A Thanksgiving to Remember

The Guatemalan Army officer insisted that we share a meal with him.

The church dominates the town square in Nebaj, Guatemala. Photo from Google Earth.

Thanksgiving is a day to reflect on what we are thankful for and to think about our history as a nation and the good and bad it has done. This year, I’m thinking about a Thanksgiving far from home 34 years ago in the Guatemalan highlands where the army was a war.

It was late November, 1985. We had been in the town of Nebaj, in the Ixil Triangle, for only an hour when an undercover military soldier wanted to question us, two bearded men and a woman with a video camera and microphones in hand.

The military had undoubtedly watched us wind our way down the twisted mountain highway, creeping along the rutted road in a rental car. They didn’t get many tourists in the Ixil Triangle since the region had been declared a war zone.

By the time we unloaded our gear at the Tres Hermanas pension, the authorities knew that strangers, perhaps journalists, had arrived.

These three Ixil men in Nebaj watched but did not speak with us. Photo by the author.

The three of us had come to document what had happened to thousands of Ixil people who had been displaced or killed during the army’s counterinsurgency campaign. For three years, few outsiders had been allowed in…