During the time period, 1960-1996, the Guatemalan people suffered through the brutality of a genocide committed by the Guatemalan government towards the indigenous people. The Guatemalan army and U.S. wanted to overthrow the communist government and therefore the U.S. gave the army weapons, money and training to make that possible. After having all of the training, the army used the excuse of the Mayan Indians to start a genocide towards the indigenous people of Guatemala. This war was the economic discrimination and racism practiced against the indigenous people. Although the dark-skinned native Guatemalans constitute more than half the nations population, they are landless. While white skinned descendants of European immigrants to Guatemala controlled most of the land. Between the years of 1960 and 1990, 200,000 Guatemalans were killed.
Genocide means the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group. The Guatemalan government committed this crime towards their own people and it all sums down to the fact that they had different shades of skin and that the native people of the land felt they were not being treated fairly or paid fairly for that matter. The whiter people felt that they were superior to the darker people and that is how the genocide began. During a testimony in Spain a Quiche woman, Feliciana, from Guatemala city, states, “There were so many shots they sounded like Christmas fireworks. We never knew why they were killing us.” The people, government, army, committed this genocide against their own people because the indigenous people felt that they were being treated unfairly and expressed that towards the government in a violent way. The government is a system of rule by state, a community is governed. A government is supposed to help, lead and support your country, not commit crimes towards it.
While researching this Genocide I found it interesting that the government would do all of this and then try to apologize by paying the people back with millions of dollars. Many people died and then the government tries to pay for the lost lives. In the article “Payments and Apologies for victims of Guatemala’s Civil WarWashingtonpost.com,” the author describes an interview that states a man, “Lost 16 relatives, including his mother and father, in the army’s scorched earth campaign against leftist Guerillas. Five years after applying for compensation, his family received $5,400 from the state a few months ago and an official apology, you can’t pay for a life,” Velasco said. Money doesn’t grant forgiveness but I am sure that it was appreciated.
The idea of our project is to have two sides being the U.S. and also having an indigenous view point. We chose the U.S. because they supported the genocide by training and supplying the army with money and weapons. The indigenous people are the other side because they were the targets. These two sides are very opposite and that’s why it’s good to have the different points of view on this project. On the indigenous side of the project, there will be two masks representing two of the targets during the genocide. We will have actual testimonies that happened after the genocide and therefore this will all be real life experiences of people who were actually there and lived through a tragic life.
When I think of a project at Animas High School I think of expressing what you’ve learned in a way that YOU want to focus on and are interested in. personally I am not interested on one certain thing but I do love art and I want to work on my writing skills. I found this project to be perfect for both of those. Making masks and having stories with them is a good way to tie those things together.
Sources:
Maria (Mask to the left)
Maria was the first witness during the testimony in Spain. She was born in Choyomche, a rural village in Guatemala. She is the eldest of six siblings, and married at fifteen to Gaspar C., with whom she had ten children.
Looking back on the horrific events that occurred at the time of the Guatemalan genocide, Maria, a genocide victim, articulates the pain and loss she experienced at the merciless hand of the Guatemalan Army. During Maria’s testimony in Spain she tells us about the brutality of the army: “They constantly threatened to kill the male children in our village, saying they should die because they were bad people, “semillas del mal” [seeds of the guerillas]. My family scattered. I had to send away all my sons, because if the military caught them they would be killed.” For two years Maria’s family had to run from village to village being chased by the army. To find food they had to go to the Quiche markets but once patrollers were installed it was impossible to make it there. Just barely surviving, they had to make due with eating berries. During Maria’s “Testimony in Spain,” she states, “I was with two of my children in the mountains and it was terrible. Thinking about it now makes me want to cry. They were both starving. They were nothing but bones.”
After two years of continuous running, Maria’s family returned to their home but still didn’t have any food. She decided to try to pass through various ravines to get to the market in Chichicastenango, the El Quiche department of Guatemala, so that she could buy food for her children. She went to the market six times and every time, soldiers would maltreat her and accuse her of buying food for guerilla parties but every time she just said that it was for her children. On her way home from her sixth visit to the market she was caught in a ravine with one of her children and some soldiers asked her what all of the food was for but she got scared and didn’t answer. The soldiers got mad and threw her food and child on the ground while a man held her to the ground and two of them raped her. When they left she grabbed her daughter, leaving all the food and ran home.
Telling her husband about this, he was not supportive whatsoever. Maria quotes him during her testimony, “He said I was to blame for having left the house instead of staying with the children. He said it was only because we were living in such a difficult situation that he pardoned me; otherwise he would have slit my throat for putting myself in a situation where I could be raped.” Maria found a different way to get to the market by crossing several rivers and that is how she supplied her children with food until the Genocide was over.
Domingo
Domingo was born in Canton Xenub, a rural village in Guatemala: one of seven children, he grew up learning to farm with his father and brothers. The massacres arrived in his village in 1981. For two full years his family ran from community to community, trying to escape the violence. Domingo lost his parents and five of his siblings during this genocide.
Before the genocide, Domingo’s family had a difficult life but it was peaceful. They picked coffee beans on the coast. The first disruption for his family happened during a fiesta, a party, 6 people were kidnapped and found dead later. Domingo states during his testimony in Spain: “We didn’t know why, but that is were it began.” The army returned days later and started doing the mass killings. There were eight left of his family and they fled into the mountains. Domingo’s family went back to collect their things from their home but found everything gone or burned. While his family was living in the mountains the army caught them and killed 80 of the people that were hiding in the same place.
In 1982, Domingo’s family moved to Churexa to escape the army. In May 1982, Domingo’s father and two brothers and him were sowing their field for three days. When they returned to the house they found the rest of the family gone; his mother, three sisters, and his niece. Domingo also states during his testimony: “I learned later from two patrollers that they were killed. We don’t know where they are buried. So there were only four of us left, we stayed alone, fleeing the patrollers.” Domingo and his family were laborers for the United Fruit Company and of indigenous ancestry. Because of this, the patrollers were persistent in ensuring the capturing and death of Domingo’s family.
Domingo’s family and the rest of the people in the area realized there wasn’t anything left to do in the area they were in, and decided to migrate to another place to hide, in Zacualpa. They were there for three days but the patrollers caught up to them to kill them. They killed a total of about sixty people. Domingo tells us during his testimony: “I was together with my papa and two brothers. We were able to run away more quickly because we were men, but the women and small children lagged behind and they were killed. We snuck back after we were sure the soldiers were gone. We saw the dead people. Some of them had no heads, others lay there with their throats cut.”
In April 1983, soldiers and patrollers surrounded and attacked Xolbalchai, where what was left of Domingo’s family had gone to live and hide. Before they arrived, his family had heard that the army was coming. Hearing this, Domingo’s father went to investigate but Domingo stayed working in the field. When Domingo heard shots going off and then saw one hundred patrollers approaching, he hid under a pile of leaves. Domingo recalls this brutality and shares with the jury in Spain: “They killed my father and one of my brothers, then my other brother. So only my sister and I were left from a family of nine.”
Project Reflection
Thinking about this project and realizing how long it took to figure everything out on what we were doing I would say that I am most proud of the stories I wrote on the two survivors, Domingo and Maria. Writing those stories I had to figure out a way to mix my writing into their experiences and tragic lives with it still making sense and being enjoyable and interesting to read. I also enjoyed doing this because it was incredible to find out what other people were going through and how people lived their lives with their families dying and having to run their whole life while towards the end of it I was just being born and still, I didn’t know anything of this genocide until this project. It shows how unaware, as a teen I am of the rest of the world and how much I have to learn throughout my life time.
If I had one more week to work on this project I don’t think I would refine anything on the actual project but I think that I would stop just skipping around in the book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, and just read the whole thing. Reading this entire book I feel would have helped me understand everything a little bit more. It would have helped me have a greater understanding of what I was talking about and assisted me in knowing more inside information on the indigenous people of Guatemala and what they were going through.
Out of all four areas of the rubric, id say we/I was strongest in the Audience Engagement section. I think this because the way our project was set up, especially having the American flag engaged the audience because people were curious as to what the U.S. had to do with this genocide. And that is just the physical appearance of the project, once people were engaged they asked questions and we knew our information pretty well which also ties into audience engagement because it showed we knew what we were talking about and had the information on this genocide down.
In our project, id say the weakest aspect would be the connections aspect of it. The stories and information in the stories weren’t weak but I think that on the masks, instead of putting random symbols on their faces we could have found some that meant something or related to the genocide in some way. I could have researched Mayan symbols and they could have had a specific meaning to their lives or the genocide. Maybe not even symbols that portrayed the symbols but symbols that meant loss, or love, or sorrow, etc. The main improvement would have been to have more meaning on the masks.
The scores I think I received in each of these categories would be; Professionalism- A, Connections- B, Focus-B+, Audience Engagement- A. For this project we worked really hard on understanding everything about the project and worked hard on how to portray it with the masks and using the U.S. flag to represent how the United States was involved. There could have been a few revisions in understanding some things but I still believe I earned a lower A. A 94% seems reasonable or maybe a little lower but hopefully I have evidence of how hard we worked and why I believe I earned this.
