Dead flowers in an ancient Mirinda orange bottle are all that adorns the stone marker at the spot where Nicolas Ajtutal Sosof was gunned down along with 12 others in the village of Santiago Atitlan on December 2nd, 1990. He was just five years old.
“All we were doing was protesting outside the army base against the kidnapping of our people”, says a 43-year-old man, who even now won’t give his name. The shooting went on for three hours. “When I got home my father asked: where is your brother? I didn’t know. At six the next morning we found out he was dead.”
A plaque in Santiago Atitlan’s Catholic church records that between 1980 and 1990 more than a thousand people from the town were killed.
Local women dressed in traditional huipil blouses embroidered with Guatemala's national bird, the quetzal, point out the monument to US priest Stanley Rother, who was gunned down. His crime: denouncing the army, speaking up for the Maya and sheltering them in his church.
General jailed
Few people stop by Santiago's peace park on the shores of Lake Atitlan these days, but today a Ladino couple from Guatemala city are here. Just last week former president, dictator and army commander Efrain Rios Montt was convicted of genocide for his crimes against the Maya people, and sentenced to 80 years in jail. "It is right that justice is done," they say. "It is time."
Ricardo Monroy, who works at a hostel on the lake, is hopeful that the conviction will create something new in the consciousness of Guatemalan society. “White middle-class Guatemalans thought this was something going on up in the mountains that was nothing to do with them. But now it’s official. It was genocide.”
Not everyone in Guatemala agrees. The case has shocked many who do not wish to see the word "genocide" associated with their country, and others who still maintain that the 30-year civil war, known here as la violencia ,was necessary to defeat the guerrillas, who were trying to claim rights long denied the indigenous Maya people.
Climate of impunity
Rios Montt was gone from power by the time the last massacre at Santiago Atitlan happened, but the climate of impunity he created continued. It's unlikely that every ruler will be held accountable for his crimes, but the 86-year-old who presided over the worst excesses of the war has been forced to listen to the witnesses who charted those horrific events.
“When the soldiers came we fled,” says witness Nicolas Raymundo Cedillo. “Those who kept working in the fields were killed, their hearts ripped out and their bodies burnt”.
With a pink and purple Mayan shawl over her head, 46-year-old Cecilia Vaca Gallelo testified that she had been raped repeatedly by gangs of soldiers until she could not walk, and could not have more children.
Forced to flee
Many of those who tried to publicise what was happening were forced to flee. American Bonnie Dilger (85) was in the middle of building a hotel when the army took over Santiago Atitlan. "I reported disappearances and killings to the local governor. Then my contractor was killed, my house was raided and my dog stabbed."
She came back and finished the hotel in 1990, and says that, since the peace accords in 1996, things have improved for the Maya in health and education.
In the hotel restaurant José told how he joined the guerrillas aged 13, and helped to deliver food to them. “The army was killing my uncles, our catechists, our priests, what was I to do? While the guerrillas also carried out some attacks against civilians, a UN investigation attributed 93 per cent of the estimated 200,000 deaths to government forces.”
José credits Rigoberta Menchu, the indigenous woman who won the 1992 Nobel Prize, with creating the climate that led to the trial.
“It’s because of a Mayan woman that we have justice,” he says. “She planted the seed in Guatemala, and it worked.”
While Mayans now play a greater role in local government they are poorly represented at national level. Discrimination and poverty are still endemic. Ricardo Monroy believes that racism is at the root of the problem. “Many Guatemalans believe Mayans are stupid, and not educated, he says. “But they were not educated because we denied them an education.”
That is changing, but slowly. Today Santiago Atitlan, the only town in Guatemala that managed to kick out the army, has three new schools, and a proud attachment to its language and culture. “It is a sad time for the families of those who disappeared,” says José, ” but we must be grateful for the blood of our indigenous brothers who cried out from the grave for justice.”