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Cover
story Lost childhood found
By MARY JO McCONAHAY
Pacific News Service Rabinal, Guatemala
Denese Joy Becker, an Iowa mother of
two, had begun to worry that the memories she carried were the vivid imaginings
of a crazed mind. She had no one she might ask, no one with whom she might
compare mental images of an idyllic childhood that deteriorated into
unspeakable scenes. In March, with the help of an Internet-savvy cousin, Becker
discovered she was a survivor of one of the worst massacres in the history of
Guatemalas 36-year internal war.
Rio Negro, once an eight-hour walk from this town, was the only
one of 15 villages that refused to move without proper compensation in the wake
of planned flooding to create the Chixoy Dam. The World Bank provided part of
the funding for the development project in the 1970s and 80s,. In
February 1982, the able-bodied men of Rio Negro were summoned to a market town
and slaughtered by civil patrollers acting as proxies for the army. On March
13, 1982, patrollers from the town and soldiers in uniform fell upon the
remaining women, children and elderly in Rio Negro.
The spread of riverside houses and their dozens of families, part
of a thousand-year-old Achi Maya culture in the valley, joined the list of 440
Guatemalan villages marked subversive and wiped out by the army
during its counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrillas. By 1996 when peace
accords were signed, some 200,000 had died in the conflict, mostly unarmed Maya
Indians, victims of a government campaign of genocide according to
a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission report.
I knew I was a survivor of something, because I remembered
things, and I remembered my name -- Dominga Sic Ruiz, said Becker, who
was adopted at age 11 from a Guatemala City orphanage by an Iowa Baptist
minister and his wife in 1984. The child became a U.S. citizen the following
year. She was raised in Thompson, Iowa, population 670. There, among blonde,
blue-eyed children, the Maya Indian girl felt shy and almost
ashamed of an awful past that she couldnt share with American kids.
Neither she nor anyone she knew followed events in the place she was born. She
recalled her village and an area named Rabinal, but over the years, she forgot
her native Maya language, Achi, and Spanish.
She had nightmares even in the security of a caring family. She
fell in love with Blane Becker, a Kmart department manager six years her
senior, during a courtship that began with a blind date and included the prom.
Even after they married, the nightmares continued. Sometimes I thought I
was losing it, she said. As sons Sturling, 7, and Skylar, 4, grew, Becker
felt more compelled than ever to return to Guatemala. I looked at them
and realized you have to know yourself well enough to teach them your own
personal history, which is part of their background, too, said Becker.
But she was shy and nervous about sharing her desire to reconnect with the
past, and anyway, funds were so tight, a trip seemed impossible.
Two years ago, at an annual summer extended family reunion in
Michigan, Denese Becker confided the desire -- even just to know if I was
celebrating my birthday on the right day -- to 41-year-old Mary Purvis,
related to Beckers adoptive father. A Spanish-speaker who spent her own
childhood as a missionarys daughter in a Mexican Indian village, Mary
Purvis had become close to her adopted cousin.
Drumming up funds
Denese would seem stuck-up at the summer family reunions,
keeping to herself, feeding her kids, Purvis recalled. It finally
occurred to me the reunions were hard for her. This was not her real family. We
are hugging each other while shes over there in pain. Purvis was
especially sensitive to Beckers desire to return because she herself
recently had been reunited for the first time with a son she had given up for
adoption at birth as a young unmarried teenager. The reunion was, said Purvis,
a healing experience.
A Mason, Mich., mother who works as a truck broker, Purvis used
the tool of her trade -- a home computer -- to research and drum up funds.
Beginning last summer, she e-mailed 30 families on the reunion list, asking for
$10 dollars a month for a year. She read a book about the Rabinal massacres by
an anthropologist on the forensic team that exhumed bodies in 1993 and wrote a
three-page letter showing where Deneses memories coincided with
testimony. She searched the Internet for information until she found a Web page
for Stefan Schmitt, a founding member of the Guatemala forensic anthropology
team who worked at Rio Negro and later in Kosovo, and now teaches at Florida
State University. Schmitt corroborated details Becker recalled.
In their hometown of Algona (population 6,015), the Beckers
pastor at the First Baptist Church heard the story at dinner, asked to read
Purvis letter and asked lots of questions, said Blane Becker.
The pastor sent a $1,000 check, and the congregation donated collections for
three Sundays.
Blane Becker supported his wifes planned return in
every way, but as the date of departure approached he grew apprehensive
about his first trip outside the United States. Meanwhile, e-mails about the
discovery of an American survivor of Rio Negro -- which occurred during a time
when Washington wholeheartedly supported Guatemalan military dictators --
flowed among the community of academics, rights activists and others concerned
with U.S. Central America policy. The news interested the Chixoy Dam
Reparations Campaign, part of the recent and growing movement against economic
policies of the World Bank. Amnesty International decided to send a cameraman.
Others wondered if Becker might be a high-profile witness in cases against
Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efraín Rios Montt, two of the countrys most
brutal military dictators.
Becker, 27, works as a manicurist and recently took a part-time
waitress job. At first, she seemed overwhelmed by the expectations swirling
around her. She had never heard of these campaigns and cases before planning
her return. She has been removed from the politics of the situation. Unlike
American activists whose interest often is fueled by anger at the U.S.
involvement in Guatemala, Beckers interest was personal. I just
want to see my family, she said the day after her arrival in Guatemala
City. She hoped to meet relatives who might tell her what she was like as a
child. Did anyone have a picture of her father or mother?
She wanted to confirm flashes of memory -- soldiers swimming
across a river, soldiers surrounding a church where she played dead among still
bodies, perhaps when she was about age 6. That happened, she later discovered,
when soldiers protecting the dam project attacked the village briefly in 1979,
purportedly to find thieves. One of Denese Beckers clearest memories was
the March day when she was 9 years old, when her mother, Magdalena, was
killed.
It was early in the morning, and my mom was
breastfeeding, Becker recalled. Her father had been slain the month
before with 76 other men from Rio Negro in the town of Xococ, and hastily
buried there. Days later, a sister was born to her mother in Rio Negro.
Soldiers surround us
Remembering her mother holding the baby, Becker said, It was
very peaceful, very beautiful, and I was sitting next to her. All of a sudden I
heard shouting. I looked up and saw soldiers had surrounded us all, and they
were grabbing people, dragging people, putting a noose around their
necks. Amid the flying boots, ropes and crying villagers, Denese said her
mother told her to grab a cloth typically used by Indian women. She tied
the baby onto my back and turned me around and squared me up and kind of took
me by the shoulders, and I looked up at her. Run, she
said.
For four months the girl tried to keep herself and the baby alive,
eating berries, squeezing berry juice into the babys mouth and wrapping
her in leaves for warmth. They slept in the crooks of trees because I was
afraid of caves. When the infant died, Denese -- then called Dominga --
buried her at the base of a huge tree. In the next months, as
starving survivors -- including an aunt -- found each other in the forests,
they passed the girl from one place to another clandestinely and finally to a
convent of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul here. After some
months, nuns secretly delivered her to the orphanage in the capital.
When Denese and Blane Beckers rented jeep pulled into
Rabinal, set in a tropical mountain zone amid deep quilted valleys green with
pines and ferns, some five hours from the capital, Deneses former
community was ready for her. Now displaced, living in small wooden houses in
the shadow of a military garrison on the edge of this county seat, they brought
loudspeakers, a microphone and marimba tapes into the main square. When Denese
stepped into the light they saw a Maya Indian like them whose skin nevertheless
showed no sign of a life worked in the sun, a woman of their same small stature
yet wearing perfect make-up, with flowing -- not braided -- black tresses, not
dressed in a long woven skirt but blue jeans.
Denese Becker was a stranger only for a moment. Someone called her
name, Dominga, and the crowd broke into crying and keening, with
aunts, uncles and cousins presenting themselves in a language she could not
understand. We thought she was dead, said her fathers
52-year-old sister, Dorotea Iboy Sic, and stroked Deneses hair. When a
hard rain began to fall, the crowd moved under a yellow arched colonnade;
Denese, pressed on all sides, touched a womans cheek and whispered,
Theyre just like me.
But tensions of that long war have not disappeared, as Denese
Becker discovered almost immediately. On the second day in Rabinal, the
Beckers, Purvis and a couple of dozen displaced Rio Negro residents walked in a
group to a square cement monument to the Rio Negro dead at the border of the
civic graveyard. Becker gazed at the names of the 77 women and 106 children,
and the confirming, hand-painted rendition of her own memory of that day:
villagers joined at the necks by a long rope, at the hands of armed men who
would shoot them just over the rise, after raping women and making them
dance.
Theres a verse in the Bible that says God sees what
happens and will take his vengeance, Denese Becker said. Villagers
thought differently. We cant wait for God. They took the cows of
the people, and the widows have nothing. We must fight here and now, said
Carlos Chen, 53, whose wife, a young son and daughter and a sister died at Rio
Negro. There were pregnant women, and those babies never saw light,
said Pedrina Burrero, 36. You can be their voice.
American view prevails
For awhile, walking the long, thin single row where the remains of
the Rio Negro villagers lay re-buried, Becker shook with tears, her only words,
as if in regret, I didnt do anything. But when she heard that
a locally well-known oreja (ear in Spanish), or military collaborator,
stood at the edge of the crowd, her tears turned to anger. Youre
causing problems here. Leave people alone, she confronted the shocked
man, as villagers melted away.
Im just here observing. Will you be staying? he
said.
Ill be returning and returning and returning,
Becker said and spat at his feet.
In the following days Becker, who customarily speaks softly and
describes herself as terribly shy, had to be dissuaded from
marching into the military outpost that keeps an eye on the resettled
community. She wanted to go to the village of Xococ, to see where her
fathers bones might be, but most civil patrollers there who collaborated
in the massacres remain free and in charge. She learned the trip would be
dangerous without protection from the United Nations human rights observer team
and armed police.
One afternoon, after searching through canvas-covered residence
ledgers in the municipal office, Becker found the hand-written entry for her
father, Rosendo Sic, along with what she was looking for: his picture. Moved
and elated, she stood for several minutes stroking the photo and arranged to
have it copied to take home. It was, she would say later, the most
important moment of her journey. It brought me peace, she
said. But that night Becker became furious. One of the ex-patrollers present at
the massacre had demanded of clerks to know her business; another patroller,
she discovered, named repeatedly by witnesses in a trial about the massacre but
never arrested, is on the city council, a member of the same party as President
Alfonso Portillo.
Im an adult now and I can do something about it.
Seeing the perpetrators everywhere. It just burns me to have them free,
she said.
She is bringing an American view of the world to this
situation, said Stefan Schmitt, the forensic expert who had traveled to
Rabinal to take DNA samples from Becker and relatives to corroborate their
blood relationship. She grew up in a country where she has rights and is
aware of them. Schmitt spoke in a small hospital with pale green walls in
need of paint, but a steady clientele served by the Daughters of Charity. Five
paternal aunts and uncles sat patiently on a bench under a sepia-toned photo of
Elizabeth Ann Seton, waiting to have drops of blood drawn from their fingertips
and placed on special paper that preserved the samples without refrigeration.
For the next days the samples would never leave Schmitts
side, carried in a backpack to maintain a secure chain of evidence. Schmitt
said establishing the family ties was a humanitarian act, but proof
of relationship to victims could also be evidence in a legal proceeding.
Beckers unexpected appearance as an eye-witness and
victimized party -- and the fact that she is an American, with the right to sue
in U.S. courts -- has not escaped notice of Guatemalans now attempting to push
cases against perpetrators of the violence, some using the model of the case
against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
After days of conversation with family members and others, Denese
Becker said she had moved from being primarily concerned about finding family
to also seeing I have rights and wanting justice. But
she had no intention of soon changing her life in Algona, Iowa. Ill
appreciate the United States more when I go home. My life is there, my job is
there, my other family, my children. America has been good to me. If she
could help make things better for her Guatemalan family, she would. If she
could just get hold of the town of Algona -- getting people there to
understand what happened here -- Id be doing good.
Meanwhile, during her final days in Rabinal, Denese Becker often
slipped into the market in the town square to buy juicy yellow jocote
fruit or an orange mango, to eat the rich traditional corn and chicken stew
called pinol from a gourd bowl. Sometimes she sifted through the lengths
of woven fabric worn by Achi women, holding the fabric to her face, as if to
impress upon her mind again the scents of her childhood.
I had to put myself in the place where these things really
happened, she said.
National Catholic Reporter, July 14,
2000
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