Panabaj

In December 1991, the community of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala decided that they would not watch their neighbors disappear in the night one by one any longer. On the night of December 2nd, a man was seized by the army that had nothing to do with the Guerilla movement. Upon hearing the screams yet again, the community, women, children and men, marched to the army camp to demand the return of their neighbor. The soldiers opened fire on the peaceful protestors killing 11. The army was removed from Santiago shortly thereafter.

Now a Peace Park is in the place of this massacre with tombstones where the bodies fell… reading the stones brought the horror to light for the ages of some of those killed were 5 or 9 or 11… children. Killed while trying to put an end to the violence that they were born into. In their lives they knew nothing else.

We visited this Peace Park during Lent with a delegation from St. Paul Area Synod. Little did we know when we arrived what happened just around the corner. Thankfully our driver knew and we visited another cemetery.

Violence once again visited the foothills of Santiago Atitlan in October 2005; the violence of nature. We heard reports of the mudslides in Guatemala due to Hurricane Stan last fall, CNN even covered the event. It is one thing to hear about whole communities disappearing, it is another to see the aftermath.

We walked into the community, looking down on houses a good meter below the road. Still not fully understanding we kept walking, until we came to the school… the outside wall had been swept away in the current of mud and debris and the basketball court inside was filled in up to about two feet from the basketball hoop. Our driver encouraged us to keep walking deeper up the path… we came to the clinic with mud up to the top of the doors and only the top of the posts to the front gate still visible and next to the clinic a new police station with its south facing concrete wall breached by the landslide. It is said that at least two cars, one of them a police pickup were still buried under our feet.

Then we turned around.

Only one tree remains where the homes had been, and in that one tree a young man was perched in the branches cutting down the tree for firewood with his machete, as if to finish what nature had missed. Off in the distance we saw the scar in the mountain where the mudslide began, bringing a river of mud to the community and taking the community with it. All of the homes were gone.

Beginning to absorb the significance of the barren space, we began to notice small shoes half buried in the mud under foot, and other debris. The mudslide came quickly and the inhabitants did not have time to flee. An entire village gone…

We were standing on a cemetery.