American Maya Goes to Guatemalan Congress
Pacific News Service, News Feature, Mary Jo McConahay, Posted: Dec 29, 2003
Editor's Note: When his brother was assassinated by government soldiers, Maya Indian Victor Montejo fled to America from Guatemala. But the soft-spoken former academic never forgot his homeland or his people's struggle. Now he has been elected to congress in a country experiencing a Maya cultural and intellectual renaissance.
GUATEMALA CITY--Peaceful elections Dec. 28 gave Guatemalans not only a new president unassociated with the country's recent, bloody past, but also a ranking Maya Indian congressman -- a powerful symbol in a land where the native population has been repressed for hundreds of years.
What's more, Victor Montejo, a Jacalteco Maya born into a rural peasant family, has spent most of his adult life in the United States. He raised an American family and is a U.S. citizen.
Center-right presidential candidate Oscar Berger, a former mayor of Guatemala City, defeated Alvaro Colom in the run-off election. Montejo ran in Berger's party.
In many ways, Montejo, 52, is a face of the country's sleeping political giant: its increasingly vocal and sophisticated indigenous majority. Companies are beginning to target a growing Maya market in television and print ads; previously, pictures of such families appeared only in tourism promotions. Before elections, President Alfonso Portillo made a nationally televised presentation dedicating the elegant Casa Crema -- until recently the home of the all-powerful ministers of defense -- to the Academy of Maya Languages.
Montejo's unmistakably Indian image was pasted on billboards throughout the campaign, alongside those of six top political leaders of GANA, as Berger's party is known. But Montejo is likely to stand out too for his American side.
"We're so afraid of terrorism around the world," said Montejo. "We need people in this country who can create the strong relationship with the United States. The indigenous, for instance, will not simply tell Washington what it wants to hear."
Montejo fled Guatemala in l982, after his brother Pedro, a teacher, was assassinated by government soldiers, and his own name appeared on death lists. With the help of new friends in the United States he began to study and became a writer. For the last eight years he has chaired the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis.
Giving up a Fulbright grant to run for Congress here, Montejo says he knows he is putting his U.S. life on hold and taking a big chance. But he insists his particular trajectory will be good for both Guatemala and Washington, which has had a complicated relationship with the country since a CIA coup overthrew a legitimately elected left-leaning president in l954, and supported military dictators for 30 years.
Besides, Montejo says, "We have to emerge from this chaos" in Guatemala, which, with 12 million people, is the most populous country in Central America. Accords on indigenous rights, a keystone of the 5-year-old peace treaty that ended 36 years of internal war, have been imperfectly implemented or ignored. Government corruption has been infamous, and has eaten into post-war monies and international support.
Montejo was brought into the Berger camp by the new vice-president, Eduardo Stein, a former minister of foreign affairs, a key player in the peace accords and a centrist in international issues. Stein is considered one of the most savvy and effective negotiators in the region. On the campaign trail, Montejo often appeared at his side. In turn, local indigenous spiritual and community leaders, including some who had shunned politics before, lent their support to Montejo, bringing Berger's party Indian votes in places it may not otherwise have won.
Ordinary Maya Indians, who as a whole speak 23 languages, are typically rural farmers who rank at the bottom of virtually all measures of health, education and infant mortality. Their immediate wants are economic development, small community projects and roads to help commercialize their products. Important too is education, which to many means a free school breakfast system that was neglected under Portillo.
But the controversial struggle over how to remember and respond to Guatemala's recent past is high on Montejo's agenda, too.
Some 200,000 died in the violence, mostly unarmed Maya Indians killed by government forces who suspected them of supporting the program of leftist insurgents. "Young people don't remember, and those who suffered don't want to remember -- it is still dangerous to talk about," says Montejo, who supports revising textbooks from primary school to universities to include accounts of the violence, and trying officers, including former chiefs of state, for war crimes. "I lived it."
Montejo's best-known book, "Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village," is a harrowing eyewitness account of the brutalization of a community by soldiers, Montejo's own confrontation with imminent execution and his escape. Published in l987, it was among the first insider reports about the largely hidden war to reach a wide audience.
Oregon author Wallace Kaufmann, who befriended Montejo in the United States and translated one of his books, recalls a man who quickly bridged two civilizations. On a visit to the top of the World Trade Center in the early l980s, said Kaufmann, Montejo gave the impression of having covered an enormous physical and psychological distance, of appearing suddenly free from the fear that stalked him in Guatemala. Eventually Montejo commemorated the ascent of the tower in a poem, "Maya Cosmonaut."
"He never forgot his roots," Kaufmann says. Neighbors in Davis, a college town, speak of a "moderate," low-profile professor who did not make public statements but did give seminar-like talks to those who were interested in the situation in his home country.
Whether Montejo's American experience and tracking his people from oral myth, to war, to today's rocky cultural re-awakening qualifies him to be a deputy in a congress known for rough and tumble politicking is an unanswered question.
"He's not a firebrand, but he always had a strong commitment, especially about getting back and improving education for Maya," says Will Lotter, a retired U.C. Davis coach. "I think he's the kind of person you listen to because of his experience."
Mary Jo McConahay (mcconahay@pacificnews.org) is an editor and filmmaker at PNS, and a longtime writer on Latin America. She lived in Guatemala for more than a decade.
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