The first half of Monday 13th of March felt like a blur. An eclectic mix of dusty roads, pristine nature, sunburns, and anti-diarrhea medication. The cascading waterfalls and booming forest unsullied by trash so characteristic of Guatemala gave the impression that one was standing inside a romantic painting. But there was something off about the whole scene. There were no people, no tourists taking a million selfies to post to their Instagram feed, there were barely any locals besides.
In July 1982 Guatemalan army helicopters landed and dismounted soldiers and a high-ranking officer close to the village of San Francisco. The Guatemalan military was trained in anti-insurgency tactics by US military advisors who also sometimes accompanied them in the field. Their arms were provided by Israel. Their mission was to carry out a scorched earth policy in the region in order to deny the guerrillas support that they received or sometimes just took from the local population. That’s the cold military jargon filed rationalization of what happened. What happened in San Francisco was however anything but cold or rational.
The lucky ones were shot. The unlucky ones had their children’s heads smashed in front of their eyes on a boulder in the middle of the village. The mothers were then also killed. One child’s hart was cut out of his body and caried on top of a post-classic pyramid that stood in the middle of the village in an apparent attempt to mock the ancestors of the victims. Today in the place where once stood the village of San Francisco, there stands only that small post-classic pyramid and the ugly looking boulder with a cleft in the middle. That rock will forever be burnt into my memory. Three men survived the massacre. One of them wrote a book. Ricardo Falla writes that that the tree, that still haunts the site to this day, was turned black from all the vultures attracted to bodies of the victims. Out of the roughly 400 victims only 23 bodies were ever recovered. The rest lie in an unlocated mass grave. The ones who buried the bodies hold their silence to this day in fear of losing the land that they received as payment for a job well done.
No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre in San Francisco. No one was brought to stand trial. No one was punished. World leaders did not come to visit the site in a show of support to the victims and recognition of the crimes committed. There was no great international outcry. No one cared. At the site of the genocide there stands no mausoleum or shrine to the victims there isn’t even a simple plaque to say what happened there.
Photo: Flowers growing on the spot of the masacre
Vitan
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