While Guatemala continues to bury the victims of the genocide perpetrated against the Mayan peoples, the State maintains military relations with Israel, refuses to call the devastation in Gaza a genocide, and remains trapped in an international architecture of impunity where state Zionism, political backing from the United States, and the silence of governments that know too well the price of barbarity converge.
I offer these reflections in the context of the beatification of the Servant of God fray Augusto Rafael Ramírez Monasterio, OFM, to be held on November 7th in Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala. The country, which in the 80s witnessed the “Martyr of Charity,” still maintains its structures of exclusion and death. May his beatification and memory bring strength and hope to the families who are still searching for their sons and daughters taken by the State, and may it help the entire nation keep alive the memory and firm the hope of forging a different country.
The wounds that still bleed
In small coffins they advanced slowly. They were not the caskets of illustrious figures nor those of soldiers fallen in combat. They were sixty-eight wooden boxes containing the remains of Mayan men, women, and children murdered by the Guatemalan Army between 1981 and 1982 in San Martín Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango. For forty-four years they awaited a dignified burial. For twenty, they remained crammed in a state warehouse, reduced to a file more than to justice perpetually postponed.
On June 29th last year, they finally returned to the earth. While relatives accompanied the silent procession toward the newly built niches, Guatemala once again faced head-on one of the darkest chapters of its history. That ceremony was not solely an act of piety towards the dead. It was also an accusation against impunity and a warning: genocide does not end when the shooting stops. It continues as long as the victims remain nameless, without justice, and without memory.
Among those who carried those small coffins was Simeón Atz Tzutuj. He is seventy-six years old. He remembers with absolute clarity the moment the soldiers arrived at his house. He saw his pregnant wife go out. He heard the insults. Then, a shot to the forehead. That same day he also lost his three daughters. Forty-four years later, he was still waiting for the moment to say goodbye to them with the dignity that the State had denied them.
There was also Cleto Martín Yool. His mother survived because she pretended to be dead while the soldiers executed several members of his family. He managed to save himself because that day he was working in the sugarcane fields of the southern coast. Now, by placing the remains of eleven relatives in a dignified niche, he confessed to feeling a mixture of relief and sadness: finally, he could light a candle for each of them, as his father had dreamed of doing for decades.
Those testimonies were the living memory of Guatemala. Because the internal armed conflict left more than two hundred thousand people murdered or disappeared. The Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that more than ninety percent of human rights violations were the responsibility of state and paramilitary forces, and that the scorched-earth strategy constituted acts of genocide against Mayan communities. It was not merely about fighting the insurgency, but systematically destroying entire villages, turning the civilian population into a military target, and attempting to erase entire peoples from the national map.
The wounds remain open because many responsible parties were never tried, thousands of people remain missing, and justice continues to advance with desperate slowness. Every new exhumation demonstrates that genocide does not belong only to the past: it still inhabits cemeteries, indigenous communities, the memory of survivors, and the pain of those who continue searching for their relatives.)
Therefore, it is impossible to contemplate what is happening today in Gaza without Guatemalan history striking our conscience. There are peoples who know horror not because they have studied it, but because they have suffered it. Guatemala is one of them. And precisely because of that experience, it has the moral duty to recognize in others the suffering it once claimed for itself.
Guatemala knows how to recognize a genocide
There are countries that contemplate the Palestinian tragedy from geographical distance or from political comfort. Guatemala cannot afford either. Its own history prevents it from viewing Gaza as an external conflict. Every mass grave opened on Guatemalan territory reminds us that there are crimes whose magnitude demands that we call things by their name.
When the communities of San Martín Jilotepeque, Nebaj, Chajul, Cotzal, Río Negro, Dos Erres, Plan de Sánchez, and hundreds of Mayan villages were razed, those who preferred to speak of “conflict,” “military excesses,” “internal war,” or “collateral damage” were not absent. For years, the word genocide was avoided. Only the patient work of historians, forensic anthropologists, judges, and survivors managed to dismantle that strategy of denial and restore the true name to the facts.
The Guatemalan experience teaches that the first triumph of any extermination project is to colonize language. When horror ceases to be named, it also begins to become normalized. That is why memory is not an archaeological exercise nor a ceremony intended solely to honor the past: it is an ethical responsibility that protects the present.
Every bone recovered from a clandestine grave, every small coffin finally delivered to its family, and every dignified burial ceremony constitute a warning directed at the present. Survivors do not only claim justice for their dead; they remind humanity of the path that leads from the dehumanization of the other to the extermination of entire peoples.
Precisely because it paid that lesson with an unbearable human cost, Guatemala should raise one of the most morally authoritative voices in the international community today. However, the exact opposite occurs. While families continue to bury the victims of the genocide committed against the Mayan peoples, the State maintains military relations with Israel, keeps its embassy in Jerusalem, and continues to avoid publicly recognizing the devastation that Gaza suffers today as genocide.
That contradiction represents one of the deepest ethical dilemmas of Guatemalan foreign policy. Understanding it requires looking back at a chapter that remained relegated in national memory for too long: the decisive military cooperation that Israel provided to the Guatemalan State during the bloodiest years of the genocide against the Mayan peoples. Without that history, it is impossible to fully understand today’s official silence.
A people that demands recognition of its own genocide from the world cannot remain silent when it perceives in another people the signs of a similar crime. Memory loses its legitimacy when it becomes a privilege reserved only for the victims themselves.
Israel in the history of Guatemalan genocide
Memory has an uncomfortable way of returning. While the families of San Martín Jilotepeque were depositing the remains of their loved ones in a dignified niche, they were not only burying the victims of a massacre: they were also unearthing an international dimension of the Guatemalan genocide that had remained relegated to the margins of the official narrative for decades.
The genocide against the Mayan peoples was not solely a national tragedy. It was also possible thanks to a complex network of political, military, and strategic support that allowed the Guatemalan State to sustain its repressive capacity during the most intense years of the scorched-earth policy.
Among those international supports stood the close military cooperation between Israel and Guatemala. Various historical investigations have documented that when other countries began restricting arms sales due to growing reports of massive human rights violations, Israel became one of the main suppliers to the Guatemalan regime. The support included weaponry, communication systems, intelligence advice, specialized training, and technological transfer, strengthening the operational capacity of the Army precisely during the years when the scorched-earth strategy reached its maximum intensity.
The findings of the Commission for Historical Clarification allow us to understand the scope of that international cooperation. The systematic destruction of Mayan communities cannot be analyzed by isolating internal responsibilities from external support that contributed to sustaining the State’s military capacity.
Remembering these facts does not imply attributing collective responsibility to the Jewish people nor questioning the legitimacy of the State of Israel. To do so would be historically false and morally unacceptable. Criticism must always be directed at concrete decisions made by governments and state apparatuses, never at a people or a religious tradition also marked by the suffering of antisemitism and the Holocaust.
Precisely out of respect for that history, it is even more painful to find out that a State born after one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century played a relevant role in the military strengthening of another State which would later be singled out for committing acts of genocide against its own indigenous population. That paradox challenges both Guatemala and Israel.
It is not solely a discussion about the past. The relations between both States do not belong to the archives: they continue to project political and moral consequences onto the present. Precisely for this reason, critically reviewing that history does not constitute an exercise in resentment, but an indispensable condition for building a foreign policy coherent with memory, human rights, and international law.
Memory is not a privilege reserved for the victims themselves. It is a moral responsibility. Only the people who learn to recognize the suffering of others with the same sensitivity they demand recognition for their own truly honor their dead. When memory ceases to be universal and becomes the exclusive heritage of one cause, it runs the risk of transforming into a new form of silence.
History, however, does not end there. There remains one more uncomfortable question: can a State that knows the weight of genocide remain silent when the international community debates whether another people are victims of such a crime? That is the question we will address in the second part.
Víctor M. Ruano P. Priest. Diocese of Jutiapa, Guatemala
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