My Gig

“Even though the arms of war have been silenced, the problems that led to the war are still unresolved. That's why solidarity is still important today. We should have solidarity in times of peace, not only in times of war.” --Rosalina Tuyuc, President of the National Reparations Program


Taking a step back, I want to write on a couple of things I haven't addressed so far that, I've been advised, need some attention: one, the somewhat disturbing BBC reference in the description, and the other, quite simply, what exactly I am doing here in Guatemala.

The former, although maybe slightly more pressing, will have to wait for another day, when I will elaborate on one of the most alarming issues facing the region. But before anything else, here's a bit on how I got here and where I'm focusing my time and energy...

I arrived in early November to start a ten-month Fulbright research grant won under the pretenses that I would investigate Guatemala's ongoing peace building efforts. As I mentioned before, Guatemala is a new democracy--just 10 years out from the end of a conflict that lasted over three decades and included a textbook case of genocide committed by government authorities against Mayan indigenous populations. My aim here is to look at what is being done in response to such calculated violence.

I've long been drawn to the field of transitional justice, which is, in a few words, the study of how post-conflict societies reckon with recent periods of violence in order to move peacefully into a new era of democracy. Tools used in these efforts include truth commissions, trials for perpetrators, and reparations for victims. Examples that may sound familiar are South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established at the end of Apartheid to investigate human rights violations, and the Nuremberg Trials that followed the Holocaust in post-WWII Europe. I fell hard for the subject after reading Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog, easily the most inspiring book I've ever read.

My specific focus is on how international actors influence these efforts. In order to get into the nitty gritty of that particular question, I made my way into an internship at the mother of all international actors, the United Nations (which luckily has a base in Guatemala City leftover from the peace building mission established to help end the war). So I waffle back and forth between independent reporter and rookie-UN rep. as I do research. With the UN, I've generally been involved in two main areas: 1) The case against seven former leaders for genocide and other crimes against humanity currently being considered in Guatemalan and Spanish courts, and 2) the National Reparations Program, which will provide money, services, and other measures of compensation to victims of the conflict.

I'll post bits and pieces on each of these every once and a while to elaborate--both issues are contentious among citizens and politicians here, and both have some serious points of international historic relevance.

At the heart of the topic, deeper than the political controversy and pragmatic doubt that come with the territory, are the victims. The people who were affected by the violence here are deeply scarred--family members were murdered, torture was used methodically against civilians, women and children were targeted for their power to carry on the Mayan ethnicities, land was seized, and peaceful communities were turned into militarized zones by the government. Today, the same ethnic groups are critically marginalized in society.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Nebaj, a region accurately characterized as the epicenter of the genocide. With any luck, I'll come back to the capital with a much more intimate sense of how the violence occurred, what the human cost was, and how survivors (as opposed to politicians) envision a future of peace.

Notes on that when I return next week.