Gira a Rabinal (3/10): Museo Comunitario de la Memoria Histórica
So. Prepárate para estar triste. Prepare yourself to be a little depressed.
The first day we were in Rabinal, we went to the Museo Comunitario de la Memoria Histórica de Rabinal, or the Community Museum of Historical Memory. As I mentioned before, the municipality of Rabinal is largely populated by Achi Maya. However, the Achi communities around Rabinal were heavily targeted during the most intense years of the civil war, around 1975-1985. This museum is dedicated to recording the genocide that happened in this area and the culture that was almost lost with it.
The museum is split into three rooms. The first room is dedicated to remembering the faces, names, and stories of Achi victims. The whole room was literally just four walls of photos. It was emphasized that since this population was mostly poor and rural before the war, many people did not have photos of themselves, so this display is vastly incomplete. The blue column that is titled “Niñas y Niños Victimas del Genocidio” is a double sided, floor-to-ceiling list of children murdered, including their names and ages. Since there are still people in power that were involved in these types of things and the war has been so politicized within the country itself, there are a significant number of Guatemalans who deny that these things ever happened (if you watched the short documentary I posted about forced disappearances, you saw an example of this). Because of that, these types of displays and historical records are even more important to keep.
The second room was dedicated to showing the process of returning bodies to families after an exhumation of a mass grave or of an unmarked gravesite of a disappeared person (or several together). This includes recording evidence at the site, the actual exhumations, forensic analysis, and collecting DNA from surviving community members to identify remains. The photo of the grey sign on a red wall is a list of exhumation sites with the number of bodies exhumed at each site (split into men, women, and children).
The third room is dedicated to showing the culture of the Achi community, which became dangerous to practice during the war. The practice of these traditions never recovered to their pre-war levels. The room shows both ancient and recent cultural items, including pottery, statues, instruments, tradicional ceremonial clothing, traditional medicine and religious ceremonies.