The story of an ex-guerrilla

As promised, here is a little bit about ‘Salou’, the ex-guerrilla who is leading the construction of the community radio training center. He is a charismatic middle-aged man who is passionate about community radio because he wants to educate and believes that women, youth, and the indigenous should have a voice and a power. Salou has a 17-year-old son in Mexico living with his mother (Salou’s ex-wife). He also currently lives with his ‘wife,’ Betty, though they are not technically married, and a 3-year-old daughter named Estefany. Betty is one of five and we got to meet her youngest sister, Marlou who is 14 (she’s 20 years younger), and her youngest brother, Walter (24, who was working with us on construction but wants to be a teacher). We also got to get to know Elvia who is the outgoing, loving neighbor who is also Estafany’s nanny while Betty and Salou are working. It was with this crew (with the exception of Walter since he was off doing a site practical for school), that we spent the day at Laguna Chicabal.

When Salou was 7 years old, he remembers that all of his uncles and older cousins were guerrillas camping out in the mountains near Chicabal. He loved to go hang out with them and hear their war stories. He was fascinated by their big weapons and dreamed of being just like them even though he didn’t actually understand what they were fighting for.

What were they fighting for? I’m not sure that I can do the complete history justice but here’s a pretty rough summary of the Civil War (with a little help from Wikipedia):

In the ‘40s and ‘50s the Guatemalan government took a swing to the left. They supported reforms that would benefit the working class and the rural poor including a land reform that would re-distribute land to the peasants so they could grow and trade bananas. The problem here is that the United Fruit Company had largely dominated the land in Guatemala and was not willing to give it up. The UFCO was a huge US company that relied on special treatment from Latin American governments to monopolize the foreign trade of fruit.

This attempt to reform the land rights sent a red flag to the US. At that point, the Cold War was just getting underway so the US was pretty antsy about communism. Not only did this redistribution of land seem like a communist move to the US, it was also threatening the power of the UFCO which was a huge US interest. At the same time, there was a host of relationships in the U.S. government at the time that made the disapproval of the Guatemalan liberal reforms even stronger. Basically, the current Secretary of State had a law firm that defended the UFCO. His brother was not only the head of the CIA, he was also a board member for the UFCO. The Assistant Secretary of State for International Affairs had been president of the UFCO. And…to top it all off…the main lobbyist for the UFCO was married to President Eisenhower’s personal assistant.

Anyway, all of these factors combined led the US and the CIA used the financial backing of the UFCO to overthrow the democratically elected (liberal) Guatemalan president in 1954. They supported a conservative president who quickly started to undo everything that the liberal leaders of the ‘40s had started including outlawing labor unions (a major threat to the UFCO).

This was followed by a power struggle with a series of overthrows that was largely characterized by the ‘fair’ elections where all of the candidates were military men. In 1960, a group of military-men tried to revolt but failed and set up a base in Cuba where they would help to organize guerrilla troops during the subsequent 36 years of fighting. In the ‘60s the fight was largely the anti-communist right wing/military trained by the US and CIA versus the urban workers and students who had no military experience. The fighting alone would have been enough to convince the poor that communism, which theoretically offered equal land rights and wealth, was better than what they were currently facing.

In the late ‘70s though, there was a transition. What followed was literally genocide. Those which were once typical battles where one side would provoke the other was turning into massacres on the indigenous populations. The war turned to the rural mountainsides where campesinos (rural poor) were beginning to take action. It was really mass chaos though. People within the same communities, even within the same families, would be banded against each other when some would join the guerrilla side and some would join the military. The side the campesinos would join was really a matter of chance. Military troops would come through and demand information about guerrilla armies. If there were suspected guerrilla troops in a village, they would ravage it, committing uncountable human rights offenses and killing innocent people. One way to survive these massacres was to join the military. At the same time, the campesinos knew they would either be forced to join the military and kill their own people or be killed in a massacre. At the same time, the guerrilla forces often threatened violence when demanding food, clothing, or weapons from rural communities. Many figured that, if they were going to be killed anyway, it would be best to join the guerrilla forces so they could at least fight for their rights and for peace.

While the war was mainly among Guatemalans, the US played a major role. Not only did they promote the initial coup d’etat, they provided $30million in aid during the initial years of the war. At the same time, the US sent their own troops in to fight and they were training Guatemalan soldiers at the School of the Americas. The SOA was based in Panama since 1946 until 1984 when it moved to US soil in Fort Benning in Columbus, GA. During the war, the SOA trained over 1500 Guatemalans. Many of the largest massacres and most heinous human rights abuses were performed under the command of SOA trained soldiers.

And so this continued until the Peace Accords were signed in 1996. In the end, 626 villages were massacred; an estimated 50,000 leftists were killed in the ‘70s; over 200,000 people were killed, mostly Mayan; countless innocent people were tortured and brutally murdered; 93% of the reported human rights offenses were pinned on the military while 3% belonged to guerrillas.

For more information:
• On the war in general:
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
o http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/guatemala.htm
o http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/305724in.html
o http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v9/9.06/7genocide.html
• On CIA involvement
o http://www.ciponline.org/iob.htm#EXECUTIVE
o https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v44i5a03p.htm
• On the UFCO:
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#cite_note-9
o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5FEXDPal_4
• On the SOA:
o http://www.soaw.org/sub.php?id=25
o http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escuela_de_las_Am%C3%A9ricas
o http://www.nisgua.org/themes_campaigns/impunity/The%20School%20of%20the%20Americas%20and%20Guatemala.pdf

So where does Salou fit into all of this? Well, at the end of our trip to Chicabal, we settled in on a hill overlooking the Laguna Seca and I translated his story to the rest of the group. He as a very enthusiastic and emotional story-teller and I remember the feelings of pain and surprise as we explained his history. Here is all that I can remember about his rocky past and empowering present and inspiring future...

Before the explanation of the civil war, I explained how Salou was 7 and spending much of his time in the mountains with his guerrilla uncles and cousins being fascinated by big guns and war stories. It was all a dream world for him; he wanted to be just like them when he grew up. It was all just aspirations until it became really real for him. When Salou was 12, his father was ‘disappeared’ and most likely tortured and killed by the military. This event gave him the courage and the hatred to insist upon joining his older friends in the mountains. He had the urge to hold a gun and kill the people who had taken his father. While his family told him he was still too young, he insisted that he was ready.

He remembers the war being a very sad and hard time but, also, some of his best memories were had during the war. He built lasting friendships with his partners in the mountains. His adolescence was spent in a guerrilla troop. Since the guerrilla troops were fighting for equality among all people, women were allowed to join as well. Salou recalled the competition among his friends at a time when there were 25 young women and 100 growing boys in this group. The training he received also served as his schooling; he was given assignments. While he didn’t entirely understand the reason for the war initially, Salou learned about international politics alongside his basic military training.

One of his early assignments was to go the Mexican-American border where an unnamed man would fill hidden compartments in their ‘latest model’ car with weapons. Other weapons were won or stolen from the military. The guerrillas would also get funding and support from what Salou called the ‘war tax.’ Unfortunately, the way that guerrillas obtained this aid was to go to the homes of the rich sugar cane plantation owners and demand food, clothing, weapons, or money. It was fairly easy to get what they needed. If the owners did not oblige, the guerrillas would threaten to burn down their farm.

It wasn’t all theft though. Salou explained how he got food in the more peaceful times when he was with his friends in the mountains. They would descend from the mountains into the surrounding communities in pairs very quickly. They would spend no more than 15 minutes loading their bags with rice, beans, pastas, and oatmeal. One man would go inside to buy the food and the other would stand out front keeping guard to 1) protect themselves and 2) protect the store owner who would be killed if the military found out he was supporting guerrillas. Then, just as quickly as they came, they would ascend back up into the mountains with 80-100 pounds of food on their backs. Not only did they carry large amounts of food, their backpacks were also stuffed with their plates and silverware as well as a spare set of clothes. Additionally, the clothes they wore weighed more than 25 pounds because they were always loaded down with guns and grenades. (And WE thought OUR hike was hard!)

Salou had a lot of military training in his younger years. He was also a fountain of knowledge, ambition, and motivation. For this, he quickly excelled to the status of ‘tenante’ and was put in charge of a group of 15 guerrillas (5 women and 10 men). He remembers the added difficulty of this new responsibility. Now, it was even harder because he had to worry about 15 others before worrying about himself. The war was already hard for him because, at this point, he new it was indigenous families fighting for the military against indigenous families fighting for the guerrillas. But, he knew that the war meant sacrificing himself to create opportunities for others.

In his first battle as the leader, his 15 member troop was up against a 100 member military brigade. He painfully retold the story of his partner being shot 6 times across his abdomen. His partner went down but was still alive. The battle was brutal, uneven, and would mean certain death for all of them so they retreated. They watched as the enemy forces picked up his living friend and carried him 1km away to their base camp. There, they had a gathering around their fire pit. The slit the throat of Salou’s partner and drained it into a bottle and proceeded to pass it around and drink it one-by-one. After he was dead, two men got a large stick and impaled the man from his groin to his throat. The roasted him on a spit over the fire like he was meat and ate him.

And so his guerrilla career continued for 14 years. During his time fighting, he never saw his family. In fact, he assumed that his mother and siblings had been killed by the military in the early years of fighting because he had received news that his hometown had been massacred.

After 14 years, he received a little note from a man who had traveled down from Mexico. His commander called him over and handed him the note that just said, ‘Salou, Tienes una sorpresa esperando en Mexico.’ (Salou, you have a surprise waiting in Mexico.) His friends were all so excited that he would be traveling to Mexico so they sent him with plenty of money for food, drinks, and movies. Salou wondered what the surprise could be and kept thinking that it might be a trip to Cuba or Nicaragua, places he’d always wanted to visit. When he got to Mexico, he was taken to a five-star hotel where he spent three months losing wondering what his surprise was. During this time he remembers ‘fattening up’ and slowly losing his muscular guerrilla figure. After three months, a man came in a fancy, latest model car to tell him that his grandparents were alive and well and they lived just six hours away. Salou made the six hour journey to visit what he thought was the only family he had left. When he arrived, his mother was outside washing clothes. She looked at him, picked up her clothes, and casually turned to walk inside not realizing who she had just seen. Salou had been a 12-year-old when he last saw his mom, now he was 26-year-old grown man. His family had not received news that he was alive and would be coming to visit. Then, his grandfather came out, saw him, and called for his mother to come out and greet her son.

Salou remembers this very emotional time fondly. He asked his family about his siblings. They were thought to all still be alive and had been fighting in the war for 12 years. All of his cousins and relatives had fought in the war. Even his mother fought for 9 years. In the end, one sibling died, 2 were captured and tortured as prisoners of war. One of the captured was Manuel, Salou’s brother but quite different in appearance. While Salou is rather short and clean cut, Manuel was tall, bearded, and in control making him look more powerful. Manuel was indeed very knowledgeable and very powerful on the guerrilla side; he was a captain and a strategist. So, when he was captured after nine years of fighting alongside the guerrillas he was subjected to the most horrific tortures because he was the beholder of some very valuable information. He was subject to electric shocks and lie detector tests. He had an ability to control his mind. He was impenetrable and he overcame the torture and the tests for four years. His resistance did not come without consequence. During his four years in prison camps, he saw countless guerrillas come in and out, being tortured, and giving up valuable information. With this, he felt defeated. He agreed to join the military, justifying his choice by saying that he would only serve as a law enforcer, that he would only punish criminals who stole from liquor stores or harmed people. The problem with this is that he was under total manipulation by the military because they could tell him anything about anyone and order him to kill that person. He fought for the military for four more years until the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996.

Everything was not cured for the ravaged indigenous populations and the fight for indigenous rights did not end when the war ended. Salou and many others traded their guns for a microphone which he states, ‘is more powerful because his words can reach hundreds or thousands of people including women, children, and indigenous populations.’

Salou explained his personal emotional battle after the war. One thing he has not been able to recover from is the insomnia. He still has nightmares about his partners who are living, dead, disappeared. He has nightmares that he is back in battle where he had to ‘kill or be killed.’ He finds talking to groups like ours about his life like a therapeutic session and thanked us for our support not only of his projects but of him as well.

At the same time, he has a few aspirations. He explained how EGL was helping him to attain one of these dreams by assisting in the construction of a training center where youth and women can have a chance to succeed and have their voices be heard. Another dream has been to write a book about the history of his family. Amanda, the CasaSito coordinator, is helping him do this by transcribing conversations with him and his family and editing it into the form of a book. When the book is complete, it will be promoted internationally and you will be able to get the more detailed, well-written story of Salou (and maybe even learn his real name)...