The Embrace of Silence: A Story of Hope and Healing During the Guatemalan Civil War

By Miguel Yga

Camila and Olivia Cutzal are two Kaqchikel Maya sisters living in the heart of the Guatemalan highlands at the height of the country's brutal civil war. Their world is shattered when their parents disappear at the hands of soldiers, turning them into orphans in the midst of a war and setting them up for a lifelong journey to heal the unhealable.

The Embrace of Silence tells a moving true story of the lonely paths we walk on the road back to wholeness. By delving into their painful past, the Cutzal sisters break the silence of the Guatemalan Civil War to remind us of our capacity to bring light to the darkest recesses within ourselves in this compelling testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

Oftentimes, it's through the eyes of the smallest among us —those we tend to overlook— that we can tell the biggest stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earth Journey Media, LLC
• Release date: Mar 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218360405

Miguel Yga

Miguel Yga is a traveling journalist, writer, and adventurer on a mission to collect and share stories that explore the human experience. By weaving travel and storytelling, his two greatest passions, Miguel takes readers into forgotten corners of the globe to live vicarious experiences that foster a sense of adventure and expand their inner and outer worlds. In pursuit of his calling, Miguel has spent the past eight years on the road collecting stories, primarily among indigenous peoples. His travels have taken him to the remote corners of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Canada, and the United States, where strangers from over a dozen different indigenous communities—artists, stargazers, shamans, tribal elders, and community leaders—have welcomed him and provided intimate, firsthand access to their world. When he isn't having near runs with sharks, trudging through jungles, or otherwise traveling the world, Miguel enjoys the pursuit of quiet pleasures that deepen his experience of life—until adventure comes knocking once more.

Book preview

Introduction

There was a cost for breaking the silence during the war. The trees knew it and, despite the rustling of their leaves, kept quiet. The hills of the Guatemalan landscape, with their heavy banks of fog lying low in the fields, knew what the soldiers had done and kept it to themselves. Even the earth remained mute as their spades buried their crimes beneath a shroud of red dirt.

Yes, to survive the war, one had to abide by the rule of silence. Whenever its thin veil was broken, tragedy and the stamping of boots in the darkness would not lag far behind. One had to become small and invisible to escape the notice of the men with the machine guns, as a rabbit does when the wolves prowl.

Silence was a double-edged sword, both your best protector and your worst enemy. It sheltered you in its embrace even as it poised the blade over your head. Staying silent would keep you from a government execution roster and a shallow grave while the spirit of injustice danced gleefully around the fire.

In this way, Guatemala suffered silently, and the world averted its gaze as the shadow of death walked through the trees.

The Guatemalan Civil War, which reached its peak during the scorched-earth campaigns of the early 1980s, has been termed the Silent Holocaust. Under the military dictatorships of generals Fernando Romeo Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt, the counterinsurgency campaign that had promised a return to peace visited violence and destruction on the Maya peoples of Guatemala unseen since the days of the Spanish conquest. Even though the war came to an end over a quarter of a century ago, the culture of fear it created remains. The nightmare has ended, its dark visions dispelled as if by the first rays of sunlight, yet its memory still vividly haunts those who survived—a ghost that refuses to rest.

The stories and lessons of the Guatemalan Civil War are very human, extremely dramatic, and distressingly tragic. From a storyteller’s perspective, it’s a classic saga of elites staunchly fighting to maintain their hold on power and privilege, the revolutionaries who opposed them, and the anonymous innocents who suffered for it. It’s a tale of how the world not only turned its back on their suffering, but stoked the fires of division to further national interests and ideological agendas. Sadly, history books are filled with such stories.

When the signing of the peace accords finally ended the war in 1996, many of those in power attempted to whitewash the silent cost paid by those who lay entombed in the stillness of the mass graves scattered throughout the verdant Guatemalan landscape. Each was a sore waiting to become an open wound in a country that never healed. Although those with bloodied hands attempted to wipe them clean with the pages of history, the bones of the countless victims still have their own stories to tell. Blood has a voice, and Guatemala is soaked in it.

When victims brave a journey into a painful past, we ensure that their stories, as well as those that were silenced, are not lost to a world that needs to hear them. It’s up to the survivors to tell the story for those who can’t. Naming the unnamable becomes a need for them, a part of their healing process. Silence is an insidious killer not only because it sickens the body, but because it suffocates the soul. To take injustice in silence, to suffer in its toxic stillness, is to allow ourselves to become shadows. Humans have a deep, existential need to be seen, heard, and recognized for who we are and what we stand for. Thus, we must speak up if we are to manifest the change we desire.

When such magic happens, the only way those in power can maintain their dominance is by instilling fear and terror into the hearts of those who would cry out against injustice. In Guatemala, when the masses raised their voices in unison to the music of change, asking for a better life and a more equal society for all, the answer they received was the brutal repression of their aspirations, hopes, and dreams. The landowning oligarchy, the military elite, and the foreigners all conspired to instill the fear of change in a people who were just waking up from the deep sleep in which they’d slumbered.

Fear thus became the daily bread of the Guatemalan people throughout the war. Massacres, kidnappings, torture, forced disappearances, and blatant state terrorism would become tools to keep them trapped in an endless cycle of violence. The hundreds of thousands of cases of human rights abuses were hidden behind the faceless mask of the state and buried in the depths of Central American bureaucracy, ensuring that both the perpetrators and the victims remained anonymous.

Yet, we must not allow these stories to disappear into obscurity. To allow the teachings of an all-too-human lesson to slip between our fingers and fall through the cracks of history would be to lay the foundations for the return of the pain and suffering it caused. To stare into the eyes of the darkness that lies dormant within us is a fearful thing. It’s all too easy to turn a blind eye to the misery of others when they remind us of our own vulnerability—the all too uncomfortable human condition.

There is much we can learn about ourselves from the tide of events that swept through Guatemala during the late stages of its thirty-six-year conflict. The Guatemalan Civil War is a story about humanity: the vain reasons for hate and the silent suffering of innocents. The tendrils of tragedy from such a story can be found tainting every society across the world, the unconscious seed of every social malaise.

Native peoples around the world are microcosms of society’s ills, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The stories of indigenous peoples are filled with racism, injustice, violence, endemic social inequality, and even genocide. We must note the lessons their suffering teaches us, as by understanding their plight, we can better understand our own. Compassion blooms when we recognize ourselves in the other, and only compassion can unlock the lessons of such a tragedy to transcend and heal the suffering it caused. It’s by seeing ourselves reflected in the stories of others that we can truly connect with their pain to realize we were never separate, but rather were bound by our shared humanity. It’s through the cathartic power of storytelling that we can expose, heal, and transcend the lessons of the Guatemalan tragedy.

Although history is mainly concerned with the collective stories of peoples, places, and events of the past, this book tells the story of the war as seen through the eyes of one of the thousands of families who experienced it. By singling out a personal story from those of the countless innocents who suffered in silence, we remove the veil of anonymity and see the war for what it truly was: a tragedy that changed the course of those it touched.

By focusing on the individual stories of real people, we can stir ourselves to empathize with their pain. Suddenly, the suffering of those who seemed so distant—so separate from us—isn’t so far removed from our own anymore. Through this process of storytelling, we can roll back the tide of dehumanization to reveal both the frail vulnerability and the extraordinary strength of spirit we share.

In the context of such sweeping, calamitous events, it’s tempting to forget the stories of the smallest of us, the children who grew up in terror and who survived the brutality of a world gone mad. Innocence is the first victim of any armed conflict, and even though the combat boots stamped on the flower of innocence, it only scattered its fragrance to the winds of change. What better way to see the senselessness of war and fratricidal conflict than through the innocence-tinted eyes of a child swept by the tide of history?

Oftentimes, it’s through the eyes of the smallest among us—those we tend to overlook—that we can tell the biggest stories.

Chapter I | The Village in the Hills

All seven of the Cutzal children were born into war. All they could remember—and, truth be told, all their parents could remember—were the constant reminders of the conflict that engulfed Guatemala: The army checkpoints, the brutal military repression, the constant state of fear in which they lived, how neighbors turned against neighbors, the terrifying sound of helicopter rotors echoing off the hills, and the never-ending string of disappearances.

If, however, one were to sit in the yard of the Cutzal homestead—atop a hill, surrounded as it was by fields and trees—it would be nigh impossible to think such a verdant land was in the throes of a decades-long civil war. Though a succession of browbeating speeches of generals-turned-presidents blew over the radio waves from Guatemala City, they seemed distant—foreign, even—in a place where the wind blew so peacefully through the trees.

The Cutzals lived in the village of Pamamús, deep in the hills of Guatemala’s central highlands. The village was a community of farmers dedicated to their maize fields and animals. In the local Mayan language, Pamamús means the place where it drizzles, a reference to the wet mist that so often blankets the high hills and trees. The village was little more than a loose cluster of caseríos, or farmsteads, spread out over one of the many winding valleys of the Comalapan landscape. But to the Cutzals, it was the heart of their world.

Most of the people in the village—including the Cutzal family—were Kaqchikel, one of the most numerous of the twenty-one Guatemalan Maya clans. They lived in a traditional household and were brought up in Maya culture. The Cutzal children didn’t speak Spanish in their daily life, but the Kaqchikel they’d learned from their parents from the day they were born. Just like their mother, the girls would dress in the huipil—a loose blouse that women tuck into their skirts and fasten with a colorful sash along the waist. These were embroidered with the patterns of their ancestral land, a kaleidoscope of bright colors on a field of blood-red cloth. Patterns and colors changed between different towns—even from village to village—and displayed the people’s connection to the land they called home.

Maya culture takes inspiration from the world around it, drawing richness and color from its mythical history and a deep connection to nature. The highlands are a place of old power where the deeds of legendary heroes and ancient kings come alive among dewy forests, cloudy mountains, and mighty volcanoes. The village was in the core of what had once been the Kaqchikel Empire. Their people had inhabited the land since time immemorial, far before the fall of Iximché and subjugation at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores.

Farming was sacred to a traditional Kaqchikel village such as Pamamús. Maize has played a central role in the world of the Maya for thousands of years. In the cosmology of the ancients, the first four men were created from as many varieties of maize kernels—white, red, yellow, and black, considered sacred colors in traditional Maya spirituality. They had even represented maize as its own deity—Hun Hunahpu, father of the mythical hero twins of legend. How could a food source of such importance to both ancient and contemporary Mesoamerican peoples not be divine?

The children’s father, Martín Cutzal, was a prosperous, hardworking farmer who worked his own land. Like his ancestors before him, he planted maize, squash, potatoes, carrots, beans, strawberries, and Brussels sprouts. They also had avocado, peach, and apple trees. Papá Martín dressed very formally, with linen trousers and button-down shirts. He would wear broad-brimmed hats and rubber boots whenever he left to work the fields with his hoe slung over his shoulder, ready to scratch a living from the earth. He was also an active member of the community. When he wasn’t working hard in the fields, he was in meetings with other indigenous leaders or otherwise working on projects to improve life for the farmers of Pamamús. Although his roots were very humble, he was a straightforward man of futuristic vision—a true Kaqchikel man of the day.

Their mother, Esperanza, was equally remarkable. She possessed that uncanny ability women have to do just about everything. She was a hard worker and would often help her husband in the fields—a testament to the family’s modernity as, in those days, Maya women exclusively took care of the house. During the harvest, she would sing as she wrenched ears of corn from the maize stalks and placed them lovingly in her basket. Every day, Esperanza would milk the cows and feed the family’s army of chickens. She also raised and took care of the children, was in charge of the housework, helped her husband sell his produce in the local markets, and even found the time to be a catechist in the village.

San Juan Comalapa, the nearest town, lies five kilometers to the south. On Sundays, the couple would take their children and walk the distance into town to attend mass and stroll through the plazas and streets. Comalapa was founded during the first half of the sixteenth century. The town had been one of the Spaniards’ original reducciones—or resettlements—of the local Kaqchikels, meant to aid in the evangelization of the natives after the conquest of the New World. The town is located at the base of a large valley and is surrounded by hills and other winding valleys covered in pine forests. Its original Maya name, Chixot, means "river of comales. In contemporary times, the town earned the nickname The Florence of America" for the great number of talented Kaqchikel painters who call it home.

Martín had met Esperanza in Comalapa during his time in the army, as he’d been drafted into the local garrison. Esperanza’s father used to load a horse with hay and firewood that he’d sell to the garrison. He would visit often—a situation that had put the young Martín and his daughter in the right place, and at the right time, to get to know each other. Esperanza had caught Martín’s eye for a while, and he capitalized on the opportunity to get close to her. Esperanza had other suitors, namely Martín’s cousin and neighbor Hector. In her bosom, however, there was only space for one man. After a time of these visits, love blossomed between the couple and Martín wasted no time proposing marriage to Esperanza, to the disappointment of the other men in the village. Once Martín’s draft service was up, the couple returned to the groom’s village, where they built a home and filled it with children: Aurora was the first, followed by Gaspar, Francisco, Valeria, Camila, Diego, and baby Olivia.

The only way to get to the village