El Grupo Saker-Ti

El Grupo Saker-Ti


Saker-Ti is Dawn in Quiché. In December 1944 political freedoms, never previously experienced, dawned in Guatemala, only to be all too soon eclipsed in 1954 by the American backed “liberation.” In this decade el grupo Saker-Ti came to birth and briefly flourished. One author has nostalgically termed it la década civilizada. Some background history is necessary prior to a discussion of el grupo Saker-Ti, its work and its influence.

Guatemala is an incredibly beautiful country that Humboltd has called the land of eternal spring. However, it had inherited the feudal system of the Spanish Conquista, that had not altered much with independence. In fact the civil wars that followed la libertad, in which Central America was initially united, pitched one caudillo against another until there were five independent states. The one distinguishing feature of Guatemala from the others is that the majority of the population is of Mayan origin. During the 19th. century there were a series of laws passed that deprived them of their communal land on which they grew their staple food, maize and a black bean, and they became virtual slaves to the new landowners, on whose fincas they were forced to work, growing principally coffee on the steep volcanic slopes, and in the coastal planes bananas, sugar, cardamon and rubber for export. The native people were driven from the best arable land to the plateaus and highlands, where they cut down the native pine trees for fuel to grow their own staple crops. The deforestation has led to soil erosion, and after a heavy rainfall the rivers are swollen and churned red with mud, and if they pour over a road half of it may be flushed into the valley below. In the middle of the 20th.century only two percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Dispossessed and not speaking Spanish, but rather a tribal language, of which there are said to be nineteen in all, they had no access to the government to redress their wrongs. Matters only deteriorated under the leadership of General Jorge Ubico from 1931 to 1944, who was not only supported by the oligarchical landowner class but, like other dictators of his era, maintained his power with the aid of a secret police.

These, however, did not prevent his being overthrown in 1944 in a revolt led by students and junior officers of the army. In great euphoria, for the first time in living memory, Guatemalans went to the polls to elect a new president, and they chose Dr. Juan José Arévalo. At that time he was relatively unknown in his own country as he had been teaching in Argentina. He was only in his forties and attracted many younger people to his government. He was an educator by profession and an author. He described himself as a “spiritual socialist”, but according to the “duck” theory of Richard C. Patterson, Jr., US ambassador to Guatemala, he was a communist. The ambassador had demanded the resignation of members of his government on suspicion that they were too radical; but Arévalo protested to the US State Department and the ambassador was recalled for “medical reasons.” But back in the States he continued to preach against the Guatemalan government with considerable effect, since he reached the ears of John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen, head of the C.I.A..

The need to redistribute the land to the indigenous people, so that they might grow their own food, was perceived by Patterson and his fellow Americans as “communism,” although Arévalo introduced only a moderate bill, compared with what was to follow. They passed the Law of Forced Rental, that obliged the landowners to lease their uncultivated land at low rates. It did not expropriate them. Arévalo not only had opposition in the United States, but also within Guatemala, since he had two potential political rivals; one his Minister of War, Jacobo Arbenz, and the other a Colonel Francisco Arana, who may have been more favourable to the Americans. However, in July 1949 Arana was shot and his killer has never been identified, although it was suspected that, whoever it was, he had received his orders from Arbenz. In 1950 Arévalo decisively lost an election to Arbenz and he went back to his teaching.

No one but Patterson could have seriously accused Arbenz of being a communist, but there were four members of the 56 seat Congress who were, and the Americans believed that they had an influence, out of all proportion to their number, as Arbenz continued the process of land reform, in spite of the opposition of the United Fruit Company, which was not only an American enclave, nuestro Guantánamo, as Cardoza called them, but the major land holder in Guatemala. Under the leadership of Arbenz the government passed the Agrarian Reform Law which did expropriate unoccupied land in order to redistribute it to the peasants. This really incensed the Americans, who began to place their faith in the military, rather than the government, and engineered Arbenz’ overthrow by means of the C.I.A. puppet, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who “liberated” his country from Honduras. Arbenz laid down the post of president as he said that it was not worth the loss of human life. Guatemala was once again plunged into the Dark Ages, el conflicto, as it is known today. People either had to passively support the new military government, or to go into exile or into the hills. There a guerilla army was formed, which for the next 42 years was constantly engaged in an undeclared civil war with the government. Atrocities were committed by both sides and the unfortunate indigenous population was caught in the middle. In this conflict over 150,000 lives were lost, and many thousands more just disappeared. It was so horrific that Castillo should write:
...es bello amar al mundo
con los ojos
de los que no han nacido
todavía.
The country finally emerged from a state of war in 1996, although some today are still settling old scores through kidnapping and lynching. The very idea of land reform has been set back by fifty years.

This lengthy historical introduction sets the scene into which El Grupo Saker-Ti was born. They were a group of bright, educated and literary young men. Their prose and poetic works were published in a series of journals, of which Saker-Ti, or Dawn, from which they drew their name, and Revista de Guatemala, edited by Cardoza,. were the two most prominent. Some of them were too young to have taken part in the overthrow of General Ubico, but their leader, Raul Leiva, was twenty eight in 1944. The father of Roberto Paz y Paz Gonzalez had been exiled in 1937, when he was only ten, but he returned in 1944 to take part in the student revolt. The youngest, Oscar Artero Palencia was only born in 1932. Membership of the group must have been somewhat fluid, as a list of members given by Cardoza, obtained from the internet, does not exactly correspond to that of Abelardo Rodas, their secretary, who is quoted by Mojón in her book Poesia Revolucionaría Guatemalteca.

Cardoza says that following a visit of Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet and an avowed communist, to Guatemala in 1949 the brightest of them were attracted to communism and “joined the Communist Party just as they would make their first communion.” The party to them appeared to be the only party that showed any compassion to the underprivileged. No doubt the church was working with the poor outside the capital, but the hierarchy was too closely tied to the oligarchy and the church itself was a landowner and had opposed the government. This was a genuine movement of the heart to the social needs of the country, and with their youthful energy they adventurously tried to build a more just society.

The group saw itself as a bombilla, or light bulb, to illuminate the problems which confronted them in their time, and to oppose the status quo. Their first concern was to identify the problems. They came together with this declared intent to form La Asamblea de Artistas y Escritores Jóvenes. They there set out to “forge a new type of cultural environment which would respond to the needs of the people that would be the function of the young Guatemalan democracy. This new environment would have to be national, knowledge based and democratic, because they recognized that the best of their cultural tradition held in high regard the dignity and independence of the country. They would oppose superstition and ignorance and provide service to the greatest number of people.” Noble ideals, indeed, not dissimilar to those of our Liberal Party!

This commitment marked a real new beginning in Guatemala for in the free environment of the new democratic society nobody was afraid to engage openly in the public affairs of the capital. They created a new literary style that united them in their prose and poetry, although revolutionary writing was not exactly new to them. Some of an older generation, such as the Nobel poet laureate, Miguel Angel Asturias, had been writing with others in a similar vein even during the Ubico years as el grupo acento. Asturias gave inspiration to his younger peers. But after six brief years they saw their work abruptly cut short by the “liberator” Armas. Cardoza said they then became earnest and even more dedicated with feeling for their enormous responsibility which they had undertaken, but, if they had failed, it was because they had underestimated the strength of their opposition, the United Fruit Company. He wrote with heartache, as they were all his close companions and friends. He suggested with bitter sarcasm that in place of the Quetzal, the Guatemalan national emblem and currency, the new government should have substituted a bunch of bananas!

The group officially disbanded after the fall of Arbenz, but unofficially it continued to grow. Each individually continued to write. Rather than being deterred by the repressive regime of Armas, several others rushed to the cause, also to become members of the Communist party and of the guerilla movement. If the American government had hoped to limit the influence of Communism their heavy handed treatment of Arbenz did more to promote it. In fact Cardoza says that the Communist party was only really organized after the fall of Arbenz. Members of Saker-Ti became its leaders, Huberto Alverado the secretary general. The most representative of those who joined the ranks after 1954 was Otto René Castillo, whose poem, Intelectuales Apoliticos, is quoted below.

Punishment for membership of the Communist party was severe. Alberto Alvarado paid the price by having his eyes gouged out before being further tortured and murdered in 1974 on orders of General Kjell Laugerud. Others chose to live in exile, such as Melvin René Barahona, who went to Argentina and died there in 1965, and Rafael Sosa, who lived in Moscow for more than a quarter of a century with what Cardoza says “that inconsistent stubbornness of being Guatemalan only comparable to my own.” He adds that none were committed to coprophagia, which is being forced to eat excrement, apparently a punishment meted to other more unfortunate dissidents. The body of Roberto Obregon Morales, in July 1970, was found floating in a river after he had been detained on returning to Guatemala from El Salvador. Castillo was captured by anti guerrilla forces in 1967 and was tortured to death at the age of only thirty one.. Roberto Paz y Paz Gonzalez was more fortunate, in that after his second exile in Argentina he was able to return to Guatemala in May 1963. Constantly threatened with death he was not killed, in spite of, as Mojón writes “his never wavering to stand for the high ideals for which he had always stood.”

But were they true Stalinists? Were they not unlike many young idealists, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who were attracted to the Communist party? By Patterson’s “duck test” they were, but were they such a threat to the world at large, or to the United States in particular, that they had to be exterminated in such a brutal manner? It does display a capacity for cruelty, not unknown in Latin history. Were it a declared war, there probably would have been a War Crimes Tribunal. The most amazing fact, however, is that it passed unnoticed by the North American media, where such brutality was usually attributed only to communists. We saw every night, ad nauseam, the Viet Nam War fought on our television screens, such that we knew every detail of what was happening half way around the globe. Where was the media in Guatemala? Who in the 1960's and 70's knew anything of what was happening there, on our back doorstep? The Canadian government must have known. I learned of it first by going in 1996 and seeing in clinical practice those who had suffered in the conflict. Then I felt overwhelmed by anger with what we as a Canadian people had allowed to happen, and then to cover it up.

But what of their work? I shall quote only a few samples of their poetry, and then only brief excerpts, from Mojón’s collection of Guatemalan revolutionary poetry. She admits that it is far from being an exhaustive anthology, but it has a sufficient number of works of el grupo Saker-Ti, as well as the earlier group, el grupo acento, and the guerilla poets who followed the “liberation.” I find that I cannot read their work without feeling all over again the intense anger that I felt when I first visited Guatemala.

The first, from Roberto Paz y Paz Gonzales, from a poem first published in the journal Saker-Ti.

Reconstrucción de la Luz Reconstruction of the Light
Las manos, sí, las manos cantan
el poema de amor bien aprendido
y es ajeno su ritmo concertante;
para usinas y arados han nacido;
más tan sucio y oscuro es el instante
que a empuñar el fusil ahora llaman. These hands, yes, these hands sing
the poem of love that is well understood
and is alien to the concerted rhythm;
they have been born for factories and ploughs;
But so filthy and dark is the moment,
they now call to seize the gun,

Las manos saben roturar la tierra:
la patria se alimenta de esos manos;
las manos saben dirigir telares:
que vistan a los pueblos esas manos;
las manos elaboran calculemas:
que construyan los puentes esas manos;
las manos saben auscultar dolencias:
que curen a los pueblos esas manos;
las manos saben ordenar las letras:
que eduquen a los pueblos esas manos. The hands know how to break up the ground:
would that these hands feed the native land;
the hands know how to operate looms:
would that these hands really dress the people;
the hands can work out problems in calculus:
would that these hands build the bridges;
these hands know how to listen to pains:
would that these hands cure the people;
these hands know how to arrange words
would that these hands educate the people.

There was so much potential to solve the nation’s problems with so many well educated, eagre, young men, and possibly ladies too, though they were not in the forefront at that time. Paz y Paz was, as were all the other members of the group, anxious and impatient to get the work done; but it was not to be, since all the same problems, such as poor nutrition, insufficient clothing and suffering from the cold, especially in the higher altitudes, poor infrastructure of roads and bridges being washed away, disease, even those that were preventable, such as those caused by parasites, and illiteracy; they all still plague the countryside, where the majority of the indigenous live. He felt that taking the gun after democracy had failed was fully justified.

Barahona, writing in exile, hopes to return to redress these evils. He dreams of the day, perhaps beyond his own, when everything will have passed, and reconstruction might begin:
Las Guitarras del Exilo The Guitars of the Exile
Todo Pasará Everything will Pass
...Y todo pasará
Y yo estaré contigo en la mañana
de las reconstrucciones. ...And everything will pass
And I shall stand with you tomorrow
of the rebuilding.
Sí, Estaré en Zacapa
y estaré en Chiquimula,
estaré en todas partes
por donde la muerte anduvo
desalojando la esperanza.
Yo estaré allí para hacer
la sangré náufraga de los ladrillos muertos.
Para enjugar la ultima lágrima vertida.
Estaré allí
para borrar con mi frente los escombros
y los recuerdos tristes Yes, I shall stand in Zacapa
I shall stand in Chiquimula,
I shall stand in all the places
where death has gone
dislodging hope.
I shall stand there in order to make
useless the blood of the dead tiles
to wipe away the last shed tear.
I shall be there
to clean up the mess with my brow
and sad memories.
Pondré una rosa roja y un soneto
en cada tumba colectiva.
Pintaré allí un vástago de mi voz, una sonrisa
un estremecimiento de mis labios
en las palmeres resurrectas,
y besaré los nuevos ladrillos y los muros
definitivamente edificados. I shall place a red rose and a sonnet
on each collective grave
I shall paint there an offshoot of my voice, a smile
an agitation of my lips in the resurrected palms, and I shall kiss the renewed tiles and walls definitively built.
Sí, todo pasará;
y vendrán nuevas madres para los niños huérfanos,
y vendrán nuevos hijos para las madres tristes,
y un nuevo pan
más dulce y más sabroso
desbordará las muecas de mi pueblo, y una nueva esperanza
desberdará los pechos reconstruidos. Yes, everything will pass;
and new mothers will sell for their orphaned children
and new sons will sell for the saddened mothers,
and a new bread
more sweet and more tasty
shall flow over the grimaces of my people, and a new hope
shall flow over the reconstructed breasts.

I have seen the orphaned children and their saddened mothers. Barahona maintains the hope that there would be a brighter day, but he never lived to return to Guatemala to see it.
Castillo, whom I have quoted earlier, was not one of the original Saker-Ti, but he identified with their cause in 1954. In his Intelectuales Apolíticos he had nothing but contempt for those in his country who in the struggle were apolitical, who did not take a stand against the injustices of his society. This may equally apply to anybody who has stood on the sidelines in the face of injustice, not only in Guatemala.
I

Un día
los intelectuales apolíticos
de mi país
serán interrogados
por el hombre
sencillo
de nuestro pueblo. One day
the apolitical intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simple man
of our people
Se les preguntará
sobre lo que hicieron
cuando
la patria se apagaba
lentamente
como una hoguera dulce
pequeña y sola If he were to ask them
about what they were doing
when
the country was being snuffed out
slowly
as is a sweet bonfire
little and alone
No serán interrogados
sobre sus trajes,
ni sobre sus largas siestas
después de la merienda,
...
Nada se les preguntará
sobre sus justificaciones
absurdas
crecidas a la sombra
de una mentira rotunda. They will not be interrogated
about their suits,
nor about their long siestas
after the midday meal
...
Nothing like this will be asked
about their absurd justifications

swollen by the shadow
of a categorical lie.
III

Intelectuales apolíticos
de mi dulce país
no podréis responder nada. You apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country
you will not be able to make any reply.
Os devorará un buitre de silencio
las entrañas,
Os roerá el alma
vuestra propia miseria,
y callaréis,
avergonzados de vosotros. A vulture of silence will devour your entrails
Your own misery will gnaw
your soul,
and you will be silent,
ashamed of yourselves.

Un día is today.

El Grupo Saker-Ti grew from the birth of a democracy in Guatemala but died in its infancy from the bullying of a big brother, who could not stand to see anything but his own brand of democracy, as he continues to do to Cuba today. As most Latins with a social conscience, they were prolific writers, whose works have outlived them and are now inspiring a new generation of, not only Guatemalans, but also North Americans, from Canada and the United States, and other citizens of the world, to put right the wrongs that they in their time were unable to do. I believe that most thinking persons, aware of what has happened, would be ashamed of the part their governments have played, or have failed to play, in this conflict, and, as Castillo predicted, of their own silence and complicity. ¡Nunca más!

Bibliography
1. Cardoza y Aragón, Luis. El Grupo Saker-Ti (Amanacer en cakchiquel).El rio, novela de caballerias.. México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1986 quoted from http.//www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~jce2/sakerti.html.

2. Frazier, Thomas R., gen. ed. The Underside of American History. 2 vols..New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1987. Vol. 2 The United States Reenters Central America by Walter LaFeber.

3. Mojón, Luisa Rodriguez. Poesia Revolucionaria Guatemalteca. Madrid: Graficas Guia. Julian Camarillo. 1971.

4. Beverley, John and Zimmerman, Marc. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1990

5. Gonzalez, Mike and Treece, David. The Gathering of Voices, The Twentieth Century Poetry of Latin America. London and New York: Verso. 1992.