Genocide Trial Most Tumultuous Week Yet

Survivors

Daughter supports mother, a widow whose husband was killed  in  the violence.

Witnesses for the defense of Gen. Efraín Rios Montt testified that life improved for indigenous Maya when he came into office in March, 1982, in the mountainous Ixil region.

Left, Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, president of the Foundation Against Terrorism, which published a 20-page newspaper insert on Sunday calling the genocide charge a "farce" and blamed a "Marxist" Catholic Church for sowing the seeds of violence with "revolutionary" theology.  Second from left, Zulema Paz de Rodriguez, wife of Rios co-defendant, former military intelligence chief Mauricio Rodriguez.  Third from left,  Zury Rios Sosa, former Guatemalan congress member and the strongman's daughter who married former Congressman Jerry Weller (R-IL) in 2004.  Right, unidentified companion of Zury Rios.

Spectators listened with stony faces in the packed courtroom. 

 Some 200,000, mostly unarmed indigenous, died during the armed internal conflict according to an estimate by a U.N.-sponsored truth commission. In a theatrical departure, defense attorneys abandoned the courtroom in protest at proceedings on the morning of April 18.

Alone at defense table, Gen. José Efraín Ríos Montt

Security was unable or unwilling to bring them back despite orders from the bench, or perhaps armed guards were unable to hear the order  in the ensuing hubbub.

Spectators and press in a crush to enter a separate, smaller courtroom where another judge "annulled" the trial going on in the Supreme Court Building

That afternoon a judge from another court ordered the trial halted. On the morning of April 19, however, the trial's presiding judge reiterated the tribunal's "independence," declared the previous day's order illegal and said the trial would continue.  Before exiting the court the three judges stood and acknowledged elated applause from the courtroom. "The tribunal appreciates your confidence in the justice system," said tribunal president, Jasmįn Barrios.

Survivors and others left the Supreme Court building for a demonstration and mile-long march to the Constitutional Court, where prosecutors filed a  formal request for review of the judge who ordered the trial annulled.

Here are two stories I've published in the last week about the genocide trial.

 National Catholic Reporter
New America Media

Before the Maya

 

      


THERE WERE THE OLMEC

The steamy east coast of Mexico is producing discoveries that are beginning to chip away at what we don't know about the mysterious Olmec civilization.  If they are famous at all, the Olmec are known for producing giant stone portraits in the round, beginning more than three thousand years ago in the regions of Veracruz and Tabasco. The imposing heads can weigh up to twenty-four tons. To see them  up close is to marvel at their individuality, and wonder how a people without the wheel managed to accomplish the task of their creation.

Those who have long claimed the Olmec were the mother civilization of Middle America, giving birth to the much-better documented Maya, have more and more to offer as suggestive evidence.

     When I think of Maya civilization certain images come to mind: the mighty jaguar; the Hero Twins whose valor and cleverness are central to the creation story in the Maya bible called the Popol Vuh; cranial deformation for beauty and status; the Maya calendar, still in use today and the Maya counting system expressed in bars and dots.

     The Olmec pieces from Mexico briefly in the United States now mirror these images, produced many years before that great Maya civilization appeared on the scene.  At the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where I visited recently as a member of the Bay Area Travel Writers
(allowing me to take these pictures inside the exhibit) colossal masterworks and fine smaller pieces are on display until May 8.  Have a look at the young twins on the left, and the larger royal twins on the right, and tell me if the Popol Vuh doesn't come to mind.  You haven't read it?  You must.  The translation by poet     Dennis Tedlock is my favorite.

                     In the same way, the bars and dots clearly seen here are like the Maya counting system, where the bar represents the number five, and the dot, one. The figures under the ball player's raised hand on the round stone on the right  (an altar?) might easily become, over the centuries, glyphs for three of the twenty "day signs" that mark a Maya month.

        The deformed heads, a sign of high status, are prominent in Olmec sculpture, as are jaguar faces on human bodies.

On occasion a pre-Columbian site will display both Olmec and Maya characteristics.  Last year I saw this at Tabalik Abaj in Guatemala near the border with Mexico, a site inhabited for more than two thousand years, from about 1000 B.C. until the great Maya collapse in about 900 A.D.  There are Olmec sculptures, and Maya features, a place where you can feel one civilization blending into another.

                                                         If you want to see how some of these huge pieces were moved from their homes on the Mexican coast to foggy San Francisco (very carefully), go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacma/sets/72157624945753603/show/                                                      

A Back Story (Maya Poetry panel)

The PUC campus where LASA is being held in Rio has its own rainforest....

Guatemala’s own Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for Literature rolled into one, the Miguel Angel Asturias prize, named after the country’s Nobel novelist (and father of guerrilla chief Gaspar Ilom), was presented to Humberto Ak’abal in 2004. He declined to accept it This shocked the country’s intellectual elite.

As a young writer, Asturias had opined on the majority Maya as a lesser kind of people, with passions and proclivities that signalled they were inferior to Guatemalans of European roots. His Social Problem of the Indian encouraged racism, Ak'abal said.

As I've said, I've known Humberto for years. In January, in Antigua, he told me he couldn't accept an honor named after Asturias. Humberto is gentle, peaceable; internationally and at home, he has accepted honors as a way of bringing light to Maya history, aesthetic, and living conditions. But even illiterate (but not uneducated) Maya know about this writing of Asturias, and there was no way he could accept, because he answered to his community.

“I am one of my people,” he said.

Arturo Arias has received the Miguel Asturias prize.

Coming: Marketing Memory, and Was there Genocide in Latin America or Not?

It's pouring like crazy in Copacabana as I write…