From the depths I call to you, Yahweh. Lord listen to my cry for help! Listen compassionately to my pleading. (Psalm 130)
The next station on our pilgrimage was the church
and grounds of the parish of Espiritu Santo in the town of Zacualpa in the
Department of Quiché. Here we
experienced remnants of the war which killed 200,000 people, mostly indigenous.
A companion commented, “We were innocent of the story and it is graphic and
startling; they walked us through.”
Next to the church is a large white cross
about twenty feet high. The crossbar
displays the word ‘MARTYRES.’ The church grounds, the equivalent of a convent cloister,
were the site of massive killings of indigenous people by the military. Prisoners were tied to trees – tortured and
murdered. The ‘Santa Cruz,’ the holy
cross, became real.
Some
were murdered and tortured in the church itself. Statues and all symbols of Christianity were
destroyed.
Photos framed on the wall of the ‘cloister’
passageways showed the project of exhuming the bodies for proper burial after
the peace accords.
We were led to a small room off the ‘cloister.’ This was another site for torture and
murder. Torture instruments were
displayed on the wall. The horror of the
place came home when we were told that the black stains on the wall were blood
stains. At a corner of the room was a life size wooden statue of a Mayan woman
on one knee lamenting the desecration of humanity. She is a contemporary ‘mater
dolorosa.’
We then went to a small building with a dirt
floor for a prayer service. Attention
was directed to a topped well now functioning as a ceremonial fire pit. A Mayan woman as official spiritual guide conducted
the prayer ceremony at the side and over the fire pit.
The well itself is significant. The guide
explained that not only were people murdered and tortured, but the bodies thrown
into this well and two other wells. She
gave us wax candles of different colors representing the diversity of the
universe; our candles were lit and eventually placed in the center of the
fire. The wax melting together
symbolized the unity of the universe. We
prayed. After the ceremony, our guide
thanked us for listening and understanding that the civil war was not war, but genocide
– a revelation for most of us.
I asked a Guatemalan colleague - member of
Voces de La Frontera - if the killing of the indigenous was really racism. Couldn’t war on the indigenous be simply
economic? After all, the indigenous are
diametrically opposed to some neo-liberal policies. He said, “Racism is ‘infundido’ (inherent) in
the Guatemalan upper class.” In the
U.S., to the extent we don’t care to know or care what happened to the
indigenous in Guatemala, we internationalize our own inherent racism. Survival
of the fittest capitalism is an excuse for racism and genocide.
Despite war, the parish of Santo Espiritu flourishes. The building was filled with people preparing
for Holy Week. The church has been
repaired and replenished with sacred images.
The trees where prisoners were tortured and murdered have been cut down
and replaced, but the stumps serve as a reminder. We talked to students taking classes in hopes
of entering high school and college. It seemed to me that the Christian myth
survived the onslaught at Espiritu Santo, and now has a new respected partner
in Mayan spirituality to build a just society.
Ch ‘ilom kolonton – my heart is a warrior*
*Laughlin,
Robert, with woodblock prints by Naul Ojeda, Diccionario del Corazon,
from a Mayan dictionary compiled in 1599 by a Dominican Friar - metaphors of
the heart with the Spanish medieval translation and the modern Spanish
version. Taller Lenateros, San Cristobal
de las Casas, Mexico 2003.
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