Educating citizens in postwar Guatemala: Historical memory, genocide, and the culture of peace

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 97, 2007, Pages 77-98

  Oglesby, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249822514     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-013     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Greg Grandin, "Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold: Violence, Trauma, and the Limits of Historical Inquiry," Nepantla 1 (2000):391-413;
2. Greg Grandin, "The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala," American Historical Review, no. 110 (2005): 46-67.
3. See Patrick Ball et al., "Democracy as Subterfuge? Researchers under Siege in Guatemala," LASA Forum 23 (2oo2): 6-10;
4. Rachel Sieder et al., Who Governs? Five Years after the Peace Accords (Cambridge, MA: Hemispheric Initiatives, 2002).
5. Myrna Mack was a Guatemalan anthropologist who studied the situation of the country's refugee and internally displaced populations. She was assassinated on September 11, 1990, by an army intelligence specialist, who was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. Myrna Mack's sister, Helen Mack, struggled for more than a decade to prosecute the high-ranking military officers who had ordered the murder, and the arduous legal process became one of Guatemala's most prominent human rights cases. In October 2002, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio was convicted of ordering Myrna Mack's assassination; he later fled the country and remains at large. For a chronology of the Mack case, see Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights), www.humanrightsfirst.org (accessed August 10, 2006).
6. Elizabeth Oglesby, "Desde los cuadernos de Myrna Mack" ("From the Notebooks of Myrna Mack"), in De la memoria a la reconstrucción histórica (From Memory to Historical Reconstruction) (Guatemala City: Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences [AVANCSO], 1999), 23-37.
7. Elizabeth Jelin, "The Politics of Memory: The Human Rights Movement and the Construction of Democracy in Argentina," Latin American Perspectives 21 (1994): 53.
8. Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire (The Abuse of Memory) (Paris: Arléa, 1998), quoted in Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Struggles for Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anatavia (London: Latin America Bureau, 2003), 35.
9. Charles R. Hale, "Does Multicultural Governance Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights, and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala," Journal of Latin American Studies, no. 34 (2002): 490.
10. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 124. Brown draws on Marx's criticism of bourgeois rights for creating an "illusory politics of equality, liberty and community" while disguising the workings of class. She also uses insights from Michel Foucault to argue that individuals are produced as subjects through the disciplinary mechanisms of rights discourses as they relate to the construction of liberal personhood.
11. Jelin, State Repression, 54-55, 140-41.
12. Ibid., 54.
13. Ibid.; Mauricio Gaborit, "Memoria histórica: Relato desde las víctimas" ("Historical Memory: Victims' Account"), Estudios Centroamericanos (Central American Studies), no. 57 (2002): 1021-32;
14. Dora Schwarzstein, "Memoria e historia" ("Memory and History"), Desarrollo económico (Economic Development) 42 (2002): 471-82;
15. María Sonderéreguer, "El debate sobre el pasado reciente en Argentina: Entre la voluntad de recordad y la voluntad de olvidar" ("The Debate Over the Recent Past in Argentina: Between the Will to Remember and the Will to Forget"), Hispanamérica 29 (2000), 3-15;
16. Leigh Binford, The Massacre at El Mozote: Anthropology and Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
17. Gaborit, "Memoria histórica"; Marcie Mersky, "History as an Instrument of Social Reparation: Reflections on an Experience in Guatemala," Just Word 5 (2000): 1-4;
18. Carlos Martín Beristain, Reconstruir el tejido social (Reconstructing the Social Fabric) (Barcelona: Icaria, 1999);
19. Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG, Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala), Guatemala: Nunca Más (Guatemala City: ODHAG, 1998);
20. Igancio Martín Baró, Psicología social de la guerra: Trauma y terapia (Social Psychology of War: Trauma and Therapy) (San Salvador: Universidad Centroamericana, 1990).
21. Carlota McAllister, "Asking Too Much: Anthropological Manners and Clandestine Habits" (paper presented at the workshop "Revisiting Guatemala's Harvest of Violence," Duke University, Durham, NC, March 26-27, 2004);
22. Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002);
23. Mersky, "History as an Instrument of Social Reparation"; Oglesby, "Desde los cuadernos de Myrna Mack"; José García Noval, "Entre dos fuegos: Desde el mundo de los gatos pardos" ("Between Two Fires: From the World of the Dark Cats"), in De la memoria a la reconstrucci-acon histórica (Guatemala City: Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences [AVANCSO], 1999), 39-80;
24. Beatriz Manz, "La importancia del contexto en la memoria" ("The Importance of Context in Memory"), in De la memoria a la reconstrucción histórica, 1-22;
25. Linda Green, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
26. Charles R. Hale, "Consciousness, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala," Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 817-37;
27. M. B. Lykes and M. Mersky, "Reparations and Mental Health: Psychosocial Interventions Towards Healing, Human Agency, and Rethreading Social Realities," in The Handbook of Reparations, ed. Pablo de Greiff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 589-622.
28. The Grupo de Análisis Histórico was created by the head commissioner Christian Tomuschat, who invited all of Guatemala's universities and major research centers to appoint representatives to the group. At first, this was a mostly symbolic gesture meant to show that the commission was receptive to input from Guatemalan society, yet it eventually coalesced into a twelve-person, multidisciplinary group that made recommendations to the commission and produced documentation and analysis used in the writing of the final report. Several members of the group participated directly in the writing of the historical volume of the report.
29. See Inés Izaguierre, "Recapturing the Memory of Politics," NACLA Report on the Americas 31 (1998): 30;
30. García Noval, "Entre dos fuegos." In the case of Guatemala, David Stoll expounds this thesis most famously. See his Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). See also the responses to Stoll: Hale, "Consciousness, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala"; García Noval, "Entre dos fuegos"; and Oglesby, "Desde los cuadernos de Myrna Mack," as well as many others.
31. Commission for Historical Clarification, Guatemala: Memory of Silence; Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification, Conclusions and Recommendations, 21, para. 23 (Guatemala City: United Nations Office of Project Services [UNOPS], 1999). The entire CEH report is available online at shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/mds/spanish (accessed August 11, 2006). Subsequent references to the CEH report will occur parenthetically in the text.
32. Grandin, "Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold."
33. UNOPS, "The Operations of the Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala," mimeograph document, n.d., 11-24.
34. The ruling on genocide was complicated in that it brought to the fore the inherent tensions between a strictly juridical perspective and a historical one. Did the army kill Mayans because they were Mayans or because they were organizing against the state? Based on a careful reading of cases, the report concluded that in some regions in particular periods, the violence had characteristics of genocide. Key here is the separation of motive and intent: the Guatemalan state intended to kill Mayans because it conflated these populations as part of the internal enemy, even though the ultimate motivation was to defeat the insurgency (see Grandin, "Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold"). The section of the CEH report that details the genocide argument is 3:249-423.
35. Research included a review of commonly used textbooks between 1986 and 2003, interviews with key informants at institutions involved in CEH dissemination projects, including policy makers in the Ministry of Education, representatives of international agencies involved in peace education programs (principally USAID and UNESCO), and Guatemalan human rights organizations involved in curriculum design (the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, the Instancia, Multi-institucional por la Paz y la Concordancia (Multi-institutional Committee for Peace and Concordance), a coalition of civil society groups set up to provide follow-up to the CEH's recommendations, and academic representatives of the Convergencia Educativa (Educational Convergence), a council of research institutions set up to advise the Ministry of Education on curricular reform. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2003. The core of the project involved interviews with teachers at six rural and urban high schools, including one upper middle-class private school in the capital, the military high school in the capital, two public schools in former conflict zones in El Quiché, one school in a less conflictive area of southern El Quiché, and one run by the private sector on the Pacific Coast. Although most Guatemalan students do not make it as far as high school, I chose high schools because students at this level are able to absorb more complicated material but are still subject to national curricular standards and programs of citizen formation.
36. Gustavo Palma and Alejandro Flores, eds., Los contenidos de los cursos de estudios sociales en el contexto de la reforma educativa: Aportes para el debate (The Content of Social Studies Courses in the Context of Educational Reform: Notes for Debate) (Guatemala City: Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences [AVANCSO] and National Council for Mayan Education [CNEM], 1999).
37. Inforpress Centroamericana, "Guatemala: Entregan propuesta para educación" ("Guatemala: Education proposal submitted"), Inforpress, September 14, 2001, 12.
38. Kristel Foster, "A Tug of Post-war: History Education and the Politics of Reconciliation in Guatemala" (MA thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2004).
39. Gustavo Palma, the research director at the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, interviewed by the author, Guatemala City, August 1, 2003. According to Palma, the historic lack of attention to investment in education was rooted in the economic structure of the country, whereby rural labor was needed for the plantation economy (and thus there was not much need to educate the labor force). Now, with economic modernization, a functionally literate workforce is needed; hence the attention to primary education only. It is a functionalist analysis, but quite credible.
40. Interview with a Ministry of Education consultant, August 4, 2003, Guatemala City. Similarly, in 2002, the United Nations Development Program produced a popular version of its annual Human Development Report on Guatemala, designed for use in the classroom. The private sector raised a hue and cry, however, about the report's inclusion of land tenure data, and after an initial printing, the report was discontinued.
41. Raúl Zepeda, "Formulación de propuesta del area de formación ciudadana para la transformación curricular" ("Citizen Formation Proposal for Curricular Reform"), October 2002, mimeograph, Guatemala City, Ministry of Education and UNESCO.
42. According to Gustavo Palma, the most common school social science textbooks, all privately produced, are the Protagonistas (Protagonists) series, produced by Santillana (a Spanish publishing house franchised in Guatemala), and the Estudios Sociales (Social Studies) series, published by the Grupe, Editorial Norma Guatemala (Palma, interview by author, August 1, 2003, Guatemala City). I surveyed texts in these two series from 1986, 1990, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2002.
43. Guatemala has two masters-level programs related to political violence: a program in political violence and mental health at the national University of San Carlos, and a program in human rights at the Jesuit-run Landivar University.
44. Juana, interview by the author, July 26, 2003, Guatemala City. For a history of Santa María Tzejá and the surrounding region, see Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
45. Interview with school teacher, August 6, 2003, Guatemala City.
46. Interview with organizer of forensic anthropology traveling photo exhibit, July 19, 2003, southern El Quiché.
47. See Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (EAFG, Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team), Las massacres en Rabinal: Estudio histórico antropológico de las masacres de Plan de Sánchez, Chichupac and Río Negro (The Massacres in Rabinal: An Historical-Anthropological Study of the Massacres in Plan de Sánchez, Chichupac, and Río Negro) (Guatemala City: EAFG, 1997).
48. Interview with academic director, Adolfo Hall Civic-Military Institute, July 24, 2003, Guatemala City.
49. Inteview with army major, July 24, 2003, Guatemala City.
50. Interview with student, July 24, 2003, Guatemala City.
51. Examples of these USAID-funded activities include an organization of formerly displaced refugees in Nebaj and a traveling photo exhibit of exhumations sponsored by one of Guatemala's forensic anthropology groups. In other parts of the country, USAID funds a Mayan organization that sponsors mental health programs for communities affected by the war, with programs directed specifically at young people. All of these are terribly important programs. The issue of whether to accept funding from USAID has been hotly debated by Guatemalan popular organizations. In some ways, this financing reflects the increasing dependence of popular organizations on international donors and a sort of governance through nongovernmental organizations. See, for example, Hale, "Does Multicultural Governance Menace?" In other ways, it reflects a deepening sophistication on the part of these organizations as they gain experience negotiating with state and international institutions. This program is implemented in Guatemala by a subcontractor, Creative Associates International (CAI). This group has done a lot of work with civil society groups, and in 1998 helped fund a forum for social organizations to make suggestions to the truth commission on the content of the report's recommendations.
52. This ad was in its final production stage when I was in Guatemala in the summer of 2003. USAID was looking for national organizations to cosponsor the campaign, but some groups declined, fearing the ad could be interpreted as an effort to sway the upcoming presidential election against Rios Montt.
53. Interview with director, USAID Human Rights and Reconciliation Program, July 23, 2003, Guatemala City.
54. Ignacio Santiago Urquijo, El Trapiche: Donde la vida escribe sus historias (El Trapiche: Where Life Writes Its Histories) (Guatemala City: Instituto Guatemalteco de Educación Radiofónica [Guatemalan Institute for Radio Education], 2003).
55. Interview with director, USAID Human Rights and Reconciliation Program, July 23, 2003, Guatemala City.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. See Hans Petter Buvollen, "National Reconciliation and Civil Society in Guatemala" (paper presented at the "Guatemala: Five Years after the Peace Accords" conference, Oslo, December 4-5, 2001), for the arguments about the use of the word reconciliation in Guatemala. This piece draws heavily from Marcie Mersky, La reconciliación en Guatemala: Una propuesta de estrategia para la Fundación Soros en Guatemala (Reconciliation in Guatemala: A Strategy Proposal for the Soros Foundation in Guatemala) (Guatemala City: UNOPS mimeograph, 2000). A common critique in Latin America is that reconciliation has been linked closely with church-infused ideas of pardon (see, for example, "La utopia cristiana de la reconciliación" ["The Christian Utopia of Reconciliation"], Estudios Centroamericanos [Central American Studies], no. 51 [1996]: 567-68;
58. Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, "Reconciliación chilena: Entre el pragmatismo y la condena" ["Chilean Reconciliation: Between Pragmatism and Condemnation"], Mensaje [Message], no. 48 [1999]: 41-45). In Guatemala, some Mayan groups protested the use of reconciliation, saying the conflict in Guatemalan society was not a matter of the past forty years, but of the past five hundred; in other words, Guatemalan society has never had "conciliation," so it is difficult to talk about re-conciliation (Buvollen, "National Reconciliation and Civil Society in Guatemala," 7).
59. See the UNESCO Web site, www.ibe.unesco.org (accessed December 10, 2004) for information on other countries in which UNESCO has sponsored curricular reform in conflict societies.
60. Juan Francisco Sagüí Argueta, Estudios Sociales, vol. 6 (Guatemala City: Editorial Santillana, 2001), 185.
61. Izaguierre, "Recapturing the Memory of Politics," 28-34.
62. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 119.
63. Grandin, "The Instruction of Great Catastrophe," 58-67.