The sensitivity of the Indian communities' past -- including tens of thousands of deaths at the hands of soldiers and death squads in the 1960-96 civil war -- was clearly on display in Panabaj, where residents even refused to allow troops in to help recover bodies. Memories are still too vivid of a 1990 army massacre of 13 villagers on the same ground now covered by a mudflow a kilometer wide and up to 6 meters deep.

All of the mudslide victims were Sutujil Indians, only about 100,000 of whom still live in communities on the shores of Lake Atitlan.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu announced plans to tour the Atitlan area and was trying to organize donations of Mayan clothing, noting they would not wear donated Western-style items.

Indians struggled to reconcile the demands of tradition -- which require that bodies be recovered and buried exactly 24 hours after dying -- with the shifting fields of mud and rotting corpses, which threatened disease and injury. Experts advised them not to dig anymore because of the dangers.

Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein said steps were being taken to give towns "legal permission to declare the buried areas cemeteries" as "a sanitary measure."

The Japan Times Weekly: Oct. 15, 2005
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