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Title: The Sulphurs of Santiaguito Author: Michael Schmidt Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Guatemala, civil war Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/8345 Notes: Michael Schmidt travelled to Chiapas for the San Andres peace accords with the Zapatistas in early 1996 as a delegate for the now-defunct Durban Anarchist Federation, then headed south to witness the closing phases of the Guatemalan Civil War. Here are his recollections of Guatemala, written in 2003.
Smoky cloud rolled down from shrouded crown of the volcano Santiaguito,
chilling my skin, as yellow-rimmed fissures hissed stinking sulphur
across the rutted track. Far below, on the slopes, Mayan peasants in
fuchsia blouses, looking for all the world like giant frangipanis,
hacked at the mud with hoes. A dented pick-up truck had just dropped
myself and my companion high up in the mountains of Guatemala.
An ethereal peace seeped through the scene — Santiaguito was dormant
after all, its last bout of bad behaviour having been the 1902 leveling
of the nearby mountain city of Quezaltenango — but as so much with this
troubled land, all was not as it seemed.
It was early 1996, at the bitter end of a drawn-out 36-year civil war,
the longest in Latin America’s gore-spattered history, and somewhere
someone was always dying. The newspapers were full of luridly
illustrated ways to die — none of them related to the war. Some guy had
been decapitated and there sat his head, life-size and on the front
page, with bits of grass stuck in his hair and his eyelids glued shut by
a sash of dried blood. Or two lovers who had committed suicide by means
of a shotgun. A full-colour photograph showed the ruins of their skulls
collapsed together, their brains spattering the wall behind. A passenger
jet had just gone down off Cuba and the TV footage showed sailors
wielding boat-hooks, gaffing the bloated corpses like tuna and dumping
them on the deck of a trawler. The fact that two of them were Polish MPs
be damned.
It was easy to die in Guatemala in those days — but just as easy to live
as if you weren’t in the right place at the wrong time. And so I floated
like Neptune in a huge square stone-lined pool, topped up by a piping
hot spring gushing from the black breast of the volcano, fringed with
ferns, at Fuentes Georginas, a rare gem set in the rainforest.
Stone lips drooled cooling jets of water down into lower pools where
flagged pathways wound around tree-ferns into the forest. Whenever I
tired of the heat in my bones, I could slither up a rock like a iguana
and steam into the cool air while sipping a Cuba Libre: rum & coke.
I could have overnighted in one of the whitewashed, tile-roofed cabins
clinging to the volcano-side. But instead we returned that evening to
the hospedaje where we stayed, down a side street in Quezaltenango,
built inward-facing around those cool courtyards that Central Americans
favour — perhaps in reflection of their own aversion to the grim reality
outside.
When we arrived, my companion’s German boyfriend told us that his hike
into the same mountains that day to visit another, more indigenous and
promisingly colourful Mayan settlement had met with disaster.
“We got there and the whole village was just smoking ruins.” he said,
aghast. “There were all these soldiers walking around and we kinda
nervously asked them what happened. They told us ‘There was a sickness
here — so we burnt it out’.”
The notoriously vicious Guatemalan army — nicknamed the “spotted ones”
because of their camouflage — had in the 1980s adopted the practice of
targeting Mayan communities suspected of supporting the guerrilla
insurgency. On occasion, they had been known to round everyone up, women
and children included, corral them in the church, throw in a few
grenades and burn the entire town to the ground. In this twisted
scorched earth policy, every goat, dog and chicken was slaughtered. In
that decade alone, some 200,000 people were killed and 400 Mayan
villages obliterated. In February 1996, this war-by-proxy, fought
against innocents, was still on.
I’d recently discovered that my paternal great-great-grandmother was
Mayan and had been married to the Belgian consul to Guatemala. Which was
why I had decided to venture into the war-zone — and partly why this
tale of butchery hit a raw nerve. I’d naively expected my trip to be an
emotional journey of reconnection. But the bonds I found that still bind
me to Guatemala were not the kind familial ones I had expected. Rather
they were like the vicious twist of barbed wire that binds the wrists of
the condemned.
In one of those rooms with five rows of plastic seats and a video
machine that passed as movie theatres throughout much of Guatemala, I
saw a movie called La Hija del Puma (The Sister of the Puma). It
dramatised just such a massacre and was being clandestinely circulated
by architecture students from the university in Guatemala City.
Barely a month previously, under a weeping sky, I had picked my way
through a thorn thicket on a muddy hillside in Shobashobane,
KwaZulu-Natal to find the maggoty body of a man hacked to death on
Christmas Day for the crime of living in an ANC village surrounded by
IFP villages. There was another woman, face-down, the back of her scalp
already chewed off by mangy dogs. And Kipha Nyawose, the ANC leader, had
had the dubious honour of being disembowelled (to release the spirit)
while at the same time having his penis cut off in insult. The stench of
their corpses still permeated my sinuses and I left the movie theatre in
tears, choking out to the fifty-something American hippie: “I’ve just
come from there! I know what they mean.” Her glazed incomprehension
infuriated me and I stormed out.
But back in Quezaltenango, I walked the other side of the invisible line
that tourists cross in war-zones, purchasing Mayan carpets woven in
lustrous burgundy and oxblood, eating American-style pizzas and watching
a Spanish-dubbed Sigorney Weaver go shit-kicking in Aliens: el Regresso
at the local bug-house.
Known by the Mayans as Xela, the city is a big centre for
Spanish-language studies and the bars, cafes and restaurants were
crowded with students, mostly Americans, apparently oblivious to the
fact that their government had largely funded the genocide.
The conflict had also drawn certain species of war whores: scruffy
journalists trying to look like James Woods in Salvador; funereal
strong-men of indeterminate criminal affiliation in black chinos and
shiny waistcoasts, probably concealing switchblades; weary aid workers
trying to work in besieged Mayan towns; lazy UN observers of a ceasefire
which had not yet happened; chatty Catholic priests on sabbatical; edgy
CIA agents who never spoke at all; and fat pederasts with a nose for the
cocaine trail.
War tourism leaves a taste in my mouth as metallic as old blood. None
but the most mercenary can seriously indulge in such tastes. But having
myself travelled to Guatemala from a tour of Zapatista-held Chiapas (on
a spine-hammering 300km bus trip that cost only six quetzales), perhaps
I wasn’t so innocent either.
Wierd conversations were not in short supply. Like trying to explain to
an earnest young girl from a progressive Dutch Reformed university in
the American Midwest that in South Africa, her “Dutch Deformed” faith
lay at the root of the calvary of apartheid. So, how does one live as a
foreigner in the midst of such unrelenting, yet undeclared pain?
I distracted myself by paying a visit to one of the marimba schools for
which the city was famous. And I went to the creepy and dusty “natural”
history museum which seemed to boast more than its fair share of freaks:
six-legged goats and such.
In the earthquake-wrecked old capital of Antigua Guatemala, another bus
journey eastwards down the spine of the mountains, I watched a Japanese
tourist and a Mayan flute-seller perform an impromptu flautist’s duel in
the main square. There was a chill in the air and the shadows were
lengthening from the ruined cornices of Conquistador-era churchs, but
the square was full of off-duty civil servants, Mayans — like a mother
and her tiny girl-child dressed in matching cobalt traditional wraps —
who sold crafts to coach-loads of day-trippers up from Guatemala City.
The lanky Japanese youth selected a pan pipe from those on offer and
began to play. The Mayan joined in with gusto, the two sounding for all
the world like a Panic version of that song about the contest between
the devil and the fiddler. The jaunty notes drifted over the gloomy
square, providing an otherworldly sound-track to the shadowed landscape.
While I ate a hearty breakfast of chili con carne in a cozy family-run
restaurant, looking out through the wrought-iron railings and
bougainvillea at the cobbled streets, a milkman allegedly tried to
assassinate new President Alvaro Arzu by ramming him with a truck while
he was out horse-riding. The milkman may have only been drunk, but was
shot dead anyway.
Just before I arrived, two British girls had been executed at a
roadside. Neither robbed nor raped. Just shot in the head and left for
the political vultures to swap blame for the atrocity.
This was after all the country where their version of Archbishop Tutu
was later bludgeoned to death with concrete blocks in his own driveway.
But as this maelstrom happened around me, I was sitting at the Sunset
Bar on the beach at Panajachel, a tiny town, several hours by bus to the
south-south-east of Xela, a Guatemalan version of Goa that was
nick-named Gringotenango because of its population of faded gringo
drop-outs.
Built on a spit of alluvial land stretching into Lake Atitlan, a cold
and very deep volcanic caldera which sported millionaires’ mansions on
one shore and the palm-frond huts of dugout-paddling fishermen on the
other.
The blonde barmaid turned out to be a cousin of Icelandic elven siren
Björk and played me some of the latter’s rare and unreleased blues cuts,
then, knowing I was African treated me to Juluka’s Scatterlings of
Africa. As I nursed my cold Gallo beer alone with her at the bar, I
reflected that I was in some ways also a scatterling of Central America,
even though trawling through phone-books had failed to turn up any trace
of my diluted bloodline. But I had found another blood-tie: that which
unites nations which have suffered under the shadow of death-squads;
that which unites those who have walked through the slaughterhouses of
their handiwork. Now, in 2003, I’ve just read that General Rios Montt,
the CIA-backed “Pinochet of Guatemala”, whose regime spearheaded the
genocide in the 1980s, has just had his legal restriction on making a
play for the Guatemalan presidency revoked.
An earthquake takes place in my heart and the stench of death is in my
nostrils once again. Suddenly I’m back on the sulphurous slopes of
Santiaguito, knowing this time that unheard and unseen, beyond the
mists, people are dying.