Bodies emerge from Guatemala’s war-era ‘model villages’
SANTA AVELINA, Guatemala (AP) — It wasn’t only bullets and violence that killed thousands of indigenous people during Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war.
The government forced tens of thousands of farmers into so-called model villages under strict army control to isolate them from the guerrillas. They were promised health care and other services, but instead were left to die from malnutrition and treatable illnesses. They weren’t included in the casualty count in the brutal conflict.
Now, in the hamlet of Santa Avelina, their bodies are being unearthed, identified and reburied. Among the bodies are scores of indigenous children who died from measles in the former model village, where residents lived in small, dirt-floor houses and sermons and Christian hymns were played from loudspeakers.
Miguel Torres, a 67-year-old farmer, recalled how the army occupied his community and, under the threat of accusing locals of being guerrillas and then killing them, made them live in the model village.
“We were afraid every day. They said if we weren’t there in a week they would burn the house. ‘We will leave it in ashes,’” Torres recalled soldiers saying.
The strategy unfolded during the hardest years of the decades-long war. In 1979 the army began relocating people who had been displaced from the western mountains by fighting. The army had identified the Ixil indigenous region as the support base of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, one of Guatemala’s four guerrilla groups. Thus the Ixil region became a testing ground for the kind of ‘strategic hamlet’ program used by the United States in Vietnam.
In 1980 the army formed one of the first model villages in Santa Avelina, located in the heart of Ixil territory in Quiche department. But without access to doctors, a healthy diet and freedom, people began to die.
Exhumations in Santa Avelina started in 2014 and in late November forensic anthropologists handed over the remains of 172 people who perished during the years of military control. Their bones and tattered bits of clothing were re-buried individually by surviving family members after over more than three decades in anonymous mass graves.
Torres recovered the remains of his daughter Magdalena, who died at about age 1 ½.
“The children were frightened because the soldiers came. The people ran up the mountain to hide. They thought they were going to die, that they had had come to kill them. When they get scared they die. Sometimes they got diarrhea, fever, and they died.” That’s how Torres explains the death of his daughter.
There is no official figure of how many people died of hunger and untreated diseases in the model villages, but there were more than 45 such villages, according to a report titled Recovery of Historic Memory prepared by the Roman Catholic Church, and Santa Avelina was just one of them.
Yeni De Leon of the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology, which was in charge of the exhumations, said about 45 percent of the 172 bodies exhumed in Santa Avelina correspond to children age 12 and under. Many died from a measles outbreak in the early 1980s.