Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords in Guatemala -- an agreement that ended nearly four decades of extreme state-led violence. The army's so-called "counterinsurgency" efforts, allegedly aimed at ridding the country of guerrilla combatants, claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people while displacing more than 1.5 million others, the overwhelming majority of whom were indigenous Maya.

Antonio Caba, an Ixil Maya activist who currently serves as president of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), lives in the highlands of El Quiche -- the Guatemalan state hardest hit by the military campaign. Some 344 of the 669 massacres committed by the army against Maya villages occurred within El Quiche; an estimated 14.5 percent of all Ixil Maya were killed.

Among the seven genocidios (the men who plotted and ordered the genocide) that the AJR is pursuing, the key figure is Efrain Rios Montt, an evangelical minister who rose to power via a military coup in 1982 and thereafter ruled over what became the most violent chapters of the genocide. Under Rios Montt's similarly brutal predecessor, Romeo Lucas Garcia, male peasants were forcibly organized -- into what were termed Self Defense Civil Patrols -- to carry out military whims within their occupied villages.

In a climate of pervasive terror, the Civil Patrols became the lone form of organization allowed by the army in many communities -- the only semblance of so-called civil society. In 1981, one out of every two adult men in Guatemala belonged to a Civil Patrol. Apart from using the civil patrollers to gather intelligence within villages and exploiting them as human shields in missions to hunt guerrilla in the mountains, the military -- through credible threats on civil patrollers' lives -- forced indigenous men to participate in the violence.

By 1982, the military had perpetrated 130 massacres in El Quiche; civil patrols had taken part in 41 of them. All in all, under Rios Montt, the incorporation of civil patrols into state-led massacres doubled, accounting for 41 percent of all the army's massacres, while the amount of victims to violence directed by the military in which the civil patrols participated more than tripled to 47 percent of those killed.
Ilom, the El Quiche village believed by many Ixil Maya to be the birthplace of their people, carries the unique distinction of having suffered a massacre on March 23, 1982 -- the exact day that a military overthrow unseated Lucas Garcia and soon replaced him with Rios Montt. Ilom is also the breathtaking hamlet that Antonio Caba calls home. Antonio was 11 years old when army soldiers, along with the civil patrol from the nearby La Perla plantation, gathered Ilom's residents in the village plaza and murdered 96 of its men.

WireTap's Elias Lawless met up with Antonio to hear about his experiences following the massacre, his forced participation in Ilom's civil patrol, and his risky departure. This is the first of a two-part interview.

Wiretap: What happened to you and your family following the massacre in 1982?
Antonio Caba: We went to live on the Santa Delfina plantation, and we were there about one year living as slaves, working the plantation without a salary. The military kept the people from Ilom living there under surveillance. After that we had to tolerate hunger since there was no food, because everything we had they burned. They set fire to our houses, our corn, our beans, and we remained with nothing -- only the clothes that we wore when we left.
And when we were on the plantation, after three or four days, the children began to die; over 150 children died. It was under Rios Montt's regime that these hundreds of children died -- of sickness, of hunger, of cold, of fear -- because they had no homes, because they lived in the rain. Sometimes one child would die each day, or two, or three. Every day children died ... back when we were living as slaves.

WT: How was your family specifically affected by the violence?
AC: Well, hunger and illnesses affected my family a lot. After three or four months, my grandfather became sick and died. The army kept him terrified because they used to threaten him and then one day they scared him again and he died there in the plantation. Then my sister died of fright, also in the plantation. What affected us is that we did not have anything, and, in fact, we remain in poverty today because there are not many resources here.

WT: How were the self-defense civil patrols formed in Ilom, and what was your experience within them?
AC: Well, the patrols were formed in the Santa Delfina plantation after Rios Montt was already president. So when his government was already in place, they first organized the men together, and they threatened them, "If you will not accept then you will die." That is to say, the army was going to kill these persons who had survived, the leftovers from those already massacred.
They were forced. The army kept them monitored, and if an order comes that they must patrol in the mountains, then they have to go. They were under threat, they must go. And when I was 14 years old, they likewise forced me to join. Boys of 14 and 15 years were forced to be patrollers by the army.

WT: What types of things were you required to do as a patroller?
AC: You had to be available in the service of the military at their posts stationed along the edges of the community. "To wait for the guerrillas" -- that is what they said.
There were lookout posts in the four corners of the community, so it was nearly enclosed. The army forced us to keep watch in these places; we had to rotate midnight shifts. Furthermore, we received no salary -- it was "military obligation." They obligated us to go into the mountains and cut firewood to take to the military bases. This affected me a lot because I became sick when forced to patrol in the mountains.
But those from Ilom did not stain their hands by killing people. Only the cornfields, yes, they had to cut down, because if they do not cut it, well, then they are one of the guerrillas. In the era of Rios Montt, an order arrived that all of the cornfields must be cut down. The bean stalks must be cut down, the sugarcane, the malanga, all of the fruit that grows there must be cut down so that the guerrillas would die.
The government did not give food to the civil patrollers; instead, only the army had food rations. Well, the patrollers did not have any, and they were obligated to be in the mountains some 15 days or a month, and when they returned, those people, the civil patrollers, would come back really feeble, arrive sick. It would be completely mournful, the lives of these people. So, I got very sick and afterward stopped patrolling, but I was already affected due to hunger and fear. For two years I was bedridden in a grave state. I was going to die, but thanks to God I escaped death, so here I am alive at the front of the struggle.

WT: What year did you leave the civil patrol?
AC: 1989.

WT: A U.S. State Department memo from 1991 stated that "those who refuse to serve in the civil patrols have suffered serious abuse, including death." When you left the patrollers did you have permission or were there consequences for leaving?
AC: When I stopped being a patroller, it was of my own volition. A congressman named Diego came along who was on the side of the poor. Well, he came here and ordered the military not to force people to join the patrols. But the army did not respect those orders. Then came [the autonomous office of the attorney of] human rights, publicizing that one can not be forced to be a civil patroller. They gave me a small book of the laws and rights regarding service in the military and what their obligations were. I did not know how to read very well; I did not have the opportunity to attend school, so I did not know much, but I understood what the booklet said.
From then on I began to participate in human rights work. They trained me, they taught me, and it was there that I first learned. So, at that moment when I first came home, I said, "They cannot force me." "This decision is mine and the law says so," I said. But there were consequences: they treated me as if I were a guerrillero, as if I belonged to the guerrillas.
The military constantly came to advise the people that to allow one to leave the patrollers signifies that they have permitted the guerrilla to infiltrate the community. This is the policy they used. But there was no guerrilla here during that time that the military was here, and the military realized that. It was a pretext, no?

WT: How did the culture and customs of the Maya people change in Ilom following the massacre?
AC: They went changing when the violence arrived. In 1978, all the men wore their white pants, the traditional belts; they had their red coats which we call cotones. But when the violence happened, these customs left -- everything. And there had been Mayan ceremonies as well as Catholic customs here. But when the violence happened, everything was changed.
The [villagers] stopped using their clothing since the military told the people that they could no longer wear the white pants because the guerrilla could see them and then kill them. That is the tactic the military used. They threatened them so they would not wear that traditional clothing. There are some today who still wear [traditional clothing] but so few you can count them. In that moment, everything changed. Now they are all evangelicals. The destiny of the population was changed by the violence.

The Maya Survivors vs. Los Genocidios: Part Two

In various ways, Antonio Caba's life mirrors that of many Maya men in their 30s residing in rural Guatemala: He tends a cornfield that feeds his wife, his children and himself; Spanish is his second language; he lost immediate family to the genocide that raged through the country in the '80s; and he was coerced -- through threats on his life -- to participate in army-organized militias called Self Defense Civil Patrols.
However, in 1989, Antonio risked death by defiantly abandoning the Patrols and devoting himself to seeking out justice for the genocidios, men who masterminded and executed the military campaign which resulted in the death or disappearance of more than 200,000 individuals, the vast bulk of whom were Maya.

Antonio serves as president of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, a coalition of survivors representing a host of different Maya ethnicities, determined to hold seven former military and political officials accountable for widespread violence that, under the guise of purging the nation of armed rebels, compelled a U.N.-led truth commission to declare that Guatemala endured nothing short of genocide.
Guatemala's nearest rendition to the now-dead Augusto Pinochet is Efrain Rios Montt, who only left the presidency of the National Congress in November 2003 and presently leads the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) as its secretary general, the political party which constitutes the largest faction in Congress. In the last elections, the FRG claimed 15 of the 20 mayoral posts in El Quiche, the department where Antonio lives and where, at the age of 14, he was required to enlist in the Civil Patrols.

The Civil Patrols -- militias in which men from the same village obligatorily carried out army orders, often including forced participation in massacres -- were ordered to dissolve with the signing of the Peace Accords, an agreement which largely ended the state-led terror in December 1996.

In August of 1996, when demobilization of the Civil Patrols began, 270,906 predominately Maya peasant men were still registered; by 1997, Civil Patrols were, at least ostensibly, defunct. In June 2002, however, just in time for the upcoming national elections in 2003, the Civil Patrols "reorganized" themselves.
Springing from protests urging the government to supply former patrollers "compensation for services lent to the nation," President Alfonso Portillo, who won office by running on Rios Montt's FRG ticket, conceded and paid a third of the promised amount to a number of former patrollers just before the election. Some 800,000 men had registered with their former Patrol commanders to sign up to receive the payments.

On July 24, 2003, on what has since been termed Black Thursday, an armed riot of masked FRG backers stormed the streets of Guatemala City to demand that Rios Montt be allowed to run for president, thereby sidestepping a constitutional provision banning ex-dictators who came to power by overthrowing the government from candidacy. In response to the two days of terror, which resulted in the death of a journalist, the courts caved in and gave Rios Montt the go ahead; he lost, taking only 18 percent of the votes.

As electioneering is presently well under way in Guatemala for the presidential contest in November, the FRG made their favored candidate known three months ago. At their national assembly, Aristides Crespo, head of the FRG bloc in Congress, announced, "The FRG has their natural candidate, Efrain Rios Montt, and there is no other." On Jan. 17, the FRG alerted Guatemala to a change of strategy: In front of Congress, Rios Montt proclaimed, "I will reach the highest rank. It could not be any other way ... I will be president of Congress from 2008-2012."

WireTap: Who is the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), and what are its objectives in fighting?
Antonio Caba: Well, we who became the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, after all that, had no idea how to struggle or continue on. But we knew what we would become. There was no one on our side, but after a little while we came to know how to organize, how to fight.
Then came the exhumation in Ilom (Antonio's village), then came CALDH (Center for Legal Action in Human Rights). I think it was 1998 or 1999. We met there and they asked me questions such as what the massacre was like, how the army arrived. I told them all about the situation that happened here in the community.
Later, we arrived at an agreement among various communities: Baja Verapaz, Alta Verapaz, Chimaltenango, Quiche, Huehuetenango, the Ixcan region. So it was from there that we came to know one another: other people from places where the same situation occurred. There we decided to found what became the AJR, that it was necessary to form a coalition that would be called the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, that we as survivors must demand justice for all the deaths we had seen. "We have to demand justice so that there may be justice," we said.
Well, that was an interest of ours, that the high military commands be tried for their crimes of genocide against the Maya peoples. As far as those of us in the Ixil region, we are the Ixil Maya -- people that were affected, were massacred, had our rights violated. For all those reasons the AJR was sprouted.

WT: What is Efrain Rios Montt's significance in this struggle?
AC: Rios Montt, as we have always mentioned, is a sickness for us. He is a disease that is very infectious for Guatemala because he has committed those grave errors, those tremendous crimes against the Maya peoples. And not only Rios Montt but also his high military command as well as Santa Delfina plantation, no? He was the government at that time, so he should have dispatched doctors for the children that died. So, what happened? It didn't bother him that children died. It did not matter to him.
Rios Montt delights in the impunity, and it is not only Rios Montt who is the wound for Guatemala, but also the authorities that presently do not act to judge this genocidio. Therefore, Rios Montt is the wound and also the authorities are the wound because they do not enforce the law.

WT: Can you discuss Rios Montt's plan, and accordingly the strategy of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), regarding compensation payments to former Self Defense Civil Patrollers (ex-PAC)?
AC: Rios Montt is always very crafty in his form, and he has always tried to conquer the people. Because if you remember the past, of what has been called Black Thursday, Rios Montt displayed his style of being on Black Thursday when he forcibly inscribed [as presidential candidate]. He revealed his nature on this day because all of his supporters wore masks, wielded sticks and carried guns violently. But who planned it? Rios Montt planned it! It was in this form that he also planned the massacres in the communities.
The Guatemalan authorities should act and not allow him to participate in elections. Not as a candidate for president, nor Congress, nor anything. Rios Montt has demonstrated his style before Guatemala and before the entire world. Rios Montt is a genocidio.
Rios Montt has always found support in the Quiche department. Do you know why people vote for him? They know he is a genocidio and that if he does not win perhaps 1982 might return again. So, for fear, the people vote to not re-experience the past.
The ex-PAC payments were planned by Rios Montt in order to not lose his power. First, a general began to convince people to attend protests under Portillo, but it was all already planned out. Portillo approved. We saw that it was not to lose his power, his party. Why do I say that? Because only his supporters received the payment. And those former patrollers affiliated with another party? They gave them nothing.
It is better to send more money to reparations for victims because there are people who lost their houses, lost their family members. Clearly former patrollers have a right because they were obligated to patrol. Well, since we know the military has grand quantities of money allocated from the government, this is what we should reduce and use to pay former patrollers. Because it was the military that forced them into patrols. And money received from other countries should not be given to ex-PACs but as reparations for victims.
Because what function, what benefit does the military bring? What the military brings us is poverty. The world knows that Guatemala is poor, but why? The military has brought the poverty. The weapons have brought the poverty. And who are the richest? The military, the generals. And the guerrilla? I have never heard of a guerrilla fighter who is also a millionaire.

WT: What should the international community do to support the struggle of the AJR and survivors in general?
AC: What they should do, or what we have always requested, and what I have asked for as AJR's president is that they pressure Guatemalan authorities to take these genocidios to a tribunal. And if they, these authorities, do not want to do it, do not attempt to do it, nor even wish to try these criminals, then what I would ask is that it would be good to extradite Rios Montt so that he may be judged in another country.
That is one thing, but also if there is no justice in Guatemala, then it would be good that Guatemalan authorities be tried as well. Because to me it would be proper that they be judged first -- before the genocidios -- because they are guilty, the Guatemalan authorities, of why these genocidios have not been tried, why they are not imprisoned.
And why do I tell you that? Because the authorities, we entrust them. For that reason they are there, to try these genocidios, to judge those who commit crimes. And another thing, we pay taxes, and these authorities are who we fund, so they must comply with their obligations, no?