EX-GUATEMALAN REBEL TRIES HER HAND AT DEMOCRACY
By David Gonzalez

November 2, 2003 – (NYT) Makrina Gudiel gave up her identity to survive.

As a teenager who accepted neither a woman's place in this macho society nor Guatemala's military government, she grabbed a rifle, embraced the nom de guerre Ana and joined the guerrillas.

Worn down by combat, she spent five years in exile in the United States, protected by the so-called sanctuary movement organized by
Americans protesting United States policy in Central America during the civil wars of the 1980's.

But she is hiding no more. Now she is a congressional candidate of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity in elections being held on Nov. 9. The rebels founded the party after peace accords in 1996 ended the country's 36-year civil war.

Ms. Gudiel welcomes campaigning openly in a land no longer at war. But it is far from peace: poverty is rampant, society is polarized and men with guns linger at the fringes of her campaign stops. Like a flashback, even Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over the counterinsurgency when Ms. Gudiel was with the rebels, is running for president.

"The conditions that brought us to war are still present," she said. "Those who massacred us are still there. Friends and family tell me to be careful. Don't say much. Guard your life."

She was born 40 years ago in a society that was highly protective of women. But despite her father's teachings that spouses were equal and indigenous people deserved respect, local life showed otherwise. Men staggered home drunk and beat their wives, and Mayan girls in their long woven skirts were shunned in public. By her teenage years, she knew something had to change.

"I did not like the life that women had," she said. "It was grow up, get married and have children. I wanted more."

Not long after her brother, José Miguel, announced that he was joining the rebels in the mountains, she followed, spending a year with the guerrillas and taking part in raids. The time with the guerrillas was not easy, she said, and it rattled her nerves so badly that she was sent into exile with another rebel who would father their three children.

Contacts in Mexico put her in touch with the sanctuary movement in Arizona, which smuggled her into the United States. Still calling herself Ana and hiding behind a kerchief, she and her family wound up living in the tower of Riverside Church in Manhattan, one floor below the huge bells.

The sanctuary movement had established itself among liberal religious groups opposed to the American government's aid to Central American armies that committed numerous human rights abuses while combating leftist rebels. The American government said the asylum seekers were economic refugees, at best.

For the next year or so, Ms. Gudiel and her companion, who had taken the name Federico, gave talks about the war and helped arrange for others to come to the United States to give testimony at the United Nations. While her audiences were sympathetic to her stories of military oppression, she did not touch on her own time fighting in the mountains.

"My North American brothers did not look well on the decision the people of Guatemala took in rising up when there was no rule of law," she said. "For North Americans, a guerrilla war is incomprehensible unless they have lived through it."

Such an admission might have complicated the often romantic view held by some people that Ms. Gudiel and her family were innocents caught between armies.

"They simply didn't tell us very much and we didn't want to know," said Mary Ann Lundy, who helped her. "We were much more concerned about people not being sent back. I don't apologize for not knowing."

Ms. Gudiel's time in the United States — about five years until 1989 when she returned to refugee camps in Mexico rather than flee farther north to Canada — changed her.

"To get to the United States was to breathe, to have hope," she said. "There I learned the responsibilities of civilians, that it was not enough to just go vote every four years. I learned you have rights, to study, to have a roof. To feel protected. I also learned to value what I had in Guatemala."

Those lessons filter through her campaign. She is considered to have a shot at winning. She talks about how people have a right to know government budgets and a say in how the money is spent. When she talks about health care or school, it is not an abstraction: she is now a single mother raising three boys while keeping up a breakneck pace dashing to campaign stops in a pickup truck.

At campaign rallies, grandmothers and teenage girls alike surround her. "She shows us we can get ahead," said Alejandra Ramirez, 56. "The government had for so long only used the hard hand against the people, so people got used to the harshness of guns and the military. Now it is changing a bit. Now women can protest this situation."

Just not too much. Campaign consultants to Ms. Gudiel have suggested that she not speak about the war.

"People in Guatemala do not believe in political parties, they only see people," she said. "And people do not want to hear anything about the war. I do not reject my past, but for the electoral struggle we do not need to mention it."

The signs of her past were evident as she rode in a campaign caravan. Another candidate wore a bulletproof vest. On the street, wiry men with steely gazes, some with missing fingers, nodded at her like the former comrades in arms they once were.

She would do it again, she said, even the hardship, the exile, the loss of friends and family.

"I could have been like a Guatemalan, get educated and do nothing," she said. "It is easy to ignore reality when you are ignorant. But when you know, then you have a commitment."

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/international/americas/02GUAT.html