Chapter 20: Populations in Resistance

Not all rural Guatemalans accepted army rule and the civil patrols. In 1993, residents of Santa Clara, a remote community in the mountains of northern Quiché, told their stories of government persecution to a research team from the CIIDH. Thus began the collection of testimonies that make up the heart of the CIIDH database. These "Communities of Population in Resistance" (CPRs), made up of peasant families that fled their homes in the early 1980s, were among the first rural victims to systematically denounce the State’s persecution, years before the official Historical Clarification Commission or the Catholic Church’s REMHI project began to take testimonies.

The CPRs are part of Guatemala’s population displaced by state violence, a population that in the early 1980s numbered as high as one million, over ten percent of the Guatemalan population at the time (Russell 1996: 5). This human disaster was, along with the mass killings, a product of a deliberate government policy.

Some of the displaced came from villages burned to the ground by the army for supposedly giving aid and comfort to the guerrilla movement. Others were victims of more selective government hostility, where the army effectively gave the local population a choice: stay and submit to their control, or flee settled villages for less militarized regions of the country or for the wilderness beyond the army’s reach.

Chapter 19 of this report concerns those who accepted army rule, including some who participated in the violence against other civilians. This chapter concerns those who never gave in to state terror, who in their resistance represented to the Guatemalan military the incompleteness of its desire to completely control the population.

Through mass killings and the destruction of homes, crops and livestock, the army under Lucas García and Ríos Montt made clear its intent to force hundreds of thousands of peasants from their homes. The army continued to pursue the displaced during their flight across the countryside. Even those who fled to save their lives were often viewed by the security forces as somehow "guilty" and worthy of death.

In many cases the army’s goal was to force those in hiding back into areas of government control, and into an elaborate system of model villages and political indoctrination camps (Jorhdal 1987; Centro de Estudios Integrados de Desarrollo Comunal 1990). Forced hunger, not just bombs and bullets, was used to discipline those who had yet to surrender. Meanwhile the guerrillas, especially the EGP, encouraged its supporters and others terrorized by state violence to hide and resist. Given the army’s persistence and cruelty, most of the displaced turned themselves in to the army within a short time, unable to withstand the privations of the life in the forest. But a considerable minority did not.

The history of the community of Las Majadas, in Aguacatán, Huehuetenango, illustrates the choices that faced those under army siege. Survivors’ testimony recalls how the army depopulated this K’iche’-speaking mountain village through a series of mass killings, beginning in April 1982. Survivors say that eventually everyone understood the army’s message: flee or we will kill you.

Some families escaped to the coastal plantations despite the lack of employment there in the middle of the year. Some of them eventually migrated to the capital. A few moved in with relatives in neighboring villages that the army had not treated so fiercely. Others begged town residents in Aguacatán to take them in, and a small K’iche’ colony established itself among Awakatekos living in the valley below. But another group of families, those most identified with the EGP guerrillas, fled away from government control, higher up the mountain, to the cold, windswept forests bordering the municipality of Nebaj.

At first they formed small, mobile settlements together with displaced residents of Parraxtut, Sacapulas and a number of villages of Nebaj. Though Las Majadas was by then an abandoned burned-out shell of a village, the forest dwellers continued to farm and raise animals on their plots of land. But by mid-1983 the army established a detachment on the mountaintop and cut off the refugees’ access to the Wednesday market at Parraxtut. Civil patrollers from nearby villages helped the army capture or kill a number of the refugees. The situation got worse when the army resettled Las Majadas under its strict control. Refugees in the forest found themselves under attack from their former neighbors.

Those who did not turn themselves in were forced to retreat further north into El Quiché, away from army/civil patrol control and towards remaining rebel strongholds. They moved slowly, subsisting mainly on wild greens and avoiding the army and the civil patrols in the settled villages. They eventually joined with Ixil refugees that the army had driven out of another area of resistance around Cerro Sumal, Nebaj. Together they continued north on foot. In other parts of the highlands—in southern Quiché, Chimaltenango, and Alta and Baja Verapaz—the displaced had nowhere to go and eventually turned themselves in to the army. But in northern Quiché, the isolation of the forests and the continued presence of the guerrillas allowed some to resist and survive.

In January 1984, this multi-ethnic group of refugees, including exiles from Las Majadas, reached the small burned-out village of Santa Clara, Chajul, deep in the forest and a few days walk from the nearest road. Residents there invited the newcomers to join their mobile community; many were themselves K’iche’s originally from Las Majadas who had settled the forest in a land colonization scheme fifteen years earlier only to have their homes and livelihood destroyed by the army’s scorched earth campaign in 1981 and 1982. Now Santa Clara was subject to regular army incursions from a base at Finca La Perla. Nevertheless, they kept their community together in the abundant forest. The Communities of Population in Resistance, the CPRs, were born.

Similar populations in resistance grew up around Cabá and Xeputul, in the mountains near Santa Clara, and further north in the warmer jungles of the Ixcán and the Petén.

Moving every week, sometimes as often as every two or three days, the exiles constructed rudimentary shelters from pox leaves, and subsisted on wild greens and edible tree roots that they dug up out of desperation. Corn was in short supply; army troops would burn any crops they found. Still, according to CPR members, they did occasionally manage to bring a small concealed crop to harvest.

For the rest of the decade the military laid siege to these areas of resistance. Army soldiers tried to capture the refugees in order to take them to their camp at Xemamatzé in Nebaj for six months of political reeducation. But residents established systems of self-defense, from vigilance patrols to staked pits, that slowed down army assaults. In addition, the CPRs counted on the armed support of the EGP. The rebels lurking presence in the dense forests made it dangerous for the army to spend any time in the area and made civil patrollers from nearby villages treat civilians in the CPRs with extreme caution. One leader of the CPRs believes that far more soldiers died during this siege than did refugees or rebel combatants.

In September 1987, the army moved most of its troop base and much of its firepower to northern Quiché for a "Year-End Offensive" to drive out the CPRs and eliminate the guerrilla presence. Key to the strategy were aerial bombardments of areas populated by civilians, though the army regularly denied they were taking place (Americas Watch 1988: 93).

Government bombs and bullets killed or wounded hundreds of CPR residents during the offensive. During the terror of the siege and over the next few years, thousands of others turned themselves in, as the army continued its stepped-up attacks on the populations in resistance. Still, the offensive only partially achieved its goal. In 1993, after over a decade of army repression in Santa Clara, the CPRs in the region still contained 17,000 residents, down from a peak of around 30,000 (Ecumenical Program on Central America 1993: 8, 11).

In 1990, the CPRs began to publicly demand recognition as a civilian population and an end to army hostilities. The government, far from considering the CPRs victims of its early 1980s overreaction, had done little to reach out to these survivors. Rather it continued to view them as an enemy population (Mack 1990). But in the new decade the government found itself limited in its ability to carry out an unlimited counterinsurgency. A combination of the effectiveness of the EGP’s defense of the CPRs (what they had been unable to do in the settled villages of the highlands), the CPRs own militancy and solidarity, and pressures from the international community, forced the government to end the siege. By 1992, the exiles began to build more stable homes and to integrate themselves into the economic life of the region. Their odyssey stands as a testament to the human capacity for survival in the face of unrelenting government atrocity.