What I Learned From a Guatemalan Shaman
A Personal Perspective: An experienced that changed how I think about decision-making.
Posted March 17, 2025 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
A few presidents ago, I was quite upset about U.S. involvement in a war. I read in the local paper that the president had gone to Guatemala, and he was taken to visit an ancient Maya archeological site. After he left, according to the article, a Maya shaman had done an energetic cleansing or purification of the site.
I thought this was a remarkable way to express dissatisfaction and opposition and to honor the lives of the Maya ancestors. It was done spiritually, quietly, without fanfare, and without any aggression.
Coincidentally, my husband and I — both of us international travel journalists — were leading a trip to Guatemala. The basic itinerary was set, and it involved some of the Maya archeological wonders from the past as well as opportunities to meet and buy from Maya weavers, artists, and craftspeople at markets, events, and in their villages. We made clear to the tour’s participants that there would be flexibility in the itinerary in case new opportunities materialized.
I decided that it might be very interesting to go to the archeological site mentioned in the newspaper article, and try to find the local shaman to tell him how moving his purification ritual seemed and how inspired it was as a way to express dissatisfaction and the need to protect what is sacred or important to us.
More:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/life-is-a-trip/202503/what-i-learned-from-a-guatemalan-shaman
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Article published during that time:
Mayan priests to purify sacred Guatemalan site after Bush visit
APUpdated:Sep 12, 2018Original:Mar 16, 2007
By Juan Carlos Llorca -- Associated Press
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Mayan leaders announced that priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate 'bad spirits' after U.S. President George W. Bush's visit.
That a person like [Bush], with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture; Juan Tiney, the director of a national association of indigenous people and peasant farmers, said March 8.
Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America included a stopover late March 11 in Guatemala. The morning of March 12, he was scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.
Tiney said the spirit guides of the Mayan community decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of bad spirits after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites - which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles - would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26 - 30.
More:
https://ictnews.org/archive/mayan-priests-to-purify-sacred-guatemalan-site-after-bush-visit
= new reply since forum marked as read
would have known immediately why the Mayan shamans felt reference to the monstrous history thrust upon the indigenous people was necessary.
Here's a completely insufficient summary for other people who also didn't learn anything about it until well after their school years, from Wikipedia:
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide,[3] or the Silent Holocaust[7] (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco, Genocidio maya, or Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.[8][9] Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and, with the backing of the United States, was a longstanding policy of the military regime.[6][10][11][5][12] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.[13]
The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants(what they referred mayans as, not what they actually are). While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against them began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s.[14] The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict[15] and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A March 1985 study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court estimated that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war, and that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed between 1980 and 1985.[16] Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982.[17] A 1984 report by HRW discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror".[18]
An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the war, including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared".[2] 92% of civilian executions were carried out by government forces.[2] The United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) documented 42,275 victims of human rights violations and acts of violence from 7,338 testimonies.[19][20] 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino.[21] 91% of victims were killed in 1978 through 1984, 81% in 1981 through 1983, with 48% of deaths occurring in 1982 alone.[1][better source needed] In its final report in 1999, the CEH concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the Armed Forces of Guatemala, and that US training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation", but that the US was not directly responsible for any genocidal acts.[22][14][23][11][24]
Former military dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide. He was convicted in 2013 of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Indigenous group,[25] but that sentence was overturned, and his retrial was not completed by the time of his death in 2018.
1954 Guatemalan coup
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and marked the end of the Guatemalan Revolution.[26] The coup had the goal of stopping and reverting the increasingly progressive policies of the democratically-elected Guatemalan government, which clashed with the business interests of US companies amidst the Cold War, notably the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita).[26][9] It installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The coup was largely the result of a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess.[9]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide
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One of the genocidal Guatemalan Presidents, former General, and fundamentalist Pentecostal minister, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Ronald Reagan, for whom former CIA Director, George H W Bush served as the Vice President.
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May 21, 2013
Conviction of Genocidal Dictator Efrain Rios Montt Overturned by Guatemala’s Highest Court
Asawin Suebsaeng
Saul Martinez/EFE/ZUMA Press
On Monday, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court overturned the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who ruled as de facto president from 1982 to 1983. On May 10, Ríos Montt, 86, was found guilty by a three-panel tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in the slammer; he is the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. But less than two weeks later, Guatemala’s highest court threw out all proceedings in the case dating back to April 19, in part thanks to an aggressive lobbying effort by the nation’s most influential business federation. Due to the court’s 3-2 decision, the way forward—for Ríos Montt’s opponents, for his supporters—has been thrown into question. After Monday’s ruling, Ríos Montt was sent back to house arrest, where he had been since the case started in January 2012.
Here’s a quick reminder of who Efraín Ríos Montt is, and what he did.
1. During his 17-month stint as military dictator, he oversaw the genocide by his armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the indigenous Maya Ixil population. Roughly 100 survivors testified during the course of his trial.
Efrain Rios Montt newspaper trial
This Guatemala City newspaper reads, “Ríos Montt charged with 11 massacres.” Via Granito: How to Nail a Dictator/Facebook
2. Along with the mass murder, his military regime carried out a policy of forced displacement, forced assimilation, torture, systematic rape and sexual assault, starvation, and arbitrary execution against those labeled as political opponents.
3. Due to his staunchly anti-communist attitudes during the Guatemalan Civil War, the general received plenty of financial, military, and political support from President Ronald Reagan’s administration and friends in the United States. (Ríos Montt is an alumnus of the School of the Americas, a Department of Defense-owned institute and notorious tyrant-mill at Fort Benning, Georgia that taught torture, blackmail, death-squad tactics, and counter-insurgency to numerous Latin American strongmen and human rights abusers.)
More:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/conviction-dictator-efrain-rios-montt-overturned/
