280 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Figure 7.8 Parade of local police and militia in the town center of Momostenango, 1968.
Photograph provided by authors.mestizo lawyer to prosecute the murderer, whereas Lt. Fermín’s defense was made
by an educated local Indian. The court proceedings lasted for eight months and re-
sulted in a guilty verdict for Fermín. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for mur-
dering Timoteo, and an appeal to a higher court was rejected. In less than two years,
however, liberal President Manuel Estrada Cabrera pardoned Fermín, and he was
freed from prison in 1904.
This case reveals that most of the Indians involved in the dramatic events were
active participants in the local militia organization. Besides Lt. Fermín and his Indian
patrol members, it appears that Timoteo, his male in-laws, and the local Indian
“lawyer” were also militiamen. All the principal Indian actors appear to have been sig-
nificantly acculturated to ladino ways: They spoke Spanish, were active in commerce,
had familiarity with the legal system, and depended more on ties of friendship than
on kinship relations. Even the manner in which the crime was committed—in a pub-
lic setting, using a knife—was a mestizo rather than an Indian pattern, for murder
in rural Momostenango usually was interpreted by the K’iche’ Indians there as an act
of witchcraft. Nor were the motives behind the crime traditional native motives, but
instead the more typical mestizo motives of jealousy over women or insults against