Mel Gibson's sacrifice of the Maya

[nosmokes]

ol mel's awfully quick to show us all how savage the jews were to jesus and how savage them pagans were before the spaniards came along to cifilize them with the word of god. not too much about the savagery of the christos though, eh?
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original-Indian Country Today

Mel Gibson's sacrifice of the Maya

by: Jose Barreiro / Special to Today

Calmly but tensely, she told me her gruesome story. Then she asked me not to write about it, thinking that they might track her down and kill her, too. A Quiche Maya woman, she had moved to the capital city of Guatemala, driven out of her home town of Totonicapan by the violence that consumed her husband and threatened to engulf her whole people.

It was 1987, 20 years ago, just as the massive repression of the Maya people of Guatemala was shifting from outright massacre by military forces to the terror of officially created ''civil patrols'' that targeted individuals for assassination. Even in Guatemala, it is hard today to imagine the stark brutality of those years, the so-called civil war that saw more than 400 Maya villages razed to the ground and tens of thousands of hard-working farming people - men, women and children - shot, burned and tortured in the most horrible campaign of extermination of modern American times.

The middle-aged woman lived in hiding then, her children at her side, a teenaged son still visibly shaken by fear even months after his father's brutal killing. ''My boy is a little crazed now,'' she told me. ''He cannot sleep.''

She is past the danger of persecution now, lost from official memory among the 100,000 widows from that time, so I can tell her story.

Her husband was a Daykeeper, a medicine person of the ancient Maya calendar, well-known and respected by the dozens of families he assisted in their rites of life passage, from birth through puberty and marriage, performing the rituals and ceremonies inherent to his ancient spiritual tradition. His work required him to travel at night to outlying hamlets, and often dawn would find him burning the sweet copal pom at remote mountain altars, connecting himself and his people to the spirits of nature and time, to cosmological deities and family lineage ancestors, as prescribed by a way of life that has sustained from the time of creation.
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complete article here

[On the Road]

1. I Didn't Have a Problem with it

the European presence was only hinted at, but in a foreboding way. The implication (to me) was that Mayans who avoided outsiders would be better off.