“Please, bring away my words so that everyone can know what we have been going through and what we underwent… And I hope my statement will be heard…” Dozens of victims with who I had a chance to live everyday for many years asked me the same question as Dona Catarina: “bring away my words” Extracting this suffering buried within themselves for more than twenty years and added to the hope of sharing their story with everyone gives a meaning to their misfortune. I can’t bear it anymore, only pain remains in my heart when I talk about that, only pain remains when the words come from the deepest of my soul. It is not easy to testify as it implies to be confronted once more with the reality that has psychologically wrecked them. But it is somehow an answer to this forced silence and the will to share this story as dreadful as it is unknown has become eventually a moral duty in spite of threats, distrust, fear, shame or the feeling of guilt of “having survived”.
Today we can see more and more the Mayas, whereas they were invisible to the eyes of the elites for five centuries, and hear more about them as they compel the country to avow a thirty-five year old conflict (1960-1996). More than 200 000 deads, 45 000 reported missing, 667 massacres, 430 ruined villages, 150 000 refugees, a million and a half people were displaced, more than 83% of the victims were Mayas and 94% of the massacres were perpetrated by the army.
Behind those terrifying figures, there are faces with last names and first names that will never be forgotten by the survivors. This unknown story is today updated thanks to the work of crews of medical anthropologists. They conduct unearthings all over the country looking for the ones that were “reported missing” for such a long time. The skeletons of men, women and children massacred more than twenty years ago that we are now finding as they were buried in common graves tell us the truth on the atrocities of those violent years because from now on the corpses of the deceased can talk and recount.