Cooperant update: A Meditation on Justice and Memory in Rabinal

Cooperant update: A Meditation on Justice and Memory in Rabinal

By: Marina Luro, Rabinal Community Legal Clinic Cooperant

Since arriving at the Rabinal Community Legal Clinic (ABJP), I have frequently reflected on what justice means. In Canadian law schools, and I imagine law schools in most of the Global North, justice often tends to be conceptualized in black and white terms: for criminal acts, justice is served when the offender is sentenced; for civil acts, justice is served when the individual harmed is paid compensation for damages. But this approach is divorced from the realities of injustice. What is often overlooked in law school classroom debates is the nuance of trauma and of healing, and what justice looks like for communities, not just individuals.

As the Vecinos case progresses, I have had many discussions with the lawyers at the ABJP about compensation for the victims. What does compensation for crimes against humanity and genocide look like? The crimes involve widespread and systemic human rights violations aimed at members of a specific group, with the intent of destroying that group in whole or in part. Membership in the community is integral to the crimes, and it must also be integral to compensation. Compensation that focuses solely on individual harms as isolated events misses these core elements of the crimes that must also be remedied – they victimized communities.

While monetary compensation for each affected family is an important goal, the nature of the atrocities committed during the Internal Armed Conflict (IAC) are such that justice demands looking beyond the individual. The crimes were not just committed against individuals, they were committed against communities and cultures – in Rabinal, primarily against the Maya Achí. So, compensation must also be aimed at making whole the communities and the cultures that were fragmented by the conflict, as well as the individuals. Schools, health centres, psycho-social support, infrastructure, roads, churches, water, and sanitation are but some of the core demands, given equal weight and importance as individual compensation. I have learned from the lawyers at the ABJP, and from the people they serve, that justice is achieved by healing the community as a whole.

But I’ve noticed that justice also takes another form – it takes shape in collective memory.

It may seem to be an obvious truth that we remember those we lost. But the why of it goes much deeper. In one sense, it keeps the victims of atrocities alive, thereby pushing back against the policies of erasure that are the impetus of genocide. Forgetting would, in a sense, perpetuate the injustices of the internal armed conflict. And in another sense, where impunity seeks to bury the past, remembrance is a powerful statement of resistance and a strong push for justice.

Professor of philosophy, Jeffrey Blustein wrote about the moral imperative of remembrance. He said:

If social justice partly concerns the degree to which a society establishes and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the recognition of collective identities, then institutionalized public remembrance of past injustice is owed to the descendants as a matter of social justice.*

Remembrance speaks truth to trauma, leaves room for healing, and shines a light on the culpability of perpetrators who, like cockroaches, thrive in dark and hidden places. I think there is a lot of truth to the notion that justice demands remembrance. It gives credence to the adage that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Reconciling and doing justice to the past requires remembrance of it. In this light, the erasure of collective public memory is the continuation of injustice.

In Rabinal, memorializing those lost in the IAC may take many forms. Private longing or prayer; public demonstrations; ongoing legal battles; or public art. Such was the mural commemorating the brave Achí women who successfully brought a case against their violators forty years later. For three years, the mural stood proudly in a public square, just around the corner from the church and the market in the heart of Rabinal. Until, without warning or a good reason, the municipality painted over it.

The mural commemorating the historic 2022 sentence in the Maya Achí Women’s case was painted over this year. Photo credit: Rolanda García

Who benefits from the erasure or suppression of collective memory? Undoubtedly, those who feel their impunity threatened. If silence, apathy, and forgetfulness are core ingredients of impunity – and I think that they are – then any action that is loud, emotive, and which memorializes the injustices will threaten the safety of the perpetrators. That something as seemingly benign as a mural could be so threatening to the architects of gross human rights violations is, in my opinion, a testament to the political power of art. But it also demonstrates the intersection of justice and collective memory.

I view this act in the context of the broader, ongoing push for transitional justice in Guatemala – it is stymied at every step by the remnants of the IAC manifesting as corruption. By suppressing the cultivation of collective memory, perpetrators of past injustices shield themselves from public culpability and deny the victims the reconciliation and healing that comes from remembrance. In this way, the injustices continue.

When trying to understand what justice looks like, it is often easier, in my opinion, to recognize what injustice looks like. Perhaps it is a symptom of the human condition that gives us a ‘gut feeling’ about what is wrong but not about what, exactly, is right. In Rabinal, we can better understand the inherent justice in collective memory by recognizing the injustice of a freshly painted wall.

* See Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2008) at 146.