Arturo Arias, is professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic books include Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Narrative in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Literature 1960-1990 (1998). Co-writer of the film El Norte (1984), his most recent novel in English is Rattlesnake (Curbstone Press, 2003). Author of six novels in Spanish – After the Bombs (1979), Itzam Na (1981), Jaguar en Llamas (1989), Los caminos de Paxil (1991), Cascabel (1998) and Sopa de Caracol (2002) – he is winner of the Casa de las Americas Award and the Anna Seghers Scholarship for two of them. After the Bombs also appeared in English with Curbstone Press (1990). He was 2001-2003 President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

"The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation"

Memory of violence in popular sectors of Latin America has been traditionally associated with remembrance of the violence suffered as a means of closure, but issues or economic reparation are not often addressed. In this talk, I will use the example of the villages surrounding the town of Rabinal, in Guatemala, that were flooded during the construction of the Chixoy dam in the 1970s, and the villagers who protested this flooding and were later massacred as "subversives" in the early 1980s, as a means of exploring the issues that link uncontrolled governmental public works in belated modernity with human rights violations. I will discuss a particular project, sponsored by the International Rivers Network, that seeks to invoke historical memory as a way of lobbying for reparations for those twin political injustices, the original flooding of villages and the subsequent massacre of villagers in the context of a seemingly-unrelated civil war. I will argue that the implications of these negotiations go beyond economic and political motivations, extending to issues of human dignity, given that the Guatemalan government, and its U.N., I.M.F., and U.S. sponsors, justified their actions by dehumanizing the Maya villagers, linking them to the natural world, and then sacrificing them, as well as the environment, in the name of progress. That is, they did not regard the Mayas as equal citizens of the nation who deserved compensation for the loss of their homes and their lives. The villagers' demand for reparations seeks to redress this dehumanization by obligating those national and international institutions to acknowledge their human rights, not only symbolically, as they have to this point, but economically as well.