Not Our Day to Die:
Testimony from the Guatemalan Jungle

Picture
Michael Sullivan

Paperback:
Perfect bound, 264 pages, 6" x 9" 
ISBN 978-1-938288-90-6
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About the Book

In the farming communities of the Guatemalan jungle, the simple life was a good one, sustained by family, faith, community, and the pilots—like Mike Sullivan—who linked their isolated villages.

Then the repression began, the random, violent government purges—aided by the U.S. military and CIA—that wiped out crops and villages and forced men, women, and children into desperate lives of hiding in the dense jungle—for sixteen long years.

When peace accords finally were signed, it was a story Sullivan knew had to be told. Returning once again, he talked with the people he’d known long before—giving us the fascinating, painful, but most of all, deeply human tales of strength and survival that fill this book.

Preview

The 16th of March 1981 was when they [began]…  The massacres were in all the co-operatives. They burned everything. In Mayalan, they burned the generator, my father's marimba. They destroyed everything. They didn’t leave anything. And, after that, we decided it was better not to stay in the house, because the army bombarded the houses. If they saw a bit of corn, they would drop a bomb on it and burn the corn, burn everything. What we did was to take refuge in the parcela. We lived as refugees for six months. Until one day …  I don’t know if from the helicopter they saw milpa, something,  they landed. They cut down the milpa with machetes. We were campesinos. We ate corn and beans. That’s what we lived on. We didn’t have money. One couldn’t continue living there.  We were obliged to walk and walk. I walked a lot, as did my little brothers and sisters. My mother was seven months pregnant with my little sister Marga [Margarita]. When my mother gave birth to Marga, she was in shock, She had lost her stability as a woman. It fell upon me for eight months, more, nearly one year, to be father and mother to my five brothers and sisters. I was only twelve years old. Anita was only six. Luciano, the boy who is also here [in Santa Elena], was sick. He couldn’t walk. I had to help everyone. I got up at three in the morning. I had to look for roots of papaya, find a bit of corn, grind it, and make tortillas. And when there was nothing to eat, I went into the jungle. I looked for bananas, fruits, chicos. There was a red fruit, nice and sweet and spongy. I picked the fruit and let it ripen for when they were hungry. At times, I gave them just one thing to eat. Other times there was something else to add to the little corn we had. Sometimes I only cooked yucca, or we cooked sweet potatoes to add to the food. My mother couldn’t even help me cook or help in the field. Because of that, we suffered much more than others. They had fathers and mothers, and they could move around. If they came to a place where there was corn, they stayed there. But we had to stay in one place because my mother was so weak and we were all so small. When Marga cried, we put a rag in her mouth so she wouldn’t [be heard]. We'd also put a rag in Luciano's mouth.  Later, I got the idea of putting the children in a hole and covering it with some wood so the army wouldn’t hear them. When they stopped crying, I took them out.

About the Author

In 1972, Mike Sullivan got a pilot’s license and traveled south, meeting Father Bill Woods in Guatemala, flying for the land reform project that was reshaping the Ixcan region, and joining his life with that of its people.

 He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Praise for Not Our Day to Die

Not Our Day to Die is the eloquent testament of a place and time. Through the voices of twenty-eight survivors, it tells the tragic story of remotest Guatemala in the 1970s, ’80s, and beyond. The dreams of these people have not died; their struggle continues. Mike Sullivan has given us a most impressive book.
—William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness and River of Traps.