NewsTaco

By Mary Jo McConahay, New America Media

GUATEMALA CITY – When the judge called his name, 70-year-old Tiburcio Utuy, wearing a yellow nylon jacket and looking determined, entered through tall wooden doors to face former Guatemala strongman Gen. José Efraín Rios Montt, charged with genocide. On a global scale the process is historic, the first time a former head of state stands trial for the flagrant crime in the national courts where events took place, not an international tribunal. On the scale of the life of Tiburcio Utuy, Maya corn farmer, the day was a reckoning so long in coming he talked non-stop for an hour.

“Who says there was no genocide?” asked Utuy of the tribunal. He was referring to the often cited assessment of the Rios Montt years by Pres. Otto Perez, who served as a base commander at the time in the mountainous area known as the Ixil Triangle, home to indigenous Maya where prosecutors say the genocide took place. Still hours by road from the capital, the region was considered home of an “internal enemy” according to one military planning paper, Maya supporting leftist guerrillas.

“The shoes, the belts were piled two meters high and wide, you could see the traces of people who had been killed there,” Utuy said, describing a room alongside the Catholic church in the town of Sacapulas, appropriated by soldiers for a torture chamber and body dump, where Utuy said he was held in 1982. “They tied me up and left me sitting in blood.”

After four weeks of testimony, on April 18 a judge in a separate court granted the request of the defense to annul the trial in a judgement based on a technicality. An appeal is expected. “You are mocking the witnesses,” said a prosecution attorney in a small, crowded meeting room amid a crush of press and the under the eyes of silent Maya, some elderly.

“The victims are the accused,” said the defense.

The decision muddies the immediate prosecution of the genocide crime, but there is no taking back the information that has flooded the country.  A dozen forensic anthropologists have reported on exhumations indicating violent deaths of children, mass beheadings. A geographer testified to the unraveling of Maya Ixil culture among thousands who fled from the army into wildlands, who ate grass and watched their elderly starve, or straggled into refugee camps in Mexico. Expert witnesses testified on military plans, the history of racism in Guatemala, the statistical analysis used to arrive at numbers of dead.

It has been the testimony of witnesses like Tiburcio Utuy, however, that has reverberated through every other hour of the trial. Prosecutors must prove Rios intended to eliminate people because of their membership in a particular group, Ixil Maya, in order to bring in a guilty verdict. However, refrain of suffering and brutality created by more than a hundred voices is likely to resound in the public memory no matter what the decision on the genocide charge against the general and his co-defendant, intelligence chief Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

“They caught up to the woman and they struck her in the head with a machete and dragged her like a dog,” said Utuy of a scene he said he saw while hiding from soldiers. Experts have testified that racism toward the majority indigenous was key to slaughter in Maya villages, which occurred in the context of counterinsurgency against leftist rebels relatively small in number. Many recalled experience in terms referring to animals. “”Just as chicks run from hawks, that’s what they did to us. Why? If we are human beings?” said witness Maria Cedillo.

Ten women who testified to sexual violence were allowed to drape their heads, partially obscuring their identity. They used traditional woven stoles to hide faces, recalling biblical images of lepers.
Some two hundred thousand persons died in Guatemala’s thirty-six years of conflict that ended in 1996, mostly civilians at government hands according to a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission. The United States government supported Rios Montt with military aid and the personal approbation of Pres. Ronald Reagan, who publicly admired Rios’ declared anti-Communism and visited Guatemala City to declare the general was getting “a bum rap.”

“I tell you judges, I’m not lying,” Utuy said. “What guilt did the baby have still in the womb of the mother?” Witnesses testified that soldiers attacked pregnant women. “I saw this,” Utuy said. Soldiers regularly burned houses, an apparent attempt to erase standing patterns of settlement. When a clay house in his village resisted destruction by fire, Utuy said, soldiers killed those inside, piling clothes, bags and blankets on the dead and set the heap alight.

At one moment in the generally somber proceedings, Utuy surprised onlookers by rising to his feet. ‘I’m not lying, look, here are my scars,” he said, lifting his shirt and lowering his belt.

Judges, two women and a man, stared down from the dias. Soldiers had tied Utuy’s feet and head together to expose his stomach, he said, during torture.

“’Ay, what pain!’ I said. What suffering I felt at that moment when my intestines fell to the floor,” he said. He replaced them with his hands, he said.

Some witnesses have been unable to relate their experience without faltering voices, others respond briefly. Tiburcio Utuy was not exuberant, but he would not let his day in court slip by with less than fulsome expression.

“What I experienced, the suffering I felt, what the military did to me, I am telling this to the whole world,” he said.

This article was first published in New America Media.

Mary Jo McConahay has reported from Central America for numerous publications. She is the author of “Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest.”

[Photo courtesy New America Media]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

The good thing about being ten days into the month of May is that we’re those many days away from April. Not that I have a particular dislike for the fourth month of the year (it’s said, after all, that its showers bring May flowers and all that). But April is also a month of horrific coincidences. Adolfo Guzman-Lopez brings it to our attention:

…the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the Cambodian genocide all had their beginnings in one way or another in the month of April.

A proposal by a City of Long Beach, California, Councilman would declare the month of April as ”Genocide Awareness Month.” Guzman-Lopez tells us, in his Movie Miento blog in KCET:

There are a lot of Jews, Armenians, and Cambodian who either lived through these genocides or whose ancestors died in the various killing fields. How do the youth of these communities learn about the genocide? I produced three radio stories trying to answer the question.

By Richard G. Santos

For the first half century after the first voyage of Cristobal Colón (aka Christopher Columbus), the Spanish Church and State deliberated the nature of the Native Americans. The Native Americans did not speak Spanish, Latin, Chinese, Arabic or Hebrew. They were not Catholic, Moslem or Jewish. Moreover, they were not mentioned in the Bible. So, were the Native Americans human? Did they have a soul? Could they go to heaven? Were they created by the same Creator? These were important questions from 1492 to 1540 as they would be today if earthlings were to encounter intelligent life from a different planet.

As the debates in Spain and the Vatican raged concerning the nature and “humanness” of the Native Americans, the European settlers of the Caribbean Islands took their own course. Due to the absence of European women, the Spanish, Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish settlers unofficially resolved the issue by forming common-law unions with the Native Americans.

As an example Hernán Cortés fathered Catalina Pizzarro with a Carib woman while in Cuba. Later in New Spain, he fathered Martín Cortés with la Malinche and Leonor Cortés with a daughter of Moctezuma and finally Luis Cortés with Antonia de Hermosillo. Cortés recognized each and every single child as his legitimate children. Incidentally, Leonor Cortés (granddaughter of Moctezuma) married Juan Tolosa. Their daughter Isabel Tolosa (de Cortés y Moctezuma) married Juan Pérez de Onate, founder of the city of San Luis Potosí and New Mexico colonizer.

However, between 1492 and 1540, the children of such common law unions of a Spanish citizen and a Native Americans created a serious problem. By law, since the Native American had not yet been declared a human being, the mestizo children could not inherit their father’s estates. The Native Americans were finally declared human with all rights of a Spanish citizen and Las Nuevas Leyes of the 1540’s so informed all citizens of the Empire. The loophole in the law was that any Native American who resisted or rebelled against the Spanish Church and State could be enslaved. Consequently, many North American frontiersmen were enslaving Native Americans declared “hostile” or “rebellious”.

The loophole was closed in 1588 when the King of Spain issued a Royal Cédula forbidding the enslavement of Native Americans under any pretext. As a footnote, Hernan Cortés (New Spain), Nuno Beltran de Guzmán (present Pacific Northwestern Mexico), Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (U.S. Southwest), Juan Pérez de Onate (New Mexico) and Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva (Nuevo León) were all indicted and tried for “maltreatment of the Indians” and removed from their respective governorships.

Many tribes and clans of various Native American Nations continued to resist the Spanish advancement onto their respective geographic areas. Hence political and trading treaties paved the way for the Evangelization program initiated in the 1680s with the creation of the colegios de propaganda fide (Colleges for the Propagation of the Faith). In areas where the Native Americans lived in communities, the missionaries erected a church, created a city council and declared it a pueblo (township). Where the Native Americans were nomadic like in South and Central Texas, the missionaries founded reducciones (communities where the Indians were “reduced” from a nomadic existence to Church governed and protected townships). In both pueblos and reducciones, a Native American “governor” was elected by the Native Americans themselves. As a footnote, the last Indian Governor of Mission San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio, Texas was Mariano Tejeda in 1800. He was the father of Francisco, father of Mariano, father of Francisco, father of Mariano and he was the father of the late U.S. Congressman Frank Tejeda. I know this because in the early 1980s I did the Tejeda family tree at the request of then Bexar County Commissioner Robert Tejeda. I thus met, became and have remained a close friend of the Tejeda family.

The bilingual, Spanish monocultural evangelization program plus the October 12, 1837 Resolution of the Republic of Texas (mentioned in last week’s article) were so successful that today there are no Indian reservations for any native Texas Indian Nation. The three reservations that do exist are for cultures that migrated to Texas! This is contrary to what is taught or at best omitted in the U. S. History and Texas textbooks.

Compare the Spanish policy toward the Native American with the U. S. Government to which “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” The U. S. genocide attitude was recorded by Major William Emory in his “Report on the United Statesand Mexican Boundary Survey: published in two volumes by the U. S. House of Representatives (34th Congress, 1st session) in 1857. Emory was the head of the U. S. Corps of Engineers studying, surveying and mapping the lower Rio Grande from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico to the Pecos River north of present Del Rio, Texas. He wrote “after studying the character and habits of that class of Indians called wild Indians, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that civilization must halt when in view of the Indian camp, or the Indian must be exterminated.”

Unfortunately, the U. S. Government took his advice and that led to the Indian Wars in the U. S. Southwest after the U. S. Civil War. We stress it was the U. S. Government and not the Spanish colonial or Mexican governments who mounted genocide, ethic-cleansing programs against the Native Americans.

So in reply to the university professor who asked who was the best colonist – the British, Spaniards or Americans – you, the reader answer the question. On one hand you have the Native Americans who preserved some of their culture in the reservations. On the other hand you have the Spanish-Mexican assimilated Native Americans with no idea that they are of Native American ancestry. You have the basic facts, so you judge the actions of our ancestors.

Richard G. Santos is an international research historian and retired university professor who lives in Pearsall, Texas.

[Photo By jdeeringdavis]