502 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Because of the personal anecdotal origin of what is told here, we are able to under-
stand that Pajarito’s violent military activities were in fact being manipulated by other
non-Indian political interests. In fact, goals quite opposite those that Pajarito believed he
was fighting for, were in fact pushing him onto the field of battle. Now, as we stand some
95 years removed from these events, we must be aware that the circumstances have become
clouded with false framing and contextualization. We are now in a position to free our-
selves from these assertions about our past, for we begin to sense a feeling of liberation
from the long tradition of racism that Ladinos have imposed on us and our own past.
Although it can hardly be argued that Pajarito’s people were justified in perpetrat-
ing all of their bloody activities, it is nevertheless the case that they were in fact being ma-
nipulated, however briefly, by Ladino power plays. (Sna Jtz’ibahom 1991:5; translation
by Gary H. Gossen)Victor Montejo’s Testimony:
Death of a Guatemalan Village (1987)
Victor Montejo, a Jacaltec Maya from Guatemala, has become one of the more promi-
nent members of a new generation of Mesoamerican Indian writers and artists whose
work has appeared in Spanish and English editions. His most recent major work con-
siders generally and synthetically the Mayan intellectual renaissance of which he is
a part:Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership(2005). He
has published a recent retelling of the Popol Wuh (the sixteenth-century Mayan clas-
sic) for young audiences in both Spanish and English editions: Popol Wuh: A Sacred
book of the Maya(1999). At heart a storyteller, Montejo has also published a poetic ren-
dering of a Jacaltec sacred narrative (El Kanil, Man of Lightning(1982) and a retelling
of Jacaltec children’s stories (The Bird Who Cleans the World,1991).
The text extract that we offer here records Montejo’s hair-raising eyewitness ac-
count of a local event in Guatemala’s recently concluded civil war—known as the
“the violence”—that convulsed national life in the 1970s and 1980s) (see the account
of this war in Chapter 8). This important work, entitled Te stimony: Death of a
Guatemalan Village(1987), is extracted here not only for its artistic merit but also for
its political content. It reflects the plain social historical truth that Mesoamerican In-
dians have spent centuries as the de facto underclass of New Spain and of the mod-
ern nations of the region. Testimonyrecords Montejo’s eyewitness account of the
Guatemalan army’s massacre of a Jacaltec Indian village on September 9, 1982, when
the civil patrol of Tzalala, where Montejo was a schoolteacher, mistook an army de-
tachment dressed in olive fatigues for leftist guerillas and fired on them. This mas-
sacre included members of Montejo’s own family. These events took place in a period
in which many of the departments of northwestern Guatemala (most of them with
a majority Mayan population) were under military occupation. The justification,
from the military point of view, was that all of the region’s inhabitants, being Indi-
ans, were subject to leftist insurgency or were themselves guerilla sympathizers.
Reproduced here are the final passages of Testimony:I returned innumerable times to report to the base commander, until he was relieved
from his post. He was replaced by another lieutenant who had stored up in his being all
the deadly poisons. I hesitated to present myself before him but finally had to do it to avoidCopyright (C) 1987 by Victor Montejo. English language copyright (c) 1987 by Victo Perera. ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED. Printed with permission the Northwestern University Press.