Through Guatemala's tropical lowlands flies a brilliant green and red bird with flowing tail feathers. This "bird of peace," the quetzal, has been honored by the people of Guatemala as a symbol of their varied and unique land.
It is a land of kaleidoscopic color: of lush green rain forests, bright Indian weavings, and "lakes that change color by the hour." Tourists, making up the country's third largest industry, are lured by Mayan ruins, exotic volcanoes, and the promise of "perpetual spring." But the calm of perpetual spring belies the calamity of permanent strife.
Guatemala is unique in Central America in that more than half of its population is Indian. These indigenous people have been known for their peaceful life and desire to live in harmony with the land. But they have suffered a series of invasions that have threatened their culture and even their existence.
Centuries ago Spanish conquerors seeking wealth enslaved and branded them. More recent history shows a string of military dictators who ruled in favor of the small landholding aristocracy and condemned the Indian majority to poverty. This line of tyranny was interrupted on October 20,1944, by a revolutionary coup which brought to power the reform-minded educator Juan Jose Arevalo and ushered in a decade of hope for the people.
Arevalo's moderate reform program was pushed even further by his democratically elected successor, Jacobo Arbenz. His radical land reform program targeted the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company (now United Brands), which dominated Guatemala's agricultural system. Of United Fruit's vast landholdings, less than 15 per cent were cultivated. In 1954, the Guatemalan government announced that the company must sell its unused land.
While McCarthyism ran rampant in the United States, our country, fearful of losing its domination of Latin America, was drumming up a "red scare" campaign tailored for Guatemala. Branding Arbenz a communist, United Fruit executives enlisted the aid of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, to engineer and finance a right-wing coup.
It was CIA aircraft that bombed Guatemala City and a U.S. embassy plane that flew in Colonel Castillo Armas, the new military dictator. Armas began his reign with a blood bath; during the first two months, 8,000 campesinos were killed. He returned land to United Fruit, dissolved all trade unions, and abolished the main political parties.
With their power and exploitative aims protected, U.S. multinationals began a new invasion of Guatemala. Like the Spanish conquerors, the treasures they sought were wealth and cheap labor. Today, 193 U.S. corporations, including Exxon, Gulf, IBM, Xerox, ITT, Dupont, Hertz, and even Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen, have subsidiaries and $400 million in investments in Guatemala. The Guatemala City Coca-Cola bottling plant was the focus of a global boycott for its repression of unions and retaliation against workers.
The October 20 issue of Time last year, on the anniversary of the revolution that U.S. industry undermined, ran an eight-page special advertising section inviting more U.S. companies to "scenic and tranquil" Guatemala, Central America's largest and most economically developed nation. While President Reagan has placed ideological stakes in El Salvador, Guatemala, rich in natural resources and fertile land, is strategically far more important.
The most recent discovery has been oil. A 1980 report from the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that there is more oil to be discovered in Guatemala than was found in Alaska.
Reminiscent of our treatment of indigenous people in the United States, Guatemalan Indians are being forced from their land, once considered unproductive but now the target for oil exploration. The land theft aggravates the inequity of land concentration among the small, wealthy elite.
The wealthiest two per cent of the country controls 65 per cent of the land, leaving the majority to suffer with the statistics of life in a nation where the best land is used for export crops such as coffee, sugar, and cardamon: 50 per cent of the population has an annual per capita income of less than $85; 81 per cent of children suffer from malnutrition and 56 per cent die before they reach age five. Many Indians are forced into migrant labor, where heavy spraying with pesticides banned in the U.S. is causing mounting deaths.
With nowhere left to push the Indians, the Guatemalan government is killing them. The repression is most brutal in the Transversal Strip in northern Guatemala, where the mineral wealth is located. This region is also known as the "Zone of the Generals" because of the land the army has grabbed up. The country's current president, General Romeo Lucas Garcia, owns 130,000 acres here. He displaced 105 families to get his most recent parcel.
El Quiche, a region of the Strip, has been occupied by the army and is described by one observer as an immense "concentration camp without barbed wire." On May 29, 1978, 800 Quiche Indians were directed to go to the city of Panzos to receive documents about their land. A delegation of landowners met them, and then soldiers opened fire. More than 140 were killed. The government's report: "Subversives, agitated by Fidel Castro, leftist guerrillas, and the clergy, had attacked an army garrison at Panzos and had been killed." Panzos has no army garrison.
The Panzos Massacre was only the beginning of rising violence, an escalation among the worst in Guatemala's long, dark history. The second massacre, which received worldwide attention, took place at the Spanish embassy.
The Guatemalan military had instituted a practice of kidnapping Indian youth to draft them for the army and then putting them through beatings and deprivation designed to make them renounce their culture and family ties. The kidnappings are often accompanied by the torture and rape of family members and the burning of crops.
On January 31, 1980, a delegation of peasants peacefully occupied the embassy to ask for protection and justice. Four hundred police stormed the building, and the 31 peasants along with eight embassy personnel died in a resultant fire.
It was in Guatemala in 1966 that terrorism as a method of counter-insurgency was first introduced in Latin America, as a "laboratory test." Since then 25,000 Guatemalans have been assassinated, most exhibiting evidence of sadistic torture. Last year the deaths included 110 trade union leaders, 18 journalists, and 76 leaders of the moderate Christian Democratic party. In recent months, the numbers have climbed to 35 or 40 murders a day.
The church, because of its work for justice among the poor, has been heavily targeted in the repression. In early 1980, the paramilitary "Secret Anti-Communist Army" threatened to kill all Jesuit priests because of their denunciation of the rampant violence. Eleven priests have been killed, including U.S. priest Stan Rother on July 28 of this year.
In August, 1980, in a gesture unprecedented in Central American history, the diocese of Quiche closed down. The closing was called for by Bishop Juan Gerardi after he survived an assassination attempt; its purpose was to call world attention to the abuses of religious in El Quiche. Bishop Gerardi visited Pope John Paul II in Rome to inform him of the repression and, upon his return, was stripped of his Guatemalan citizenship and denied entry to the country.
But the church lives on in Quiche. Two hundred catechists, or "delegates of the Word," have taken up the work of the religious, and faith flourishes among the persecuted.
The Guatemalan government is getting away with murder. Unlike El Salvador, which claims to have a moderate government unable to control extreme military elements, the Guatemalan government is clearly linked to the deaths. An Amnesty International report released in February of this year charged that the work of the military death squads is supervised by President Lucas Garcia himself and directed from secret offices on the fourth floor of a National Palace annex. Lucas Garcia says the violence is like an "allergy": the people must learn to live with it.
In urban areas, police are largely responsible for the repression. By 1970, more than 30,000 had received training from U.S. personnel, including a special force patterned after the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Weapons and Tactics Squad, known as "El Super SWAT."
The U.S. government has clearly chosen for the murderers and against the poor of Guatemala. In June, reversing the Carter administration's suspension of military aid to Guatemala for its blatant human rights violations, the Reagan administration quietly re-classified military equipment and approved the sale of $3.2 million in military vehicles to the Guatemalan regime. The aid fulfilled the promises of support from Reagan advisers, who visited Guatemala a year before. One high Guatemalan official paraphrased the message he had received: "Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done."
Vernon Walters, special emissary to Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Jr., visited Guatemala in May of this year and said of human rights abuses in the country: "There will be human rights problems in the year 3000 with the governments of Mars and the moon. There are some problems that are never resolved....The best way...is not to impose the ideas of one nation on top of another." As long as such an attitude reigns, U.S. military aid will continue to flow into Guatemala, and its people will pay with their lives.
In this land of many colors, red seems to predominate. It is in the eyes of those in power, who see only communism behind the struggles of the people for survival. It is on the streets in the blood of the martyred peasants whose lives have been offered up for justice. It is in the blood of Christ poured out in hope and shared with courage among those who suffer.
In a small Mayan town 35 miles from Guatemala City, peasants remembering their sufferings in the earthquake of 1976 collected $97 in small coins and delivered it to the Italian embassy for the relief of earthquake victims. The sum was more than most Guatemalans make in a year.
The poor of the village have learned that peace is rooted in sharing and love--a lesson which defies the practices of their government and the U.S. presence in their country. Theirs is truly a peace that passes all understanding m a land where everything speaks of war. It is the only hope of those who have nothing left but their faith and one another.
In this strife-torn, bleeding land, the "bird of peace" can find no home but in the hearts of those who have learned the lesson of love. And we who struggle in faith to know it too must make clear that we are on their side.
Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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