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The Passion Story of Holy Week is a painfully sobering tale that is always contemporary. Humankind, from our earliest development eons ago through what I suspect to be our final resting place, seeks to annihilate that which threatens our power. We kill repeatedly, willingly, and horrifically other human beings.

We often carry out these acts of aggression with our holy books in hand. We often stand watching, silently with our holy books in hand. We often go to our violent deaths with our hold books in hand.

My Lenten, Passion Week reading has been Silence on the Mountain, stories of terror, betrayal, and forgetting in Guatemala. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, it could be a story of too many countries. Past, present and future, there are chilling patterns in our capacity for cruelty. I believe that it is imperative that we read and hear today’s gospel text and the horrific texts to follow through Friday with a mindset focused not on 2000 years ago but rather on the present. Think in terms of reading the newspaper instead of the Bible.

Part III. Chapter 1.

“Long before any houses burned, there had been a law that could have made a difference in Guatemala. Or rather there had been a law that, for a brief two years, did make a difference – such a difference that even after it was revoked and its authors were in exile or unmarked graves, it continued to shape the way Guatemalans understood their place in the world. The law was Decree 900, the 1952 “Law of Agrarian Reform.” Its overarching aim, set forth in its opening paragraph, was to “overcome the economic backwardness” of the country and “improve the quality of life of the great masses.” Whether it could have achieved these ambitious ends will never be known. In 1954, the CIA toppled Guatemala’s reform government. A military regime took power. The reformers were driven underground. And the country began its long terrifying descent into a state of lawlessness, cruelty, and despair.

The United States celebrated the coup as a triumph for democracy. For years to come, the cold warriors in Washington held it up as a model for what covert operations could accomplish overseas. Yet few Americans really knew what had taken place in Guatemala in 1954. The press coverage had been carefully choreographed by the CIA. Even the New York Times had complied with the agency’s request to keep its correspondent from the country so that he could not give a firsthand account of the coup and its aftermath.

The Times would eventually cover the story more fully. But only forty years later. In 1997, access to once classified documents (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) would provide the Times and the US public with a more reliable account of the 1954 operation. Among the documents was a history commissioned by the Agency and published for internal consumption in 1994. Unfortunately, this declassified history was riddled with holes – names, facts, and descriptions that the Agency had excised on the grounds that, even after forty years, there were some things that the public should not know.

The biggest hole left in the story was how the coup affected the countryside, where the process of agrarian reform, which had been gathering momentum for two years, was brought to a sudden halt.”

How did this coup which resulted in a 36 year civil war affect the displaced native people and peasants that slaved on the coffee plantations?

There had been a massacre on the mountaintop of Sacuchum. It, like so many other atrocities, was rarely discussed.  Intimidation and violence, alive and well still today, keep the people afraid and silent. The author over years of relationship building with respected leaders was invited to the Sacuchum community.

Part IV Chapter 1

When Fabian finished, all eyes focused on me. I cleared my throat and spoke slowly, first thanking Fabian for inviting me here. I said I couldn’t offer the community anything other than to record what they told me and try to let people know about it. I said that my aim wasn’t to create any problems for anybody – neither the victims nor the perpetrators – but only to find out what had happened.

I stopped talking and the room was silent, but for the pattering of the rain on the roof above. I opened my notebook. “So to begin…” I thought a moment, how should I begin? And opted for a specific question. “When exactly did the army arrive in town?”

Again there was silence. I looked around at the unfamiliar faces. They looked back at me. The question hung in the cold air between us. I glanced over to Fabian, but it didn’t appear that he was gong to answer it. I saw one of the young men in the back step out the door into the rain, and I imagined he was off to report what I had said. My eyes wandered the room, and my mind searched for a way to wrap up this meeting as quickly as possible.

Then I saw an arm rise in the far corner of the room and a shadow of a man step forward. I nodded to him, and he began to speak.
“It was the first of January 1982, a Friday …”

There had been a battle in the woods below, and all day long they had listened to the army bombing the mountainside. Then on Saturday the soldiers came up the mountain from all sides and surrounded the valley. The people had no idea what the army intended to do. So they waited. And on Sunday morning the soldiers came down into the town.

“That wasn’t the first time we’d had trouble, you know,” the man said, hesitating as if unsure whether it was okay to backtrack. I nodded for him to go on. “Earlier in the year, four of us were stopped by soldiers when we were returning from La Igualdad. They kicked us hundreds of times, all over.” He put his hands now on his chest and stomach, as if massaging old wounds. “I was sick for four years after that. After beating us, they tied our arms to boards and made us walk uphill, like we were carrying crosses.”

Again there was silence. I had never heard anyone in Guatemala talk like this in public. I looked around the room to see if others would join him. But no one spoke. So I threw out another question. “How many soldiers came into town that day?”

This time it was Apolinario who answered. “There was an enormous number of them – a few hundred soldiers. And more in the hills around town. And there were helicopters, three helicopters, that circled overhead. The soldiers ordered everyone into the center of town. And they dragged people out of their houses.”

The man in the corner said, “They dragged some by their hair. They knocked people to the ground as they walked.”

Now an older man who was sitting in one of the back rows spoke up: “And they went into the homes and took whatever they wanted. They took radios, clothes, money, whatever they could find.”
From the corner: “And they raped the women.”

Silence again. I imagined the scene: soldiers swarming up over the mountaintop and down into the valley. What I couldn’t conjure up was what had gone on in the houses, the images that must have been playing back now in those eyes that were watching me.

“How many people were raped?” “About twenty,” Apolinario said.
No one elaborated, so I moved on. “And what happened next?”

The man in the corner spoke: “They gathered us into the plaza in front of the church. And there a captain spoke to us from the belfry. “Today you will be punished,” he told us. “It’s known that you are bad, that the guerrillas have been here, that they’re here because they’re fed by you. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your support.’ And he said, ‘Fish only live where there is water. You here are the water. When the pond dries up, the fish dies. We’re going to take care of you, so that the fish will die.’ Someone in the crowd spoke up: Please, senor, God does not permit this.’ The captain yelled at him: ‘Here there is no God! Here there is only the Devil!”

The soldiers then herded the people out to the soccer field and made them form a line and present themselves, one at a time, before a group of officials who stood with a civilian wearing a hood. The officials had a list of names and occasionally they would ask the hooded person: “Is it this one?” The people who appeared on the list were taken by the soldiers. The rest were ordered to return to their houses. There were to be no lights or fires, and anyone who ventured outside would be shot.

The older man said: “People couldn’t cook. They couldn’t sleep. They passed the night worrying, waiting for their relatives who had been taken away.”

I looked at the women who sat in the front row like a silent chorus. It occurred to me now that they weren’t as old as I had first thought. Yet there was something that made them appear prematurely aged. Their faces had that parched look you see in people who are perennially exposed to the sun in the Andes and other high places. Which was strange since this mountain wasn’t that high and the other people in the room didn’t have it.

The women gazed back at me, and when our eyes met they didn’t look away, as they probably would have under other circumstances. It was as if our gazes never really met, as if it wasn’t me they were looking at, but something I represented – something that, for some reason, was in fact important.

Apolinario spoke: “The soldiers left town on Monday morning. Before going, they announced that the people were not to leave their homes for the rest of the day or they would be killed. But as soon as the soldiers left, some of us went out.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.
The man in the corner answered, “They said they’d kill us if we went out. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to find out where my brothers were. I was ready to die if I had to.”

Apolinario said, “Some people had seen the soldiers leading the prisoners into the woods. So we went to investigate, climbing up the ridge and down the other side. It was around ten in the morning that we found the first bodies. They were half-buried, in ditches, five or six people in each ditch.”

“There were my brothers. They had their throats slit.”
“Many of them had their throat cut. Like animals.”

Some had been strangled. They put a cord around their neck, tied it to a stick, and turned the stick until they were choked.”
“Forty-four people had been killed. And no bullets had been fired.”

There was a moment of silence while I scribbled in my notebook. Then a new voice spoke. A woman’s voice. I looked up and saw her traje, and it suddenly dawned on me: of course, these must be the widows. Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were fixed intently upon me, first on my face, then on my notebook, as if she wanted to make sure I wrote down her words. I did write them, and I kept writing as the other people around her began to speak. Later I would remember the look of her face, determined and defiant, as if she were standing at a floodgate and, having just pulled the lever, was bracing herself for the deluge. And it came, from all around her, new voices, with new details, about throats and fingers and skin, but none so horrifying to me as what she had said: “They cut out their tongues.”

Kyrie Elision. Christe Elision. Kyrie Elision.

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