Hello Friends, Family & Allies,

So, this is my final dispatch; my days of accompanying genocide case witnesses in two Guatemalan highland villages have come to an end.

As I prepare to return home after nearly 11 months here, yesterday’s cover story in the nation’s largest newspaper reiterates once again that my
solidarity work with the AJR is far from finished, however:  Immunity for Rios Montt: Congressional Candidacy Makes even more Difficult the Judicial Process against him.

The most murderous dictator in our hemisphere’s recent history has almost positively secured four more years of impunity for overseeing the army-led killing of some 70,000 Mayans. The courts have okayed his candidacy forSeptember’s elections, thereby granting him immunity from prosecution (as hiswealth, fame and evangelical connections render him a shoo-in).

“TELL THEM HOW POOR WE ARE & WHAT WE’VE SUFFERED”

Repeatedly in saying goodbyes, Mayan friends and colleagues have either pled or demanded that I relay what I’ve lived and witnessed firsthand back to those in my homeland: the fabled Norte, the land of plenty, the veritable empire that overthrew their democracy in 1954 and propped up genocidal military dictatorships throughout the 1980s.

“Tell them how poor we are. Let them know what we’ve suffered. Share our stories with them.” All a formidable challenge when most people in the U.S. still don’t know that Guatemala endured a recent genocide and its perpetrators remain free and powerful (not to mention the unspeakably horrific role that otherwise occupied U.S. citizens allowed our government to play here).

FREE DRINKS FOR A GRINGO CEROTE

Earlier this month in Nebaj, my partner Josué and I went to a restaurant/bar for tea before retiring to bed. A somewhat inebriated Ixil man zipped by, cursing us under his breath: “gringos cerotes.” I called him out, not particularly happy that he had called us “big gringo zeroes” for seemingly no reason, and told him to repeat it. The room grew silent, all eyes fixed on us, and the tension soared. Immediately, another man slung his arm around my shoulder, apologizing for hisfriend and ordering us drinks on his tab, effectively defusing the potentiallyvolatile moment. The man who insulted us, I soon learned, had recently resignedas governor of the Quiche province where I work and is gunning for Congress withthe FRG party, which is led by none other than Rios Montt.

Later that night, I contemplated how horribly wrong that evening might have turned out and tried to envision the converse of the situation, with a Guatemalan in a U.S. restaurant/bar being insulted. Then I considered an article I had recently read. A few weeks ago, a Republican county official in Utah submitted a resolution labelling immigrants “Satan’s minions” that hate the U.S.

This was not a bar, it was an official document and, while extreme, folks in the U.S. routinely use vocabulary that insults the human dignity of immigrants and ignores the very real factors that transform these individuals from Guatemalans to immigrants in the first place (many of which are, in fact, undeniably rooted in U.S. policy).

RONALD REAGAN & THE U.S. ARMY ARE ILLEGALS

Take, for example, the term “illegals.” Unsanctioned immigration is the only crime in the U.S. which saddles its violators with the identity of an “illegal.” No one calls Enron executives, habitually drunk drivers, tax evaders, or Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists “illegals.” Meanwhile, the U.S. knowingly funded and trained Guatemalan military dictatorships which were carrying out genocide against the Maya in the 1980s:

* In terms of training, between 1947 and 1991, at least 1,598 members of the Guatemalan Army were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) and 13 Guatemalan Army officials served there as instructors. Following the 1996 Peace Accords, which largely ended the state-led massacring of Mayacommunities, a U.N.-led truth commission singled out the role of the SOA, reporting that its counter-insurgency instruction "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed conflict."
* Of the three ex-dictators sought in the genocide case, SOA graduates comprised four of eight military officials in the cabinet of Romeo Lucas Garcia, six out of nine under Efrain Rios Montt and five out of 10 under Oscar Mejia Victores. General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who designed the Scorched Earth campaign that led the army to burn at least 440 Mayan villages to the ground and is also sought in the genocide case, was trained by the SOA in high military command.
* Regarding the Ixil region, where I have lived since July, two declassified CIA documents from February 1982 state that General Lucas Garcia "acknowledged that because most Indians in the area support the guerrillas it probably will be necessary to destroy a number of villages" and that "the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike." One month later, 96 people from Ilom were mass-executed in the plaza beside our current room.
* That summer, the Reagan administration declared that Guatemala was "not a gross violator of human rights." In December 1982 - the same month the U.N. passed a resolution condemning the human rights situation in Guatemala - Reagan met with Rios Montt and told The New York Times he was "inclined to believe" that the coup-launching SOA graduate "had been given a bad rap." A few weeks later, the U.S. State Department granted Rios Montt another $6 million in military assistance.

POVERTY: A SOMETIMES BLOODLESS VIOLENCE

Based on months of conversations with ex-immigrants here, the explanation for their dangerous journey through Mexico and across a treacherous desert, sacrificing years away from their family and loved ones, in a place where people act racist and hateful toward them and ignore their humanity, can be summed up as this: poverty.

At times I wonder if every time someone in Guatemala suffered a hunger pang a droplet of blood were to seep out their navel, would we non-hungry Earth dwellers (that fortunate one-third of the same species) ultimately recognize poverty as violence? Would the crimson stain marking the stomach of every shirt they own (all two or three of them, often enough) flag them as casualties of an invisible, ongoing war?

Is our callousness in denying these individuals a way to feed their families – by funding army-led massacres with our taxes, championing “free trade” policies that increase their poverty, or constructing a wall to keep them from doing work that sustains both our nation’s and their family’s well being – a de facto extension of genocide?

While countless U.S. citizens may pontificate from air conditioned offices about how Guatemalans need to learn to work harder to emerge from their poverty, I can attest that folks in Ilom do extremely physical work virtually everyday from sun-up to sun-down and the problem is not their deficient industriousness, its about who holds the resources, how they got them and how they kept them.

Following the massacre of 1982, the neighboring plantation La Perla, which voluntarily housed the army during the genocide, stole massive amounts of Ilom’s land. They recently sold much of it to transnational companies who are plundering what they can from it – creating a profitable dam, leveling forests, looking for oil, while their shotgun-wielding guards keep them safe from locals.

Everyone in Ilom had to start from nothing when the army burned down their village, only that afterward they had even less land to work (and, accordingly, food to eat and sell).

Massive immigration is a consequence of the violence of poverty – a poverty the U.S. has brutally exacerbated by funding a genocide and pushing free trade. Neither the Democrats and Republicans understand this; both appear intent on stripping immigrants of their labor rights in order to create a permanent underclass via their worker programs.

I’LL BE HOME TOMORROW

I arrive in Austin tomorrow night and will be there until June 16th when my partner Rebeca and I will embark on a tour to California. We will be giving presentations along the road about the anti-genocide struggle in Guatemala. If you have any friends/contacts in Corpus Christi, TX; Wichita, KS; Lawrence, KS; Kansas City, MO; Denver, CO; Boulder, CO; Albuquerque, NM or San Diego, CA that would be interested, please let me know and I’ll pass them details about the presentation.

While in Austin, I’ll be preparing for the tour up until its launch. If anyone has access to a copy machine, please let me know as I would be forever grateful. (I hope to make a bunch of informative zines - homemade publications - from interviews with AJR members, other stories, photographs, and journal entries to distribute along the tour.)

Thank you for all your support this last year, and I look forward to seeing many of you face-to-face soon!

Jordan

P.S. To receive updates related to Guatemala’s human rights struggles, sign up here: http://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/nisgua