Youth in Postwar Guatemala

Michelle J. Bellino

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813588018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala’s civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country’s history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy. Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised.  

1

Citizen, Interrupted

Carlos was the first guerrillero I met.1 I stared at his small body from across the room with a mixture of awe and fear before working up the nerve to talk to him. His nephew Marco, who was too young to be a guerrillero during the war, beamed as he introduced us. He presented me as a student and Carlos as an ex-guerrillero, an identity I had assumed was to be kept secret. Carlos was quick to remind me that there was no such thing as an ex-guerrillero. They were guerrillas for life. Carlos said I could ask him anything, but it took time before it felt right to tread into his past. I told him about what I was doing in Guatemala, explaining my interest in education and the ways that young people were learning about the civil war. This was usually enough to show that I knew something about Guatemala’s history and cared about its future. We soon dipped into the sardonic space of contemporary “postwar” Guatemala, which invited bitter declarations from around the room that life was more insecure now than during the war. It was different, but the same. Clumsily curling my fingers into quotes around “postwar” often earned me the added respect that I knew something about Guatemala’s present. I initially saw this gesture as overtly political and somewhat risky, but soon came to realize that everyone was dissatisfied by the postwar. No matter who they were, and no matter what this history meant to them, the war’s aftermath held everyone captive.

After the peace process, Carlos moved to Villa Nueva, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Guatemala City today. It took him almost a decade to return to his family home in Quiché. At first no one there remembered him. They looked straight into his eyes but still needed to hear his family lineage before placing him in the community. He laughed and explained that many of them remarked, “We thought you were dead.” Not being remembered was one thing. It had been a long time, he reasoned, and he had grown up, looked different from the boy from the pueblo they once knew. But what really got him about going home was coming face-to-face with what he had lost in exchange for what his people had gained. He explained, “When I return to my village, I see what I fought for. I fought for roads for my people. I fought for schools for my children. I fought for the voice of the humble people. . . . [Today] they have put in roads, but the roads lead nowhere. They have put in schools, but there are no teachers and no books. There are community spaces but no community.” When I asked Carlos if he would one day let his young children join the lucha (struggle), he made a long, drawn-out noooo. He told me that to struggle was hard, lonely work. He was cold and wet and hungry all the time. He shivered and said something about suffering alone even though the struggle was bigger than he was. Several times he said, “I struggled so my children would not have to.” Over the years Carlos has continued to wrestle with his desire to grant his children a peaceful future even if it means filing away the past and his open recognition that little has changed, that there remains much left to fight for.

By evening that first night we met in the Highlands, the men began drinking and Carlos’s wife, Tania, nudged me into a small bedroom, where the children were watching television. She explained, “When they drink, the stories come.” The stories were war memories, flashes of “things they did” and “things that had been done to them.” It was better this way, she said. Better to let them drink and remember the pain than to stay silent. In the morning it would be like it never happened. “You will see,” she said. And I did.

Praise and Critique in the Postwar

Transitional justice processes are regularly shaped by and for those who survive mass violence, but it is often postwar generations that expose the strengths and weaknesses of particular forms of reckoning and the decisions made in pursuit of the better postwar future (E. Cole, 2007a; Jelin, 2003; Murphy, in press).2 As Carlos explained, wars are often fought in pursuit of future opportunities, struggles taken on so that the next generation will not have to. But the flawed realities that postgenerations encounter may radically undermine the hope that survivor generations invested in the better future. These flaws also speak to the intergenerational nature of historical injustice and the fiction constructed around peace as a “single line in time” (Lederach, 2005, p. 43).

From 1960 to 1996 Guatemala experienced one of the most brutal civil wars in Latin America’s history, called the Conflicto Armado, the “Armed Conflict.”3 Though the principal actors featured in history books are the state military and several guerrilla groups, various sectors of civil society became willful or unwitting perpetrators or targets of violence that at times appeared selective and other times gave way to indiscriminate repression. Nevertheless, the vast majority of victims of torture, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, displacement, and death were indigenous civilians, unaffiliated with either the state or the guerrilla movement (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [CEH], 1999). The truth commission that investigated the conflict determined that atrocities committed by state forces included ethnic genocide in their intentional targeting of indigenous peoples. During the course of thirty-six years of conflict, over one million Guatemalans fled to Mexico and other Central American countries, seeking refugee status. Thousands of others hid in the mountains and starved to death.

Nearly two decades after peace negotiations, Guatemala’s postwar society is hardly at peace. The country ranks as one of the most dangerous places in the world, exhibiting homicide rates four times greater than what the World Health Organization considers “epidemic.”4 A majority of young people endure both poverty and existential insecurity, while facing a profound lack of opportunities to be educated, to find work in the formal sector, and to sustain—let alone surpass—their family’s current socioeconomic conditions, often already located on the fringes (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2012). For many, desires to bring about change sit uneasily alongside hopelessness abided by history. What should survivors like Carlos tell their children about the ways that violence, terror, and loss so profoundly shaped the trajectories of their lives, when so little seems to have changed? This is a story about postwar youth in Guatemala, but I begin with Carlos to remind us that young people are relationally embedded in generational politics and are subject to hopes and anxieties that are stitched into postwar transitions.

Amid a host of postwar challenges, today’s Guatemala is experiencing a severe “youth problem” (Burrell, 2009, p. 97; 2013, p. 20).5 Reflective of the global “youth bulge,” nearly 40 percent of Guatemalans are younger than age fifteen (Urdal, 2012). It is not the high proportion of youth alone that is worrisome, but the large number of young people in “social limbo” (Reimers & Cardenas, 2010, p. 144)—out of school, unemployed, or underemployed. These “school-to-work linkages” influence youth civic development in significant ways (Youniss et al., 2002, p. 135), risking social exclusion and political distrust when states cannot fulfill the promises of egalitarianism, inclusion, and meritocracy conveyed to young people as they invest in their education.

In the particular context of Guatemala, growing numbers of criminal youth and climbing rates of youth homicides have provoked, and been provoked by, the grim reality that “young people [are] locked into a dead end future” (Adams, 2011, p. 45). Traditionally a symbol of hope, Guatemalan youth, once imagined as the “vanguard of modernity” (Levenson, 2013a, p. 13), have been “turned upside down to signify the radically dangerous present, chaos and death, an obstacle to the future instead of its herald” (p. 2). On a societal level, many adults have come to fear and pity young people rather than support and empower them.

Given the scale of postwar violence and entrenched structural inequality in Guatemala, one might wonder whether the history of war is worth remembering at all. In 2009, after I presented on social memory and postwar violence in Guatemala at an international human rights conference, a member of the audience directed me to the literature in the field of transitional justice that showcases the sometimes necessary and desired work of forgetting. How better to institutionalize forgetting than through a curriculum that treats decades of violence as incidental to the country’s democratization? Although I am sensitive to the ways in which survivors might opt to express their agency not through narrative but through silence and selective forgetting (see Husseyn, 2005; Jelin, 2003; Theidon, 2013), I was troubled by the suggestion that the rise in Guatemala’s youth gang violence necessitated silencing decades of armed conflict, brought on by centuries of structural inequality and institutionalized racism, and whose consequences remained agonizingly visible. The comment evoked the discourses of power operating in Guatemala, which make a persuasive case for ahistorical compartmentalizing of injustice, presuming that looking forward requires not looking back. Even if the war could be erased from public memory, legacies of violence and division would continue to mark society and structure power inequities in the present. Moreover, who gets to decide that it is better to actively disremember violence, when erasing the past so clearly benefits those who committed atrocities and marginalizes those who were targets of violence and repression? In part, this book is my response to claims that postwar problems demand postwar solutions such as historical silence.

In making this argument, I do not discount the scale of violence afflicting Guatemalan and Central American youth. I do, however, believe that a complex set of historical circumstances accounts for this rise in violence, so that the postwar cannot be so easily disentangled from the history of war from which it emerged. I could not have come to this realization without the guidance of young people, who presented savvy critiques of their social conditions, attentiveness to the legacies of colonialism compounded by civil war, and the enduring unequal and exploitative relations that organize their society. It was young people who helped me see that Guatemalan adolescents are the perpetrators and the victims, the killer gang members and the disaffected youth sorting through the city trash for food scraps—and that both of these paths were born from the history of extreme terror and violence that forever marked the lives of their parents during the Conflicto Armado. Though today’s youth did not live the violence, they inherited its legacies and the failed dreams of the popular movement—in material ways such as lost family members, underresourced schools built atop clandestine graves, and roads that “lead nowhere,” as Carlos notes. They also inherited the symbolic remnants of the conflict in the purposeful silence and unanswered questions about the past, lingering fears about collective action, and the uncertainty about whether and when the future might get better.

Many scholars regard Guatemala’s contemporary violence as a once-preventable outgrowth of the civil war (Grandin, 2004; Isaacs, 2010a; Manz, 2008; Sanford, 2008), but the state recounts a different story. The consistent denial by state officials that genocide happened, that war trials would restore trust in democratic institutions, and that today’s popular movements remain targets of political repression dovetail with public claims that postwar peace was achieved, only to be violently ruptured by the influx of transnational, “apolitical” gangs (Levenson, 2013a, p. 8) and criminal networks (see Benson, Thomas, & Fischer, 2011). On the contrary, today’s “land problem” (Palma Murga, 2011, p. 454) and “indigenous problem,” a term used to signal the challenges of multilingualism and pluralism, are not new forms of exclusion and marginalization but rather unresolved political issues, rooted in a history of conflict and inequality. While the scale of today’s “youth problem” (Burrell, 2009, p. 97; 2013, p. 20) manifests as a distinctly postwar phenomenon, its roots too spring from the past. Political and criminal violence have been described as “two sides of the same coin” (Stanley, 2001, p. 535). In this sense, efforts to disarticulate postwar, “apolitical” crime from the history of “political” violence serve distinct purposes in the present (Cruz, 2011; Isaacs, 2010a, 2010b; Levenson, 2013a, 2013b; Moodie, 2010). Downplaying long-term consequences of the Conflicto Armado evokes a hierarchy of suffering between past and present, while transferring accountability from the state to criminal youth.

Under these conditions, educating postwar generations about historical injustice is often dismissed as irrelevant and potentially harmful to stability, national unity, and postwar peace (Bellino, 2014a, 2015b). Whether citizens should cultivate critical historical consciousness of injustice has repolarized debates among educators and the public about what good citizenship entails in a fragile, postwar state.6 As we will see, historical injustice plays a key role in young people’s civic identity formation and their sense of agency to participate in the civic life of a democracy in transition.

Historical Consciousness and Leaps of Civic Faith

Throughout the text I pursue two complementary aims: to illustrate the varied ways that youth learn about historical injustice in formal and informal educational spaces as a component of citizenship education and to explore how urban and rural adolescents draw on their construction of the violent past in shaping their evolving sense of themselves as civic actors and as members of a postwar, postauthoritarian democracy. Through ethnographic accounts in four communities, I examine how postwar political processes and global discourses of peace, democracy, and transitional justice influence educational reform and everyday opportunities in and outside of schools to narrate, commemorate, and contest injustice.

Long heralded as society’s primary citizen-making institution, education has recently been recognized as an ideal, albeit underutilized, civic space that can be honed as a mechanism of transitional justice in the context of everyday life (Bellino, 2016; E. Cole, 2007b; Cole & Murphy, 2009; Davies, in press a; Paulson, 2009). Education as a sector is far-reaching and multigenerational, and the messages, relationships, and practices that young people are exposed to in schools profoundly influence their civic identity development, sense of belonging, and connectedness to fellow citizens and the state (Flanagan, Stoppa, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2010; Murphy, in press). In particular, history education is envisioned as a model space for aligning civic knowledge, skills, and attitudes with the societal needs of transitioning democracies. Teaching about historical injustice in the aftermath of mass violence has been conceived as a collective obligation to clarify the historical record, reestablish moral frameworks, promote reconciliation, and acknowledge past atrocity for future generations (E. Cole, 2007a; Minow, 1998; Weinstein, Freedman, & Hughson, 2007), all of which are regarded as essential means of reckoning for the transitional citizen. In line with other transitional mechanisms, education can cultivate a “two-way gaze” (Davies, in press a, in press b) among learners, acknowledging past conflict while aspiring toward a shared vision of future transformation.

Teaching the past in any context is susceptible to politicization and public contest, particularly on subjects of violence and injustice (e.g., Barton and Levstik, 2004). What underpins these debates is often a deeper question about the purposes of teaching history and its civic implications, which take on particular significance in settings undergoing democratic transitions. But because of history’s potential divisiveness, it is more often silenced in curriculum and classroom discussions, orienting youth to their civic roles as shapers of the postwar future (see Paulson, 2015), while granting young people little interpretive agency to question and critique past events. As in many postconflict contexts, the “two-way gaze” (Davies, in press b) often gives way to historical silence and idealistic projections of postwar peace and harmony (Paulson, 2009). In the process, schools convey postwar citizenship as conditional on particular engagements with historical injustice. But memories circulate in the private sphere, even under conditions of public censure. The construction of the past is therefore not confined to schools or textual resources, suggesting that young learners make meaning of the past through various educational exchanges, some formal and others informal, while embedded in broader sociocultural contexts (Ahonen, 2005; Angvik & von Borries, 1997; Seixas, 2004). Yet, as this book illustrates, youth do not simply inherit memories of violence and visions of peace from their parents and teachers; they actively interpret, reconstruct, and place themselves within these narratives, even when they are intentionally silenced. Through this process, young learners construct the role and relevance of the past in their present lives. That is, they construct historical consciousness, organizing the meaning of the past around what they deem “‘worthy of remembering’” (Funkenstein, 1993, p. 17). In doing so, they build temporal and agentic connections between themselves and the past, present, and future (Murphy & Gallagher, 2009; Murphy, Sleeper, & Stern Strom, 2011).

In and outside of schools, young people have daily experiences with civic agents and institutions, which shape their understanding of the social contract, fairness and justice, and individual and collective roles within a democratic society (Flanagan, 2004; B. Levinson, 2007; M. Levinson, 2012; Rubin, 2007, 2012). Young people in all societies come to understand democracy and the civil contract through experiences with their weaknesses and “disjunctures,” as well as their strengths and “convergence” with democratic ideals (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Dyrness, 2012; Rubin, 2007, 2012). Particularly in transitional democracies, the deficiencies and exclusions evoked through “democratic disjuncture” (Holston & Caldeira, 1998) powerfully resonate with historical injustice and the illusory promises of the better f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Citizen, Interrupted
• Chapter 2. Education and Conflict in Guatemala
• Chapter 3. International Academy: The No-Blame Generation and the Post-Postwar
• Chapter 4. Paulo Freire Institute: The All-or-Nothing Generation and the Spiral of the Ongoing Past
• Chapter 5. Sun and Moon: The No-Future Generation and the Struggle to Escape
• Chapter 6. Tzolok Ochoch: The Lucha Generation and the Struggle to Overcome
• Chapter 7. What Stands in the Way
• Chapter 8. The Hopes and Risks of Waiting
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Read More in the Series