Panajachel, Guatemala

This article is the fifth in a series of travel entries from CMC Steamboat student Bailey Peth, who has been recounting her recent trip with CMC’s Study Abroad program to Guatemala in her blog, Bluebird Sky.  The program filled up in 2012;  find out information about next year’s Guatemala trip, and other study abroad opportunities, through our study abroad page.

Mountains behind Lake Atitlan, Guatemala
Panajachel, "place of the Matasanos’, on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

We sit in a circle in the kitchen of our new guest house, this one in Panajachel on the banks of Lake Atitlan. Amongst us sits an ex-guerilla fighter. He takes a moment to tell us about himself and also to outline the conflict that ravaged Guatemala. For years multinational corporations have been taking lands form indigenous people without compensating them for it. Without these lands people have no way to feed themselves or their families. This type of hunger leads to social distress. Without a voice in the government, the local people did the only thing they could to make a stand; take up arms. This movement was met from tremendous fear from the government and resulted in 440 indigenous communities wiped out and 200,000 people dead.

With a smile in his eyes he told us this, “The Guerilla movement started in our hearts against the state of injustice. A state indifferent to hunger, to poverty. So to understand this movement is to see your neighbor suffering, to be able to see the injustice around you and want to change that. The last step is to be willing to give yourself up to change it. The movement came from people throughout the community; students, farmers. The main force behind the fighting was internal. There was so much injustice a lot of people were motivated to change it. The revolutionary movement within a person brings them to a higher level. You have to be willing to give up your home, your family, in order to change the country. We gave up college, family, good jobs and friends. Whole communities moved for this change. This movement generates the motivation. We were lacking food, shoes, medicine. And there is an enemy down there and he’s looking for us. You don’t join a war on instinct; it’s not only extreme on the body, but also on the mind, you must learn what’s going on in your country, in the world. You also must explore what happened with big companies, other countries in your country. It’s the most complete college I could have had.”

He spent 20 years in the jungle fighting for his people, and was part of the group that sign peace agreements with the government; the URNG, which means National Guatemalan revolutionary Unity. The URNG consist of former guerilla fighters that formed a legal political party. He was later elected to congress.

When asked if he felt he did more good as a guerilla fighter or congressman, he told us that he feels he did more good in the jungle.

After his twenty years in the jungle someone asked him what he was going to do, he told them the he was going to fight for twenty more years after that.