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RECKONING
The Ends of War in Guatemala
By DIANE M. NELSON DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4341-7
Chapter One
UNDER THE SIGN OF THE VIRGEN DE TRÁNSITO
One is too few, but two are too many. Donna Haraway
I have two faces. Mayan catechist
There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike and capable of anything. The U.S. seems destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of freedom. Simón Bolívar
MASKS AND DISPOSSESSION
A drum is playing and the thin reedy song of the oboelike chirimia. The sun is very hot for the mid-August titular festival in the highland town of Joyabaj. The streets are jammed with people, as everyone-even Evangelical Christians disdainful of the fiesta's paganism and depravity-comes down from the hamlets to sell or buy in the bustling market, to try the carnival rides and games, to watch a video, or to fulfill ritual obligations through dancing or hosting. At any one time there may be five or more dances going on, sometimes all at once, in the square in front of the church, whose facade was one of the few things left standing after the devastating earthquake of 1976. Buses are busy bringing people back from work on the South Coast and from the capital, and children home from boarding school. Some Joyabatecos return from as far away as the United States, where a sizeable number now live for a few months, years, or a lifetime. Mindful of luring workers to cut cane in the upcoming harvest, sugar plantations sponsor banners congratulating the town on its fiesta. Periodically a group of men dressed as angels and monos (monkeys) and often rather inebriated, approach the huge pole, fashioned from a single tree trunk, erected in the central square. Both climb up, and the angels hook their feet into stirrups on ropes wound around the top, and jump-the trunk turns, and they go twirling, circling, and slowly descending to earth. All this is to honor the patron of Joyabaj, the Virgin of the Assumption, known colloquially as La Virgen de Tránsito (transition, transformation, or journey).
Down a side street, dancers dressed in heavy costumes and thick wooden masks trace the back-and-forth steps of the Baile de la Culebra (Dance of the Snake). Unlike the Baile del Venado, in which humans are disguised as deer, or the Baile de los Monos, in which humans take the part of monkeys, in this the snakes the dancers handle are real and poisonous. In brown masks drawn from old Spanish images of "the Moors," dancers repeat the yearly rituals of being contracted to work as mozos (laborers) on the sugarcane and coffee plantations on the fever-ridden Pacific coast. In the masquerade an indigenous man also assumes the role of a ladino, or nonindigenous, by (cross)-dressing as a Spaniard, in blonde wooden curls. The agent of national and transnational capital in its local form, he bends one dancer over to use his back as a table to mark down the men's names in a book, recording how much they owe for the drink he just bought them or for the cash advance they received when their child fell ill. It is an act I've seen repeated out of costume, that is, in real life, in the main square. While in that life it is quite difficult to escape the combined forces of debt collectors and the iron law of wages, in the dance the names provided for the notebook are "generally nonsense names, or puns, or malapropisms.... The dancers have a lot of fun with each other and the specific exchanges are highly improvisational ... humorous non-sequiturs that turn on the miscommunications so common between ladinos and Maya" (Maury Hutcheson, pers. comm. 2004). However, experience on the fincas (plantations) is anything but fun. It is described as hateful, abhorrent sufrimiento (suffering) rather than work (McAllister 2003:85). It is a place where one goes to work without earning anything, where one contracts malaria.
Meanwhile, the contratista's (contractor) two companions, his "wife," a man (cross)-dressed in the huipil of the department capital, and his shaman, or Maxe, in the traditional dress of nearby Chichicastenango, seem to be dallying behind his back. In the slow rhythms of the dance the workers plan a revolt. Rituals are performed, including passing the snakes among the dancers so that each gets a solo with one around his neck, and as the master is sleeping they creep up and put the snake under his clothes. After much struggle he dies, and the workers rejoice. But their joy is short-lived, as the shaman performs powerful necromantic spells that bring him back to life. Things seem to go back to the way they were.
When I saw the dance in 2000 and 2002, amidst gales of laughter and shrieks when the snakes came too close, the audience yelled out, "Maxe necio!" (naughty Maxe), among other things. Maxe is a nickname for people from neighboring Chichicastenango, where everyone is reputed to be a shaman. People in Joyabaj call themselves Xoye. Both speak the K'iche' language. As in the Dance of the Conquest-a Spanish dance commemorating the expulsion of the Moors in 1492, reworked as Pedro Alvarado beating the K'iche' hero Tekum Umán, which is sometimes performed amid great cacophony right next to the dance I've just described-in the Baile de la Culebra the people united are defeated.
These are dances about loss and dispossession. They enact many of the tensions that interest me: tensions around remembering, forgetting, and actively covering up; identity and pain; fascination and danger; the rationalization of everyday life (the debt notebook) and its magic. They are about embodi/meant (the corporeal) and enjoy/meant (in both the sense of pleasure and, more fiercely, jouissance). They conjure unexpected allies, like the snake, not all of them human, and sudden, deadly reversals. The dances and this book are about relations between the highlands and the rest of Guatemala and with other parts of the planet. They are also about class, ethnicity, and gender, which are not things but relations-relations that accumulate capital. David Harvey, drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, calls them two-faced. One face consists of the everyday economic processes like those depicted in the baile, in factories or agricultural estates and mediated by transactions between capitalist and laborer. The other face is the rapacious and brutal "accumulation by dispossession" between capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production mediated via colonial policy, the international loan system, and war (2003:137). The dances are ways to co-memorate, or remember together, the experiences of dispossession and collective action. They contemplate the failure of that action to reach its immediate goal, all in the midst of ongoing exploitation and danger. They play with masks, truth, and power, and in that spirit I'll situate the end of war (its conclusion) by telling a story about some ends (or goals) of people who participated in a rebellion similar to that of the mozos against their patrón (boss). They were struggling for possession of land, labor, capital, dignity, and power, a struggle that has not ended.
THE ENDS OF WAR: STRUGGLES FOR POSSESSION
It is difficult to define the postwar because the stains of five hundred years of accumulation by dispossession have kept war in people's veins (Williams 1991). Ritual processes-like the dances performed in indigenous communities, the National University's annual Huelga de Dolores, and Catholic masses for their martyrs-monuments, family storytelling, books, cassette tapes, videos, and DVDs co-memorate and motivate organizing, taking up arms, reform, democratization, coups, nationwide mobilizations, counterinsurgency terror, survival, and rebuilding. To tell part of that story, I'll go back to 1978, when a goodly number of Guatemalans were actively involved in trying to create massive social change at every level, from the individual out through the family, community, church, local economies, regional politics, and on up to the nation-state-with many hoping, in turn, to transform Guatemala's relations with the world. They were addressing both of Harvey's faces of capital accumulation, which meant intervening locally, nationally, and transnationally, with Rigoberta Menchú Tum's testimonio being the most incisive intervention in the latter. The status quo-a somewhat stabilized relation of subordination, always dependent on a great deal of violence-could no longer hold, as it became increasingly understood as an unnatural domination.
Activism took many forms, from holding Bible study groups to conducting electoral campaigns; from colonizing jungle areas inspired by utopian visions of dignified human communities and unalienated production to re-conceptualizing the alphabets of Mayan languages; from unionizing workers across ethnic and linguistic identities to engaging in massive strikes for better wages and working conditions; from teaching in shantytowns to joining one of the guerrilla movements. Accounts from that time, and people's current memories, evoke enormous hope, enthusiasm, effort, and learning. The names people chose for their organizations and the words they use today to describe these experiences suggest unstoppable forces and telluric entities-volcanoes, fire, streams flowing into rivers. People use terms like "euforia insurreccional" and "calor del momento revolucionario" (the heat of the revolutionary moment) (Bastos and Camus 2003:57), "acceleration," or remember being "swept up in this dynamic," this "vortex" (McAllister 2003:268).
Those who did take up arms also took on a second name, or nom de guerre-a name that inspired them to become another person, to assume a different identity than they had before. Likewise, naming guerrilla fronts after international symbols of resistance to violent imperialism like Augusto Sandino and Ho Chi Minh worked like a GPS, or Global (south) Positioning System, to call, via the sympathetic magic of the name, such resistance into being via the individual bodies of recruits. The groundwork for this effervescence was laid by decades of organizing around a host of issues. Also essential were the consciousness raising and practical experience gained through people's lived activities in institutions like the school, the church, the town hall, the cooperative store, the military, the health clinic, the land registry, the courts, and the multicultural barracks on the South Coast plantations, where families of mozos, migrant workers from all over the highlands-including indigenous and ladino poor people-lived together chockablock. All these coalesced with memories of hopes raised, shattered, and raised again through national experiences like the social and land reforms of the Guatemalan Spring of 1944-54 and the subsequent repression and insurgency-and with a moment of global crisis encompassing tenacious and ultimately successful anticolonial movements in Asia, Africa, and parts of Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, the nonaligned movement, the Tri-continental projects, and the worldwide May '68s.
In Guatemala these mobilizations involved an enormous amount of talking and thinking, reading and more talking, and practical experimentation. How do you organize a cooperative store? What crops grow in cleared jungle soil? How does a village respond to thieves? What do you do when your husband reacts badly when you tell him you've gone to a meeting? How do you organize a political action with someone who doesn't speak your language? How do you take care of a gun? Do you use Usted, Tu, or Vos (formal or informal "you") with compañeros of a different ethnicity? And then more talking. The mobilizations were laboratories, sites for trying things out and experimenting, then contemplating the outcomes. The talking and acting, aka crítica/auto-crítica, aka praxis, took place in USAID-sponsored bilingual education workshops, in kitchens, on sugarcane plantations during a strike, on the campus of the National University, in high schools and on elementary school playgrounds, on the production lines of factories, between rows of corn or banana trees. A ladina lawyer remembers going, in the mid-1970s, to the eastern highlands where the Arbenz land reforms had been most developed and, in the late 1950s, were most brutally overturned, to offer legal advice and consciousness raising to indigenous peasants. To her surprise, she says, they were way ahead of her. "'The time for that is past,' they said. "Where are the guns?'" No more than the anti-British struggles in India, were these actions undertaken in a fit of absentmindedness (Guha 1983:9).
Increasingly, as the decade progressed, some people gave their whole lives over to these processes, living full time in guerrilla camps, aka "revolutionary schools for new men [sic]" (Andersen 1983, see also Hale 2006, Harbury 1994) or visiting and even residing among insurrectionaries in countries like El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam, and Morocco. "Really," said an urban psychologist, remembering his student days, "you didn't know from one day to the next if you were going to up and head for the mountains. It seemed like every day someone else from our circle had gone to join the guerrilla." The Mayan leader Rigoberto Quemé recalled those times: "In the 80s there were three possibilities for the people in [the highland city of] Quetzaltenango working for social change: join the rebels, go into exile or stay in Quetzaltenango. The last option was, for many, a death sentence" (in Grandin 2000a:236).
People mobilized into a wide range of activities (only some of them armed) and for a number of different reasons, or ends. Projects that had been coalescing for decades became articulated-connected-in the late 1970s. It was a multiple-front process, and people changed their strategies as the terrain of struggle changed-as when peaceful protest was met by a hail of army bullets in the Panzós massacre of 1978 (Grandin 2004). The great majority of tactics were nonviolent, although by the early 1980s the counterinsurgency had pushed more and more people to take up arms, what few they could get their hands on. A turning point for many was the peaceful occupation in 1980 of the Spanish embassy by students and peasants involved with the Campesino (Peasant) Unity Committee (CUC), which was the culmination of a number of unsuccessful efforts to raise awareness about land usurpations and army murders in the mostly indigenous highlands. The army surrounded the embassy, it caught on fire, and almost everyone inside was killed, leading many to believe that unarmed resistance was futile.
However, the very breadth of the mobilization above- and underground in the legal, religious, educational, military, and productive realms gave rise to classic counterinsurgency prose (Guha 1988) denouncing it as two-faced. The military state insisted that legal protests and human rights work were nothing but a front for the lawless guerrillas, designed to dupe the government, international observers, and maybe even the activists themselves. In this view, although they thought they sincerely believed in economic and political justice, they were really doubled over, puppeting Communist propaganda, mindlessly repeating the "Havana line."
In colonial discourse or counterinsurgency prose we will see again and again this deployment of duplicity as double. Resistors are two-faced, both above ground and clandestine, and therefore dupers. But they themselves are duped. Rebellion is clearly a babosada (idiotic act), so anyone who tries it must have been tricked or possessed. When the army offered people the choice between death and amnesty if they confessed to being tricked by the insurgency, or when David Stoll suggests that Rigoberta Menchú needs to find herself as a Maya and not as a leftist, rather than both, they are rehearsing one formula of the assumption of identities. The confession of having been duped (Assumption Two) opens the way to transformation (Assumption Three) into the nonduped-two faces are "fixed" into one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RECKONING by DIANE M. NELSON Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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