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down for most of us indigenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the early fifties, things weren’t all that bad. But in the summer of 1954 the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company—the Chiquita banana folks—engineered a coup against the elected president and set up Carlos Castillo Armas as a puppet dictator. Besides doing everything the Pulpo—that is, the Octopus, as we called the UFC—wanted, he immediately began an unofficial ethnic cleansing policy against the Maya. UN estimates list about two hundred thousand Maya massacred or disappeared from 1958 to 1985, which gives Guatemala the lowest human rights rating in the Western Hemisphere. For us it was the worst period since the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century.

The U.S. Congress stopped official aid to the government in 1982, but the Reagan administration kept it going secretly, sending weapons and training Guate army officers in counterinsurgency techniques at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. Maybe a few of them were sincere anti-Communists who actually thought the guerrillas were a threat, but 97 percent of everything is real estate and by ’83, when the genocide peaked at around fourteen aborigines per day, the war wasn’t anything but a real-estate grab. They’d roll in, say, “ You’re all guerrillas,” and that’d be it. A year later any producing fields would be occupied by Ladinos.

In the U.S. most people seem to think of the CIA as some kind of sleek, efficient secret society with good-looking employees and futuristic gadgets. Latin Americans know it as just another cartel, big, bumbling, but better financed than most, running errands for the big drug wholesalers and shaking down the small ones. In the seventies and eighties the military built thousands of little airstrips all over rural Guatemala, supposedly to help us disadvantaged types move products to nonlocal markets but actually so they could drop in anywhere, anytime they needed to goose a deadbeat. There were more than a couple around T’ozal. One of my father’s many uncles-in-law, a parcelista named Generoso Xul, marked out and burned off a few milpas on common land that turned out to be a bit too close to one of them. By late July Generoso was missing, and my father and a few others went out looking for him. On the second day they found his shoes tied up and hanging in a eucalyptus tree, which is a kind of sleeps-with-the-fishes warning sign.

My father talked to this person he knew from the local resistance, who was a Subcomandante Marcos-like figure called Teniente Xac, or as we called him, Uncle Xac. Tío Xac said he guessed that the Soreanos “habian dado agua al Tío G,” that is, that they’d killed him. After that my father got all these kids and parcelistas and their kids to watch for the airplanes and write down their registration codes on cigarette papers and bring them to him, and he compiled a pretty long list. A friend in CG checked them with the AeroTransport Data Bank—Guatemala was so much these people’s backyard that they hardly ever even bothered to change the numbers—and it turned out a bunch of them were operated out of Texas and Florida by Skyways Aircraft Leasing, which, it came out much later, was a shell corporation, and had flown out of John Hull’s estate in Costa Rica. Hull—and this could sound a little conspiracykookish if it weren’t well documented in, for instance, the 1988 Kerry Congressional Subcommittee paper “ ‘Private Assistance’ and the Contras: A Staff Report” of 10/14/86, easily available at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, California, under “White House Legal Task Force: Records, Box 92768”—was a U.S. citizen who laundered money and shipped uncut cocaine for Oliver North’s crew. Most of the money went to the contras in El Salvador, but the North cartel, the Bush cronies, and the Ríos Montt group—Montt was the puppet