Senselessness of US Policy in Guatemala Confounding
by Swanee Hunt, Rocky Mountain News
September 28, 2024

Driving through the highlands of Guatemala this month, I found it hard to believe that this picturesque land endured 36 years of a brutal civil war that ended six years ago. As mass graves have been excavated, the UN estimates some 200,000 killed, in addition to a million forcibly displaced. The struggle pitted the military, controlled by a few elite families, against the large indigenous Mayan population. Watchdog influences-civil and human rights groups, independent media, political reformers-were progressively and systematically suppressed.

For years the U.S. took the side of the elite, as the struggle for land reform in Central America was painted red by cold warriors who backed ruthless political and military figures. The struggle was no surprise, since 80 percent of Guatemala's 10 million live in poverty. Still, for decades our policymakers thwarted internal land redistribution efforts, even though less than 3 percent of the people own 70 percent of the arable land.

After a lengthy visit at the U.S. Embassy, I left Guatemala City and drove six hours into the mountainous Ixil region, near the Mexican border.

Here the conflict was the most ferocious, as rebels fled into the folds of hills and valleys with the military in hot pursuit. With covert U.S. support, the army engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to deforest and depopulate the region, where Marxist rebels were hiding. Villages were burned and villagers massacred. The names of the murdered and "disappeared" are painted on small brown crosses, flanking a large crucifix in the local church; they include Catholic priests and nuns killed while engaged in development projects for peasants, work that spawned a new "liberation theology" that was unusually activist - and dangerous - for that institution.

After hours together bumping along tortuous mountain roads, I felt comfortable enough to ask the affable driver of our van about his own experience. Mario is a well-educated man in his forties, a member of the Pentecostal Church of God. "My classmate was killed by the army. They decapitated him. They took my brother in December 1980. He was an accountant and a pastor, but the army said he was a guerilla. They shot him in the forehead. My sister they raped and left by the road, thinking she was dead. Some young people found her and took her to a hospital. She came to live with me. She wanted to kill herself, because she was pregnant from the rape. The baby was born without a skull and died. The army was still looking for her, so the U.S. Ambassador authorized a visa for her and she went to Denver. Now she's back in Guatemala, working in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, taking care of elderly people." Now Mario is the Guatemala director for Agros, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization working in several Latin American countries.

The group buys land enough for a village, then lends it to farmers who pay back their loans over five years. Agros also lends funds to build homes and schools, consulting on agricultural methods that allow villagers to raise and market more profitable products. We visited three Agros villages, tucked away in the hills.

In the first, the land was newly purchased and homes were being planned; after five years in hiding, the villagers eyed us with wariness. In the second, construction was underway; we were welcomed and escorted through a dozen two-room homes by the proud owners. The third village was several years old. There children ran up to me, laughing. Each of the five pockets on my jeans had a tiny hand holding onto it as I walked along the dirt path, with a sixth child on my shoulders.

The women and girls of the villages wore traditional hand-woven wraparound skirts, with bright gardens embroidered on white blouses.

Life is simple on less than $2 a day-the average per capita income of the large majority of the population. Talking with these villagers, it was hard to believe they were ever part of some dangerous threat to our democracy. When it was time to leave, we stood together in a circle, each saying words of gratitude and encouragement to the other. One more time, an impossible connection formed across a chasm of experience, politics and economics. In the van going back, I wondered how U.S. foreign policy might have been different if Washington's decision-makers had taken a couple of days to drive into the highlands.

more articles by Swanee Hunt

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