FROM REPRESSION TO RESISTANCE

If they were not so horribly real, so rich in detail, nor so similar in their content, the thousands of stories told by Guatemala's Mayans of the atrocities they suffered at the hands of the army in the late 1970s and early 1980s could seem exaggerated.

"The soldiers killed my grandmother, they cut her up like a sheep, just like that. Then they sprayed the children with machine-gun fire. After that they dug a big hole in the ground, threw the bodies in and set fire to them", recounts 35-year-old Mercedes Uty.

"My aunt was pregnant when she was killed. The soldiers cut her womb open and took out the foetus. My brother also disappeared at around the same time. We never found out what happened to him," says community leader, Diego Cobo.

Fifty-eight-year-old Jacinto Raimundo Maton could do nothing to prevent the army taking away his teenage son. "They tied him up like a dog and dragged him along behind them until he was dead." Jacinto reaction was a mixture of fear and rage. But he admits, "what were we going to do, we had nothing with which to defend ourselves, while the soldiers came with their guns and their war planes and all their military equipment."

Diego Cobo remembers how the army first came into his home town of Nebaj in 1980, threatening the local people not to get involved in the incipient armed guerrilla groups that were beginning to take shape in the area. When the soldiers next came back, it was to begin selective kidnappings, he says. Bodies began appearing on the outskirts of the town. As the guerrilla activities increased, the army took a heavier hand. By late 1982, they were burning houses, crops, domestic animals, razing whole villages and killing their inhabitants, heedless of whether or not they were involved or sympathised with the guerrillas.
Finally, after these experiences, Mercedes, Jacinto and Diego ended up us internally displaced in the CPR and managed to survive.

This was the beginning of the forced migration of up to 15,000 Mayan peasants. Under constant harassment from the army and civil defence patrols, they moved from place to place, each time going further into the dense jungles and mountains in search of a place to hide. Food was desperately short and many died on the long trek towards safer regions away from the main towns, now occupied by the military. "We were always on the run. The soldiers would come, on foot, with the planes," recalls 55-year-old Feliciana Raimundo Cob. "I took off with one of our children, my husband had the others. But with only fruit to eat he got sick and died," she says sadly. "The army burnt everything they found. When we managed to plant some corn, they found it and destroyed it. We spent nights sleeping in the open rain."

"We hid in the mountains, eating roots and fruit, hiding from the bombardments and the soldiers," says Nazaria Tum Sanic, a slightly-built Quiche woman. When the army came close to discovering them, some of the mothers would forcibly breast-feed their babies so as to stop them crying out and alerting the soldiers to their presence, she recounts. "It was extremely hard. There was no food, no medicine, not even a change of clothing. And we couldn't go down into the villages to buy anything. We were totally entrapped by the army."
As more and more scared peasants gathered in three main areas around the north of Quiché they began organising themselves, first of foremost for survival in such harsh conditions. Nazaria says that a simple warning system was established to alert people of the presence of the army. That was a first and vital task, she says. Feeding an increasingly large population also meant organising groups to sow grains and roots, or collect fruit. "Everyone had to work together, there was no time doing things individually, it had to be a collective effort," says Nazaria. They baptised themselves the Comunidades de Población en Resistencia, or Communities of People in Resistance, CPRs. "Why 'resistance', because there we were, resisting the bombs, resisting hunger, resisting every eventuality under the mountains," she says proudly.