CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Guatemala’s Ongoing Memory Battles

Mayans in Guatemala. Photograph Source: vasse nicolas,antoine – CC BY 2.0

As a human rights activist, Angélica Macario was used to the hubbub and noise of protests and to seeing her people take their clamor for justice from the mountains of El Quiché to the streets of Guatemala City. For the past 20 years, however, she has carried on that legacy in another way—one which began with her father and dozens of other community activists in the 1980s. Since 2003, she has safeguarded the archives of las Comunidades Étnicas Runujel Junam (Council for Ethnic Community Runujel Junam, CERJ), a community organization founded in 1988 to resist state-sponsored genocide.

Ángelica grew up in Chulumal Cuarto, an aldea of Chichicastenango in the highland department of El Quiché. At the time, the department was the center of a brutal state-backed counterinsurgency. According to the UN-sponsored truth commission report, Memory of Silence, there were more than 344 massacres in El Quiché and that 45 percent of human rights abuses occurred in the department during the 36-year conflict. Memory of Silence also reports that more than 200,000 civilians were killed and more than 1 million displaced between 1960 and 1996—almost entirely at the hands of state agents—and found that the state of Guatemala had committed genocide against Indigenous Maya groups.

The CERJ archive tells the story of Maya resistance to this state-sponsored genocide in more than 80 boxes (more than 75 linear feet) of meeting minutes, police reports, flyers, and pamphlets. Together, the archive documents the group’s efforts to bring democracy to Guatemala, exhume clandestine cemeteries, and to deliver direct aid to the survivors of genocidal violence. Now, Angelica and her compañeros are processing and digitizing the CERJ Historical Archive to rescue and preserve the group’s legacy and carry on the fight for historical memory and social justice in Guatemala despite institutional and personal obstacles.

Indigenous Resistance to Dictatorship 

Angelica grew up steeped in the tradition of Indigenous resistance and community resilience. As a child, she attended CERJ meetings and protests alongside her father, Don Eusebio Macario. They were protesting the actions of the state backed counterinsurgency, known as the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil, or Civil Defense Patrols (PACs). The PACs were created by Generals Lucas García and Ríos Montt in the early 1980s to combat the country’s insurgent movements. However, they soon became a key mechanism of genocide. Military leaders forced all Indigenous men between the ages of 15 and 65 to participate in weekly, 24-hour shifts patrolling the countryside for so-called “subversives,” which the military broadly defined as anyone from guerrilla members, Catholic catechists, cooperative leaders, and eventually entire ethnic groups. Under threat from military commissioners,........

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