Lost in the demagoguery about the border is any mention of Washington’s crucial role in creating it. One of my first foreign reporting trips 40 years ago uncovered what was then secret American support of a genocide in Guatemala. That country has in the midst of war that pitted the military dictatorship against a leftist incongruency.
In the spring of 1982 photographer Ian Dryden traveled deep into Mexico’s Lacandón rain forest to confirm rumors that Mayan people from northern Guatemala were fleeing savage counterinsurgency massacres. They reportedly found refuge just across the border in Chiapas, Mexico.
Here is an excerpt from my book. It recounts part of the story I wrote for the San Diego Union.
Puerto Rico, Mexico—Felipe Rodríguez squatted in the shade of a ceiba tree, idly poking at an anthill. Only hours before, he told a visitor, he had returned from his native village, Santa María Tzeja, a two-hour walk along jungle trails in Guatemala. “
I had been afraid to go back there,” the tiny, wiry Rodríguez said in a monotone voice. “But I needed to bury my family, so I made myself strong.”
Inexorably, the talk focused on his family’s recent murders. It is the same with many of the hundreds of Guatemalan war refugees in this jungle settlement.
Even a casual conversation with the refugees, Mayans from the northern departments of Quiché and Huehuetenango, elicits talk of a horrifying, unexpected death at the hands of Guatemalan troops. Refugees from places near Mexico, such as La Unión, Santo Tomás, Pueblo Nuevo, Ixtauhacan, Los Ángeles, Mayarán, and Kaibil, tell of a military campaign started last year and continuing today aimed at wiping them out.
“I guess the government doesn’t want any more Indian race,” said one refugee.
Rodríguez carefully pulled a color photo from a nylon bag. In the photo, he stands smiling, wearing an orange T-shirt, his arms folded across his chest. Children of all ages—his children—and his wife crowd around him.
When the soldiers came to Santa María two months ago, Rodríguez and most of his children were away working on a farm. But the soldiers found his wife and several of the children.
“My wife here, they shot her in the back twice when she tried to run away,” he said, pointing to a plump, dark woman. Two of his daughters in the photo wear green dresses, one seven and the other five.
“The little one,” he said, pointing to the more petite girl, “they shot her right here,” said Rodríguez, his finger resting just below his left eye. “All of this,” he continued, his right palm cupping the back of his skull, “got blown away. My other little one, they beheaded her.”
Rodríguez and two other men offered to guide us to one of the attacked villages. They assured us we would find human remains, proof of the army’s savagery. Ian and I agreed that venturing into Guatemala with killer soldiers on the loose was far too risky. We declined the offer.
The American and Guatemalan governments deemed the story untrue. Any massacres were committed by the rebels, they insisted. No other news organization picked up my story. But history would prove it was accurate and just a small part of the genocidal campaign that Washington bankrolled with millions of dollars. Years of savage violence set the stage for the extreme insecurity in Guatemala that fuels the exodus to the border.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 