A life of struggle and hope - A personal account from Union Victoria

The following are notes from a talk given by Agustin Solis Cobo and his wife, Antonia Ramos, to a Church of the Brethren Young Adult Work Camp, June 2007, in Union Victoria. Both are under the age of 30 and grew up during the most violent years of Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war. Agustin and Antonia are both part of a civilian organization called Communities in Popular Resistance, or CPR. Sadly their stories are not unique but only give us a glimpse of what many Guatemalans have gone through in the past 40 years. Please share their stories…

Agustin Solis Cobo...

International visitors, welcome to my home and thanks for visiting our community. I know you have traveled far to be here, and left behind your family, friends, work, and studies to come to Guatemala. I’d like to introduce you to my wife, Antonia Ramos, and my grandmother, Catarina Cobo.
I’m an orphan because my parents died a long time ago. My grandmother, Catarina, raised me. Then, about six or seven years ago, my wife and I started a family together. We were formally married in the Catholic Church about a year ago.
I was born in a village called Amakchel, a mountainous area in the municipality of Chajul. My grandmother is from a village called Aj’k’na in the municipality of Nebaj. Since I was born in 1977, my family has been in resistance; we were refugees in our own country, in hiding from the military. I was 6 years old when the war began, just a little boy, really, when the soldiers came for the first time to my village. They came in a helicopter, and we knew they wanted to start a war, but with whom? We didn’t know of any groups of armed people.
On that first excursion of the military, the soldiers left again the same day. But on their second visit, there was a massacre. We knew they were coming to kill us, so we fled into the mountains. The soldiers killed our animals, burned our houses and crops, and then they left. On their third visit, they set up any army base in Amakchel. That was when they also killed people. They brought 7 helicopters and 6 airplanes, from which they dropped bombs on us. The people were afraid of these new land and air offensives, so we fled again into the mountains.
When we were in hiding, my father went out one day to look for a place for us to live and some food for our family to eat. He was searching for malanga [a starchy vegetable very similar to taro root] when the army captured and killed him. That was in 1981. About a year later, my mother died. She died from an illness, but it wasn’t just that she was sick; she was also hungry and exposed to the rain because the army had burned our house. After my mother died, all of my little brothers and sisters died, too, because there was no one to take care of them.
Another aunt died of illness, too. My uncle, who was just a little boy of 8 or 9, got lost one day as we fled from the army. We went up one path and he took another, and he just disappeared. I was together with my grandmother, since we had no one else, but my uncle had no one. We didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
So I lived with my grandmother; all the rest of our family was gone. The government signed the Peace Accords in 1996 and the worst of the violence ended. Although I was just a little kid, I had to start working in order to support my grandmother. I didn’t have time to study like the kids today who have parents to support them as they go to school and learn. Necessity made me start working at a very young age.
After the 1996 Peace Accords, we wondered what to do next. My grandmother had owned land in Nebaj, but in all the years she had been hiding in the mountains, other people had claimed it. We decided to turn to the government, and with collaboration between CPR-Sierra and international support, we demanded that the government help our communities that had no land.
We were very well organized, and had a big assembly of the Communities of Popular Resistance. Together, we analyzed our biggest needs: land and housing. Our leaders started negotiating with the government to discuss where we could find land.
About this same time, in 1997, my grandmother and I thought we would start to look for my missing uncle and the graves of my parents. There was a Human Rights team that was helping people find their disappeared relatives and exhume mass or hidden graves. We heard that my uncle might still be alive, but we had no idea where to start looking—in the coastal plains, or in the highlands? The Archbishop of Guatemala and the Human Rights office organized fact-gathering commissions in every municipality to collect information about people’s lost relatives.
Eventually, we found a person who could be my uncle, but he had a different name. My grandmother knew him as Baltazar Raymundo, but this man’s name is Luis Nájera. He had to get new papers when he came of age since he had none when he fled, and they gave him a new name. My uncle, now Luis, had also been looking for us, but we no longer lived in the same region of the country, so he didn’t find us right away.
On May 8, 2007, my uncle came to visit us for the first time in over 30 years. We were so happy to see him, but sad too for the 30 years we’ve lost. He’s 42. Since he disappeared, my uncle had gone to work on the army base as a little boy. He would take out the soldiers’ trash and shine their shoes so that they would give him food. When he turned 18, he joined the army. The work was too hard, though, so he ran away. The army eventually caught him and made him finish his term of service.
Now my uncle lives in a very sad situation. He’s out of the army, but he has no land of his own. He rents land and a house for 3000-4000 quetzales ($400-530) per month, and he farms on the land. His family has no clothes and little food, and it makes us so sad to see such a poor family. We’re going to help him look for land. We hope that he can come here to Union Victoria, to this land that the government gave us. It’s his land, too, so we hope it will be possible for him to move here.
With the help of the Human Rights organization, I was able to exhume my mother’s grave a couple of months ago. Now her remains are in a lab in Guatemala City and will be released to me later this year. When she died, the soldiers were nearby, so we couldn’t bury her properly. We had to leave her or the soldiers would kill us, too. She wasn’t in a real cemetery. Soon, I’ll be able to bury her in a proper cemetery.
We’ve suffered so many deaths and losses, and the law says that we’ll be compensated. But the law also requires so many difficult pre-requisites and paperwork that we don’t always have, like birth certificates and death certificates that were impossible to get during the war. But I fulfilled all of the paperwork and turned it in a few months ago, so I’m waiting. The government just paid the Civilian Defense Patrols [civilians that the army forced to do much of their dirty work] for the third time, compensating them for all the suffering they caused. We’re the true victims, and we haven’t received any compensation at all.

Antonia Ramos (Agustin’s wife)....

I was Petrona’s age [seven] when my dad was killed, and Civilian Defense Patrols killed him. He was just looking for food for his family. He said, “I’m going out, and I’ll be okay.” Then he was shot and he never came back. We were left without food for 7 days; we couldn’t even light a fire for fear that the army would see us. Eventually, my mother had to look for food. She found just a little, maybe a handful of corn, some Santa Catarina [a bitter wild green]. We didn’t even have salt to cook it with.
The soldiers came repeatedly, and we would have to flee: without food, without clothing. We would eat wild onions. We didn’t have a father, a house, anything at all. I’m originally from the department of Huehuetenango, from a village called Las Mojadas. We heard about a place called Santa Clara, a village in El Quiche that was safer. My family decided to go there, so we walked for an entire month.
The whole way to Santa Clara, we would see soldiers and have to flee. This made everything take longer. Even in Santa Clara, the people were hiding from the soldiers; they had just returned to their houses when we arrived from our long journey. At least they had a little food that they shared with us—malanga. Even so, it was a hard place to be, and we were often without food. I have a brother who was so sick then that he still can’t walk today.
Once, it was so hard that I ran away to the army because I had nothing, absolutely nothing. At the same time, the soldiers captured my mother and we managed to find each other in Nebaj. Later, we escaped and went to live in another village called La Estrella. We tried to work, but we didn’t know how to use a machete very well. Eventually, my brother came to join us. Even though he was only 7, he knew how to work a little.
Later, we returned to live in Santa Clara, and joined the people in the CPR communities that were talking about getting the government to buy them land. I decided to come here and my family stayed behind in Santa Clara.

Agustin again.....

These stories are hard for us to tell, and they could fill a whole book. But it’s good for us to tell them and important for you to learn them, too. We’ve heard that there’s a war in the U.S., but I think it must be easier for you than it was for us. Here in Guatemala, we got the worst luck in the war, but even here on this land where we live now, we find the remains of people. It makes me so sad to see people’s bodies just tossed on the ground and not properly buried. We just have to trust God to take care of us.
We hear about things like CAFTA [Central American Free Trade Agreement], and we recognize that this is another war. But we also know that if there had been no war, then you all wouldn’t be here today to suffer with us. In the 1990s, many international human rights accompaniers came from Europe, Mexico, and the United States to be with us. They came all the way into the mountains, which meant walking for 3-4 days up and down mountains. They struggled for us, and so are you. I know that you could be at home with your family, comfortable. But we’ve learned that there are people who would die with us. In the 1990s, there was an accompanier who died in an airplane accident when he was coming to visit us. I pray that God will guide you home safely.
When you get home, God willing, share our story with your community so that they know what we have suffered. The distance between our countries makes it impossible for us to share our stories, but it is so important. We also would like to know more about your situation, your struggle. We can’t give you things, but we can pray that God will guide you safely home.

Thank you.