This year marks the tenth anniversary of the end of a bloody and intensely violent civil war that raged between 1960 and 1996 in the Central American country of Guatemala.
At least 150,000 people were killed, a further 50,000 ‘disappeared’, and one million became refugees during the war. It was the indigenous Mayan communities, which make up 65% of Guatemala’s 11.2 million population, that suffered most during the armed conflict.
Two weeks ago, I travelled to the western highlands of Guatemala to see, first-hand, how the Mayan communities are getting on, 10 years after the conflict came to an end. I stayed in the quaintly-named town of Santa Marìa Chiquimula (pronounced Chick-ee-moo-lah!), nestling high in the mountains at an altitude of 2,500 m. You get breathless just walking around the house.
The surrounding area, peppered with trees, terraced farms, dusty roads and tiled mud houses, is breathtakingly beautiful. Unfortunately, however, the most striking aspect of this region is the abject poverty. The houses are mostly made of mud brick. Running water is a rarity and, as a result, the women spend most of their time hand-washing clothes and fetching water. The principal fuel is wood, which locals have to gather. Electricity is unreliable and education and health services are too costly for most of the population. According the UN, 56% of Guatemalans live in such poverty.
The seeds of the war in Guatemala were sown in 1954, when the US’s CIA helped to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically-elected President, Jacobo Arbenz.
Arbenz had had the temerity to confiscate the land of United Fruit, a US company, re-distributing it among local people. That didn’t go down well in the Pentagon and the CIA-inspired coup led to a series of military governments that waged a 36 year war against a left-wing guerrilla movement (URNG) and indigenous Mayan communities accused of supporting them.
Many of the Mayans who suffered are still not able to speak of what happened, as the pain is still too raw. Loved ones are still missing, and threats from the State and the army remain active. María Elena Sucuquí, who lives in Santa Maria Chiqimula, was willing to talk. As a result of the war, Marìa’s family had to flee their village when she was very young.
“The indigenous people began to fight against the discrimination we had suffered for 500 years since colonisation,” Marìa explains. “The ladinos called us ‘stupid Indians’. They told us we existed just to work for the rich in their homes and pick coffee in their plantations on the coast. We were never supposed to get an education. But we demanded that, as indigenous, we should have the right to be deputies in congress, to be governors, to live in dignity just like the ladinos (Guatemalans of Spanish descent). But this annoyed the ladinos, the rich and the government, so they sent in the army to massacre us.”
During the conflict over 600 massacres took place. In one, for which the government has since accepted responsibility, in July 1982, some 60 members of the army and the PAC (civilian paramilitary patrollers) entered the village of Plan de Sanchez. The soldiers first raped the women and girls and then killed them. They took the men, older women and children to a nearby site and murdered them also.
The Recovery of Historical Memory Commission (RHCM) revealed in 1998 that the army was responsible for 93% of the massacres. Monsignor Juan Gerardi, the driving force behind the commission, was assassinated two days after he presented that report...
In 1996, the war in Guatemala came to an end, when Peace Accords were signed between the URNG and the government. The Accords addressed the rights of indigenous peoples, and specifically of women, and promised better healthcare and education as well as land redistribution and accountability for human rights violations.
However, progress has been slow, and many of those responsible for the atrocities have yet to stand trial.
Mateo Castillo Gregorio works in Quiche (one of the hardest hit areas during the war) with the human rights commission of the Accion Cultural Guatemalteca, “Nothing has been done about the promises made in the Accords to address the centuries-old discrimination in relation to access to land for the indigenous Mayans,” he says. “To make matters worse, the government in recent years, without any consultation, granted permission to English, Canadian and US multinationals to mine minerals, gold and other resources in areas populated by indigenous Mayans.” The likely effect will be more displacement, poverty and pollution. In addition, Guatemala recently signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, which will benefit the large US multinationals and the richest and most powerful sectors in Guatemala, to the detriment of the small businesses and farmers (campesinos).
“The campesinos can’t compete with cheap US imports,” Mateo laments. “Many have to leave their lands and emigrate to work in the city, on the large fincas (coffee, banana and corn plantations), or in the US.”
Amnesty International reported in 2005 that human rights defenders like Mateo are the target of intimidation and persecution and that violence against women is on the increase. For Mateo, it’s as if the civil war never ended.
“We are afraid,” Mateo says. “We are experiencing the hidden power of the state security services in Guatemala. Some campaigns’ offices have been broken into and all the information taken from the computers.”
Despite the on-going repression, Mateo feels that the indigenous Mayan movement is beginning to assert itself, in a way that is similar to other indigenous movements across South America. “We are starting to get organised at the grassroots, and we hope to construct alternatives in the face of the globalisation of North America,” Mateo says.
Mayan culture, with its spirituality, values, literature and, most importantly, the 24 native Mayan languages is enormously rich. The hope is that it can survive the mono-culture and consumerism that is the product of globalisation. In this regard, education is of central importance.
Natalie Livingstone, 28, an Irish development worker, is currently co-ordinating a development project in Santa Maria Chiquimula.
“In this area, the population is predominantly Mayan and the illiteracy rate reaches 60%,” she explains. “As well as addressing the educational need, our project is also trying to promote the local Mayan culture.”
Unlike in many of the State schools, classes are taught both in Spanish and in the native Mayan language (k’iche’). The project provides primary and secondary education. It also encompassess a health service, literacy adult weekend programmes and an intercultural research centre, which documents local Mayan cultural practices and provides materials in k’iche’ for the community.
“It’s about empowering the Mayans to find creative solutions to their own social issues,” Natalie says. “Living and working in the developing world has given me a perspective that I would never have gained in Ireland. I feel I am learning as much, if not more, from the indigenous I work with than they will from me. This is important for us from the first world. We must realise that we do not have all the answers – they must and can come from the people themselves.”
As with most aid programmes, however, there is always a shortfall in finance. “It’s frustrating to see how hard people are working here when so much more could be achieved with a little more funding,” Natalie says.

In 2005, Amnesty produced a report on Guatemala entitled: “No Protection, no justice, killings of women in Guatemala”. It stated that the high rate of murders of women was a product of weak laws and a firmly entrenched ‘macho’ or sexist mindset. They called for protest demonstrations in front of Guatemalan embassies world wide.
“The machismo is one of the most difficult aspects of life here,” Natalie explains. “Through education and working and living alongside the women here, I hope to be an example of how it can be different for them.”
Maria, for her part, believes that machismo is going to be difficult to eradicate. “Women must be educated about their rights. We shouldn’t have to accept it that women often sit on the floor while the man sits at the table,” she says.
Due to the pressures of globalisation, telecommunications, tourism and the virus-like influence of English, it is said that, every two weeks, somewhere in the world, the last elderly man or woman with a full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, more than half of the world’s 6,500 languages may be extinct by 2,100. This is an incredible loss to global heritage and diversity.
It is against this backdrop that the indigenous Mayan communities of Guatemala are engaged in a struggle to maintain their culture – and to ensure their languages like K’iche’ are not consigned to dusty history books. Their movement, supported by projects like Natalie’s, will hopefully ensure that poverty and suffering are replaced by strong, proud, sustainable communities.
“Some people say the 36 years of war bore no fruit for those of us who struggled for justice and resulted only in death and misery,” Marìa explains. “But now people realise we Mayans can lead a community, a town, a country. We can even be President. During the civil war the minister for education decreed that we couldn’t wear our traje (traditional colourful dress) at school. Now we wear our traje and talk our own language openly with pride.”
Long may it continue.