Day 7: The next morning we all headed into the vans to Saint James the Apostle Church in the town of Santiago Atitlan. There was a small fair going on outside the church with a Ferris wheel and other rides. With the volcanoes in the background, it was a colorful sight.

Santiago Atitlan fair outside of the Saint James the Apostle Church

Mayan boy selling jewelry outside of the church

Saint James the Apostle Church was built in 1547 (at least part of it was; other parts were added on over the years). Since the Feast Day for St. James, the patron saint of the church, was only a few days away (July 26), the church was preparing for the upcoming celebration. There was a strip of beautiful geometric designs made out of colored sawdust running down the main central aisle of the church. At the end of the festival, the priests walk down the middle of the aisle, destroying the designs, I guess as a demonstration of the impermanence of everything (like how Tibetan monks ritualistically disassembling their intricate sand mandalas a couple of weeks after creating them).

Strip of colored sawdust designs

Close-up of one of the sawdust designs

Church interior

Santiago Atitlan looked peaceful and charming enough during our visit, but it had a violent, bloody history during the civil war. The town was caught in the middle of the warfare between the revolutionaries and the government military, with tragic results. One of the Catholic priests back then, Father Stanley Rother, more affectionately known as Father Francis Apla, to the local community, was a US citizen living in Guatemala since the 60s, and fighting (non-violently) for the rights of the Mayan people suffering during the war. He made frequent trips back to the U.S., telling people in his Oklahoma church about how the U.S. backed Guatemalan troops were killing and torturing Mayans that they (the soldiers) thought were in collusion with the rebels. One of the members of his congregation became offended by Apla’s criticism of the U.S. involvement in the war, and contacted the Guatemalan embassy. From that point, Apla was marked as an enemy of the Guatemalan military and was living on borrowed time. In spite of all sorts of precautions he took for his safety, he was eventually murdered in a nearby chapel. To this day, he is remembered as a martyr for his efforts to protect the Mayans from the military’s brutality. A memorial photo of him hangs in the chapel, and there’s a plaque on the church wall describing his efforts to help the Mayans, and how he was murdered because of this. I have to wonder if the person in Father Apla’s Oklahoma congregation who reported him to the Guatemalan embassy ever learned of the consequences of his action. Father Apla’s body was returned to the US for burial, but his heart was buried beneath the stone floor of the chapel. I was deeply moved by learning what happened in this town so many years ago.

Memorial photo of Father Apla

Stylized Mayan crucifix in the chapel where Father Apla was murdered

Memorial plaque describing Father Apla’s murder

After the visit to the church, we piled into the two vans again and drove a few miles outside of Santiago Atitlan to the Peace Park, another sad reminder of those violent days. During the civil war, after a wave of military-instigated violence against the citizens of Santiago Atitlan, about 3000 citizens marched peacefully in protest, waving white flags to indicate that they were unarmed. In response, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing about fifteen protestors, some of them children. This was such an over-the-top response, that even the military felt ashamed of and agreed with the citizens to no longer maintain any further presence in the town, an agreement that was honored throughout the rest of the war. The spot where the massacre occurred was turned into Peace Park, a place commemorating the victims of the massacre. Those killed in the massacre are all buried in the park with little head markers for each body.

Peace Park, site of a massacre of Mayan citizens by the military twenty years ago.

The grave marker of a nine year old child killed during the massacre

That evening we returned to San Lucas Toliman and had dinner at the village church (or rather a building adjacent to it). The dining hall was filled with US teenagers from some church organization, and we shared our meal with them. We identified ourselves as a mostly gay and lesbian group (with a couple of fellow travelers), but the kids seemed to take this fact in stride, with no displays of awkwardness or hostility. In fact they were very friendly and outgoing, a sign of the changing times.