Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

GUATEMALA CITY — Her eyes darted here and there, searching the forest for signs of the trickster.

Hidden in the shadows, someone lobbed pine cones, one after another.

The girl pressed close to her sisters, only pretending to be afraid. Somebody was playing a prank. Who, she did not know.

A man stepped into the open.

“Papa! Papa!” the girls cried with joy. Then, as in all dreams, the moment passed.

For as long as she can recall, Maria Ixcoy has dreamed of the forest and the father she never knew.

Anastasio Ixcoy was a weaver who lived in a tiny hamlet near the city of Santa Cruz del Quiche in the central Guatemalan highlands. He died when Maria Ixcoy was 3, among the legions of people in his country swallowed by political violence. Now 27, his daughter can’t remember the sound of his voice, or the caress of his nimble fingers.

Instead, she has the dream.

The truth found Ixcoy one day as she struggled to build a life in Guatemala’s capital city. The dream, she realized, was a remnant of her father’s love.

He had played with her in the forest, not long before men with guns took him away.

 

Silence breeds cruelty. It seals lips and helps people disappear into graves nobody remembers. Silence infected Guatemalans during the civil war that played out for much of Ixcoy’s life. It continues today, as the country bleeds from new violence connected to drug trafficking, street crime and government corruption.

“The worst is, nobody talks about it, about the psychological effects the war has left on all of us — the great emptiness that it leaves in the family and the society,” Ixcoy said. “At times, I wish it was a dream.”

She was still just a child during the early 1980s when the military government controlling Guatemala launched La Violencia. The wave of politically motivated slaughter was the darkest chapter of a 36-year civil war that divided the country starting in 1960.

The government said the violence was necessary to contain communist guerillas. In truth, there was a darker agenda. An estimated 200,000 people were exterminated in what an independent United Nations commission determined was genocide aimed at the descendants of the Maya, the country’s most numerous — and poorest — population.

Today, Ixcoy has grown to be everything the killers tried to eradicate.

She is Mayan and proud. Like many university students in Latin America, she admires Che Guevara, the long-dead guerilla who in Guatemala is as much a symbol of self-determination as a purveyor of leftist politics. Although she stands just 4 feet 6 inches tall, about the height of a typical third-grade student in the U.S., Ixcoy’s dark chocolate eyes flash with strength.

She wants a country where people work together to repair the damage of the civil war. On her shoulder she carries a knotted wool handbag like those her father made. Woven into the front, in big red letters, is the word describing what she prizes most: justicia — justice.

Ixcoy has learned her father attempted to organize other Mayan families in his village to protest the dominion a wealthy few held over the poor. Those in power felt threatened. He was arrested by police. When he persisted, he was arrested by the Guatemalan military and beaten in front of his family.

Fearing for the safety of his pregnant wife and four children, Ixcoy’s father left for the anonymity of Guatemala City. That’s where he disappeared.

Maria Ixcoy grew up being told her father had been killed in a traffic accident. It was the type of lie that was routine during the war, when people feared that speaking about the evil around them was the surest way to bring killers to their door.

“In that time, everybody kept quiet,” she said. “They never told the truth, and that was a form of self protection.

 

With her father gone, Ixcoy began working at 4, watching over sheep and cattle.

At 10, she left her childhood home in the highlands to work as a maid in Guatemala City. Her mother didn’t support the move, but the family had little choice. There would be one less mouth to feed at home. Ixcoy could send home money to help support her younger siblings.

She arrived in the nation’s capital unable to read, write or speak Spanish. For four years, she worked in the homes of middle-class Guatemalans, mostly people who claimed some European ancestors. That made them different.

Each employer gave her a place to sleep. They all ordered her not to eat from their plates or drink from their cups. In some homes, she was threatened with physical and sexual abuse.

Life began changing at 14 when she took a job caring for three boys, ages 7 to 10. Their mother was more accepting of Mayans. She encouraged Ixcoy to spend her days off attending classes and studying.

Ixcoy was 22 when she completed her final examinations, earning the equivalency of a high school education in the United States. That’s something achieved by only two in 10 Guatemalan students. Her final research project focused on the peace accords that had ended Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

 

By then, the war’s violence was a personal story.

The truth tapped on her shoulder one Sunday when she was 15.

“I think something magical happened,” Ixcoy said.

She was in the plaza in the city’s center, not far from the Metropolitan Cathedral and its genocide memorial. A Mayan woman whom Ixcoy didn’t know asked the name of her father.

Why? The stranger said Maria Ixcoy’s strong features reminded her of Anastasio Ixcoy, a man she’d once loved as a brother.

The woman then said she was there that night in 1980 when paramilitary killers led the weaver to his death. The woman’s brother also was killed that night.

Learning how her father really died was both a shock and a revelation.

Her mother always discouraged asking questions. She’d burned the weaver’s belongings, as if erasing evidence that he had ever lived would keep her children safe.

That secret family history called to Ixcoy. She needed to know the man who brought her into this world.

Without knowing her past, how could she understand her future?

 

The killers came in a pickup truck and a car with tinted windows. Ixcoy’s uncle and a cousin, then 15, were visiting her father in Guatemala City. They, too, were abducted.

The captives were jammed into a room, stripped of their belongings, beaten and questioned.

The teenage boy was let go. Ixcoy’s father and uncle were never seen again.

Relatives told Ixcoy how her cousin returned to the village and shared the news. He wanted to know why a man from the village was among those who came to get his dad and Ixcoy’s father.

Horrified and fearful, his family told him to shut up. He wouldn’t. A year later, at 16, he too disappeared.

The truth emerged by destroying the silence. She asked questions. She told her older sisters about the forest dream. They told her about the day in the woods, and the pine cones Anastasio Ixcoy had thrown.

In her mother’s house, forgotten in a corner, she found one of her father’s handwoven bags. Inside was the thread he’d used to make weavings. There also were a couple of photographs, the kind used for identification papers. They are the only surviving images of the weaver. She keeps a framed copy in her room.

Ixcoy is now taking college courses in education and sociology. She is a researcher for a human rights group. Her most rewarding work so far was the two years she spent as a street teacher, running classes for children who, like she once did, make their living at the margins of society.

Ixcoy draws strength from her father, from the dream he left her to fulfill.

“I feel he is always with me.”