The Poetics of the Jungle and an Insurgent Analysis of Counter-Insurgency: The Collection Mario Payeras at the CAMeNA

 

 

The documents collected by the late Mario Payeras were given to the CAMeNA in two batches. One part of the collection was stored in digital format on a pen drive which Payeras had brought with him from Guatemala. His partner Yolanda Colom gave this pen drive to the CAMeNA after Payeras had passed away. The second batch of documents were given to the CAMeNA staff on a separate occasion, on paper. The documents encompass two areas which nurtured each other in Payeras’ life and works: the poetic, and the insurgent analysis of military strategies of counter-insurgency warfare. Payeras was a writer of all genres who received the prestigious literary prize Casa de las Americas in 1981 for his testimonial novel Los días de la selva, about the life of a guerrilla group in the jungle. This novel is complemented by his later novel El trueno en la ciudad, on guerrilla activity in the city. Payeras also published a play, short stories for adults and children, poetry, a testimonial, essays on environmental themes, and a volume with essays on military-strategic analysis. As well as a writer he was, for 16 years, a key military analyst, strategist and educator for the Guatemala guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP). He advocated a profound re-consideration of Marxist analysis in light of its relationship with the eco-system, which he articulated in his book La latitud de la flor y el granizo (1988).

Payeras was born in Chimaltenango in Guatemala in 1940. He studied Philosophy at the University of San Carlos, at the UNAM in Mexico City and, through a scholarship offered by the Guatemalan Workers Party, for four years at the University of Leipzig, where he arrived via Romania. His first-hand knowledge of these Eastern Bloc states led to a critical attitude towards their power structures and their cultures. During his time in Europe he learned Romanian, Italian, and German. After his return to Guatemala, Payeras became one of the founders of the EGP in 1968. He was a member of their National Command and responsible for the analytical and military training of the membership. In 1982, General Efraín Ríos Montt took power by way of a coup d´état. Under his orders counterinsurgency strategies that targeted the civilian population were implemented, and a wave of genocide and repression unleashed. Payeras argued that the EGP’s strategy had failed in this context, and he proposed a profound change. The General Command refused to accept his analysis, and Payeras left the EGP in 1984. He founded a new armed movement and eventually crossed the border to Mexico where he lived in exile and at times, in hiding, until his death.

Payeras, like Ernesto Guevara, saw the urgent need for a body of insurgent military and strategic analysis that would enable guerrilla forces to effectively stop the machine of the – almost always, U.S. sponsored and trained – armies that throttled any attempt at a non-capitalist social and political transformation in the spirit of social justice. Payeras studied and analysed the military strategies of insurgent and counter-insurgent movements to learn from them. He wrote an analysis of the military principles of Simón Bolívar, available under the rubric ‘Historia y cronologia’ I AL1). Under the rubric ‘Partidos y movimientos políticos democracia y elecciones’ there are copies of the document detailing the EGP’s criteria for ideological training, under M GT 3, and under M GT4 a typewritten manuscript of educational talks he gave for the EPG. Some documents are about non-armed social and political struggles in Guatemala, such as political parties like the workers’ party, whose programme for a popular revolution is available under M GT2. Papers collected under the rubric ‘movimientos sociales’ include information about strikes, labour struggles, and trade union organization in Guatemala

The second major theme in the collection Payeras is biographical material such as a detailed list of life events and his literary work, collected mostly under the rubric ‘Expresiones y manifestaciones culturales’. The documents include texts of his works, reviews, interviews, and correspondence. Literary analysts of Los días de la selva have pointed out that Payeras’ work is somewhat unusual in the context of the testimonial and theoretical writing of guerrilla members at the time. Payeras tacitly rewrites some of the tropes of guerrilla literature which continue in the tradition started by el Che; for example, Juan Duchesne, Marc Zimmerman and Stephen Henighan all point out that Payeras does not uncritically embrace the idea of sacrifice and self-sacrifice that is dominant in the writing and the life of el Che, and that he tacitly rewrites it. Some of the themes, the type of metaphoricity and some specific metaphors that Payeras deploys in his jungle narrative resonate with the later writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos and in EZLN communiqués.

The materials available on La latitud de la flor show just how deeply alarmed Payeras was about the deteriorating relationship between the human being and the natural world, and that the reflection on how to re-attune humans with nature was to him essential to a Marxist analysis. Among these materials is a talk by Yolanda Colom on Payeras’ reflections in La latitud.

Finally, the collection contains biographically relevant newspaper clippings and testimonies about the desecration of Payeras’ grave. Payeras died in Mexico in January of 1996. He was buried together with the guerrilla commander Marco Antonio Yon Sosa in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas. Shortly after, his remains were stolen and have not been found since. A collection of newspaper clippings on the profanation of his grave is available under the rubric ‘ Expresiones y manifestaciones culturales’ E GT24, with other materials on his life.

It is generally assumed that the removal of his remains was intended as a desecration of his grave, as the remains of the other persons who are buried with him were untouched.

His collection is of interest to all those who wish to research guerrilla literature, the life and times of Mario Payeras, or the military and political histories and the military strategies of counterinsurgent forces and of insurgent movements in Guatemala.

References

Duchesne, Juan. “Las narrationes guerrilleras: Configuracion de un sujeto epico de nuevo tipo,” in Rene Jara and Hemrn Vidal (eds.), Testimonio y literature. Minneapolis, MN: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature (1986), pp. 85 – 137

Henighan, Stephen. “No History to Absolve Them: Spanish-American Revolutionary Discourse after 1990.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 81, no. 4 (2004): 511-20.

Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio in Guatemala: Payeras, Rigoberta, and Beyond.” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 4 (1991): 22-47.

By Dr. Cornelia Gräbner

The research on which this post is based was funded by The Leverhulme Trust Fellowship on ‘Acquiescent Imaginaries: Snapshots from the Cultures of Low-Intensity Democracies ’. Cornelia Gräbner would like to thank the staff at the CAMeNA for their generous collaboration and support.

The Mega-Project of the Panamá Canal and Politically Engaged Journalism in the Collection ‘Jorge Turner’ at the CAMeNA

Panamanian researcher, journalist and activist Jorge Turner researched and documented the political and social implications of what we would today call a mega-project: the Panama Canal, which opened for business in 1914. Bent Flyvbjerg defines mega-projects as ‘large-scale, complex ventures that typically … take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people.’ Mega-projects are now hotly contested because of the notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ which inform them and which they perpetuate, usually at the expense of the natural environment, of the social fabric of the communities who live in the area, and of democratic political process. While mega-projects are usually justified and advertised with promises of jobs and access to conveniences, they have often disproportionately benefitted multinational corporations and undermined workers’ rights.

A prime example of all this was the Panama Canal. The area surrounding it was known as the Panama Canal Zone and it was controlled by the U.S., even though it was on the territory of the Republic of Panama. In the 1904 Isthmian Canal Convention, the government of the newly independent Panama granted the U.S. control and right of use in perpetuity of a zone extending five miles around the canal and of the canal itself. This lasted until 1979, when the U.S. returned control over the canal and its surroundings to the government of Panama. While some Panamanian citizens and politicians hailed this situation as beneficial to the economy, others were fundamentally opposed to it because of the influence it granted the U.S. over Panama, because it undermined Panama’s self-determination and sovereignty, and because of the ways in which it imposed a capitalist model of development on the country. One of those citizens was Jorge Turner.

Turner was born in Panamá in 1922. In his youth and while studying, he worked as a docker in the port of Balboa, inside the Panama Canal Zone. The Panama canal was a meeting point for seafaring folk and port populations at the time, and Turner quickly fraternized with seafarers and port workers from across Latin America and the wider world. The experience of the exploitation of labourers in non-regulated free trade zones, where employers reign supreme and unbridled exploitation in the name of capitalist trade flourishes, that Turner developed a strong anti-imperialist conviction, as well as an affinity with labour organizations and trade unionism and eventually, with the Cuban Revolution. Turner participated in the uprising on 9^th January 1964 in Panama which demanded the end of the ‘colonial enclave’ of the Panama Canal Zone. After a 1968 military coup d’état he was imprisoned and, after about a year, released into exile to Mexico. There, Turner continued his organizational and activist trajectory. He organized with fellow exiles, and became instrumental in creating the statutes of what was to become the Comité de Derechos Humanos de Centroamérica. The correspondence surrounding a work trip to Costa Rica for this purpose are available at G AL 1, under the rubric ‘Derechos humanos.’

Turner mostly worked as a journalist, and as an organized journalist as such. His writing brought into focus the question of how to bring into focus issues such as those surrounding the Panama Canal. As an organized journalist he was instrumental to the foundation of the Federación Latinoamericana de Periodistas (Latin American Federation of Jounalists), and one of the founders of the Journalism School at the National University of Panama. Crucial to his work was a constant reflection on the politics and the ethics of Journalism, a continuous thought process reflected in the document ‘Los principios internacionales de ética profesional en el periodismo Periodismo Internacional’ O IN 1, a document elaborated in the context of a series of consultative assemblies held under the auspices of the UNESCO. Like Gregorio Selser, Richard Kapuczynski or Martha Gellhorn, he was constantly engaged with the question of how to conduct a journalism responsive to, and clearly positioned towards, political situations of domination and oppression. This self-reflexive attitude is also present in a collection of his notebooks, a genre which has recently garnered some interest, available under the rubric ‘Periodismo, comunicación y propaganda’ under O PA 1.

Turner was also an activist of exiles. In 1977 he was instrumental in negotiating the rehabilitation and the right to return of those who had left Panama for political reasons, by negotiating with General Torrijos on the sidelines of the negotiations of what was to become the Carter-Torrijos-Treaty. It seems that Turner was recommended to the General as an interlocutor by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who introduced him in a handwritten note available under the rubric ‘Periodismo’ O PA 4. Turner’s negotiations were successful; yet, he himself remained in Mexico as a researcher at the UNAM until his death.

The political complexities and personal heartbreak behind different forms of engaging with power are exemplified by the letters sent to Turner by Rosa de Aragón, the widow of exiled journalist Leopoldo Aragón. Aragón was a friend of Turner’s who, at the time, chose a different form of confronting the powers that be. He set himself on fire in front of the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, in 1977, to protest against the regime of General Torrijos and the Carter-Torrijos Treaty, and died. Aragón’s ashes were given to Turner, who kept them safe until he could give them to Rosa de Aragón.

In February 2011, shortly before he died, Jorge Turner participated at the CAMeNA in the presentation of the new edition of Gregorio Selser’s opera magna, the encyclopaedia Cronología de las Intervenciones extranjeras en América Latina. The speech he gave on this occasion is available under the rubric ‘ Periodismo, Comunicacion y Propaganda’, under O AL 5.

The documents collected by Turner and donated to the CAMeNA by his widow María Guerra are of particular interest for those working on big projects and the Panama Canal, for anyone interested in politically engaged journalism in Central America and, though there are fewer documents on this topic, for those interested in Central American solidarity organizations.

Reference

Flyvbjerg, Bent. “What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview.” Project Management Journal 45, no. 2 (2014): 6-19

By Dr. Cornelia Gräbner

The research on which this post is based was funded by The Leverhulme Trust Fellowship on ‘Acquiescent Imaginaries: Snapshots from the Cultures of Low-Intensity Democracies ’. Cornelia Gräbner would like to thank the staff at the CAMeNA for their generous collaboration and support.

Ernesto Guevara, also known as El Che: The Collection M at the CAMeNA

From Rodrigo Mora, El Che en blanco y negro, La Jornada 08/10/2004

The coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (see collection L) was a watershed moment in 20^th century Latin America. It suggested to those who felt that justice and equality could be achieved from within the existing system, that Latin American oligarchies and their allies in the U.S. would not let that happen. One person who witnessed the coup first hand was the person who is at the centre of collection M: the allergologist Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. He lived in Guatemala at the time, together with his Peruvian partner Hilda Gadea, an active supporter of the Arbenz government. The savage repression that followed the coup and Hilda’s arrest and eventual release forced them to leave the country for Mexico. There, Guevara met the group of exiled Cuban revolutionaries around Fidel Castro with whom he would eventually embark to Cuba, first to engage in guerrilla warfare there. Eventually he followed his profound anti-colonial convictions and participated in liberation struggles in Angola, Congo and Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967.

In 2017, the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II published a bestselling biography on Guevara, entitled Ernesto Guevara, también conocido como el Che. Taibo’s family had fled the nationalist-fascist regime of General Franco in Spain to Mexico, where they arrived in 1958. Paco Ignacio II became a well-known bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction books, all of which explore questions of justice versus corruption and repression. When researching for El Che, Taibo II accumulated a vast collection of documents on Guevara, ranging from books and photographs over correspondence to articles and manuscripts. He donated this archive to the CAMeNA to make it accessible to the public, and it has now become Collection M.

Ernesto Guevara was possibly the most globally significant and influential 20^th century Latin American thinkers and practitioners. Taibo has characterized him as ‘romantic, adventurous, and a vagabond’, and has pointed out that Guevara’s politics were based on ethics, and not on negotiations. Throughout his life and even after his death Guevara galvanized people into action and into thinking outside the box (whereby ‘thinking’ is here understood as analytically grounded political imagining). He did not accept limitations, whether personal limitations imposed on him by severe asthma, or those imposed on history and politics by those who want to keep the status quo. He was fiercely disciplined in his lifestyle, and an innovative decolonial and anti-imperialist political thinker (see for example his notes on the Manual of Political Economy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR N AL 2). Like few other individuals he personified pan-Americanist solidarity. In her recollections of the young Guevara available in collection M, his school friend Dolores Moyano writes about the Guevara family that ‘in their house the inevitable never happened, only the unexpected.’ Collection M captures that spirit.

Collection M is vast and shows the painstaking and wide-ranging research that Taibo carried out for the biography. Here I will briefly signpost some aspects that reflect Taibo’ enquiry into the interplay between the person Ernesto Guevara and the figure of el Che. The collection is a wonderful resource for those researching the life and thought of Guevara. It also shows the emergence of the biography authored by Taibo, and it holds materials of interest to all those who investigate representations of ‘el Che’. Under the rubric ‘Pensamiento y filosofía’ we find two large collections entitled ‘El Che Guevara. Vida, pensamiento y acciones. América Latina, 1961-2007’, I and II (N AL 1 volumes 1 and 2). They contain articles, interviews, press clippings and other documents about Guevara’s biography and thought. These collections are as informative as they are entertaining. They are complemented by ‘El Che Guevara. Mito revolucionario y mercancía. América Latina, 1968-2002’, catalogued under the rubric of ‘Periodismo y comunicación’ as O AL 1. The documents focus on the creation of the icon ‘El Che Guevara’ and capture another element of 20^th century Latin American and international intellectual and political history, namely the commodification of the figure of one of the continent’s outstanding political practitioners and thinkers. Under the rubric ‘Expresiones y manifestaciones culturales’ we find under E AL1 and E AL 2 collections of photographs by and of Ernesto Guevara. Of relevance to the complicated question of how to remember and honour a person and a legacy as complex as his, is a collection that is filed under the rubric of ‘Grupos y conflictos armados’, as G AL 4, of ‘Homenajes, monumentos y memoriales en honor del Che Guevara. América Latina, 1969-2004’, which collects everything from songs about Guevara, to articles about monuments and about institutions named after him, such as schools.

Under the rubric ‘Grupos y conflictos armados’ we find testimonies of people who knew Guevara while he was involved in armed struggle. The material collected in this section is of interest not only with regards to Guevara himself; it also allows glimpses on those who worked outside of the limelight, sometimes in his shadows, and whose voices are preserved through their stories of him. A particularly moving document is the typed manuscript of a biography of Juan Pablo Chang Navarro Levano (G AL 1), a Peruvian citizen of Chinese descent, who fought with Guevara in Bolivia and was executed with him.

According to Taibo, one can only approach ‘el Che’ through heterodoxy – and this is reflected in the collection of materials he generously donated. The material on Guevara’s life, his work, and the responses resist the boundaries imposed by any form of categorization, reminding us that we should not resign ourselves to the inevitable and should instead embrace the unexpected.

By Dr. Cornelia Gräbner

The research on which this post is based was funded by The Leverhulme Trust Fellowship on ‘Acquiescent Imaginaries: Snapshots from the Cultures of Low-Intensity Democracies ’. Cornelia Gräbner would like to thank the staff at the CAMeNA for their generous collaboration and support.