Given the fact that the Mayan people are the base of the Guatemalan social pyramid, a revolutionary struggle in their favor could be justified; but as the majority of the Mayan peasants are illiterate, it can be assumed that they did not share the Marxist ideology of the revolutionary leaders. At the time of this decision to change the “combat scenario”—following the Vietnamese experience and knowing the new counterinsurgency strategy of “taking the water away from the fish”—it was natural to think about the possible risk of a government reaction that would determine the extermination of broad sectors of the Indian population. Was this—the fact of endangering that particular sector of the population with extermination—a subject of debate?

The answer is no, this had not been the subject of debate. After delivering the answer with disgust, Dr. Novales characterizes my question as “extremely unfriendly.” Another of the course attendees adds that my question seemed paternalistic, that he had known some Mayan people who did want to fight.

Afternoon.

I do not know if it is as an indirect retaliation that the doctor then speaks in a tone of confidence of a “bourgeois friend” who, in the late seventies, resigned from the board of directors of a family business “because in one of the meetings, they proposed the murder of a union leader.” I think I know who that is. I can think of three friends of mine (one of them disappeared) who were members of boards of directors at powerful companies, and who, because of their leftist tendencies, became involved in a revolutionary movement and ended up in exile for some years. Two things occur to me. First: although it is likely—as has been proven in more than one case—that some of the directors of large companies felt threatened by the trade union movement at the time and planned and carried out the murders of trade unionists, it’s hard to believe that they would have discussed these murders in a general session. Second: if it is the friend whom I think it is, it seems reasonable to me that she would resign from the board of directors, but should she not also have relinquished all stock in a company that was clearly criminal? Should she not at least have opted to sell those shares? As far as I know, she did not.

Thursday, January 18. B+’s birthday.

Today I resume note taking after several days of apathy.

I have finished reviewing the files of the Identification Bureau. I ask to see lists of official executions, whistleblowers. . . . For some reason, I cannot have access to those documents “yet.” They move me back to the hospital, to a room on the second floor, where half a dozen archivists are dusting off meeting minutes and other documents before they are digitized. While they are working, they listen to boleros.