In a rural hamlet in Chimaltenango, the remains of dozens of victims of the Guatemalan armed conflict piled up in a dingy storage room for decades. Now, their families have begun a burial that the government had promised but never carried out.
Yuliana Ramazzini writes, movingly, in El Faro English about a long-delyed burial for victims of the internal armed conflict and reminds us about the violence, racism, and brutality of the Guatemalan armed forces, and the state, in that period and about the affect on individuals.
In the general cemetery of Pacoj, a rural hamlet in Guatemala, a smell of dampness guards a storage room of ossuaries in boxes stacked like reams of paper. Each one bears a number. Nothing else. Remains of women, men, girls, and boys massacred by the Guatemalan Army in 1982.
Some of the remains have been exhumed since 1998. Others in 2014. Since the room was built nearly 20 years ago, most have been waiting for a dignified burial — a promise the government made in the 1996 Peace Accords. It’s Monday, June 29. Today, they will finally be transferred to individual burial niches, each bearing a plaque with a name and a date. This will ensure they are not forgotten, a reminder of what was done to them under the army’s “scorched earth” policy.
Many in Guatemala are taking the day off for Army Day. It’s actually tomorrow, June 30, but the Domestic Tourism Law moved the holiday to today to create a long weekend. A small group of residents from several communities in San Martín Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango —70 kilometers from Guatemala City, among them Pacoj— got up early to walk along a narrow, steep dirt and gravel path to the top of a hill, to the Pacoj General Cemetery. Another group arrived by bus from the city.
They’re all Kaqchikel Maya, and although their colorful attire resembles flowers in a garden, the atmosphere is somber. Of course, it’s a cemetery, but there’s something unsettling about this one. The place is small. Two very slender columns hold up two iron gates that swing open in the middle, forming a rickety entrance. There are some 25 mausoleums of all sizes and colors, overtaken by vegetation. A cluster of empty, numbered niches sits to the left of the entrance. It’s a pyramid-shaped concrete structure that has just been built. At the very top is a cross bearing the inscription: Victims of the C.A.I., or Internal Armed Conflict.
You can read the full article, with photos, here, Pacoj Buries Its Victims of the War in Guatemala.
Categories: Accompaniment, Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Military, Racism, Solidarity in Action/Guatemala, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
Post comments here