MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Etelle Higonnet is the editor of Quiet Genocide, a new collection that includes a translation of the materials on genocide in the Historical Clarification Commission report on Guatemala. She speaks about the book and how it increases our knowledge about Guatemala and genocide.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Etelle Higonnet who is a researcher, scholar and film director and as is related to our conversation today, she’s also the editor of Quiet Genocide: Guatemala 1981 to 1983. Etelle, thank you for joining me.
ETELLE HIGONNET: It’s my pleasure to be here with you here today.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: To start off, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background in Guatemala. How did you become involved in the conflict there?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Sure, I started very young, actually. The war ended and the peace accords were signed when I was just finishing high school and starting college. So as a very young woman, I went as a college student in fact, for a summer to Guatemala where I worked in an organization that was helping resettled refugees, people who were brave enough to come back from Mexico and elsewhere and come back to communities that they’d fled -- fled because of massacres, because of killing, in fact, most people had fled during the genocide. It was an incredibly moving experience and really politicized me to sit and talk to these people whose families had been killed in front of them and to experience some of their hardships and to see the determination and courage that they were proving every day while they were rebuilding their lives. I myself on the day of the military, had a very scary experience being held up by a squad of people in black with guns in my office. It was a summer that changed me forever. Ever since then I’ve been engaged in the question of genocide, the question of justice and what we can do to shed light on this past, this dark past that I think really, in a way, haunts not only Guatemala but that has a lot to do with America and American foreign policy. Not just shed light on the past, but also try and bring us one step closer to justice.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And one thing that’s really interesting about the case of Guatemala is that it was a conflict that had been going on for years when really the genocidal phase, 1981 to 1983, unraveled. Can you give us a little background on the conflict itself, and then how that genocidal phase, what happened there when the violence really intensified?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Absolutely. It is a bit complicated and so let me just try and draw the contrast between the dirty war as a whole and the genocide in particular. You’re right to say that the dirty war both came before the genocide and continued after the genocide. I think it’s fair to sum up what the Truth Commission found in terms of why the war was taking place. It named three real factors: economic exploitation, racism directed at the country's majority Maya population, and authoritarianism. So basically you could say it’s economic, racial, and political. Those three problems, I think really do explain, I think that the U.N. Truth Commission did a great job in naming those three problems as being the root causes of that long war.
Now although about 200,000 people were killed from the beginning to the end of the war, it intensified dramatically between ’81 and ’83. In that time period a little over 100,000 Mayan peasants who were unlucky enough to live in an area deemed a hotbed of communist insurgency were killed. You can see how dramatic the spike is in killing in those brief years. For me, of course, since I’m interested in the genocide question, the most important part of explaining the war has to do with racism. Racism against the Maya by the Ladino population, which is I think something that started way back during the colonial era when many Mayan peasants were considered to be almost animals and treated as such in the plantations: whipped, starved, raped, treated as slave labor essentially. The root causes is the racial problem predate even the dirty war; it goes all the way back to colonialism. But then in the dirty war, Maya were identified as natural sympathizers for communist guerilla. It was seen as this sea that the fish would swim in. They had to drain the sea to kill the fish, to kill the communists. You had to get rid of the Mayan peasants that supported them. And so racism against the Maya intensified and became linked to this anti-communism ideology. That’s really what fueled the genocide.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And how did it intensify during those years? What were some of the actions that changed during that time period?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Well, excellent question. Basically the most visible and immediate change was that during the genocide, vast numbers of soldiers came in and occupied the Maya region that was considered to be the hotbed of communist insurgency, the sea that had to be drained in order to kill the fish. As more and more government troops flooded in, they started to first conduct targeted killings of leaders, people that they thought were communists or communist supporters. Then increasingly indiscriminate massacres. And then really large scale massacres where entire villages would be burned out. They’d surround the village. Herd everybody into a church or into a building if you could and then set it on fire. Or where you’d line everybody up and sort of mow them down with machine guns or attack them from above with helicopters. Not only mass killings intensified, and not only did you see a change from individual targeted killings to mass killings, but you also saw a dramatic uptick in rape, right the use of sexual violence as a war crimes, a tool of terror, and a tool of destruction, cultural destruction, destruction of Maya identity. You also saw a sort of cultural genocide where anybody wearing Maya clothes was considered suspect, killed. You also saw a dramatic uptick in torture. Killings of leaders, elimination of historic, cultural, and even I would say religious Maya sites. I think you can’t just talk about physical elimination. It’s not just massacres. It’s also rape, it’s also torture, it’s also destruction of important sites, so cultural genocide and a scorched earth policy that led to tremendous forced displacement. So basically it emptied out whole regions.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And as you said it occurred during a time period during the Cold War where anti-communist insurgencies, that was the framing language for how this kind of conflict was understood. Can you say a little bit more though about how that framework operated to or did it, cast a shadow over the targeted nature, the group targeted nature of the violence and who were the governments’ supporters and were there any networks alive then to declare solidarity with the Mayans?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Well three excellent questions, Bridget, and let me try and take them one by one. The first is that the whole genocide and the dirty war needs to be understood as part of the Cold War, as part of the struggle against communism. So yes, the reason that so many Maya Indians were killed is because the government had decided it needed to crush a communist insurgency. There were communist guerillas operating throughout the country. The government felt that in order to get rid of those communist groups they needed to kill anyone that was first communist, then socialist, then leftist, the even vaguely interested or supportive of leftist issues. Eventually all the Maya who are considered natural supporters of the communists partly because they were so poor and they were down trodden.
The guerillas, the communist guerillas actually appealed to them and said, you know, “We’re here to defend the poor, the down trodden, the capitalist system is exploiting you, come to us.” So the government-- you must inscribe the government counter insurgency war, the dirty war and the genocide, within that anti-communist battle. That means it’s also very important to look at the broader picture which is America’s support for the Guatemalan government. I mean the United States of America was behind the Guatemalan government pretty much every step of the way and provided the Guatemalan government with international legitimacy, with arms, with training, huge numbers of Guatemalan soldiers who ended up committing acts of genocide and fighting and committing crimes of you could call it crimes against humanity, were trained at the school of the Americas, paid for by American tax dollars, trained by American teachers.
The United Stated government I think it’s fair to say really felt that the Guatemalan government was fighting a necessary fight against communism. I believe, as do many scholars, that it was easy for top American officials to understand that what was happening in Guatemala was a genocide, but they closed their eyes to that and continued to channel aid, training, money, and weapons. You know at one point Ronald Reagan defended one of the architects of the genocide, Rios Montt, and he said that Rios Montt had been getting a “bum rap.” He was being unfairly criticized. So I think that’s the first answer to question about communism. Yes, this genocide was about the anti-communist war.
Then the second question; how much of it is political versus ethnic? You know, it’s no surprise that in the areas that we’re talking about where the genocide took place, disproportionately the Maya were targeted. So if there Ladinos in communities the Ladinos would not be killed but the Guatemalan Mayans would be killed. If you look at the percentage of people that were killed, a much, much, much higher percentage in every Mayan region was killed than of Ladinos, although there were some Ladino who were killed. I’m not saying there were none, of course there were. It was a much, much, much smaller percentage. Wildly disproportionate killings targeted the Maya.
Your last question is about networks and solidarity and who stood up. Who said something? Who was courageous enough to try and stop this and to speak out, speak truth to power, and the answer is a lot of people. Many people acting within the Catholic Church, who were acting from within a framework of liberation theology, were very heroic. And in fact the Catholic Church organized something quite similar to a Truth Commission called the Recuperation of Historical Memory, Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a sort of Catholic Truth Commission. They launched that even before the U.N. Truth Commission. And, you know, the Catholic Church was very active in denouncing abuses and in counseling torture survivors and in helping people who had been targeted. Also journalists, human rights activist, you know, Amnesty International was sending delegations there. Juan Mendez who contributed to the book that I’m the editor of, he had gone down to Guatemala when he was working for Human Rights Watch. Although at that time it was called the Americas Watch Program. And they were denouncing the genocide at the time. They were denouncing the abuses, so there were many incredibly heroic human rights activists who really stood out and often paid the ultimate price, they were often killed or raped or tortured themselves.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the book includes-- and you said you’re the editor of the collection -- includes an essay by Juan Mendez who also spent some time as the U.N. Special Advisor on Genocide, the first one in fact. But one of the major contributions in addition to the essays is the translation of the Commission on Historical Clarification in Guatemala. Can you introduce that report?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Of course, I think that the CEH report, the Commission on Historical Clarification report is one of the most important and interesting reports that really looked at genocide for the first time in a way that we’re now more used to. So it was really ground breaking at the time. The decision to call the genocide a genocide was radical. It was very courageous. I think it’s important to recognize that report as daring and...
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Did they soften it a bit though by saying that it was “acts” of genocide?
ETELLE HIGONNET: Yes. But I would say that because this is one of the first reports that did an analysis on a large scale of masses of data and testimonies and reports and papers for the United Nations about genocide, it’s not a cop-out. I wouldn’t at all describe this as the kind of quibbling or vacillation or obfuscation that you saw around the Rwandan genocide where many people were trying to say that they’re genocidal acts and that we don’t have to act right now to stop what’s going on in Rwanda. I would not qualify it that way.
I would say that this is a sort of early iteration of genocide scholarship and as such, it’s really one of the bedrock texts that we all need to go back to. And it’s incredibly well written. It’s right on the mark. It breaks down the genocide by looking at different Mayan groups and analyzing how each one was targeted. I’m talking about the genocide findings in particular because there are many other findings as well. There’s a whole historical section; there are many sections. But the genocide section looks at each of the Mayan groups in this key area that was targeted for liquidation and mass violence by the government. For each group there’s a detailed exploration of targeted killings, mass killing, torture, sexual violence, forced displacement, scorched earth and cultural genocide or destruction of material and spiritual aspect of culture.
It’s a very meticulous, painstaking reconstruction of the genocide -- some parts of which kind of read like a novel because they’re so unbelievable. With very powerful testimony from people, from both victims and perpetrators. We have a, for example, a wonderful quote that says, “And what do you feel?” asked the lieutenant? “Now you’ve acquired courage for the future to kill the fuckers. It’s progress. Now you know that you too can be like soldiers.” You even have perpetrators talking about what it was like to be formed and shaped and trained to carry out genocide as well as victims talking about what it was like to experience the violence. Somebody who says incredibly powerful stuff, “they gathered the women with the children and locked them up in a house. Then they set fire to the house until they died. Four children escaped from this mass killing. Some 50 or 60 children died that day.” So you talk about all the different sort of mosaic of voices that come out from this. This book it’s very impressive to me, a very impressive scholarship.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Etelle, thank you very much. The translation is of course a huge contribution to all of us who work on genocide and to people who want to learn about what happened in Guatemala. The book again is, Quiet Genocide: Guatemala 1981 to 1983, and Etelle thank you for speaking with me.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.
