Maya Women of Chajul

Historical Background and Contemporary Challenges

San Gaspar Chajul is one of three municipalities in the northern province of El Quiché, Guatemala, a country where 43–60 per cent of the 14–15 million inhabitants are indigenous, mostly Maya. The median age is 20 years, with a life expectancy of 71 years. Approximately 54 per cent live on about $3 per day; some suggest that in rural areas such as Chajul, that figure rises to over 80 per cent. Despite recent increases in educational levels among today's youth, a large percentage of adults are illiterate, with estimates of only 39 per cent literacy among indigenous women between 15 and 64 years of age, many of whom are monolingual, speaking one of the country's 21 indigenous languages but not the country's official language, Spanish.

Indigenous people were evangelized and forced into servitude under Spanish colonization, which endured until the country achieved independence in 1821. Liberal reforms in the 1870s introduced coffee on a large scale, plantation agriculture became the norm and inequalities in wealth escalated. A democratic revolution in 1944 brought a reformist government to power that was overthrown in 1954, with the US Central Intelligence Agency playing a major role and installing military dictators supported by a powerful oligarchy.

In the 1970s, the military unleashed widespread counter-insurgency violence against a confluence of revolutionary guerrillas and social movements who threatened their power. After nearly four decades of armed conflict, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity and the Guatemalan government signed Peace Accords in 1996. The Catholic Archdiocesan report Guatemala Never Again (REMHI) and the report of the UN-brokered Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) estimated the death toll of those years to be between 130,000 and 200,000, with an additional 50,000 ‘disappearances', at least 1 million internally displaced persons, 100,000 officially recognized refugees and 200,000 orphaned children. The CEH concluded that the acts of the Guatemalan state against the indigenous people constituted genocide.

Over one third of the approximately 600 documented massacres during the armed conflict occurred in the Quiché region. The military and their forcibly conscripted civilian patrollers occupied the town of Chajul, terrorizing the local community, raping young girls and women and, among many other atrocities, hanging a woman in the town square whom they accused of having lured the army into a guerrilla attack. The REMHI report identified at least five massacres in the vicinity of San Gaspar Chajul in the early 1980s—four in the village of Chel and the fifth at the La Perla Plantation.

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