El Faro first published this photo essayin Spanishin March 2019 and has translated it in the lead-up to the verdict in the trial of retired Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas García on the charge of genocide against the Maya Ixil people.
Four decades ago, in the early 1980s, the Maya Ixil people were crushed by the Guatemalan Army as it perpetrated multiple massacres across Ixil territory, a region encompassing the municipalities of Santa María Nebaj, San Gaspar Chajul, and San Juan Cotzal in the department of Quiché, some 300 kilometers from Guatemala City. Under the justification of counterinsurgency, the Guatemalan military murdered hundreds of Indigenous people in multiple operations. The Ixil people continue to denounce abuses, counsel each other, honor the victims, and remember their lost loved ones every day. And they do it all in the same remote and isolated countryside where the communities attacked during the armed conflict, and ignored by the state during the post-war period, survive to this day. Decades after the war, the dead live among them still.
Guatemala’s Ixil region spans the towns of Santa María Nebaj, San Gaspar Chajul, and San Juan Cotzal. The villages here, which suffered the worst massacres of the war, are remote and isolated, bounded by fields and hills: homes of wood surrounded by crops. The villages are located 300 kilometers, or about 185 miles, from Guatemala City.
As of 2008, 10 percent of Chajul’s population had migrated to Cobán in search of work on coffee plantations, or to southern Guatemala, to work on sugar cane farms. Among that percentage are also those who migrated to the United States. Many who remain, like those in the image above, make their living selling handicrafts that they make themselves.
Catarina Solís, 64 years old in 2019. Her parents, her two brothers, and her husband were disappeared in 1983 and have been missing ever since. Catarina says that the military raped her, beat her, and burned down her home. Today, she continues to demand justice, in the community of Sajbata, in Nebaj.
Two men talk outside a cantina in the municipality of Nebaj on a Sunday afternoon, March 3. A 2010 study by the Ixil Foundation revealed that post-war conditions in the Ixil region have exacerbated a series of problems related to psychosocial instability. Among them: alcoholism, domestic violence, post-traumatic stress, drug addiction, low self-esteem, and the proliferation of gangs.
“I've been coming to talks and presentations and listening for a long time and they’ve never given me anything. I’m tired of fighting, and pretty soon I’m going to lose hope of getting reparations,” says Juan Brito López, 65. He is a survivor of the massacre of Cocop and the village of Pextla Grande, which took place in the municipality of Nebaj in April 1981.
San Gaspar Chajul, a colorful but extremely poor town in the department of El Quiché, is crowded with adobe and clay-tile homes. The town center is in ruins, and residents subsist primarily on farming. During the armed conflict, the Guatemalan Army massacred the people here and in the surrounding villages.
Catarina Pérez, 64, lives in San Juan Cotzal. Her husband was killed in 1980 and her father in 1982. In Cotzal, there is a registry documenting 280 disappearances. To date, only 80 bodies have been recovered. Catarina washes clothes for other families and harvests corn to survive. She says that, for years, she dreamed every night of her husband Juan Velasco: that he was alive, by her side. One day, she visited his grave to ask for his forgiveness. She says that she has not dreamed of him since.
Juan Cobo Brito survived the April 1981 genocide in the community of Cocop, in the municipality of Nebaj, after a bullet entered the right side of his neck and exited through his back. Cobo Brito saw his wife, mother-in-law, and brother-in-law die. In 2005, he was finally able to bury them, after a search that lasted 24 years.
The communities of the Ixil region have managed to maintain control of their villages in the years since the war thanks to communal organizing. It is common to see children playing alone in the streets. The communities impose Maya justice on anyone who commits crimes: A communal council decides the punishment, which usually consists of a public whipping of the perpetrator.
Jacinto Santiago, 74, poses with his three-year-old granddaughter, Petrona Santiago. He remembers how, on Apr. 17, 1981, in the village of Cocop, community members gathered the bodies of the victims and buried them in a mass grave. Among them were his wife, Juana Rivera, and his sons, José Santiago and Gaspar Santiago.
The majority of the Ixil population lives in remote, rural areas and lacks access to basic services like potable water and sewage treatment. Only 70 percent of the population has electricity.
Gaspar Caba (left), 50, and Miguel Brito, 42, rest at the entrance to the church in the municipality of Chajul, while a young boy shines their shoes. Communities in the area live in conditions of extreme poverty.
Juan Chávez, 77, lost his wife, mother-in-law, and brother-in-law during a massacre perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army on Apr. 16, 1981. He continues to seek justice and never misses a meeting about the state programs for securing reparations for harms caused during the war.
In the Cocop cemetery, there are 33 graves containing the remains of some of the victims of the genocide, one of the first atrocities committed in the Ixil region.
Residents of Cocop commence a communal meeting with prayer in the Ixil language. Men and women gather in this place nestled between dusty paths in the mountains. This is where one of the first massacres was registered: The Army murdered 77 people here on Apr. 16, 1981. Four decades later, community members continue to search for their loved ones and fight for the justice and reparations that still lie beyond their grasp.
*Translated by Max Granger
Support Independent Journalism in Central America
For the price of a coffee per month, help fund independent Central American journalism that monitors the powerful, exposes wrongdoing, and explains the most complex social phenomena, with the goal of building a better-informed public square.
Support Central American journalism.Cancel anytime.
