State Terror, Resistance, and the Poetics of Survival in Sabino Esteban Francisco’s Gemido de Huellas

Between 1980 and 1983, the Guatemalan army carried out some of its worst attacks against the Maya populations in the rural areas of the country. For instance, General Efrain Rios Montt’s scorched earth campaign, “Bullets and Beans,” concluded with the massacre of over 70,000 civilians within the short period between 1982-3. Notwithstanding the thousands of people that were persecuted, murdered and displaced, thousands of those who fled the state sponsored terrorism managed to survive by employing collective strategies in the altiplanos. Today these survivors are known as the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR), a network of organizations that settled or were in constant movement in the jungles of Guatemala (at times, in Mexico) and number over one million people, displaced by the violence. In this presentation, I will explore the CPR’s politics of resistance through Sabino Esteban Francisco’s (Maya Q’anjob’al) book of poetry, Gemido de huellas [The Moan of Footprints] (2009).  I argue that with his book, Francisco—a survivor of the war who grew up in the settlements of the CPR located in Ixcan—develops a poetics of survival in which he criticizes an oppressive hegemonic order by inscribing subaltern memory and establishing conditions that would allow for the creation of a non-colonial alternative.