Thanksgiving Retreat w/ other YAVs

Each 4-6 weeks, all the YAVs here in Guatemala meet for a 3 night retreat with our coordinator, Marcia. Our first one was November 18-20 and it was at a coffee finca called Finca Santa Elena on the coast, where one of the YAVs works.

It was really nice to be able to speak lots of English and be around the other YAVs and hear their stories. Oh, and we even ate lasagna one night (the husband of the owner is from France and the US). We also got to go on a hike to see a lot of the finca, which was really fun. I liked pretty much everything about the retreat (especially the warmth of being near the coast) except the giant mosquitoes.

We also talked a lot about the books we had read for this retreat. Each retreat we have a theme to study, and for this one it was Guatemalan history, namely the armed conflict that just ended 13 years ago. I still don´t feel like I have a great idea of the historical sequence of events, but I do know that a bunch of people here were slaughtered in an almost 30 year act of genocide against indigenous persons, and we knew and did nothing. No, actually the US government did do something—we funneled money and weapons to the army (via Israel after we promised not to support the military dictatorship anymore) and trained many of their leaders at the School of the Americas in Georgia. Much of it in the name of fighting communism.

The two books we read were Silence on the Mountain and ¡Nunca Mas! (in English, Never Again!). If you´re interested, Silence on the Mountain is a well written account by a man from the US who came here to try and get some people´s stories about the violence. He writes that he felt that he had to do what he did because he could always leave if he was in danger. The people here couldn´t leave and so they couldn´t go around trying to interview people about their experiences. Actually, some Guatemalans did do just that, but they were very quickly murdered.

Even now, efforts are still being made to try to give justice to some of the victims and their families (exhumations, going through army documents from the time, etc.) and the UN had to come in with a special task force because when people from within the country try to do this they get killed. The government apparently knows, though, that there are harsher repercussions (as in, there are repercussions) if from the UN group shows up mysteriously dead with signs of torture on his/her body.
Nunca Mas is also really good, but less of a narrative, so I found it a little harder to get through, but it has lots of really good information. It was the first attempt to really catalogue all of the human rights violations—the tortures, massacres, rapes and disappearances.