Acknowledgment of past wrongs in Guatemala and payments to victims of state violence is helping to heal wounds, writes ANNE-MARIE O'CONNORin Guatemala City
WHEN ARMY helicopters landed in his village in August 1982, Francisco Velasco was away in the cornfields with the men. Then they heard the screams. Velasco rushed back home and found his wife and two baby daughters dead.
Velasco lost 16 relatives, including his mother and father, in the army’s scorched-earth campaign against left-wing guerrillas. Five years after applying for compensation, his family received $5,400 (€4,300) from the state a few months ago and an official apology.
“You can’t pay for a life,” Velasco said. “But it is a gesture of support.”
Since President Álvaro Colom took office in January 2008, Guatemala has stepped up payments to survivors of the estimated 200,000 people who died in the 36-year civil war. The programme, which started in 2003, had compensated 3,000 survivors by 2007, according to its directors.
But under Colom, whose family suffered a high-profile death during the war, the state has handed out 10,477 cheques – many relating to claims ignored for years, according to Cesar Davila, president of the National Compensation Programme.
Survivors also receive a letter from Colom asking for forgiveness for the losses they suffered as a result of abuses committed by the state during the war, which ended in 1996.
“The fact that the president signs it is very important,” said Orlando Blanco, Guatemala’s secretary of peace. “It is an official document that says: ‘Here is the truth: My son was not a subversive or a delinquent. It was the state that killed him.”
Many of the compensated survivors are Mayan. A truth commission report said Mayans were victims of genocide by the army, which feared that their poverty and marginalisation would make them potential allies of the rebels. Seventy per cent of the recipients are women who lost husbands, parents and children, Blanco said. Some were raped, a violation that recently became grounds for reparation, he said.
Officials say 64,000 requests are pending. The Colom government is trying to help the survivors most in need of the payments, which range from $1,500 to $2,500. The programme has built more than 800 houses for war victims and plans thousands more.
“There are so many victims, there is not enough money for everyone,” Blanco said. “What we look for is to benefit someone who is older and more vulnerable.”
The stories of the past still haunt Guatemala. Lucia Quila (54) survived one of the best-documented massacres. Armed men led her husband out of a cornfield in the village of Xecoxol in 1982. He never returned.
Then soldiers came looking for left-wing guerrillas. They found civilians: Quila’s sister, whom they gang-raped and shot; her elderly father, who was beaten so badly that his back was broken. Their bodies were dumped in the church latrine in a mass grave of 16 villagers.
“They were going to kill my little sister. She was 10,” Quila said, wiping away tears with her skirt. “She started to cry. Another said, ‘She’s just a girl. Leave her’.”
A few years ago, Quila went to a ceremony at the presidential palace to pick up her compensation cheque. She cried when officials asked for forgiveness.
“It meant a lot to hear that, yes, the state accepted responsibility,” she said. “It wasn’t just the money. No money can pay for my lost husband and the chaos we suffered. I won’t forget that until I die. But at that moment, the government finally acknowledged the damage done to us.”
In a country where many subsist on less than $2 a day, the money helped Quila remake her life in the capital, where she is a co-ordinator of a support group for war victims.
“Most people can’t even imagine the kind of poverty these people live in,” says Barbara Bocek, the Guatemala country expert for Amnesty International USA.
“Of course you can’t compensate people for their village being wiped out. There’s never going to be adequate monetary or personal human recognition for any of those deaths,” she said. But “any amount of actual cash to folks in those circumstances is gigantic”.
Colom recently apologised to a group of Mayan villagers in person.
He had just attended an official ceremony for his own uncle, one-time mayor Manuel Colom Argueta, who was assassinated in 1979 during military rule.
“The money will not heal their wounds,” he said. “But the fact that the president asks their pardon has an impact, in some cases, greater than the money.” Colom said he began to realise the depth of grief when he attended the unearthing of a mass grave after the war.
“People would spot the favourite toy of a child and find the body,” he said. “It gave them such comfort to find their loved ones and give them a dignified burial.” One grave contained the remains of two soldiers who villagers said refused to participate in a massacre, the president said.
Human rights groups say a thorough airing of the past is essential to healing a brutalised society in which war has ended, but criminal violence is still endemic.
“Remembrance of the victims is a fundamental aspect of this historical memory, and permits the recovery of the values of, and the validity of the struggle for, human dignity,” the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification said in a 1998 report. – (LA Times-Washington Post service)