IN THE lush highlands of southwestern Guatemala, where coffee plantations roast in the shadows of Tajumulco Volcano, Central America’s highest peak, the afternoon silence is occasionally broken by the creak of a rocking chair, a hummingbird’s whirr, or the sleepy whimper of the resident dog. Whispering students conjugate Spanish verbs to the rhythm of their swaying hammocks. Others attend classes with local teachers in palm-thatched, windowless huts.
Such an idyllic pastoral scene, where the only apparent danger is posed by pesky mosquitoes that work silently and leave bites that itch for months, belies the campaign of slaughter, rape and village burnings – carried out in these very mountains – that led to the setting up of this small, non-profit Spanish-language school outside the town of Colomba, and its sister establishment some 30km away in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second city. “We started up so that we could tell the world about what happened to the communities near our schools and across Guatemala – the torture, the rape, the genocide of a people,” says Carlos Sanchez, who founded the Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco de Español in 1988.
Unlike commercial language schools in Central America, the focus here is on teaching not only the intricacies of Spanish grammar, but also the political and cultural history of Guatemala.
“Government after government has been allowed to act with impunity, and with no repercussions. This school and the projects we run are our way of remembering and honouring René and Danilo.”
René Leiva Cayax (29) and Danilo Alvarado (32), who were close friends of Sanchez’s, were kidnapped within days of each other in October 1987, then tortured and murdered. Cayax, an agronomy student at the University of Quetzaltenango, and Alvarado, a father of two and an agronomical engineer associated with the university, had both campaigned alongside other staff and students for human rights and democracy for Guatemala, a country then wracked by civil war.
The conflict, in which state forces were pitted against leftist rebels, has been called the dirtiest of Latin America’s dirty wars. Between 1960 and 1996, under various administrations, more than 200,000 people – the vast majority of them Mayans – were murdered or “disappeared”, and up to one million people were displaced. A UN-sponsored commission found at least 90 per cent of the killings were carried out by the state’s military forces or by paramilitary death squads. Mayan villages where rebels were suspected of hiding out were looted and burned and their inhabitants raped and slaughtered as part of the state’s counter-insurgency strategy, designed in accordance with the pronouncement of military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who held power from 1982-83: “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” It was a strategy that culminated in acts of genocide, the UN commission concluded.
The heavy-handed military tactics persisted under President Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, and it was under his regime that Cayax and Alvarado were abducted. “We knew it was because they had taken part in anti-government demonstrations, calling for an end to the oppression of the ordinary Guatemalan people,” says Sanchez. “It could have been any one of us.” The pair’s friends were certain the police were behind the kidnappings. Students and teachers demonstrated for their release, to no avail.
“They found Danilo’s body on the highway,” says Sanchez. “Just dumped there.” Cayax’s body was found the same day on a different stretch of road. They had suffered gruesome deaths, with Alvarado’s corpse showing eight stab wounds to the thorax, while Cayax had been strangled, his stomach cut open and organs exposed, and his left arm broken. His back had injuries from an electric saw.
The Quetzaltenango police chief and five policemen were accused of involvement in the murders and, in the first such case in Guatemalan history, members of the security forces were tried for human rights violations. They were convicted and each sentenced to 30 years. However, on appeal, the convictions were overturned and the six released.
The story is not unusual in Guatemala, say Sanchez and teachers at the school – some of whom were involved in the guerrilla movement – but rather is representative of a country where democracy and the rule of law have never been allowed to function properly. Even today, as Guatemalans prepare to vote in presidential and legislative elections tomorrow, most of the commitments made in peace accords signed in 1996 remain unfulfilled. These included goals to promote human rights, set up a properly functioning judicial system, establish a truth commission, advance the rights of indigenous peoples, address the problem of the displaced and ensure the integration of guerrilla forces into society. However, the accords heralded no new era of democracy and rule of law.
Amnesty was granted for even the worst crimes. The state’s security apparatus of intelligence units, death squads, police and army counter-insurgency forces mutated into criminal organisations. In 1998 the Guatemalan archdiocese human rights office, headed by Bishop Juan Gerardi, released a report documenting hundreds of crimes against humanity and naming some perpetrators. Two days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death, a murder eventually revealed to be part of a conspiracy involving military officers.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions issued two reports on Guatemala, in 2007 and 2009. He called the country “a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it”. Human Rights Watch cites official figures showing that as of 2009 there was 99.75 per cent impunity for violent crime. In 2007, a joint study by the UN and the World Bank ranked Guatemala the third most murderous country. Between 2000 and 2009 the number of killings rose steadily, ultimately reaching 6,400. The murder rate was nearly four times higher than Mexico’s. In 2009 fewer civilians were reported killed in Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala.
Amnesty International has appealed to all presidential candidates to make human rights a priority. The rights body has called for the new leader and government to improve inquiries into past abuses, tackle the alarming rates of violent crime and killings of women, provide long-term solutions to land conflicts and protect the work of human rights activists.
Not surprisingly, many Guatemalans, including Sanchez, place no faith in politicians. Instead, he says, he and his colleagues make their own practical contribution to society by providing work for families in indigenous communities, campaigning with them for the reappropriation of land snatched during the war, and using profits from the school to fund rural workers’ initiatives, women’s co-operatives, labour unions and environmental projects. The main school in Quetzaltenango (known as Xela) employs local families to host students, and the school has provided a primary school teacher for the community surrounding the mountain school. The Proyecto also set up a community centre next door to the school in Xela, where students of Spanish are encouraged to volunteer in offering local children free lessons in English and art.
The portraits of Cayax, Alvarado and Gerardi hang prominently in the school at Xela, and the anniversaries of their deaths are marked every year. “Our students who are old enough to have lived during our war, even those from the US, not far away, tell us they knew nothing about it at the time. But their government knew,” says Sanchez. “Guatemala was cut off from the world. People need to know what happened here. We must never forget.”
For more information on the school, see hermandad.com