Land of Psychological Operations

As I read Paradise in Ashes and thought about what I could possibly blog about, I had in mind to mention the psychological aspect of all the things that were occuring in Santa Maria Tzeja and the surrounding areas in Guatemala. I think Beatriz Manz does a very good job of capturing individuals thoughts and perspectives on the situations discussed. Land ownership was also a central and reoccuring them in this book.


Father Luis certainly played a major role in equipping the first settlers of Santa Maria Tzeja to hold their own. Casa Social seemed to be an institutuion within which people were given not only the physical and cognitive tools they needed to survive on their own, but they were also give the psychological encouragement to build and maintain their own village. The intense training and preparation and the promise of owning land were factors that psyched the future inhabitants of "the promised land" to make the long trek to a place they had never been. The idea of having maize was enough for the people of the newly formed Santa Maria Tzeja to labor all day in the difficult rainforest and scorching heat. As we have discussed on so many occasions, land is very important to many people in Guatemala, especially the indigenous peoples. I honestly felt the sincerety for the sacredness of land when one villager stated, "No more worries; there is maize, there is food, there is life (64)." It's amazing that this one thing could make the village so happy. Although they had to work really for this land, they were beyond pleased to call it their own.

It is so disheartening that the many days, weeks, and months the villagers worked to build Santa Maria Tzeja seemed all for naught. The tactics used by the government army were very psychologically driven. As the years passed and the violence continued to escalate in the book, I noticed that there were many mind games that the army played with the hope of forcing the people they had under their authority to remain without hope. The army wanted to diminish the hope of returning to one's villiage and once again living peacefully surrrounded by relatives. One of the tactics the government army used was titled "psychological operations" (159). Under this plan, the army posed as the protectors of the the villagers against the ruthless guerillas who were the actual "perpertrators of destruction". The fact the army went as far as to corroborate stories of and items belonging to members of the guerilla army demonstrates how ruthless the army could be at times. The fact that there were people who honestly believed the stories, in my opinion, demonstrates the psychological effect the army hoped to achieve.

Another game that the army played, which I must say was well-executed, was using land as a factor in their "psychological operations". With the introduction of new settlers into Santa Maria Tzeja, the goverment army was able to further advance their tearing apart of the nation. Their strategy contained so much promise because it contained a strong psyche-deceiving component and also divided the population that existed in so many different factions that there was little chance of the people uniting and overtaking those in authority. By creating a population consisting of seven different ethnolinguistic groups and five different religious denominations, the army ensured that the people would never form a strong enough cohesive unit to overcome the goverment that was in power. Furthermore, by introducing newcomers, or nuevos into Santa Maria Tzeja, the army was able to please a decent portion of the population. As a result of having extremely content peasants who had been given land, the army was able to get these individuals to do anything they for the most part.

Land was a very important motivating factor for these peasants, just as it was for the villagers who first built Santa Maria Tzeja. Through all of the mind strengthening prepartion of Casa Social and the psychological games of the army, one of the many ideas is the importance or owning and working one's own land. I believe the army understand how important this was and therefore centered its acts of destruction around this entity in as many ways as possible. The ultimate illusration of such destruction are the ashes that serve as a sign of what used to be and what the army had the power to make, or better yet destroy.