Accompanier perspectives: On Being Stiff Necked

Ethan was in Guatemala as an Internacionalista with NISGUA during 2024–2025. They wrote this final letter in January 2025, reflecting on their experience and the people and movements that left a deep impression on them.

On November 28th, 2024, the First Court of Appeals (whose members all have connections to corrupt actors and the military) convened to decide whether or not to throw out the genocide trial of former General Manuel Benedicto Lucas García. The usual group of anxious activists, accompaniers, lawyers, and journalists arrive on the 3rd floor of the Palace of Justice, avoiding making eye contact with the right-wing journalists and representatives of pro-military organizations wearing suits and badges. Nana Winter, the German-and- Q’eqchi’-descended wife of the general, former Miss Guatemala, indigenous fashion activist, and genocide apologist, has brought a group of 11 Q’eqchi’ women from Cobán to participate in a ceremony in support of the general. The defense lawyers join the ceremony enthusiastically, perhaps sensing their imminent success in defending a man responsible for the killing of more than 1800 Ixil men, women, and children and displacing hundreds of thousands more.

There’s not nearly enough space inside the courtroom, so we’re sitting outside watching the proceedings on the Facebook livestream. The audio goes in and out and the Spanish is a little too quick for me to catch, but after an hour or so, the faces of the people around me make the verdict clear. In their dismissal of the case, the Court of Appeals cited as proof an audio recording from the presiding judge of High Risk Tribunal A, who, at around audience number 45, made an offhand comment in conversation with a forensic anthropologist about being generally against impunity. To the First Court of Appeals, this was a “declaration of intent” by the judge against those who might benefit from impunity, and therefore proof of his partiality in the case. The association of genocide survivors were told that although everything from the preceding 7 months, 99 public audiences, 50 direct witnesses, and 50 expert witnesses was discarded, they were welcome to start the trial over from the beginning with a different tribunal in 2-3 years, at which many point many more of the witnesses, already having waited more than forty years, will have died. The members of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation have been through this rodeo before, however.

A couple weeks later, on December 10th, hundreds of AJR members come from across the country and gather outside the Supreme Court for a Mayan invocation. They bring yellow flowers and signs that say, “No to Impunity”, “Consuelo Porras Resign” and “Justice for the Ixil People”. In a press release, they condemn the Attorney General’s recent dismantling of the Attorney’s Department for Human Rights which has supported these genocide cases and call on President Arévalo to pass the National Plan for Dignification and Reparation, which would bring much needed reparation to survivors. In an earlier interview, a member of AJR reminds us of what this was really about: fighting for historical memory, fighting for no repetition. This was never just about locking up a 92-year-old man– it’s about raising up survivor’s voices, exposing the horrors committed by the Guatemalan army and the resilience of the Mayan people, shifting the balance of power, insisting over and over again on a world where this can never happen again.

Most of my time in Guatemala has been in an activist bubble where people are talking about the genocide all the time. But over December break while traveling I spend more time in the gringo circuit, the backpacker loop from Antigua, to Lake Atitlan, to Semuc Champey, then down to El Salvador or up to Tikal and over to Mexico (backpackers are warned never to set foot in Guatemala City). I have the same conversation over and over again, in shuttles and hostels and beach bars with backpackers from Germany and Australia and France. When I mention what I’m doing in Guatemala, and the genocide, I sometimes get a few curious questions, but mostly it’s just a baffled look and then the conversation moves as quickly possible back on to which island has the best beaches off the coast of Belize.

But it’s not just the tourists. In December, while kayaking on Lake Petén Itza outside of the island of Flores in the jungle of Petén, we stumbled across an island museum. A Guatemalan hipster DJ from the capital told us his grandfather bought the island in the 50s and built the area’s first radio station. He took us on a 30-minute tour of the small museum: Mayan artifacts (Flores was also the last Mayan city conquered by the Spanish), an old radio transmission system, paper currency from around the world. I asked him what the situation had been like here during the Internal Armed Conflict. “Oh yes, my grandmother remembers seeing helicopters, and yes there were guerillas around here. But it’s a very ugly thing to talk about. Besides, in this museum, we don’t discuss such things. Here we focus on history.”

It’s easy to see the genocide falling out of public discourse and then slipping from the history books, another Mayan temple silently reclaimed by the jungle, another epidemic of collective amnesia. This week, for my last accompaniment trip, we visited AJR board members in the Rabinal region, where a survivor of massacres shares the following with us:

“There [talking about the community they were displaced from] we had everything we needed. If you needed wood, you could go to the forest and cut it down. If you needed water, you could go to the river. All the land was collective, so you could find a parcel and plant your corn and beans, and then the next year if you wanted to, you could move and plant somewhere else. Now if you need wood, it costs money, if you need beans, it costs money, everything costs money. And we don’t have any.”

There have been moments in many of these conversations when the bad news piles up almost too thick. A life story involving massacres, disappeared family members, near starvation in the mountains. The genocide cases are suspended by judges linked to the corrupt pact and groups of ex-military personnel and then thrown out altogether. A drought wipes out ninety percent of a cardamom harvest and will take two years to regrow. Loved ones who need surgeries but can’t afford it, sitting in their houses and waiting to die. The sadness gets thick, and we just sit in it for a moment with nothing else to say.

Then, there will often be a small sigh, and the survivor will say: “pero, la lucha sigue”. But, the fight goes on.

And sometimes it’s just a matter of holding on. In the morning, we meet with another leader from Rabinal for breakfast. She has just come from a ceremony her nephew, who lives in another town, had asked her to organize for her and her family’s flourishing and protection. She has a clear strategic intervention to make: “We need more ceremonies,” she says. She had also noticed that when the genocide case was thrown out on November 28th, the defense had a ceremony, and our side didn’t. “We need to have the wind of our ancestors at our back,” she says.

Before Rabinal we visited the radical returnee community of Copal AA for their 29th anniversary, a community that had played a key role in fighting against and defeating the Xalalá dam, a bit further down the Chixoy river. As the community members dance to marimba, on one of the 3 days a year they’re allowed to drink alcohol, a tipsy 27-year-old tells me his life story. As a kid here, he started the circus club: clowning and juggling and stilts are quite popular here. “Yeah, I’ve been to the US twice,” he says. “I’ve crossed the desert. South Carolina, Florida. The migra couldn’t catch me, I’m too fast,” he bangs his chest. “And I could do it again if I wanted to.” He pauses. “But I don’t want to. There’s nowhere more beautiful than Copal AA, right?” he says, gesturing towards the river, “there’s nowhere more beautiful than right here.”

I came to Guatemala in part because I was burnt out and I wanted to be inspired by Indigenous resistance to continue organizing work, continue fighting for a just and redeemed world. This desire was probably colored by some leftist version of what the Indigenous women’s communicator network Jun Na´oj calls folclorización, romantic and reductive stereotyping about Indigenous people.

I haven’t found some great insight deep in the jungle or on top of a mountain about how to stay in the struggle forever. Indigenous organizations are as flawed as any other. There’s petty infighting, organizations run by charismatic leaders with big egos, and the ever-present challenge of machismo and patriarchy. Indigenous traditions have been co-opted and twisted by the Guatemalan state: the military death squads, the kaibiles, are named after a fierce Spanish-resisting Mam king; Nana Winter leads Q’eqchi’ women in a Mayan ritual to pray for impunity for the genocidal general; Guatemala City’s shiny new shopping mall, which replaced a long-preserved forest park, is called Cayalá, the Kaqchikel word for paradise.

The one piece of Torah I learned thoroughly while I was here was a discourse on the Biblical story of Noah from the Esh Kodesh, a series of discourses written by R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Esh Kodesh establishes a difference between those who are kasheh oref, stiff necked, stubborn, and those who are hafachpach, flip-floppers. God criticizes the Jewish people for being kshei oref, but Moshe responds that it is exactly this quality of kishui oref that merits the Divine Presence. Like every quality, kishui oref can be used for good or used for bad. But in moments of trials, of genocidal violence, whether in the Warsaw Ghetto, in the Ixil territory of the 80s, or in Gaza today, a little bit of kishui oref is required to insist on the liberatory threads of our traditions and our dreams for a redeemed world, despite the overwhelming violence and desecration around us that can makes these visions seem far away.

I didn’t find a single grand insight here, but I did meet people, learn stories, images, practices, metaphors, about how Indigenous communities in Guatemala have been able to cultivate that insistence. To wake up after 40 years of frustrated justice, feed your chickens, and say “pues, la lucha sigue”. To leave at 3 in the morning and travel seven hours out of solidarity with survivors from a community far away from your own. To allow time for everyone in a meeting to speak about why they are there, what it means, however long it takes, even if it takes the whole agenda. To prioritize ceremony and prayer. To start with family and neighbors. To lead with hospitality and tortillas and good coffee. To take up arms to defend your community and the land in one season, and put them down in another. To develop a strategy and cultivate it and push it and push it and in the right moment, let it go, and let a new strategy burst forth. To build an organization and cultivate it and push it and push it, and in the right moment, let it die. To spend time in cemeteries and tend to the dead. To build collective memory out of museums, ceremonies, trials, testimony. To travel across jungle and desert and a thousand deaths to earn money for your family, and then to journey back again. To cultivate and defend your culture and language, stitch by stitch and poem by poem. To look to your own community to build power. To go as a community to the place where violence, exploitation, extraction is happening, and stop it. To be stiff-necked, and to continue learning. To claim victory. To insist on and inhabit a decolonized world.