Unusual Pair Takes Over in Guatemala

[struggle4progress]

Source: Associated Press

By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA – 9 hours ago

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala's new president, Alvaro Colom received training as a Mayan priest. His vice president is a heart surgeon ...

After a 36-year civil war, and still plagued by poverty, corruption and street gangs, "Guatemala is sick, very sick, in intensive care," says Vice President Rafael Espada, who gave up a decades-long medical career in Texas to return to Guatemala last year as Colom's running mate ...

Colom is best known for his work with the Guatemalan government and the U.N. to bring home more than 40,000 refugees, mostly Mayan, after the civil war ended in 1996 and invest hundreds of millions of government dollars in the areas that were hardest hit by the war. The refugees honored him by training him as a minister in their religion ...

Few Guatemalan families escaped unscathed from the war, which left 200,000 dead and another 40,000 disappeared. Colom's was no exception — his uncle Manuel Colom, the leftist mayor of Guatemala City, was assassinated by the army in 1979 ...

Read more: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jbDxDtTYPnPE86bTH2P0_aJ2iylgD8U54NEO0

[ben_meyers]

1. Didn't the Mayans invent a kind of heart surgery?

The higher one's position in the hierarchy, the more blood was expected. Some ceremonies demanded the living heart of a victim, in which case the victim was held down by the four chacs at the top of a pyramid or raised platform while the nacon made an incision below the rib cage and ripped out the heart with his hands. The heart was then burned in order to nourish the gods.

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CIVAMRCA/MAYAS.HTM

[struggle4progress]

3. The bloody sacrifices effected by military dictators after the CIA's 1954 coup will seem

more important to the current generation: the cruelties of US-armed and US-supported paramilitary death squads are within the memory of people still living there

Of course, there may be a certain parallelism between the predations of various pre-Colombian ruling classes, the predations of the Spanish colonial rulers, and the 20th century predations justified by the Monroe doctrine: one expects that in all cases the victims were unenthusiastic about the supposed "blessings" brought by the predatory "civilizations"

[Judi Lynn]

4. It's doubtful they could EVER have outdone the sheer hideous bloodthirsty brutality of the death

squads, following leaders trained by the U.S. at School of the Americas, starting with deadly seriousness in 1954, when Dwight G. Eisenhower got rid of the democratically elected populist President Jacob Arbenz.

Any DU'er who hasn't read about this and gotten clear on the history of what happened to Guatemala starting then should set aside some time and start taking advantage of research tools. It is a pattern which has been repeated throughout the entire Americas exhaustively, to the great suffering and grief of the people.

Thank you for throwing some light were it apparently was desperately needed, struggle4progress.

Anyone who has the time should take a look at these photos, clicking on the thumbnails and reading the material in the articles. Photos showing Guatemalan citizens carrying small coffins are showing people taking the remains of their own loved ones from a mass grave following massacres to be reburied.

I don't think there has EVER been a Mayan priest who would have dreamed of the purely evil act of killing a peasant family, cutting off their heads, and sitting them around a table, with their heads in front of the torsos just to terrorize the villagers.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Sorry, had to leave before completing the link immediately above.....

I mentioned photos which lead to information which will help anyone wanting to know more about Guatemala's struggle:

http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-37,GGLD:en&q=Guatemala+%2b+massacre

Had to leave in a hurry, didn't take time to realize I had not included this. Just looking at the articles connected to the photos will go a long distance beyond what you've been reading from your corporate media all these years.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Here's a good example of reading articles behind the thumbnails:

If you check the link to google images "Guatemala + massacre" you'll see a thumbnail of this photo:


A Mayan priest holds a cross
with the ages of his family
members killed in a 1980s Rio
Negro massacre in Guatemala.
Over the past few years Rio
Negro massacre survivors have
become central actors in efforts
to document human rights crimes
and seek meaningful remedy.
Photo by Jonathan Moller.
Only in clicking on the article associated with the photo will you see the following useful story:

Report on Science and Human Rights

Fall/Winter 2003 Vol XXIII, No. 3

Notes from the Field:
Guatemalan Community Struggles with Chixoy Dam Legacy of Violence, Forced Resettlement
Barbara Rose Johnston, Senior Research Fellow,
Center for Political Ecology, Santa Cruz, California

In July 2003, I served as the AAAS representative at Chixoy Dam Legacy Issues meetings in Guatemala City and Rabinal, Baja Vera Paz. I traveled at the invitation of Rio Negro massacre survivors and other dam-affected communities as part of an ad-hoc coalition of environment and human rights groups supporting community efforts to seek reparations for the consequential damages of Chixoy Dam development. This report summarizes the findings from the July 2003 meetings and subsequent efforts to explore the details of this case.

The Chixoy Dam development represents a case where an energy initiative was conceived and built in a country in the midst of a civil war characterized by the state-sponsored genocide of Mayan peoples. In 1975, Guatemala’s National Institute for Electrification (INDE) announced approval for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Project and began building access roads in the previously inaccessible region. The feasibility study stated that the area was largely unpopulated, no notice of the project was given to the people living in project area, and no effort was made to assess socioeconomic impacts or identify the costs of a resettlement plan. The 1976 earthquake put an 18-month halt on construction, and a World Bank-funded Earthquake Reconstruction survey produced a new assessment of the area identifying a Maya Achi population of some 463 families (about 1500 people) living in five separate communities, describing archaeological sites and socioeconomic conditions, and mapping where people lived in relation to the planned reservoir. With a revised assessment, INDE was able to secure a $105 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank with the condition that a resettlement plan be developed and archaeological sites salvaged. INDE then informed the people of Rio Negro and other villages along the river that a dam would be built, their villages flooded, and they must move. INDE promised replacement farmlands, homes, and compensation for lost resources. However, those who accepted relocation offers found that resettlement programs failed to meet basic human needs or adequately compensate for the value of lost property. For those who attempted to negotiate the terms of resettlement, removal from the project area was finally completed through a series of threats—accept relocation offers or be killed.

The Chixoy Dam experience of resettlement at gunpoint reflected Guatemalan government policies that (1) viewed Mayan communal culture as a form of communism and a natural threat to the state; (2) forced at gunpoint enrollment and service in a civilian militia to monitor and patrol Mayan communities against guerilla incursions; and (3) characterized Mayan resistance to civil patrol service, dam development and other state-sponsored initiatives as evidence of support for the guerrilla armies. Beginning in 1978, state-sponsored violence directed towards the Mayan communities in the Chixoy Dam project area escalated. While many incidents reflected the Guatemalan government’s war against perceived Mayan militants, in a number of instances violence was directly connected to resettlement issues. For example, in July 1980 Rio Negro leaders Everisto Osorio and Valeriano Osoio Chen traveled to INDE offices at their request carrying their community’s Libro de Actos (Book of Legislation containing land titles, a registry of affected families, and the community documentation on INDE’s resettlement promises). They disappeared in route, their mutilated bodies were found a week later, and the Libro de Actos was never recovered.

By September 1982 over half the population of Rio Negro (447 residents) had been murdered in various incidents and in four massacres. INDE began to fill the reservoir in 1982 and those still in Rio Negro abandoned their homes and fled to the mountains. In 1983, four farms were purchased by INDE near Rabinal and used to build the “model village” of Pacux to house displaced villagers in a cluster of homes with a single access road guarded by a military base. Arguing that the loss of Rio Negro’s Libro de Actos required a new resettlement plan to be enacted, INDE conducted a new census of Pacux and ruled that only 106 families from Rio Negro were eligible for compensation. This effectively disenfranchised a total of 44 families. Some were not present in Pacux as they had fled to the mountains to escape massacres. Others were present in Pacux, having survived massacres, but with the death of the male head of household could not hold legal title as women or minors, and were according to INDE ineligible for compensation.

More:
http://shr.aaas.org/report/xxiii/chixoy_dam.htm

[Peace Patriot]

10. Considering the ritual, mechanized slaughter of millions and millions of people

by European white guys, in two world wars in the last century, in the horrendous bloodshed in Vietnam (2 million slaughtered in Southeast Asia before it was over, including over 55,000 U.S. soldiers, in a completely unnecessary war), and in the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people in north and south America prior to these other mass deaths, and the 200,000 Mayan villagers slaughtered in Guatemala with Reagan's direct complicity, and many thousands more Latin Americans in various U.S.-backed tortures and slaughters, and even unto the last five years and the slaughter of a million Iraqis, and the torture of thousands of innocents, by rich American white guys, to get their oil, the ancient Mayan sacrifices to propitiate the gods seem almost...civilized.

In fact, I have an anthropologist friends who somewhat jokingly suggested that we re-institute ceremonial human sacrifice, in lieu of modern warfare.

How dare you refer to these ancient Mayan religious practices, as if to say that modern Mayans deserve to be slaughtered, without mentioning the horrendous slaughter and mayhem that supposedly civilized white men have instigated, mostly on behalf of war profiteers and corporate profit?

Cold, calculated "shock and awe" from sleek modern jets rained upon poor children, mothers, the elderly, with nowhere to run, and slaughtering them in the tens of thousands. Cold, calculated application of electrodes to genitals, beatings, inhuman deprivations and death inflicted at random, in wholesale roundups and jailings, on a traumatized civilian population in Iraq, and also on complete innocents in Guantanamo Bay--people sold to U.S. forces by drug lords, mere bystanders, or simple patriots with rifles defending their homeland from invasion--scooped up, whisked round the globe in inhuman flights (bound, gagged, hungry, peeing in their seats), incarcerated for years without charges or trial, tortured, driven mad, killed. Many of them still there, in fact--the forgotten prisoners.

Really, nothing that the Mayan priests did even comes close to horrors thought up by the Bush Junta, and modern "civilization."

So, really, get out of here with your cruel little joke about the heart surgeon who ran for vice president, on a progressive ticket, and won. Specifically, he and his presidential running mate said that the drug war mayhem must be solved in peaceful ways, not with a police state (as their rightwing opponent advocated). And you are comparing his former profession, heart surgeon--during which he performed thousands of free surgeries for Guatemala's poor--to Mayan ritual sacrifice? That is a truly disgusting joke.

[krkaufman]

2. 200,000 dead; 40,000 refugees; and an economic shift to the right.

Guatemala, another 'Shock Doctrine' "success" story. (link)

[defendandprotect]

5. How would we ever begin to try to make amends . . . if we, ourselves,

weren't currently led by bloodthirsty dictatorship and could actually think along those lines ---?

How about atoning for 2 million new civilian murders in Iraq--?

Our government/CIA used every filthy tool to steal the wealth/resources and intelligence of Guatamala -- and disappearing liberals was a huge part of that CIA agenda.

Not to mention savage capitalism and the banks/loans and arm-twisting to steal everything from
this country ---

Without violence/torture and theft, how would the right-wing survive?

[nealmhughes]

6. I was in Chiapas in 1990 and met a lady who worked with the Mayan refugees.

I wanted to go out to one of the camps to visit, but she told me it wasn't safe -- not from the Maya, but from the Federal Army from Mexico City, and the possibility that I might cross the border into Guatamala.

It is hard to believe that 17 years have passed and the refugees are still there.

The visit was exciting but sad, the chicle sellers on the street of the zocalo in San Cristobal de las Casas was absolutely shocking, I had seen kids do that in border towns, but not adults until I got to Chiapas. Meanwhile I would go back to my colonial palace with A/C by day and heat by night and agua purificado for the showers and sit by the fire and listen to Victor Jara songs by South American and European tourists. . . On the other hand, the Maya were wonderful and shy about speaking in public -- and the hotel manager told me only the men had a bit of Spanish and the women might be able to count to make change and a few other words! It was really hard to believe that I was only a few hours away from Merida or DF. I bought as many handicrafts I could afford on that trip, straight off the loom from the makers.

[Javaman]

9. This is so one can rip out the heart and the other can put it back in. LOL nt