“I want to show you the reality of the people who live here, will you come?” It was with this question that the day veered off in a direction that rattled me deeply, a day that I will never forget. I looked out over a community that dotted a hillside near San Christobal Verapaz that lacked electricity – over forty homes and a school. I had spent that past few hours interviewing homeowners regarding their needs and resources, examining their homes, and thinking about ways in which we could bring cheap, clean electricity to this community. I drank glass after glass of pinol and cola. No homes had more than a few possessions – clothes, a table, and a few beds. Some of them had up to ten people living in one home. I had not been given much information beyond the name and phone number of a contact – Cesar. He translated most of my questions from Spanish into Poqomchi´. As I finished up my visits, the community had a few elements that didn’t make perfect sense. It had been recently settled. The homes were all of the same design –cinder block arranged into a three room 3m x 10m structure. The electric grid was nearby, but not connected. I generally like to take in information and build my own narrative rather than to outright ask questions, so when Cesar asked me this question about the reality of the people here, near the end of my visit to the community, I simply said “Let’s go.” I took a few last photos of the school and then we hurried down a footpath to reach a pickup truck that waited below.
We climbed into a black pickup truck and sped off towards San Cristobal.
“In 1981, 1982, and 1983 thousands of people from this area disappeared or were murdered,” Cesar explained. “Many of them have never been found. In 2012, the government permitted anthropologists to explore the grounds of a military base near Coban, where they encountered four mass graves that were filled with over 500 people – men, women and children. These remains are being tested and matched to families who have reported missing relatives. One family received their father’s yesterday and they are having a funeral this afternoon. We are going to bury his bones today.”
We parked the car and started walking. We didn’t get far before Cesar stopped me and said, “Bring your camera.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
I went back to the truck and grabbed it. We walked on a dirt path that bordered a creek through verdant pastures with coffee plantations in the distance. We arrived at a small home where a few dozen people were gathered. Cesar ushered me in and introduced me rapidly to the family members of the deceased. We then stepped into a room whose floor was covered in pine needles and the air was redolent with the smell of burning copal. There was a casket in the middle of the room and two women standing on either side. A black and white picture of a serious looking young man sat on the casket that was flanked by brilliant flower arrangements.
Cesar opened the casket and a sheet covered the remains. He asked one of the women to uncover the remains. She did so, closed the lid, and then opened a viewing window for me to see what remained of Don Sebastian. I stood in silence. There was a deteriorated and broken skull peering out at me from the casket. Something slipped inside of me; the moment seemed too deliberate. It was like the world had colluded to bring me there, so that I would see this skull from 
an innocent man that had been kidnapped and murdered. I felt panic well up inside of me, for what reason and from where I cannot say. I could feel the hollowed out eye sockets of the skull peering into me and the eyes of everyone else in the room watching me. I felt like I let this happen, despite it having happened before I was born. Thoughts poured through my head in the interminable silence, how atrocities like this were happening today, how those of us who did nothing were responsible for letting people like Don Sebastian just fall through the cracks, letting them just disappear. We are complicit.
“There are no words,” Cesar said.
“There is nothing that I can say,” was all that I managed to say. What could you say and to whom? I looked around the room at the faces of everyone else as I took a deep breathe.
“You can take photos.”
“Really? You are sure?” I directed my question at everyone in the room. The women nodded. I interpreted this as them wanting the story of their father, relative, or friend, who had been nameless, buried in a hole with hundreds of other people for over thirty years, to be told. I snapped a few photos rapidly, vowing in my mind to tell this story.
We set out. I carried some flowers and the family shouldered the lacquered casket that scintillated under the scorching midday sun. The procession packed into waiting vehicles and the casket was loaded into the bed of the pickup. I realized at this point that they had been waiting for us, we arrived in the truck that would carry the casket to the cemetery.
We stopped in front of the faded white façade of the Catholic Church that overlooked the central square. We filed into the church and Don Sebastian was placed in front, again surrounded by flowers. The priest spoke at length in Spanish and performed arcane rituals whose significance was lost upon me. I 
knew that many of the people didn’t speak Spanish from my interviews and this was made clear by the fact that most of the crowd completely disregarded his commands to sit and rise. It put me at ease, because I didn’t understand either. As he went through his rituals I watched a group of kids wrestle and giggle between the rows of pews, making a racket that echoed off the concave roof of the building. The parents let them be; I decided that the laughter of these kids is what should have been written in the bible. The priest did not laugh.
We departed from the church on foot. The women and children wore hand-made guipiles and dresses of woven of every color under the sun. The family took turns carrying the casket and flowers. People lined the sidewalks, stood in doorways, and peered out from windows.
I gestured to the people watching us pass and asked Cesar, “Do most of the people know why we are here today? Do they know what happened?”
“Yes. I would say most of them know about the disappearances and the mass graves. Almost every person in this community was directly affected by the civil war.”
I told Cesar that most people from the United States did not know about what happened in Guatemala. We were not taught that the our government backed and armed oppressive regime after oppressive regime because land reform threatened US interests in the country. We were not taught that these successive regimes killed and disappeared between 140,000 and 200,000 mostly indigenous peasants in what amounted to genocide. In a particularly terrible period in the 1980’s, entire villages were razed and burned to the ground. A story is often told that the guerillas who advocated land reform were partly responsible for this violence, but a United Nations-backed commission – La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico – found that the government was responsible for 93% of the killings.
The violence did not end as the war wound down. The truth was too much of a threat. Archbishop Juan Gerardi, a defender of human rights, investigated and documented the atrocities and crimes that occurred during this period in a report entitled Guatemala: Nunca más. Two days after it was published he was beaten to death in his own church.
Every Guatemalan that I have asked has told me that the history of the civil war is not taught in school there either. They say that possibly in university – a public one, not a private one – you will learn about what happened here. Social amnesia is an intentional process orchestrated by individuals and institutions that benefit from appropriation of land or resources, slavery, colonization, or looting of public goods for private gain. History is ignored, or rewritten in a way that doesn’t clearly define who benefitted and who lost, facts are distorted, intent and causation obscured. As time goes on rage is replaced with resignation in the face of injustice, memory fades around who took what from whom, and a new normal solidifies. The threat of punishment, redistribution, or retribution slowly fades. The wealth and resources that were appropriated don’t fade away though; they grow in value.
We blocked the streets and traffic politely waited behind us with nary a horn. We marched on towards the green foothills that cradled the city. I caught a few words from a girl that was talking with Cesar that piqued my interest.
“Why would I believe in words written in a book? I don’t trust them. They are just someone else’s view of the world; the way that they want other people to see. I know that trees, rivers, and mountains have spirits, yet none of that is in the bible. I think we should all just trust what we know. The story of the bible is the story of the colonizers.” She spoke with passion and I listened in admiration.
As we walked, I met a woman named Lourdes that who worked with an organization that worked to document the history of San Cristobal from ancient times to recent history – meaning she documented from Poqomchi´ creation myth to the aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War. We walked side by side through the graveyard.
She swept her hand over the back of the graveyard. “Most of these graves in this area are from people who died in the conflict. One of the most important leaders of the pueblo is buried here. He managed to buy two large coffee plantations
using credit and then returned the land to the people that it rightfully belonged to. The movement was gaining momentum and power, it was a threat and wealthy people took notice. He was kidnapped and murdered, just like Don Sebastian. What they did worked – the land redistribution movement here was halted by fear. But they didn´t stop killing,” she explained as a matter of fact.
We continued on in silence, sweating under the power of the sun. The path was lined with graves that identified the deceased as being a victim of forced disappearance or internal conflict. Just like on Don Sebastian’s plaque – the date of their disappearance, date of discovery, and location of discovery were listed on the plaque. Many of the plaques listed their location of discovery as CREOMPAZ.
“Where is CREOMPAZ?” I asked Cesar.
“That is the military base in Coban where some of the largest mass graves from the civil war were discovered. Many of the bones show signs of torture. The facility was where people were brought to be tortured, murdered, and then thrown in holes as if they were animals. So far about 130 of the 550 remains found there have been identified.”
We gathered around the casket. The wind whistled through the pines. A man was selling ice cream to many of the attendees. A woman began to speak. Her voice shook as tears welled up in her eyes and she choked back sobs. I listened and 
cried quietly as she poured forth words that seemed like they had been burning inside her for decades. I can only remember the parts that were seared into my memory.
“Don Sebastian was murdered for believing that we had rights and for trying to protect them. He was murdered by a government and a military that say they are there to protect us, but in reality they are there to protect what the wealthy and the powerful. There is no government that is legal in the eyes of the pueblo. They are there to protect the people who took our land, the people that are the reason why I make just enough money each day to feed my children and have to rent a place to live,” She faced the sun and her tears caught the amber afternoon light as she let loose, “What have they ever done for us? They don’t care about us. If there was a president, or a policeman, or a soldier in this casket there would be a parade and a band. For us, for someone from the pueblo?” She waved her hand around at the small group of people standing around the casket. “Nothing.” Her eyes continued blazing with rage and hurt as she translated everything into Poqomchi´.
Everyone stood mute or sobbing. Don Sebastian’s daughter stood beside the casket holding his photo. She managed to choke out, “If they hadn’t killed him, he might still be alive today. I might have a father.” She looked up towards the sky. “Why did they take you from us? What happened to you?” She fell to her knees beside the casket and trailed off into sobs and wailing. When she finally regained her composure she began to pray in Poqomchi’. The rest of the crowd joined with soft prayers or chants in the same tone, just above a whisper. I closed my eyes and the sound shook me deeply as the words were imbued with a force, something timeless that I could feel, but not understand.
Silence eventually descended until only the pines spoke. I thought again about how many more times this same funeral would play out here and in innumerable other parts of the world.
Don Sebastian was placed into his tomb and then we stood as it was meticulously sealed with cinderblocks and concrete, seemingly waiting to make sure that this time he would not be deprived of his right to a peaceful place to rest under any circumstances.
We turned our backs on his grave and walked in silence for a while before asking Cesar, “Did the Civil War affect your family?”
“No, not directly. Like everyone, they lived in fear. But nothing like the people here. The brother of Rueben, the founder of our organization, disappeared and he still doesn’t know what happened to him. So this is all very person and something that he lives with each day. He paid for most of this funeral and another recent one,” he explained.
I hopped into the back of the pickup with the woman who made the impassioned speech at the funeral. I introduced myself. Erlinda sat with her two little kids huddled around her. I wasn’t quite clear what her relation was to the Don Sebastian.
“Was Don Sebastian your father?”
“No, he was a good friend of my father. They were both professors and were working to return land back to our people. I think what happened to Don Sebastian happened to my father as well. I think he was kidnapped and 
murdered. I never knew why I grew up without a father for a long time. When I was a little girl, we fled our village as soldiers burned our home and everything that we owned to the ground. We ran into the mountains to hide and were forced to eat whatever we could find. We were forced to come to the city for refuge, but we had nothing. Eventually, I began to wonder why other kids had fathers and I did not. My mom explained that he had been disappeared, our land had been taken, and that was why we were living in extreme poverty. I started looking for my father over 20 years ago. My mom and my sisters gave up – they don’t want to get involved in it or think about it. I am the only one who can’t let it go. I need to know what happened to him, if he is dead or alive. I just want to know him – I would even forgive him if he had another family. I just want to know. I named my son,” she nodded towards the boy who clung to her side, “Mariano after my father.”
“How did you end up in La Colonia?”
“I was renting and working with barely enough money to feed my children when I met Reuben and he decided to help me. I have two jobs – taking care of my children and making money to feed them. I barely make any money because I never had the chance to study when I was a girl. I want to study because that is the only way that anyone can get ahead, but I have to work every minute just to feed my daughters and pay for their school supplies. I work so hard, I work from dawn to dusk and get paid 15 Quetzales (two dollars). Barely enough for food,” She paused to think before saying, “Maybe when my girls are a bit older I can go back to study.”
We arrived back at the home where we started. Smoke was billowing out from the cooking fire under a massive pot of saqkik – a dish made with corn meal and, in this case, chicken. The table was loaded with tamales wrapped in banana leaves. Darkness had fallen and a nearly full moon lit up the fields. Saqkik is eaten without utensils and kids gathered around me and howled in laughter as I sloppily ate the saqkik and let it drip from my beard.
“Hunger, which kills silently, kills the silent. Experts speak for them, poorologists who tell us what the poor do not work at, what they don’t eat, what they don’t weigh, what height they don’t reach, what they don’t have, what they don’t think, what parties they don’t vote for, what they don’t believe in.
The only question unanswered is why poor people are poor. Could it be because we are fed by their hunger and clothed by their nakedness?” – Eduardo Galeano
