A Thanksgiving Story in Guatemala

After graduating UT in May, I joined a human rights team that accompanies an indigenous-led coalition of survivors seeking to legally charge eight former military and political officials with genocide. I was there due to the threats survivors face, prompting a call for international observers to live with them.

As I joined friends harvesting maize in one of their fields, a curious parallel struck me. Here I am, my first Thanksgiving away from home, as a somewhat recent immigrant with European lineage learning to pick corn with my new, amiable, indigenous neighbors on the fourth week of November. The next day at lunch, I decided to share with my friend Mu`s why Thursday would be a day of celebration in my homeland. I explained how the pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock and relied on the goodwill and solidarity of indigenous North Americans for survival. The story goes that both communities came together in a shared feast to celebrate their friendship, but of course, the story typically ends there.

As elaborated in Anita Quintanilla’s poignant Firing Line last Wednesday, following that memorialized meal of 1621, the continental newcomers soon massacred their one-time banquet companions and thieved their land. I relayed the whole story to Mu`s, including its unappetizing finale which, at least stateside, is usually cut out of our festive consciousness – among the annual holiday "trimmings," so to speak.

Mu`s listened intently, then shook his head and replied, "The very same thing happened here in the 1980s. When the military first arrived, we welcomed them into our homes, shared our rice and tortillas with them. Then they massacred us, and burned down all of our houses and crops." Half-joking, he chuckled, pointed at me and posited, "Hey, maybe they learned that trick from the United States!"

To what extent did the U.S. government train those responsible for a military-led "counterinsurgency" campaign that, under the auspices of hunting down guerrilla rebels, resulted in the murder of more than 200,000, overwhelmingly Maya people?

In terms of training, between 1947 and 1991, at least 1,598 members of the Guatemalan Army were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and 13 Guatemalan Army officials served there as instructors. Following the 1996 Peace Accords, which largely ended the state-led massacring of Maya communities, a U.N.-led truth commission singled out the role of the School of America, reporting that its counterinsurgency instruction "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed conflict."

Of the three opressors sought in the genocide case, SOA graduates comprised four of eight military officials in the cabinet of Romeo Lucas Garcia, six out of nine under Efrain Rios Montt and five out of 10 under Oscar Mejia Victores. General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who designed the Scorched Earth campaign that led the army to burn at least 440 Mayan villages to the ground and is also sought in the genocide case, was trained by the SOA in high military command.

Regarding the Ixil region, where Mu`s lives, two declassified CIA documents from February 1982 state that General Lucas Garcia "acknowledged that because most Indians in the area support the guerrillas it probably will be necessary to destroy a number of villages" and that "the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike." One month later, 69 people from Mu`s’s village were executed.

That summer, the Reagan administration declared that Guatemala was "not a gross violator of human rights." In December 1982 – the same month the U.N. passed a resolution condemning the human rights situation in Guatemala – Reagan met with dictator Rios Montt and told The New York Times he was "inclined to believe" that the coup-launching SOA graduate "had been given a bad rap." A few weeks later, the U.S. State Department granted him $6 million in military assistance.