THE WAR IN MY TOWN

By Silvia Puac Hernández

Guatemala had a civil war that lasted thirty-six years. The war started at the University of San Carlos where the children of poorer families attended college, and it ended in December, 1996, when a peace accord was signed. There wasn’t constant war for the whole thirty-six years. The fighting would flare up and die down, and it would move from place to place.

It came to the town where I grew up for several months in the 1980’s when I was nine years old. This was a town of a couple of thousand people in the department of Chimaltenango, but during the fighting, almost nobody stayed in the town at night. They all went out to hide in the woods before dark, and they would come back home after daybreak when the soldiers would be gone. The fighting only went on at night. All night long, we would hear: Poom! Poom! Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa! The next day, there would be cadavers in the streets. These would not just be shot to death, but tortured. I didn’t see this, because my mother wouldn’t let me look, but my brothers saw, and would describe it to me. There might be a head over here, and an arm over there, and the rest of the body was some other place.

My father worked in Sololá, which was about thirty-five minutes away by bus, but he rode his bicycle, which took an hour and a quarter. He said that at this same period, there were always cadavers along the road to Sololá in the mornings, too. Nobody talked about this with other people in the town, though. Nobody dared to say anything about what went on, because you didn’t know who was on which side, and if you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, you might find yourself on the death list of one side or the other.

We never knew which side was coming into town, the army or the rebels, because they all wore balaclavas pulled down over their faces with just their eyes and mouths showing. Sometimes both sides came into town and shot at each other, but usually they were looking for people who lived in the town to kill them. We lived in houses with walls of caña, or dried corn stalks, with straw roofs, so you could hear everything that went on. My family always stayed in the house overnight instead of hiding in the woods, and a couple of times I heard our neighbors’ doors get kicked in, but the houses were empty, and the men went away without firing any shots.

If a man joined either the army or the rebels, the other side might kill his whole family. People who went out of town to hide at night often climbed up in high trees, and would sleep up in the trees at night. The soldiers would sneak around the coffee groves all night looking for people, but they would never find anybody who was high up in a tree.

One of our neighbors was warned by someone that he had been placed on a death list, and he left town altogether. He was gone several weeks, but one morning his body turned up in town. He had been tortured. Among other things, wires had been woven into his flesh. I went up to the casket at the funeral and looked in at his body. He had a blood bag over his head. When your face is disfigured, they put a plastic bag over your head for the funeral, and tie it around your neck. But you could see through the plastic bag, and I saw that he had no eyes.

This was during the presidency of Efraín Ríos Montt, who is now the Secretary General, and who holds all the real power in the FRG. He knew about all this, because he would go on the radio the next day and announce that the army had gone into such and such a town the night before and had protected the people from the rebels. Nowadays, we think it was more the case that the rebels were protecting us from the army, because a lot of people think that Ríos Montt was mainly interested in suppressing the Indians.

Ríos Montt made a law that nobody was allowed out of their houses after 6:30 at night, and if the army found you out in the street after dark, they would kill you. My father’s work kept him out after 6:30, and sometimes he would not come sneaking home until after midnight. By the grace of God, he was never caught.

It was really my brother who saved us all during this time, because we had no books or television, and we knew nothing, but he had it in his blood to be a soldier. He did not learn about warfare from anyone, but was born with the knowledge. When he was very little, he took a big stick and used a machete to carve it into the shape of a rifle. He was fourteen years old when the war came to our town. He told us that instead of eating at the table at night, we ought to eat under the table, and we listened to him. He said that we should sleep on the ground so that bullets would not find us so easily, and we did it.

There were usually three days every year when the army recruited new soldiers. Everybody was supposed to serve in the army whether they wanted to or not. The way the army recruited was they would see a man on the street who they wanted and would just go and grab him, and he would then be in the army. Unlike the great majority, my brother wanted to be in the army, so when he heard the army was recruiting, he went and sat in the park, and of course the army eventually came along and took him. He got to be a sergeant by the end of the war. Now he works for a private security company, and is in charge of the security at a factory in Guatemala City. It is a dangerous job, because a lot of guards get shot. Most people say most of the violence there is today is from the civil war, and is the fault of the peace accords of 1996. For thirty-six years people had learned to do bad things, and when the war ended, there was no work for them, so they just went on doing bad things.