Dignity Recovered at Last

XIQUIN SANAHI, Guatemala -- Inocente Tubac rose to tell the story of the dead for the first time.

In front of him, grim and rapt, stood their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. The silence was broken only by the fierce shushing of women trying to still the children who pingponged through the ranks of the adults.

A slight man whose thin mustache gives him the air of a 1930s movie star, Tubac pulled out a white sheet of paper and began to recount the days of slaughter. Pine incense filled the chill mountain air and dark clouds tumbled overhead.

Some had been killed when the army tossed grenades into the village church. Others were taken from their homes and shot in front of their families. Others simply disappeared, their bodies later found tossed in shallow graves.

Now they were back at last, all of them, 75 men, women and children. Their bones rested in a long row of pine coffins that filled the same white church where so many had died some 20 years before.

“In this moment, we remember the pain that we’ve had,” said Tubac, 43, speaking this month in front of the church, still pockmarked with bullet holes. “It’s a great day since now we can give them the dignified burial that they deserve.”

It is a scene repeated throughout Guatemala’s remote highlands these days as villages like Xiquin Sanahi rebury the victims of hundreds of massacres that took place during the country’s 35-year civil war between the Guatemalan army and leftist rebels.

A United Nations-backed truth commission created as part of the peace accords that ended the conflict in 1996 encouraged forensic teams to investigate the killings, even though the agreement granted amnesty for all but the gravest of crimes, such as genocide or torture.

Since then, forensic teams funded largely by the U.S. have exhumed more than 250 sites. The teams operate with the approval of the Guatemalan government, though they are independent organizations.

Now the teams have begun to rebury the bodies to help provide closure to the mostly indigenous communities that bore the brunt of the scorched-earth campaign undertaken by the Guatemalan army and paramilitary forces in the early 1980s as they pursued the leftist rebels.

As hamlet after hamlet has reburied its dead, more and more villagers have come forward to tell their stories. Long silenced by fear, they now see a benefit to talking: the possibility of having the bodies of their own loved ones returned.

“People say, ‘I didn’t come forward before because there was nothing in it for me,’ ” said Sergio Pivaral, a human rights advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has given more than $5 million for exhumations over the past several years. “Now we can offer them something.”

As a result, human rights investigators have recalculated the scale of violence in Guatemala’s civil war, which, with a death toll of more than 200,000, claimed more lives than the Cold War-era conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Argentina combined.

Instead of the 669 massacres tallied by the truth commission, forensic investigators believe there could have been more than twice that many -- 1,700 incidents in which four or more people were killed.

“It’s difficult to understand and impossible to explain. How did it happen?” said Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, the largest forensic group. “All I know is that it needs to be investigated.”

The reburial ceremonies are also the latest evidence that Guatemala is still struggling to overcome the legacy of its long and brutal conflict.

The peace accords have stalled. None of 14 laws the United Nations considered crucial have been passed. One of the most important is reparations for victims of human rights abuses.

The wounds are angry and obvious. Senior military officers accused of committing grave human rights violations remain free. Rights workers are increasingly the victims of savage attacks. Amid so much past and present pain, the exhumations and reburials provide concrete proof of the horrors the villagers suffered. A proper burial has become a way of giving peace to the living as well as the dead.

Life has always been tough in Xiquin Sanahi, a hamlet of mud-brick huts with corrugated tin roofs that clings to the spine of a mountain. Its few hundred inhabitants are mostly poor Kaqchikel Mayas who make their living growing corn and beans in the milpas, or fields, that pattern the steep slopes like a quilt.

The village lies at the end of a dirt road that weaves through an uninhabited valley before rising up a mountain covered in pine forest. It is the kind of place the Guatemalan government has long forgotten. For as long as anyone can remember, many of its people have lived and died within sight of the village church.

The village is in the department of Chimaltenango, a guerrilla stronghold during the war. Many who lived in Xiquin Sanahi then were sympathetic to the guerrillas’ goals of a more equitable distribution of land and wealth.

So when the guerrillas launched an offensive in the region in the summer of 1981, the army struck back hard at the villagers, perceiving them as rebel supporters. At first, villagers simply disappeared, whisked away in the night by masked men.

But in January 1982, people had gathered in the town church at the request of the rebels to hear a speech. Tipped off, the army stormed the town.

Two rebels standing guard opened fire when they saw the soldiers approach. The army counterattacked, shooting everyone who tried to flee, and tossing grenades into the church to finish off the survivors.

Twenty-nine people were killed that day: one guerrilla and 28 villagers, 17 of them children. It was the beginning of an orgy of bloodletting that continued for more than a year.

Survivors remember it as a time of constant deprivation.

“We who survived abandoned our houses and hid in the woods, suffering hunger, rain, cold and sickness,” said Juan Calicio, 45, whose father, grandmother and grandfather were killed in 1982 in separate incidents.

After each attack, the villagers would hurriedly bury the dead wherever they could: in peach orchards or corn fields, in mass graves near the church or hidden in the woods.

The killings went all but unnoticed by the outside world. The truth commission’s 1999 catalog of massacres made only a passing reference to the incidents here, citing a report that 60 people had been killed in the town in 1981. But the date is wrong, and none of the dead are named.

And so it would have remained if the villagers had not heard from a local nonprofit group dedicated to indigenous rights about the possibility of the excavations. They made a request to local authorities, as is required, and the digging began in February 2002.

A team of about a dozen anthropologists spent nearly two weeks digging up graves the villagers pointed out. In the end, they had bones from 68 bodies. Those from seven more were found later in a nearby town.

In the months that followed, forensic investigators studied each set of remains. Most of the dead appeared to have been shot. Six showed signs of having been beaten to death. In one grave, anthropologists found the skeleton of a woman and the skulls of three people who apparently were decapitated.

Of the 44 bodies whose sex and age could be determined, only seven were adult men. The rest were women and children. The estimated ages ranged from 5 months to 87 years.

The examination took more than a year. Most of the bodies were identified by villagers, who either remembered where the victims were buried or what they were wearing when they were killed.

Each set of bones was set into an individual pine box with a simple flower carving on the side. The boxes were stacked in a secured room and wrapped with plastic tape with the word “Evidence” on it. The findings could be used in a court of law, though Guatemala’s corrupt and overburdened judicial system has sentenced only a handful of people for war crimes since the accords were signed.

For the first time, each set of bones had a name. And for the first time, the horror of Xiquin Sanahi had been documented.

“Our history of violence has left a mark on every person here,” said Andres Tubac, a village elder. “For the history of Guatemala, it’s necessary to tell the story.”

So on a drizzly gray day, Inocente Tubac read the villagers’ account of the carnage as the town gathered in front of the white church.

They stood in a ragged semicircle around the rectory, a crude structure of unpainted cinder block.

The women wore huipiles, traditional blouses woven in intricate patterns and bright colors. Some of the men had procured suit jackets, wearing them over tattered shirts and mud-stained pants to provide a rough dignity to the event.

Tubac spoke from the porch of the structure. His blue cardigan seemed to swallow his frame.

“We want people -- nationally and internationally -- to know what we suffered,” he said, his hands shaking as he read his speech. “We are now living a moment of relief. It gives us some happiness, but also sadness since we must relive the past.”

After Tubac and the other community leaders gave their accounts of the killings, villagers transferred the remains from the old church to a new one built next door. The coffins lay inside, each with a candle on top. Plain wooden pews were pushed back against the walls to make room for them.

Because of a bureaucratic mix-up, one set of bones was not placed into its coffin until the day of the burial. One of the anthropologists carefully took the bones of Juliana Diaz’s 15-year-old cousin out of a Manila envelope and laid them in the box.

As the worker was about to shut the lid, Diaz stopped her, and pulled a small white handkerchief from her bag. She laid it across the bones, then closed the lid. Later, she explained that she did not want her cousin to be cold. “I wanted to feel like he was a little bit dressed,” she said.

Next came the services to bless the dead. The priest spoke first in Spanish, then in the thick, clackety language of the Kaqchikel Mayas. His message was simple:

“This has left our families grieving,” Father Eleobardo Tu- yuc said to the congregation. “Naturally, we want some justice.”

When the service ended, the townspeople picked up the coffins and walked outside. The women balanced them on top of their heads. The men carried them under their arms or held them gently on their heads.

They walked down the dirt road toward the cemetery. Soon, they straggled into a line about 200 yards long.

They wound their way to a small rise overlooking the mountains. There, in the town cemetery, the people had built a mausoleum of whitewashed concrete. One by one, they slid the coffins into numbered niches.

A gentle rain began to fall, tapping the canopy overhead like a drum. The men dug into a mound of sand and began mixing concrete to seal the tombs.

The dead of Xiquin Sanahi were at last at rest.