"A Monumental Task"

- By Grahame Russell
June 1996

There are so many victims of State repression in Guatemala. They are the massacred, the disappeared and assassinated, the raped, tortured and displaced. Much less talked about, the victims are also the surviving family and community members. These 'indirect' victims have been forced to keep silent for years by threat of more repression; prevented from mourning their loss, let alone trying to see any justice done. Now, they want to re-claim the names and lives of their murdered loved ones and tell the truth about the political crimes and human rights violations of the past.

To tell the truth in Guatemala continues to be dangerous because there are so many people -- army officials, soldiers, civil defense patrollers, military commissioners -- who ordered and\or committed the crimes and violations, and who have had effective immunity from prosecution. They don't want the truth to be told. Some of them enjoy and benefit from the impunity.

Remarkably, many victims are ready to forgive the criminals, but not before the truth is told, not before the guilty are identified, and certainly not before the names and dignity of the dead are rescued and recognized.

During the two years I spent in Guatemala (November 1993 until October 1995), I had the privilege of being involved in what is known as the exhumation process. Guatemalans are digging up mass graves across the country, excavating the remains of their loved ones from anonymous, gaping pits where they were unceremoniously dumped by their murderers in the 1980s.

I traveled to exhumation sites, interviewed family and community members of the victims. I spoke with and got to know eyewitnesses to massacres, who, by incomprehensible twists of fate, escaped or were spared. I wrote articles about the exhumation process, trying to draw more international attention and protection to these courageous people.

I worked with international delegations that came to attend the reburials of the dead and I took video crews to make documentaries. The Monuments to Truth project grew from this work.

The first Monument to Truth was in Rabinal where the Rio Negro community had in 1993 exhumed the grave of their massacred loved ones; in April 1994 they reburied them with Mayan and Catholic ceremonies. Even the few words engraved on their first tombstone, explaining how they died, were too much truth for local military and civil defense patrollers. It was destroyed within two weeks.

"We have to rebuild it, but this time bigger and stronger." With those words a survivor of the March 13, 1982 Rio Negro massacre (177 Mayan-Achi women and children killed) came up with the idea of the Monuments to Truth project.

The construction of monuments and plaques aims to rescue and restore the names and dignity of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of State repression. The process of digging up the mass graves, properly reburying one's dead, and building monuments in their honor, helps individuals and communities begin their mourning process. They begin to recover from the trauma of what they have suffered and lost, and from the trauma of the forced silence.

There is so much to do. A member of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team that carries out most of the 'digs' once said: "Not even with 30 years and 30 forensic teams would we be able to dig up all the graves." Nevertheless, the Team continues its work, presently doing laboratory work studying the excavated remains from the Cuarto Pueblo massacre (Close to 300 persons were murdered on March 14, 1982). The next site slated for an exhumation is Aguas Frias, in the department of Baja Verapaz.

While individuals and communities are overcoming well-founded fears, the repression continues. The October 5, 1995 Xaman massacre (11 killed and 30 seriously wounded) in the department of Alta Verapaz, is a reminder that while an important peace-negotiation process is taking place between the government and the URNG armed rebels, little has changed. In Guatemala, constructing a future of lasting peace and real democracy is a monumental task for many reasons, not least of which is the huge importance and challenge of dealing with the past.

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By Grahame Russell, a Canadian human rights lawyer and journalist, now director of Rights Action.