John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

 

By Jennifer Nislow

The “scorched earth” policy of the Guatemalan government during the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in the massacre of thousands upon thousands of Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan groups. A “Silent Genocide” is what human rights scholars would term this atrocity since the world community gave little recognition, much less condemnation, to this wholesale decimation of a people by their own government.

The origins of this violence go back to 1954 when Guatemala became entrenched in an armed civil conflict that pitted military dictatorships against left-wing insurgents and prompted the overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.With his removal, land given to the country’s rural poor under his administration was returned to its previous owners.

The repression of indigenous leaders and the reversal of social reforms led to the emergence of a left-wing guerrilla campaign. Aiming to deprive leftist forces of a rural base of support, the military governments in power waged all-out war on the Mayan people. In 1999, the United Nations Historical Clarification Commission, or Truth Commission, found that “country agents ofthe Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayanpeople....”

When a precarious peace was forged in 1996, the military was found by the U.N. to have committed 93 percent of the atrocities and the leftists 3 percent. Overall, an estimated 200,000 people were killed, 50,000 disappeared, 150,000 escaped over the border to Mexico and 1.5 million were displaced during the course of nearly four decades of war.

Yet, the victims of state-sponsored violence in Guatemala are still waiting for the day when those responsible for the torture,murder and disappearances of their friends and families will pay for their crimes.

“There is a lack of recognition of violence in the (Latin American) region,” said John JayProfessor Marcia Esparza, a recognized Guatemalan scholar. “Within the field of genocide studies, there is no recognition of what Guatemala suffered. There was no International Criminal Court. There were International Criminal Courts for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but there was no International Criminal Court to try to bring the perpetrators in Guatemala to justice.”

Esparza’s Interest
Esparza became involved with Guatemala and its indigenous community through a human rights internship in 1992 that dealt with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala. Coincidentally, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the Guatemalan human-rights activist and Nobel Prize Laureate, was affiliated with that organization as well.

On her own, Esparza visited the Guatemalan refugee camps, visiting different communities that had been displaced by the war. In 1997, she was hired as an international consultantand field researcher to the U.N. Guatemalan Truth Commission. During the three years she spent in Guatemala, Esparza conducted hundreds of interviews with survivors.

“That’s when I realized the magnitude of the violence,” she said.

Esparza spent 1997 to 2000 “vicariously bearing witness” to the Guatemalan genocide by collecting testimonies from survivors living in refugee camps. After joining John Jay in 2000 as an assistant professor in the Department of Latin American and Latina/oStudies, she began creating the Historical Memory Project (HMP) as a way of “preserving the memory of violence in theregion as it affects vulnerable populations.”

The Historical Memory Project, that has since grown to include other Latin American countries, is unique. While there are similar projects in the United States, none, she believes, pertain specifically to Latin Americaand the history of state-sponsored violence in the region.

Memory Politics The project is also a significant part of a larger global movement called “memory politics” that emerged from human rights activism in South Africa and the Latin American countries of the Southern Cone — Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. It refers to how societies that have suffered under repressive regimes handle these legacies of brutality once they have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. It is often accomplished through truth commissions or the passing of amnesty laws that give perpetrators of human rights violations immunity from prosecution.

“My aim and the aim of people working with me are to try to preserve this history as truthful,”said Esparza. “There are many truths. Who is to say who has the truth? But, we have a body of evidence, pictures, oral testimonies that account for a specific truth.That’s the memory I’m trying to keep alive.”

Assisting Esparza in this work are several John Jay students who come from other Latin American countries, including Colombia and Argentina. The HMP was expanded to include these and other nations, Esparza explained,because it was evident that there was a pattern to the violence that stretched from Mexico down to the Caribbean.

While the extinction of indigenous peoples is crucial to an understanding of how terror is institutionalized in Latin America, the HMP now also examines violence directed at urban populations, as well.

“When I compare what happened in Chile and Guatemala, of course there are differences but there are also many similarities,” said Esparza, who is Chilean. “I think the common denominator, one common denominator, is the role played by the United States intervening militarily in all these countries to protect transnational economic interests.”

Students’ Research — A PersonalConnection
Jenny Escobar, 28, moved to the United States from Colombia when she was nine. She graduated from John Jay in 2005 with a degree in forensic psychology and is now pursuing a doctorate in social psychology with a focus on social justice from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As one of Esparza’s mentees under the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Escobar spent two years researching the Guatemalan Truth and Reconciliation Commission from a psychological perspective. However, her dissertation is on collective memory in Colombia.

Escobar’s family experienced little direct violence. Her mother and extended family came to the United States for economic opportunities that were unavailable in their country.

Still, “my focus on Colombia definitely comes from my personal history. The more I learn about Colombia and the history of the time my mom emigrated,” said Escobar,“I think it has to a lot to do with the result of the conflict.”

Were it not for “neo-liberal policies,” like free-trade agreements, “we wouldn’t be poor,”said Escobar. “There is a lot of exploitation from transnational companies; not only in the U.S., but around the world. I see my mother’s moving [to the U.S.] in a larger political context.”

As part of a human rights delegation to Colombia last year, Jenny Escobar found that while the families of those who disappeared may ultimately want perpetrators punished, for now, they are seeking a more personal sort of justice.

“It’s a first step,” she said. “Trying to find out what happened, and trying to find the bodies of those who disappeared has given them alot of strength to get together and get this done, as opposed to waiting for the criminal justice system to bring them justice from the top down.”

Another of Esparza’s HMP students, Lina Rojas, is specifically researching Colombia. She is a junior in her first year as a McNair Scholar. Unlike Escobar, Rojas, who is 20,was born in the United States. Her extended family remains in Colombia. 

“I basically grew up hearing about all the violence that went on there because it is awar that has been going on for about 40 years,” she said. “That’s all I’ve known of theplace.”

As recently as October 2008, the BBC reported that 7,763 people disappeared in Colombia between January 1, 2007 and October 21, 2008. The figures come from a study by the country’s National Commission for the Search for Missing Persons. Of those missing, the Commission has established that 1,686 were forced disappearances.

Arie Braizblot, 23, another student, focused his research on Chile and Argentina. However, unlike Escobar and Rojas, who emigrated from Colombia out of economic necessity, his family escaped from Argentina.Braizblot’s father left Poland one step ahead of the Nazis during the 1930s, then was forced to leave Argentina in the 1970s when a military junta took over the country.

Now, enrolled in an international affairs graduate program at Brooklyn College, Braizblot is planning to join the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer or another government agency as a political scientist and expert on Latin America.

It is not surprising these students want to participate in the HMP, observes Esparza.Coming from countries that have been devastated by war, they are seeking answers. “They want to understand.”

Concluding Thoughts
According to Esparza, “Violence in Latin America is often ‘ghetto-ized’ by scholars and policymakers who believe it only pertains to the study of the region. And, there may beeven darker reasons for that.”

An entire chapter of her upcoming book State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years is devoted to why there has never been an international tribunal to investigate the Guatemalan genocide, as there has been for Cambodia and other countries. “I attribute the invisibility to A) it’s Central America and B) it relates to indigenouspeople,” says Esparza. “To my eyes, it’s a bigdose of racism, of rendering indigenouspeoples’ genocide invisible.”

Esparza speculates that discrimination was also behind the lack of extensive media coverage as thousands upon thousands of Mayan people in Central America were tortured, murdered and conscripted intoparamilitary squads against their will.

Jennifer Nislow is senior writer at John Jay College.