We’ve Come for the Garbage

BY VICTORIA SANFORD

He came at six in the morning while my husband was in the shower.  He rang the doorbell.  Because I was leaving on a morning flight from Guatemala City to Tokyo, I was up and dressed.  I dashed through our front garden to the metal door and opened the little window to see who was ringing the bell so early. I did not want the doorbell to ring again and awaken my baby.  Through the window grate, I saw a man standing firmly, almost bored as he waited. Tall for a Guatemalan, he was about my height and had cropped, dark hair.  Erect in stature, he appeared trim in a navy Adidas running suit. His bearing belied his civilian clothing andI immediately knew he was from the army. “What do you want?” I asked him.  He tilted his head back in an arrogant stance and looking directly into my eyes, he said, “We’ve come for the garbage.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.  He tilted his head back in an arrogant stance and looking directly into my eyes, he said, “We’ve come for the garbage.”

I knew he had not come for the garbage. Garbage in Guatemala is picked up by poor boys in dirty, smelly clothes.Boys who look as if they have not bathed in weeks, which may be the case, or it may simply be the filth they acquire by spending the day being transported around the city in the garbage truck because they actually sit in the garbage and sift through it as they go from stop to stop.  I knew our garbage boys well.  I always gave them some food and a tip, sometimes I gave them clothes.  I packed anything sharp or broken in a separate bag and told the garbage boy about it in an effort to prevent injury.  The garbage boys were often barefoot and their hair looked sooty and stuck out in different directions as if they had just awoken.  This healthy man at my door was no garbage boy.

“At this hour?” I asked, shaking my head and swallowing my fear I answered my own question, “No, there is no garbage here.” And the trim man in the Adidas suit held up his cell phone in my direction as he said, “We’ll be back.  There is garbage here and we always get the garbage.”  I said nothing as I closed the window.  Later, I realized he had taken my photo with his cell phone.

This is how the threats began.  I still flew to Tokyo that morning, mostly because I had fronted the cost of the plane ticket to give a keynote lecture at United Nations University about the Guatemalan peace process and I could not afford to not be reimbursed for my $2,300 plane ticket.  I wept most of the way to Tokyo, worried sick about my two-year-old daughter.  And, they, whoever they are, already know that.  The people who make threats already know what matters most to you and if you are a mother or a father, they know it is your child.  

The only thing truly surprising about this early morning threat that was almost elegant in its brutal understatement is that it happened in March 2007 and not earlier.  It is not that my years of work in Guatemala had been without threats, it is that previous threats were more general, not directed specifically at me and my family.  

More than a decade earlier, when I was working with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation in the summer of 1994 (two years before the peace accords were signed) on the exhumation of the clandestine cemetery of army massacre victims in Plan de Sanchez, high in the mountains above the municipality of Rabinal, the FAFG received a fax reading“Deja los muertos en pas[sic] hijos de puta.”  (Leave the dead in peace [peace was misspelled] sons of whores).  The same day we received the threat, the local and national office of the Human Rights Ombudsman received the same faxed threat.  At the same time local Achi Maya peasants received the kinds of threats they had grown accustomed to: they were called to the local army base in Rabinal where the army commander told them, “Those anthropologists, journalists and internationals are all guerrilla.  You know what happens when you support the guerrilla.  Leave the dead in peace or the violence of the past will return.”  The difference between being a Maya peasant and a member of the forensic team was that we forensic anthropologists were all pretty sure that the army would not kill all of us and somehow found safety in the analysis.  The Maya peasants did not have this luxury when carrying out their complicated political calculus about whether to move forward with the exhumation – after all, the graves were the evidence that the army had no compunction about slaughtering 268 Maya peasants, mostly women and children.  Still, as the forensic team and the massacre survivors shared news of receiving threats, we all agreed to move forward with the exhumation because stopping it would leave the community with even less political space than they had when we began our work.  So we called in national and international press and human rights NGOs to bring attention to our work and the struggle of the massacre survivors.

That same summer, I hosted an interview at the national palace with a high-ranking member of the Guatemalan government who was involved in the peace negotiations I was surprised by how much he knew about the day-to-day workings of the team in Rabinal and Plan de Sanchez.  Clearly, someone was giving the government information about our movement and even our conversations.  Without naming anyone, he directed my attention to Tom, an international member of the team who had made some disparaging, if warranted, comments about the Guatemalan army.  Then the civilian functionary said, “No one should believe that a US passport protects him from the army.  If the army is insulted, it will strike back.”

In Guatemalan parlance, this was not a threat, but a warning which gives one the possibility of stepping back in line, whereas a threat does not.  And I thought, “I cannot believe that I am in the national palace and that a member of the peace negotiating team is menacing a US citizen member of the forensic team and telling me the army will strike any one of us if they don’t like what we say.”  And I noticed the hanging lights were vibrating and emitting a kind of hum as the lights dimmed and brightened.  As soon as I left the palace, I went straight back to my hotel to listen to the tape.  I was so excited to have proof of the menacing collusion between the civilian government and the army that sought to halt the exhumations.  The beginning of the taped interview is perfectly clear, as is the end.  But in the middle, just when the civilian functionary gave me the warning, the voices are garbled behind that hum from the lights. Except on my tape, the hum is louder than the voices which seem to be inaudibly pulled into slow motion, sounding like talking underwater.  

If you look at  recording equipment, there is a tag that says something about compliance with the Federal Communications Commission:  

This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following  two conditions: (1). This device may not cause harmful interference; and, (2). This device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation. Apparently, my device had accepted interference from the office of army intelligence of the Estado Mayor (the high command of the army) which had its offices right above the civilian functionary in 1994.  

How does this intelligence and surveillance work?  Who decides when to follow? When to frighten? When to sequester? When to harm?  How does a gringa like me play in to all of this?  What are the stakes?  What tips the balance?  Exactly how does all this violence work?

In 1997 when I was living in Guatemala for a year doing research for my dissertation, I was also followed by an unmarked army vehicle when I was driving by myself (with Asha, my German shepherd) back to Guatemala City from exhumation of Maya genocide victims in San Martin, Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango.  There were two men in a grey pickup with darkly polarized windows and an antenna on the roof.  They tailed me.  At first, I thought they wanted to pass me; so I slowed down.  This only brought them closer to my bumper.  So I increased my speed so much that I had to pass several vehicles in front of me—and somewhat dangerously.  They did the same on the windy, two-lane mountain road.  And, they made a point of letting me know they were behind me by almost hitting the back of my Isuzu Trooper.  So I sped up again, and they sped up again.  I slowed down, they slowed down.  This cat and mouse game went on for more than an hour.  I was terrorized.  I realized they were definitely following me and meant to frighten or injure me.  

As I got closer to Guatemala City, I started thinking about where I should go.  “Can’t go to the police station, they are not going to help.  Can’t go to the US Embassy because it is so far behind barricades and reaching the periphery of the embassy would only put me into contact with local Guatemala police, again no help from them.  Can’t go home.  On the off chance that they don’t know where I live, I am certainly not going to lead them to my house.  Can’t go to a hotel or shopping center because I would first have to enter a large underground parking lot – the stuff of stalking nightmares.”  I considered driving to the forensic team’s office but worried that I might find myself alone with one police guard.  What can a gringa in distress do?  Where should she go?  

Then, I thought of my mechanic and his brother who were both burly ladinos and had a repair garage with very large and heavy metal doors to protect their expensive equipment.  I drove directly to them.  I pulled in my car and told them about the truck of men following me.  They immediately pulled me behind them and all gathered together making themselves visible to the road outside with menacing looks and heavy wrenches in hand as they closed the garage door.  At their suggestion, I stayed inside the garage with them for an hour or so.  They gave me coffee and sweetbreads.  Then, they drove me home.  One of them drove my car back to my house in one direction and the other drove me to the house using a different route.  I don’t know if the men who followed me saw me again, but I never saw them.

I was undeterred.  It is hard to explain why.  Though I often tried to explain to my mother and finally reached a form of détente with her on the topic.  What could I say to her when, like the civilian functionary, she reminded me that my US passport was not a bullet-proof shield. t did not stop bombs from falling from the sky or grenades from flying through windows.  I never felt immortal, exactly, I just seldom felt afraid, and when I did, it was temporary.  Moments of fear were like war correspondent stories to be shared with others who did the same kind of work and were told as a kind of joke over a beer.  The last laugh was on the mystery men who made the threats because, after all, we were sitting together telling stories of how we gamed them and were still digging up graves or investigating high-impact homicide cases.

But somehow the equation is different when the threat is singularly directed at you and your family. People who are threatened become isolated and, at the same time, further isolate themselves for fear of putting themselves or their family members at greater risk, or passing their precarious condition on to friends through Guatemala’s ideology of guilt by association.  Ultimately, people who receive threats become their own jailers.

After the garbage incident, we stopped going out as a family because I was afraid we would be run off the road and die in a “car accident.”  We did not go out to dinner with friends or away to Lake Atitlan for weekends even though we were repeatedly invited.  I could not visit my Maya friends in the highlands because the trip was too dangerous and I feared placing them in danger with my presence.  

We never left our daughter without at least one parent and we always had at least one other international staying in our home.  Subconsciously, I stopped leaving the house.  I only left with Jorge Velasquez to go to the Human Rights Ombudsman or prosecutor’s office to push for an investigation of his daughter’s murder.  I was too fearful to take a taxi because it could be carjacked, not be a real taxi, or even be a taxi that worked for whoever was threatening me.  I did not want my husband’s employees to take me to any high-impact human rights case meetings or to drop off any envelopes because I did not want them to be marked for surveillance or worse.   And my husband could not drive me because we could not leave our daughter and I was terrified by the idea of us all being in one car together.  I could not drive the car because I was afraid to go by myself, afraid I would be disappeared.  I did not want to leave a car unattended because I was afraid of having drugs planted (as had happened to a friend of mine).  I could not talk on the phone about the threats because the assumption was that whoever was making the threats was listening to my phone calls.  One of my research assistants received threats – they were written all over the wall at the university: “We will rape you to death.”  Was this related to work she was doing for me?  She told me they were unrelated and I chose to believe her because violence was so pervasive and I felt powerless.

Little by little, threats filled up every corner of my life.  One afternoon, our daughter was playing in the little, walled garden patio in front of our house.  The walls must have been about eight feet high.  She was 2 ½ years old.  She came up to me in the living room and said, “Mommy, there is a person in the garden.  Can I touch it?”  Her nanny and I looked at each other in terror.  At my instruction, Marlena grabbed my daughter and took her into our bedroom and locked the door.  I called her father in his office a few blocks away as I closed and locked all the doors.  Raul came running home with the messenger and graphic designer from his press with the women from the office trailing close behind.  They burst into the empty garden and then into the house.  The garden was small, no one could hide anywhere.

By this time, Marlena was playing with my daughter.  I gently asked her to show me where she had seen the person in the garden.  She took me to the large pepper tree in the center of the patio.  She pointed to the ground on the back side of the tree.  “There Mommy.  See, there is the person,” she said.  I looked down and started to laugh.  She had been asking me if she could touch a little doll in the dirt.  I picked it up and washed it for her.  It was a three-inch Lara Croft Tomb Raider doll.  

Over the next few months, the fears awakened by that little doll would find new places to dwell on a near-daily basis. A neighbor informed us that a man with a gruff voice called looking for me. The call had gone to her home because she lived in the house connected to ours. Apparently, she had the original phone that had belonged to the home before it had been divided for renting. She said, “They called for Victoria Sanford. I said, ‘you are mistaken, there is no one here by that name.’” She explained that we should know about the call, because the caller was angry and said “It doesn’t matter, we will  find her.” She was concerned, “It reminds me of before. I thought you should know.” 

Surveillance seemed to increase by the day. Whenever we left the house, there was a young ladina woman sitting on the curb in ridiculously high white platform sandals reporting on passersby. “They are leaving now,” she would say. When Jorge and I arrived at the office of a human rights group to talk about his daughter’s case and some other cases, there was a man in an unmarked pickup who glared at us as we walked past him and on up to the door of the office. I felt his eyes piercing through the back of my head. I thought he was going to shoot us. When we got to the front step of the human rights office, there were three police officers milling around almost blocking our access to the door in an aggressive, accusatory kind of way. 

A woman called my nanny and told her a lot of personal information about my nanny and her family – a way to scare my nanny and let us know that they knew who cared for our daughter. Then, our landlords came to our home – the little half-house that we had leased for a year - asking for it to be returned immediately. The señora wrung her hands and reiterated, “I know you are honorable people, but you must go.” Sometimes, surveillance is an effective form of intimidation and terror. 

As my world folded in on itself, Jorge said, “Victoria, I want you to know that if you leave today or tomorrow or next week or next month, I will always be grateful for your accompaniment. We will always stay in touch.” Jorge freed me from my guilt over leaving. He also drove me to see the human rights lawyers so that I could tell them exactly what had happened. We decided that I should notify the US Embassy. I wanted them to know that if I died in an accident, it would need to be investigated. 

Just as I had accompanied Jorge, he accompanied me to the US Embassy so I could report the surveillance and intimidation. When I met with the chief political officer, I wondered if he would take seriously this odd collection of threats and experiences. I was mistaken. Guatemala had made him war-weary in less than two years. He told me he had previously been posted in Argentina for two rotations and been involved with investigations of rights violations there. He said, “I thought I knew everything about political violence after serving in Argentina. But in 18 months in Guatemala, I have learned a whole new vocabulary for killing. I never knew there were so many words for murder.” Then he asked me, “When are you leaving?”