Status Updates From Unfinished Conquest: The Gu...

“The lunch she and Calixta prepared included herbs they picked in the campo and corn tamales with chipilín, a native herb, Cakchiquel style.”

“We are the result of the sexual violence of the Spanish conquistador against the Maya woman.” - A ladino anthropologist

“…compared to the fragmentary data we have collected about the Mayas, the lives of Egyptian Pharaohs who ruled three millennia ago read like an open book.”

“‘…Their anthropologists come to study our customs but don’t seem to pay any attention to the homeless people in their cities. North Americans should work to save their own culture before they come down to Guatemala to pretend to save ours.’”

“‘The guerrillas demanded our allegiance, but when the army came, they abandoned us to our fate. As far as I am concerned, the army and the guerrillas are the sane. They are all bad. If any one of them show their faces here again, I will boil water and throw it in their faces.’”

“I did gather sufficient evidence to indict the Guatemalan army of heinous crimes against the indigenous communities of northern Quiché. The campaign of ethnic extermination in the Ixil Triangle by a military elite armed and advised by Israel, the United States, Taiwan—among others—far exceeds the means necessary to neutralize a guerrilla force [of no more than 8,000].”

“Elliott was harshly critical of the army’s activities in the Ixil area and said he feared a total military victory as much as a guerrilla takeover. ‘One way or another,’ he said, ‘the Indian always gets it in the neck.’”

“‘Operación Ixil,’ as the campaign was described in military publications, was the cornerstone of a much larger plan of counterinsurgency whose objective was to wipe out the peasant support bases of the two leftist guerrilla organizations most active in the highlands and to bring 4 million Mayas living there (out of a total Guatemalan population of about 7.5 million in 1981) under direct military control.”

“The view that the contemporary Maya, in particular, is in some way subhuman is all too common among Guatemala’s military officers, worthy successors to conquistador Pedro de Alvarado. Their training in the Politécnica, Guatemala’s military academy, includes conditioning that breeds contempt for everything Indian, as well as a visceral disdain for all intellectuals and most politicians.”

“The transitive verb ‘desaparecer’ (to disappear) originated in Guatemala.”