Interview with Rosalina Tuyuc, by Maite Rico, Guatemalan journalist
Rosalina Tuyuc
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Many things are torn away that I wished to keep for ever, and the tearing will, I know, bring misfortune, greater than the span of a human life. Franz Kafka, Czech writer (1883-1924) |
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Timeline 1954: The CIA overthrows the left-wing
government of President Jacobo Arbenz, ushering in a series of military coups and
upheavals. |
Rosalina Tuyuc has
spent the past 17 years waiting. One night in June 1982, the Guatemalan army came
and took her father away. “Francisco Tuyuc is dead,” she was later told by the military,
who never returned his body. Another night, in May 1985, they took away her husband,
a peasant leader.
But Rosalina, a 43-year-old Kakchiquel Mayan Indian, was not deterred and in 1988
she founded the National Association of Guatemalan Widows (Conavigua), whose 15,000
members are today fighting to ensure the victims of the country’s civil war are not
forgotten. In 1995, Rosalina was elected to parliament as a deputy for the coalition
of left-wing parties.
Can time ease the pain for those who have lost a loved one?
No, you never find peace from that. My children still ask me what’s happened to their
father and if he’s coming home. We relatives of people who’ve disappeared are looking
for our loved ones, and we don’t find them, either dead or alive. Now that the state
has admitted that abuses occurred, it has a moral duty to tell us where our dead
are buried. Many of them were executed at military bases. In the name of reconciliation,
the army must say where they are. Most people just want to give their spouses or
children a Christian burial.
Have the aims of Conavigua changed since the peace agreement was signed in 1996
and the Historical Clarification Commission’s report was published in February 1999?
The report confirmed we’d been right about the extent of the repression. Now we’re
fighting to get the peace accords applied and for Indian rights to be recognized.
But we’ll continue to seek compensation for victims of the war, to be told where
the mass graves are and to bring impunity to an end.
What kind of compensation?
The government has launched a plan to compensate communities—by introducing electrification
and building schools, roads and bridges—but it’s forgotten the widows. We want direct
individual compensation for the women themselves, including a psychological support
programme, scholarships for their children and help in recovering their relatives’
bodies from unmarked graves.
Can anything more be done to fight impunity?
Keep on trying those responsible. We don’t want revenge, we want justice. We’d like
to take matters to an international court because it’s very hard in Guatemala to
obtain justice. The trials are costly, they drag on for years and the results are
not very credible. But we’re going to bring to court at least a few of the 80,000
cases we’ve listed.
How do you balance the demands of the victims’ families and political reality,
which involves making concessions to safeguard the transition process?
Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. First we need to know who to forgive. Many families
don’t know who killed their relatives. And if we don’t manage to establish who was
responsible, history may repeat itself. There’s always the fear of a backlash from
certain sectors but we can’t forgive until we have justice.
Do the peace accords take the victims into account?
The agreements led to a “reconciliation law” which we regard as an amnesty. It
doesn’t apply to acts of genocide, kidnapping and torture. We voted against this
law and we will oppose any other amnesty. The army and the guerrillas share responsibility
for the war, though in different measure. It’s normal that their leaders have made
peace with one another, but in the villages, families are not even speaking to each
other. There, reconciliation will take a long time.