed by Arzu to head the Presidential High Command. During Arzu’s first year in office, he literally swept the military clean of its retrograde elements, retiring almost 100 generals, colonels, intelligence specialists and other officers. With the end of the Cold War, and the increased isolation of the military and the guerrillas in the world community, Porras and Molina fell into one another’s arms, like punch-drunk fighters who no longer remembered why they got into the ring.

Unless Molina stumbles badly and falls prey to die-hard army officers who remain opposed to losing the peace after they won the war, he appears positioned to consolidate the reformist line as Arzu’s next defense minister.

The biggest obstacle to achieving a lasting peace is the issue of amnesty for retired generals and guerrillas with blood on their hands; a close second is the imperative need for an agrarian reform along the lines of the redistribution program of fallow lands that led to the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. Another prerequisite is a verified, irreversible demobilization of the dreaded civil-defense patrols and the reduction of the military by one-third by the end of the year. But perhaps the greatest challenge will be raising funds abroad to rebuild a war-torn country.

The estimated cost of implementing the peace accords and re-integrating the warring parties into a peaceful, prosperous democracy runs into the billions of dollars. The only hope of raising this money starts with creating a climate of confidence attractive to foreign investors. But it is far from clear whether Arzu will prove as adroit a manager in the productive and just allocation of foreign monies as he has been in building a national consensus. The spectacular failure of former President Vinicio Cerezo, another consensus-builder whose greed and political weakness devastated Guatemala’s last democratic apertura, remains fresh in the collective memory of both indigenous and ladinos.

The key issue remains whether the unprecedented alliance of “Guatemala profunda” and historic Guatemala can triumph over a dinosaur swollen by 42 years of defeats and hopelessness to forge a credible, multiethnic, pluralistic democracy prepared to reenter the family of free Western nations.