Chris Shorne

So Many Rivers: Accompanying Witnesses in Guatemala’s Genocide Trial

The bus crosses over another river and my mind wanders. The other passengers don’t push for small talk. I’ve bussed hundreds of hours in these Guatemalan highlands and no one—save one drunk man—has proffered opinions, offered personal details, or asked me anything more private than where I’m from and why I’m visiting. My head rests against the window, my gaze drifts. To our right, the river runs on; we follow alongside in silence. Ten hours after leaving Guatemala City (and ten months after leaving my home in the U.S.), we pass a dam and I know we’re close.

An hour later, I’m scrabbling up a path of rolling stone slabs, hopping from one to the next. Coffee beans dry in single layers atop corrugated metal roofs; dogs bark their welcomes and their warnings. I arrive at the house of Emanuel (not his real name), one of the people I’ve been accompanying as an international human rights observer. His house, like most in the area, is relatively new; the army burned down his home in 1982 during one of the massacres. A small stream runs alongside his new house. It flows toward the river I saw on the drive in.

Our power as accompaniers lies not only in being active citizens of a global superpower, but also in being physical witnesses.

As international accompaniers, we observe, document, and share information about abuses to people’s human rights. With this information, people in our home countries can pressure those who have the power to lessen these abuses. In the 1970’s, for example, observers documented human rights abuses in Guatemala; for this reason, U.S. citizens petitioned the government to stop military aid. They succeeded—at least partially: in 1978 the Carter administration suspended direct military aid to Guatemala. In the 1980’s, the ban was lifted and military aid increased.

Our power as accompaniers lies not only in being active citizens of a global superpower, but also in being physical witnesses. We go to the land where massacres happened, visit survivors in their homes.

“Buenas tardes,” I call, standing at the edge of Emanuel’s property. Next to the large outdoor sink stands a woman with her head tipped forward; her hair, soapy and wet, cascades down, covering her face and nearly touching the dirt where chickens and ducks scratch and scramble. Emanuel steps out of a dark doorway.

“Pase, adelante,” he says, in his second language. Ixil is the name for this area in the highlands, the name of the indigenous people who live here, and the name of their language. Those who have learned Spanish, such as Emanuel, use it only when necessary. Unlike much of the Spanish I hear in the city, Emanuel’s Spanish is slow enough for me to understand. With his permission to go ahead, I step onto his property and shake his hand. He wears jeans stitched at the knee and a light blue t-shirt. I recognize the shirt; it’s from the Association for Justice and Reconciliation—the organization of genocide survivors that we accompany and of which he is a member.

In 2013, Emanuel and the others who comprise the Association for Justice and Reconciliation brought to trial former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his former head of military intelligence, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Montt was convicted and Sánchez was acquitted. The sentence was disputed on what amounts to technicalities and, ten days later, effectively annulled. Four years later, in the fall of 2017, while I was accompanying, the trial began again. This time, the men are being tried separately, Ríos Montt in the mornings, behind closed doors and Rodríguez Sánchez in the afternoons, with doors open to the public. [1]

Emanuel, along with nearly 100 other witnesses, will take a bus anywhere from six to twelve hours from a village in the mountain highlands to a courthouse in the capital city to tell, once more, what they have seen.

Standing just inside his property line, I ask Emanuel if I can use his restroom. I follow behind him and notice his shirt is worn thin and ripped from—I suppose—the firewood he cuts and carries on his back each week. We walk past the woman washing her hair (I still can’t see her face), into a dark room, out through another door, and into the sun. He points to a curtain of black plastic and says: “El baño.”

I walk over, pull the plastic aside, and see two beams stretched across the stream. A slab of concrete straddles the beams. In the center of the slab is a hole and over that hole, a concrete toilet. I’d heard about this bathroom from previous volunteers. It seems to fascinate those of us whose waste is flushed down porcelain bowls into unlit tunnels we rarely consider. I step in and sit down, holding the plastic curtain’s edge so it doesn’t blow open. I wonder if I can see my pee hit the stream that washes over the smooth rocks below. I lean forward. I can.

“We never found her,” Emanuel says, speaking suddenly of his wife, his first wife. We are sitting in his kitchen. I am always sitting in someone’s kitchen. The chickens pass from the packed dirt outside to the packed dirt inside, scuffing the earth in disjointed circles. Emanuel’s second wife is making us lunch, her hands in a bowl of tortilla dough. She tosses bits to the chickens. A cat prowls up to her feet, sits, looks up, and mewls at her. She drops down a ball of dough.

I’ve tried making tortillas; they either stick to or fall through my hands. I watch the woman pinch off a piece of dough, roll it, slap it back and forth in her palms, then turn it clockwise, tapping its edge with her finger until, seconds later, a perfectly round tortilla smokes on the wood-stove. In the space between the top of the wall and the roof, a space just large enough for a child to crawl through, the smoke from the fire escapes.

It gave me what these college friends would call “social capital,” a kind of wealth, a kind of power that comes from knowing about something, even superficially.

When I first learned about this thing called international human rights accompaniers, I’d had only a dim idea of the Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996). Friends majoring in Latin American Studies talked about neo-liberalism and extractive industries; Israeli arms deals and U.S. foreign policy; the massacres, the money. It was easy enough to believe; their words, vague and far away, demanded almost nothing of me.

In the 1980’s in Guatemala, one of the places and times to which my friends’ words referred, the military followed the plans designed by the regime of Ríos Montt and his head of security, Rodríguez Sánchez. The military went into a village; killed the adults and children; raped, then shot the women; and set afire their homes, outhouses, chicken-coops, and cornfields. In this way they razed 70-90% of the villages in Ixil—including Emanuel’s. But these were specifics I wouldn’t learn until later.

The general information which I’d heard from my friends was sad, yes, but did it sadden me? I don’t think so. If anything, I felt a little better about myself: however remote and partial the information, knowing things made me a more informed citizen. It gave me what these college friends would call “social capital,” a kind of wealth, a kind of power that comes from knowing about something, even superficially. It was on my first trip to Guatemala, in a Spanish immersion program in 2013, that I heard for the first time details about the genocide, heard about it from Guatemalans themselves during the genocide trial itself.

I didn’t go to the trial then but followed along in the papers and talked about it with my teachers at the language school. Each morning before class, the teachers huddled in the school’s central patio, tense and alive, talking quietly of what had happened in the previous day’s trial. I can still see the red tile floor they stood on, dulled by sun and rain, the warm tea and coffee in their hands. Too, I remember the photos of the courtroom: the ex-dictator, in his own country, sitting in a chair before a panel of judges. And, on the polished wood floor between them—crouching, sitting, squatting—a swarm of reporters, photographers, and journalists. And, although I didn’t know it then, somewhere behind the rows of people who’d survived the massacres, watching quietly and scribbling furiously, sat international human rights accompaniers with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA).

Four years later, as an international human rights accompanier with NISGUA, I walked into a different courtroom for the same trial. The room was small. I was late. All the seats, save two, were empty. A third person, from an independent media outlet, came in, set her recorder near the speakers, and sat down. I thought I’d walked into the wrong room. Was this the trial for genocide and crimes against humanity? I looked toward the defendant’s chair and recognized Rodríguez Sánchez. I had seen his photo. The survivors I accompany had told me about him, about the outcome of the intelligence he’d gathered and shared. This was the place.

Twenty minutes later, thirty people walked in a line through the metal detector; men put their straw hats in their hands and women gathered their skirts as they sat in the seats in front of me, filling the right half of the room. They sat close and whispered to each other in a language I didn’t understand. They were those who, during the massacres, fled to the mountains or were forced to live in “model villages” controlled by the army. They were survivors who, while the killings were still happening, told each other what they knew, asked each other: Have you seen my husband, my daughter, my cousin, my nephew. They began, slowly, to tell outsiders: lawyers, journalists, forensic anthropologists. Together they began exhumations and requested military documents. They gathered more and more survivors, like water pooling in a hollow. They gathered evidence. In 2000, they petitioned for international human rights accompaniers, formed themselves into the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, and set in motion the trial I was attending.

After seventeen years of accompaniers walking in and out of his house in a constant rotation, I don’t know why it is this day that Emanuel decides to talk about the massacre. Who’s to say what calls a story forth into the air between two humans. I don’t know if other accompaniers have asked him for his story. I don’t ask him for it, but he offers it to me.

They were those who, during the massacres, fled to the mountains or were forced to live in “model villages” controlled by the army. They were survivors who, while the killings were still happening, told each other what they knew, asked each other: Have you seen my husband, my daughter, my cousin, my nephew.

He tells me that when he came back, after the army had burned the houses and killed his first wife, he did not find their baby either. He found only her dirty diapers. They were strewn about, as if someone had thrown them. He does not know why they would do that. His brothers and his sister, he tells me, they were killed too.

“God knows where they put them,” he says. Their bodies never found.

I have heard similar stories by now, have read about the seventy-seven massacres here in the Ixil area, but it doesn’t make it easier. I tighten my jaw and look away to keep from crying. Between the wooden planks of the walls I see a neighbor across the path. She brushes something off her bright red skirt, dirt, perhaps, or a bit of egg. Those who fled into these mountains in the eighties couldn’t wear their normal clothes because the red skirts could be seen from the air. Even when I try to look away—it is this place, here. It is him; it is her. I look down: The wooden planks and the holes in them and the dirt floor a half foot below. I look right: Emanuel’s wife, his second wife, stands on the dirt floor, sets the blackened pot on the stove.

“We met,” he tells us, referring to himself and his current wife, “in the corn field.”

I fold my eyebrows, surprised.

“We all did it,” he explains. “If they came and saw that you didn’t have a husband or didn’t have a wife, they would say it was because she was a guerrilla and you must be helping the guerrillas. And they would kill you. So, we, all of us, we went down to the corn fields, all of us who had…whose husbands and wives had been killed, and we paired up. And we got new husbands and new wives so they wouldn’t kill us.”

Questions float up. Why was there still a corn field? According to military documents, the army saw the entire Ixil ethnic group as the enemy. They burned their crops and animals so that any survivors would starve. Did he pair up with his second wife before they burned the fields? Or did they not burn this particular field? Or had they already relocated the survivors to one of the so-called “model villages” and there replant their corn? I’m curious, but don’t know if I want to ask.

Prepping for my time here, I read a nightmare of a memoir by a U.S. nun who was captured and tortured in Guatemala during the conflict. In The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, Sister Dianna Ortiz explains how telling one’s story can cause one to live again the torture. This is why the lawyers in the current genocide trials requested that witnesses not be called to testify for both trials (that of Montt and that of Sánchez) in a single day; they were concerned it was re-traumatizing them unnecessarily.

The worst things that can happen to humans have happened to those we accompany, including Emanuel. Charred diapers. So, if he wants me to know something, good God, I’m going to listen. But I don’t want to be another person who comes to take something out of him. Not even a story.

I don’t ask. There are worse things than not knowing. There are discomforts greater than awkward silence. But something in Emmanuel’s silence lets me know his story is not quite over. Part of my job, as I see it, is to use my physical presence as a container for whatever those we accompany do decide to share. I’m not the best of listeners, but I listen as best I can. I tether in my thoughts when they wander away while someone chatters about the going rate for a bushel of coffee beans. I gather my attention and focus it into this moment. I let myself come back to this planked floor, the warmth of the wood-fire, the human in a light blue shirt sitting on the wooden chair in front of me. I bring my attention back to the task that has been asked of me: that I accompany.

His wife hands me coffee. I am always given coffee. I take a careful sip from my plastic cup. The coffee I saw driving into the village, drying on roofs and on tarps in the road, was probably for export. The coffee they drink is instant. A couple handfuls of ground coffee and twice as much sugar dropped into a pitcher of hot water, then poured into another pitcher and back again to mix it. It’s not just the taste that stays with you, light and sweet, but physical bits. Drinking it down to the last is like drinking a handful of water from a puddle on a dirt-road. You try to spit out the tiny parts of earth, but some days a bit stays, rubs its way between your teeth and gums. It makes me think of all the dirt and debris that must gather at the wall of a dam’s reservoir. Where does it go when the river stops running?

They believe that if they tell the judges, if they tell the accompaniers, it can make a difference. Emanuel believes it will make a difference if you know his story.

“They hid their bodies,” Emanuel says, after I say nothing. I put my head down. I have seen the photos of bodies dumped in holes big as houses. Bodies that some hoped would be forgotten and that others could never forget. The front of his shirt reads: La memoria de los Pueblos, la que cuenta la verdadera historia. The memory of the people, that which tells the true story. Emanuel and the other witnesses told their stories at the genocide trial in 2013 and now they do it again. When they share their stories, I don’t ask why. I don’t have to. Each person tells me why. Why they talk to accompaniers, why they gave their testimony once, twice, why they will do it as many times as it takes. “So that it never happens again.” “So that this never happens to our children.” Those two phrases. Almost word-for-word no matter who is talking. They believe that if they tell the judges, if they tell the accompaniers, it can make a difference. Emanuel believes it will make a difference if you know his story.

That is why he tells it to me, I think. And it is why I’m telling you. He tells me about that big thing we call genocide or the war or the Internal Armed Conflict. The event, for him, was more concrete. And, for his part, he makes it clear to me, makes it into something cold and almost physical passing over my lips, making my gums ache.

“They put them in the river,” he says. He nods his head to the right and my head turns automatically, looking for what he is looking for. He points out the window, toward the river I saw on the drive up, its coolness collecting along the white wall of the reservoir, far away from the concrete courthouse in Guatemala City, farther still from my own wooden home in the Pacific Northwest, to which I will soon return.

“There are a lot of bodies in that river,” Emanuel says, his hands wrapped around his coffee. I move my eyes to his face, turned toward his family. He looks back at me. He is so close.