Myrna Mack Chang: The Guatemalan Anthropologist that Gave Her Life for Indigenous Equality
“What’s the difference between an American anthropologist and a Guatemalan anthropologist? In America, you publish, or you perish. In Guatemala, if you publish, then you perish.” — Myrna Mack Chang
Today, an estimated 50% of Guatemala’s population belongs to one of 22 Indigenous groups. Despite their ample size, these groups are consistently marginalized by the Guatemalan government, often violently persecuted and displaced from their lands.
While Indigenous people have mobilized throughout history against the State that represses them, they recently attained positions in politics, academia, communications, and the like that have allowed them to exercise greater influence for human rights and land ownership. One such figure was Myrna Mack Chang. Her story is disclosed in the book Paradise in Ashes, a comprehensive but stomach-churning account of the genocide against Guatemala’s Indigenous tribes.
Mack Chang was a Guatemalan anthropologist of Maya-Chinese descent. During the late 1980s, she was a social investigator for AVASCO (Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences) and a colleague of Dr. Beatriz Manz, now professor and author of Paradise in Ashes. Mack Chang was the only researcher conducting an investigation on the displacement and violence inflicted upon Indigenous communities in Guatemala by the U.S. counterinsurgency-trained Guatemalan military.
The Guatemalan government sought to maintain secrecy on the extermination campaign they were executing against Guatemala’s Indigenous tribes following years of stealing Indigenous land. Growing political movements opposing this campaign of ethnic cleansing were unsuccessful. As peaceful alternatives to ending despair, hunger, and poverty proved futile, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor emerged as an armed movement in defense of Indigenous lives and rights.
Mack Chang had published vital documents on the resistance of Indigenous communities and would reveal evidence that legally compromised the Guatemalan Army on September 7th, 1990 (as recorded in the Case of Myrna Mack Chang v. Guatemala). On September 11, 1990, Chang was stabbed 27 times outside of her office in Guatemala City. The assassins were two graduates of The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the U.S. School of the Americas.
The School of the Americas is a U.S. Army training center that taught combat skills, mainly to soldiers in Latin America in an effort to improve ties and maintain democratic civilian control. Its participation in torture, murder, and political repression is well documented throughout Latin America. Simply put, it was a training ground for far right extremists with close ties to the U.S. government.
Mack Chang posthumously received justice in 2004, fourteen years after her death, when her sister Helen Mack Chang pursued justice against the Guatemalan government. Despite not receiving support from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, her success pushed the Guatemalan government to publicly admit that they had murdered her sister.
Mack Chang’s death wasn’t a unique occurrence in Guatemala. The preceding years of Chang’s research were some of the darkest of the Guatemalan Civil War. In addition to academics and journalists, Catholic priests such as Father William Guillermo Woods from the Maryknoll Order had been assassinated after helping organize settlements for peasants in Guatemala and refusing to publicly denounce the Guerrilla Army to local Maya populations.
Among those massacred, 80% were of the Maya K’iche’ tribe. In addition, many of the K’iche’ had also fled to the U.S. in the 1980s in spite of facing language barriers, cultural differences, and xenophobic sentiments across the country. Though there is popular support for immigration reform in the U.S., our immigration system still brings little solution to these issues.
As a person of Guatemalan descent, I would like to say that I am relieved to find truth and justice prevailing in this case. However, in this past year it’s become clear that broader justice has yet to be achieved. Last May, as Guatemalan Judge Miguel Ángel Galvez ordered nine military offices to trial for torturing and killing nearly 200 men, women, and children (during the 1980s war against Indigenous people waged by the Guatemalan Armed Forces), he quickly received death threats. These threats remain unresolved.
Indigenous people in Central America are the most marginalized population in the Western Hemisphere, neglected by the Guatemalan State, and as migrants by the U.S. government, which consistently fails to fully meet its obligations (under international law) to welcome refugees and asylum seekers. Yet Maya leaders continue protecting the environment and fighting climate change as is the case with activist Bernardo Caal Xol and former activist Ramiro Choc. They are 500 years strong.
References
Inter-American Court of Human Rights: Case of Myrna Mack Chang v. Guatemala
The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas
