Spring 2011 Issue - Lehman College

ims of Injustice
Photo by Estuardo Dieguez
kick and a slam of machine gun butts, the door gave way and
loudly fell to the floor. Seeking to protect her husband, Doña
Ana rose from bed and stood between the armed men and
her husband.
“They knocked me down on the ground,” she says with sadness,
as she clutches her stomach and rocks forward. “They
tied up my husband and kicked him and hit him with their
guns.” Doña Ana begins to cry as she recounts, “They took
him away.”
Doña Juana: Wiping the sweat from her brow with a small
hand towel, Doña Juana seats herself at the table. She has
been waiting nearly eight hours to give her testimony. Her skin
has a gray pallor accompanied by the thick cough associated with
tuberculosis. She immediately begins to speak, “My son was a catechist.
He knew how to read. Now in the village, no one knows how
to read. My son just disappeared.” She is desperate. She is hopeful.
“Do you know where he is?” she asks me. I am powerless and feel
close to useless as I explain that we are exhuming the victims of
the plaza massacre and that we do not know the fate or place of
burial of the disappeared.
Doña Rosario: In 1978, at 55 years of age, Don Manuel was
the eldest Maya priest in his village. He was a spiritual leader and
guide respected throughout Panzós. One year after the plaza massacre,
he and his wife Doña Rosario were awakened in the middle
of the night by the sound of a truck on the dirt road near their
home. Soldiers broke into the house and dragged the Mayan priest
out, wrapped in the hammock in which he had been sleeping. “They
were beating and kicking him with no mercy,” remembers Doña
Rosario. “That same night, the other priests disappeared, too.”
Doña Magdalena: Doña Magdalena‘s parents and brothers
survived the plaza massacre. Her husband was not so fortunate. “I
had ten children when my husband died in the plaza. But that year,
many people died, she explains, trying to give context to the incomprehensible
by making ordinary the extraordinary. She pauses for
a moment, nodding her chin and rocking her body, then she says
almost matter-of-factly, “It was a year of death.”
Photo by Larry Kaplow
The Plaza Massacre
All testimonies corroborated that those who had gone to the plaza
went because they needed land to cultivate their subsistence
maize crops. We reconstructed the massacre and the violence that
followed. Based on testimony, as well as municipal records, we
knew that at 9 a.m. on May 29, 1978, there was a burst of gunfire
into the crowd gathered in the Panzós plaza and that those who
were not shot fled. The fact that the Guatemalan army opened fire
into a crowd of civilians was not disputed.
“With just one burst of gunfire they killed the people,” said
María Maquín. “It was only just for a moment and everyone
fell there. I was so surprised because we had only arrived just
a few moments before. My grandmother was going to ask for
a favor. She said she wanted to speak with the mayor. But they
didn’t respond well to her. They answered, asking, ‘What do
you want?’ ‘For a little bit of land, that’s what we came for,’
she said. They responded, ‘There are your lands, there in the
cemetery.’ They opened fire, and I was in shock as I watched the
people die.”
May 29, 1998: The Reburial
Photo by Alyssa Butler
The auditorium in Panzós was filled to capacity
last summer to commemorate the 32nd
anniversary of the plaza massacre and to hear
from panelists that included Lehman Professor
Victoria Sanford (far left). Above, Maria
Maquin, who was twelve when she survived
the massacre, addresses the crowd (left) and a
widow remembers those who perished (top).
The following spring, on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre,
we returned the remains of the victims to the community for
continued on page 18
Lehman Today/Spring 2011 17