This salsa evening Saturday 5th May at 8pm in Theatr Clwyd organised by the Clwyd Latin America Human Rights Group is to raise funds for the Movimiento Nacional por los Derechos Humanos (MNDH) in Guatemala. In February the MNDH suffered a number of intimidations reported by Amnesty International, including a break in at their offices (picture below).

If you`re interested in finding out more information about this fundraiser event, you can phone 01352 740 642 or 01244 531 702.

Post by Jordan Buckley

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Hello Friends, Family and Allies,

This is my next-to-last report from Guatemala about accompanying witnesses in the national genocide case.

Since my last bi-monthly dispatch, activists with whom we work have been threatened, followed home, received alarming anonymous phone calls, had their offices raided and one organizer was even briefly kidnapped. Perhaps because the Ixil - the region where I live - has become the main focus of the genocide case, we have also had our share of local intimidations in the last weeks (see further down).

A GLIMPSE OF GENOCIDE: PLAYING SOCCER, BUT NOT WITH MY PEERS

Recently, friends in Ilom - the resplendent highlands village believed by the Ixil Maya to be the birthplace of their people – invited me to join their soccer team Sociedad Juvenil (Juvenile Society) in a regional tournament about an hour and a half hike away. (I’ve played off-and-on with them for the last 8 months).

While I certainly prefer our squad’s name to that of Ilom’s other team, Los Chiqueros (The Pig Sty Boys), I have always been intrigued by their choice; we range broadly in ages – mostly either teens or late twenties and up - and I often joke with my friend Mu’s that since he’s already a grandfather and pushing 40, perhaps they should contemplate renaming the crew.

As our tiresome, uphill trek to the soccer match snaked past the Santa Delfina plantation, my pal Chato broke the silence by shyly pointing out that he was born there. Chato will soon share something in common with me that is truly rare among Ilom residents, a community of some 450 families: he will be 25 years old.

Last Friday not only marked the 25th anniversary of the military coup that put Efraìn Rìos Montt - the deadliest dictator in Latin America’s modern times – into power. It also marked a short quarter-century since the Guatemalan army rounded up 96 of Ilom`s men into the plaza and gorily ended their lives. The army then set fire to the entire village (as they would do to at least another 625 Mayan villages before their genocidal campaign ended), forcing survivors to flee to nearby Santa Delfina.

In an interview (see link below), Antonio Caba - president of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, the coalition of witnesses that we accompany – related that refugees from Ilom were virtually enslaved on the Santa Delfina plantation following the massacre of March 23, 1982, and, given the extreme circumstances, children that had fled from Ilom died there on the plantation, every day for months and months.

Chato, our midfielder for Sociedad Juvenil, was one of the lucky ones.

A LITTLE BOMB NAMED SOFÌA

Sunday before last, a shocking three-page cover story in Guatemala’s leading daily newspaper directly linked Ríos Montt to massacres perpetrated in the Ixil region during 1982 and 1983! The article reports that in August the Attorney General acquired a copy of secret military documents outlining Plan Sofìa - an extensive army campaign ordered by then president and commander-in-chief Rios Montt against "subversives" in the area - but he has still refused to formally initiate the genocide case proceedings.

In February, I had the opportunity to switch spots with another accompanier and visit 5 villages in a different area of the Ixil. Apparently while I was visiting witnesses in those communities, Guatemala’s Minister of Defense was claiming to the presiding judge in the genocide case that Plan Sofia does not exist. However, the exposé article from March 18 asserts that not only does Plan Sofìa exist, two of the communities I had been accompanying were likely massacred as a result of Plan Sofia in the summer of 1982.

RÌOS MONTT’S ESCAPE ROUTE: CONGRESS

The next five weeks will determine if Ríos Montt - who ruled over the estimated murder of 70,000 predominantly Mayan people - will evade justice for at least another four years (or feasibly forever, given that he is 81 years old).

If Ríos Montt is able to register as a candidate on May 3 for this year’s congressional elections, his possible win will provide him parliamentary immunity from prosecution. However, if the Attorney General takes an initial declaration from Ríos Montt regarding the accusations cited against him in the genocide case, it would disqualify his candidacy.

Accordingly, please e-mail the Attorney General to urge him to move the case along!

If only half of you reading this e-mail were to devote the 10 seconds required to click a box to send him an e-mail, the Attorney General would have to wade through some 150 e-mails from foreigners upset with his stalling on the
genocide case.

LOCAL INTIMIDATIONS IN THE IXIL

Last month, my accompaniment partner received a phone call from an unknown person who creepily asked her how she was doing, and, when asked to identify himself, only told her that he was "a man." She hung up. The Caller ID indicated that another fellow accompanier had called her but we knew that he was in a village where there is no service. He later confirmed that, of course, he had not called her, signifying that someone seems to be showing us that they are watching us and able to infiltrate the phone system.

Twice since December, unidentified men have approached my accompaniment partner and me and, without a word, taken our picture on a digital camera, then quickly walked off. And just a few weeks ago, as fellow accompaniers and I met up in a public park (as arranged by phone), a woman maybe 50 meters away stood quietly filming us for minutes on end until we confronted her.

This is by no means all of the suspicious behavior or incidents we’ve been encountering recently, just a sampling to provide some idea.

PRESIDENT BUSH IN GUATEMALA: HE KILLS ?

Lastly, President Bush came to Guatemala a few weeks ago. While he managed to devote a large chunk of time pitching neo-liberal reforms to Guatemalan officials, and other measures that would benefit the U.S. economy, it appears he never once mentioned the recent, unpunished state-led military campaign which claimed upwards of 200,000 lives.

(Makes one wonder what consequences might have sprung from Bush having expressed even one sentence’s worth of concern over the absence of prosecution for the bloodiest genocide in our hemisphere’s recent history.)

After the Guatemalan government strong-armed Bush’s way into Iximchè - a sacred site to indigenous Kaqchikel people - to entertain him for the day (despite the massive protests of local community members kept behind the Secret Service and police blockades), Mayan priests returned en masse, performing rituals to cleanse the area of the evil spirits they say Bush brought in.

Many expressed pain and anger over Bush - a man whose war in Iraq has resulted in a staggering number of innocent deaths (the British government recently conceded that a study pegging the death toll around 655,000 is credible) - desecrating such a special, holy place to them, and their powerlessness, in the face of state repression, to prevent it.

It might be worth observing that the word for "bush" in Spanish is "mata," which curiously also translates as "he kills" or functions as the command form of the order "to kill."

HOMEWARD BOUND

In 7 weeks I will be back home in Austin. Many thanks again for all the support you all have provided me during my time here – from e-mails to music to homemade cookies to literature to money to art and so on. You have enabled me to feel a sustained sense of loving community despite living tucked away in the western highlands of Guatemala, and I really appreciate that.

Again, if you haven’t already, please send an e-mail to the Attorney General calling on him to let the survivors testify, thereby also preventing Ríos Montt from retaking Congress.

With love and solidarity,

Jordan

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New articles detailing the battle against impunity for genocide in Guatemala:

A Dictator’s Reprise in Guatemala, The Daily Texan (by me)

Guatemala’s Anti-Genocide Activists Under Threat (by Elias Lawless)

The Maya Survivors vs Los Genocidios: interview with Antonio of the AJR (by E.Lawless)

We just received the following press release about the new English translation of Oswaldo Salazar's book "Por el lado Oscuro". Salazar was recently in London to take part in launches of the book that included an event in Canning House and then the Instituto Cervantes. Having read the book - it is certainly a compelling read. And pre-revolutionary Guatemala is certainly an interesting time to look at.

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Guatemala has a new master of narrative in the form of Oswaldo Salazar, whose compelling first novel From the Darkness is one of the few works of Central American literature to explore the region's criminal history.

In From the Darkness - the English translation of the prize-winning Por el lado oscuro - Salazar explores the bitterly unhappy circumstances that can make a woman kill, and the unforgiving quality of male justice.

From the Darkness is a captivating story of a murder and the ensuing investigation that became known as "The Gourd Poisoning" in a traditional society unprepared for a crime that lay outside its powers of reasoning. It begins in the spring of 1939 when a man dies in agony at the San Juan de Dios de Amatitlán Hospital outside Guatemala City. His wife and children are accused of poisoning him, shattering the calm of a land kept in fearful order by the cold and tempestuous dictator General Jorge Ubico (1931-44).

Salazar's work touches a raw Latin nerve, giving the reader a unique insight into lost Central American worlds: that of the Guatemalan peasant woman - ignored, abused and constantly judged by her unforgiving male superiors; that of the small, rural Latin American town, where a handful of strongmen oversee all life; and that of the era of military caudillos, dictators whose quest for order and progress shapes all official culture.

The winner of the prestigious 2003 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, Por el lado oscuro was translated by Gavin O'Toole and will be published by Aflame Books in March 2007.

The Mexican writer Carlos Montemayor said of this book: "Por el lado oscuro has a magnificent narrative quality, exposition and style as well as a forceful central character, delivering the unexpected features of a species of crime novel within a work of historical reconstruction."

Oswaldo Salazar was born in Guatemala City in 1959 and has had a distinguished academic career. He took his first degree in philosophy and literature at Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala then studied as a Fulbright Scholar at Boston College in the United States. He currently teaches at Guatemala's Francisco Marroquín University.

Aflame Books is a small, independent UK publisher committed to publishing in English translation works from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Democracy Now! interviewed veteran anti-sweatshop activist Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee about the report they've recently produced on the conditions at the Legumex factory. It is titled "Harvest of Shame."

According to the NLC though Legumex may have turned the corner. You can see various video testimony of child labour by the NLC on a recent trip to Guatemala.

Democracy Now! also interviewed a Guatemalan migrant worker and featured another report looking at the abuses under the Guestworker programme. Mary Bauer explained the report to Democracy Now!'s Juan Gonzalez. Mary is director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project. She is author of the new report "Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States."

Here's recent news via Casa Alianza UK from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Street Children:


Background

You can read a full report on the meeting on Casa Alianza UK's website. There's also more background information here from the Consortium for Street Children.