war and peace

My poor Spanish teacher, Marta Lydia, kept giving me more paper towels as I cried during class yesterday. I have heard many personal stories about the civil war which raged here for most of the last half century. I have known several Mayans whose entire families and villages were brutally murdered by the military or guerrillas. But I was vividly reminded yesterday of both the reality and horrors of the war here and of its devastating impact on this country today. We watched "Las Cruzes," a film which told the story of one indigenous village and its struggle to survive an impending attack of the military. A few people escaped and survived the onslaught, but most were defenselessly, and brutally killed without cause: the elderly, children, men, and women alike. There was an interesting article in the NYT this past Sunday 9/30, "The Art of Political Murder" about a book written about Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera. A quote: "Gerardi was murdered as he returned to his Guatemala City residence on April 26, 1998. Two days earlier he had released a four-volume report on the civil war that formally ended in 1996, after it had claimed some 200,000 lives over four decades. The indigenous Mayan population, which makes up about 40 percent of the people in Guatemala and a majority of which is poor, suffered most: villages were erased, while fear fed docility. The bishop’s commission nonetheless extracted chilling firsthand accounts of torture and massacres conducted by an army intent on ridding the country of left-wing guerrillas." The "peace treaty" was signed in 1996, but war still consumes this country. My teacher told me that many of the gangs that now threaten the streets of the capital, were formed by young soldiers and guerrillas who had no where to work after the war, or by their children who were orphaned during the war. Travis joked one day that he wouldn't know what to do when he went to withdraw money in the States without a youth with a big gun standing by for protection! But it's true... guns are common place here and oddly serve as a symbol of safety or war, security or danger... depending on who's carrying it. This friendly security man outside my bank gladly posed for a photo.