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The Grandfather Sun grew old. 2 00:00:20,698 --> 00:00:22,153 He is already ancient.
To finish this B'ak'tun, he is going to take a bah...
...just as he is going to cut his hair, to shave, to change his clothes...
...When new B'ak'tun rises it is already a new Sun
'We are going to start the Fifth Sun', said the grandfathers.
The 13th B'ak'tun...
...the 13th B'ak'tun...
...the 13th B'ak'tun...
...the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...What is the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun?...
The little that I understand of Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...some of them truly say that...
...there is a lot of talk...
...much has been said at national level...
...also at world level...
...a lot of people, we don't understand...
...that it is not like the explanation that they gave us...
...not to scare us...
...with many speculations that have been made, but...
...for us, the Mayas...
...in our worldview...
...the old Mayas gave us a legacy...
...they had a cyclical way to count the astronomical events...
...like a ring...
...it's a long period of time.
The B'ak'tun...
...are 400 years...
...but are 13...
...it means that they are...
...5,200 years...
...it's a Mayan era of 5,200 years...
...it's a change...
...change was expected very much in Guatemala...
...the completion of...
...the natural cycle of time...
...that is going to take place on...
...the 21st of December...
...2012...
When the 13th B'ak'tun was first spoken on...
...it bothered me a lot when it said:
“well, the Mayas said it was the end of the world'
knowing that for us the end of the World does not exist
because for us time is cyclical.
To understand what 13 B'ak'tun is we have to understand worldview of the Mayas...
...which has a lot to do with agriculture
So, it is really linked with the cycles...
...with agricultural cycles, for example.
If you look through their eyes, such calendar changes make more sense:
it is a moment when time is re-planted.
Time, when B'ak'tun is completed it is said of tz'utz
that can be read as 'end' o as 'change'.
But also it can be understood as a word of 're-planting'
as a corn is re-planted each time harvest and burning is over,
...it can be replanted. So it is linked to those cycles...
When one understands that those cycles are primarily agricultural ...
Then other things can be understood.
The worship of Time.
If one is really searching... because it's a thought which is much more abstract than Christian thought.
Then if one searches at the end deeply,
...you will find that the supreme deity of Mesoamerica is Time.
And the time is a real dynamic concepto.
And that's why the goal to determine the starting point, 3,314 or thereabouts,
...and from there count the time.
For example the date 13 b'ak'tun, 0 katun, 0 tun, 0 winal
it will be repeated again...
...and it will be repeated again, and so on until infinity
Time is a transition, is an evolution,
...are deep transformations that appears from the cycle of seeds...
...A tree that is green turns yellow and the cycle starts again.
Like the entire evolution of everything.
This has much more to do with the 260-day calendar...
...that goesby the name of Tz'olkin.
The sacred calendar, for example, is tied to...
...the rotation between the Earth and the Moon.
And this fact has many effects on human beings,
Let us say, how long is 260 days? How many Gregorian months, if you wish?
Nine months. And how long is the period of gestation?
It is nine months. Then lets say that this calendar also has that function.
To say it is tied to life.
And that is why in all languages, in all communities the Moon is called 'Grandmother'
If we see the moon, which has been the source of our calendars from the beginning...
...we see the different phases,
Now day by day in the west, we can talk about four moon phases:
first quarter, third quarter, full moon and new moon
...If we see how the moon is growing, there is an interesting thing:
...to reach a full moon from a new moon, so that the moon is completely fat...
...it takes 13 days. Right?
After we reach 20 days for the completion of that phase where the moon grows smaller.
And after, if we already add it all up, it gives us a lunar month of 29.
...From there the numbers 13 and 20 certainly gain importance
...more noticeable than other numbers...
According to the Mayan numerical system...
...counting goes from 0 to 19.
...After 19, a point is added at upper level, and it goes back to 0...
...in the lower level
And so on in each one of the leves.
The mathematicians who calculated the tropical year...
...without more than one mistake in the fourth decimal.
The synodic revolution of Venus!
Well, it means that the universal language that matters is mathematics
... they dominated it.
The Maya wrote in...
....in hieroglyphics
Like in epigraphy
Then, besides epigraphy...
... they also wrote pictography.
For example, one point in Maya is “one'
And also a head of...
... of a woman, of lx, or of the corn itself
which means “one'.
To look at a Mayan city is like looking at an astronomical map
The alignments of the structures in many cases, and in specific cases...
...of specific structure with certain characteristics...
... we can see the use of astronomical observations.
Inside this worldview...
...the triad...
...has a basic importance.
And we see it in the earliest architecture
until the most recent.
But the architecture we can see is in the big sites
...which is of quite a high standard...
...has, like all architecture, its base in the vernacular architecture.
And within the vernacular architecture, that is to say of the common people,
...we can find this triad
So now, where is this triad?
The triad is the three stones where the fire is made.
The grandparents...
... put their attention, their knowledge, their experience...
... in what we call the oxib' xukub',
the three tenamastes...
... of the stove in the floor of the kitchen
There is a stone here, and here and another stone here ...
...And in the centre is the fire.
It represents...
... symbolically the father Sun, grandmother Moon and mother Earth...
Those are our foundations
The grandfather Sun communicates with the grandmother Moon...
... and the grandmother Moon returns her strength, her energy towards grandfather Sun,
...they agree and send their energy towards Mother Nature.
On an astronomical level, it is related to Orion's constellation.
Within the quiche narrative we can talk about the nebula that is
inside this triangle that we can put together among the stars of Orion is fire.
And when we see the constellation of Orion and below Orion's Belt
we can put together the triangle, we see the nebula...
...at a first glance it looks like a small cloud...
... Well, we believe that those three stars...
... form in the sky that which people are doing here in the land by forming those three pyramids.
When you build a house...
...you reanimates the cosmos, or re-enact the original creation.
You draw the four corners...
...the four spaces of cosmos just like the creator gods had done...
...and then place the three stones
Then, that is the foundation...
... of education...
...of wisdom...
...of good knowledge...
...this is our university.
Then a messanger from Xibalba appears before Balam K'itz'e, Balam Acab, Mahucutah and Iqui'Balam...
...and says in this way:
'This is truly your god...
...this is your support...
...also, the representation, the memory of the Creator and Founder.
Do not give people their fire until they offer to Tohil'.
We the indigenous have...
...more writing that has not yet been investigated
I believe that there is more writing.
We could also say that there is scripture in the weavings
There is memory in the weavings...
All of the weavings have a memory of the ancestors.
So there, people do not need a university to learn to do the weavings.
It is done from memory.
We have advice that have received from our ancestors
And that is why we want to recover it, we do not want to leave it.
We want to rescue our Guatemalan culture
It is not simply...
...a belief
That is to say, it ultimately rests...
...all of the perpetuity of the identity
We are grateful...
...of Ajaw
The Heart of the Sky is the Heart of the Earth
We are sons of the time, of Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...we are the trascendental offspring...
...we are sons of the cosmic...
...the cosmic being, the cosmic feeling, the cosmic living.
They don't pray, they don't recite, there are no prayers.
When they burn the pom and all that
...they look to their ancestors...
...they ask them for advice, they tell them their problems...
...and as such it is known that they are not ancestors 'that my grandfather'... no, no.
A whole lineage.
And there is a lineage, there is a past.
If there is a past, there is an identity.
If we don't look at our history, we don't know who we are and we don't know where we're going...
...and that is the same message the Mayans have left us in their writings...
...the memorial of Tecpan Atitlan speaks exactly of using the memory...
...to know that we are still here, right?
It's my culture,
it's my origin...
...it's important that a person knows what their origin is.
The colonial heritage was too strong.
In the ideological field perhaps...
...the biggest ogre they had was racism.
The Western system came to change the mindset.
They installed fear...
They installed some interests...
...they imposed religion on them, mostly Catholicism or Christianity.
All that was historical, cultural heritage...
...the identities,
...the thoughts, the way of life of the people...
...without their own leaders,
...without their basic lines of thought...
...and bombed by the...
...indoctrinating priest, the Catholicism...
...and the weight of the Inquisition...
--what they have been subjected to...
...plundering and looting dynamics.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE
We know, or the majority of professionals...
...know the history starting from colony.
Before the colony, everything was thought...
...that the Mayans were polytheistic, that they had many gods and that they lived here...
The entire first phase, especially the colonial, had deep contempt.
Not even going as far to say they spoke languages.
The hegemony works also in terms of shaping...
...the linguistic reality of countries.
That way of thinking...
...destructed the...
...descendants who had in their minds...
...the idea of the world and Mesoamerican life.
We have in mind for example, the Indo-Arabic numbering system,
...the Gregorian calendar we have it inside, then...
...it is difficult for us, for example, return to the numbering, and this kind of situation.
And the quiches, the Kaqchikele priests, our grandparent quiches wrote it...
Not in stone but on paper, they made amate paper...
...that now we call 'codex' or 'wuj'...
And the first bishop of Yucatan, Fray Diego de Landa...
...was concerned with gathering as many of these documents as possible...
Among those books there were books about botany, medical books, remedy books...
...psychology books, I don't know what else, books of therapies...
...and he burned them to the ground.
This was the most brutal act of faith...
...where a whole contribution of a culture...
...and a good part of Mesoamerican civilization,
...a contribution to the world was lost...
...because of the mental blindness...
...and the intransigence of the Spanish Catholic Church.
And why the spanish invasion do that?
Because of fear...
...because there was a fear of our culture, that was very strong.
...give us this day our daily bread...
...and forgive us our trespasses...
...as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
From the vision of the world logic is born.
From the logic comes expression.
The hardest hit is the ideological, isn't it?
The ideology of the Conquest was Spanish-Catholicism...
...intransigent, absolutely...
...dogmatic.
Then they put us to a box, and if we went outside of it, we were bad.
If we stayed inside inside the box, we were good.
If we went outside the box, we were going to Hell...
and the idea of 'good' and 'bad' is based...
...on this concept.
We are people that were built on dualities...
...of good-bad, indian-white, man-woman, and so on...
It takes us a lot to understand the magnitude and complexities of our reality.
Thinking is already...
...heretical.
You must is believe. The belief above thinking.
GOD
But in order to succeed...
...they had to ill-treat with all this...
as witchcraft, sorcery,
...the devil, satanic.
The people were afraid...
...they were afraid of being killed.
And a lot of people still hide.
There are people who want to participate but can't because...
...they know what their neighbours and others would say.
They call us witches, call us polytheists.
They call us crazy. I've already been called crazy...
...because I speak to the stone and wood.
Perhaps the biggest problem that remains,
...not as much in the indigenous population...
...but in the Mestizo population,
...is that they renounced thinking, and above all, creating.
Guatemalan society as a whole...
...doesn't know the value, significance, or history of their country.
If you were to ask a Guatemalan about B'ak'tun 13...
...only a few can answer about what it is and what it means.
That idea... that nothing from here matters...
...worked at 100% of the colonial era...
...and in the early days of that false republican ages.
And then it creates the idea...
...that anything good and new...
...has to come from somewhere else.
I call this 'mental colonialism',
...that it's the worst kind.
One of the most serious problems Guatemala has...
...is the obvious problem of land concentration...
...and the concentration of wealth.
The issue of land access is not only an economic and social issue...
...but it is fundamentally a political issue.
Let us remember the colonial period was driven by strategy...
...for a policy for communal lands,
...in order to concentrate Indians in towns and control them.
First enslaved, then entrusted, then later...
...from the commitment it passes to the distribution,
...for personal services, which is a terrible thing.
Since the appearance of...
...colonial estates...
...which gives large areas to the most prosperous...
...and leaves the highlands, streams...
...low-wielding lands to the rest of the population.
...it establishes an oligarchic state the focuses on property and interests...
...for the landowners linked to the military,
...it disposes the indigenous communities...
...and it starts the process of land privatisation.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
Racism...
...based on body surface...
...rests on the population deliberately plunged in poverty, lack of education and communication.
Because we are a country that produces for subsistence.
That means there will always be others who accumulate...
...and who take the extra value.
Guatemala in general is one of the countries in Latin America...
...where the State invests less in human development.
No one is going to turn into a genius...
...on an empty stomach. It's impossible.
We have impressive amounts of inequality...
...not only in terms of income...
...rather it is seen in towns, through racism, through gender discrimination.
One always hears the expression “indigenous problem.'
An assimilation, right?
...it has always been heard in the background and is still heard...
...that the remedy is to kill the indigenous population.
After meditating, with a new clear, revolutionary conscious
...I have made a decision of enormous significance for our country...
...in hopes of halting the aggression and returning peace to Guatemala...
...I have decided to leave power.
After the downfall...
...of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, that was a period of ten years,
...which we call the 10 years of spring.
...we all know how they have bombed and machine-gunned cities...
...slain women, children, elderly and defenceless citizens...
...In what name? Which is their flag?
...We all know it well...
...The truth lies in the financial interests of the fruit company...
...and in the other North American monopolies....
...that have invested a lot of capital in Latin America...
...fearing that the example of Guatemala sets could spread to other Latin American countries.
They imposed a propaganda war...
...a psychological war...
...and purely military.
The most insanity...
...they imposed on these people.
In the schools of the Americas in Panama they gave training in order to...
...establish an army which supports the interests of North America here in the towns.
Almost all of the soldiers were indigenous.
...hunted...almost like an animal is hunted,
...very young.
...submitted to brutal discipline.
And this army in Guatemala...
...was fierce.
It brought terror.
The force was not only through the uniformed army.
There were civil defence patrols...
...where obligatorily people took part of it.
These people were military organized...
...in battalions...platoons...
...they gave them weapons, weapons that only the army could officially use,
...they gave them instructions, even to torture,
...to denounce their own people.
What caused the most damage here was the psychological war...
...the war of destruction of the spirit of the population.
...anyone who has weapons against the institution of weapon...
...must be executed...
...executed, not murdered.
Then the head of Hun-Hunahpu was put on the branch of a tree,
...and the princess Ixquic arrives
...and Hun-Hunahpu spits in her hand
And then he tells her:
"Go up to the surface of the earth... ...you will not die...
...in my saliva and my drool I have given you my descent.
This is also the nature of sons...
...their condition is not lost when they leave,
...but is inherited, their image does not extinguish or disappear
...but rather it is left to the daughters and sons they produce'.
In that war...
...we had to ...
...get involved.
And I went to the guerrilla.
I said to my mother that...
as a person, I did not want to stay this way, with crossed arms...
and say: “Well, they killed my father and...'
My dad was a catechist, he was...
...the leader of the community.
And we really did community based work...
the counter insurgent policy of the army, considered it
...to be a communist rising.
And they said: "to capture all the catechist leaders, leaders of the cooperative,
...leaders of the committees of social improvement...
Spirituality was also persecuted...
...mainly grandmothers and grandfathers.
They weren't allowed to see or to listen or to feel someone making their ceremony
...so I'm told by the people of Comalapa.
They say that they performed their ceremonies at midnight...
And they did it in the hills, far away,
... when they celebrate the ceremonies they sense the smell ...of everything they offer coming
The first protection that we had was to make an excursion to the jungle.
We left our family and we hid.
That is how we began to...
...become clandestine.
It was like that. Like my family in those days.
I did not know if my mum was still alive...
...nor did my mum know if I was,
...so I lived with those who were around me...
Women, for example, in those days,
...lived, or took on many roles on a par with a man.
They were there, ready for the fight every day.
I worked in...a workshop, repairing weapons...
...and finishing my three years in the Ixcán...
...I went back to the mountains where I was living with the CPR of the mountains
And I was a literacy teacher for children, teaching them to read and write...
And we began with an era of survival.
Survival is when you don't have...
...medicine, you don't have clothes and you don't have health nor food,
...so we began to survive with what the jungle gave us.
It gave us life...
...it gave us food, it gave us everything...
I felt during this time of struggle with my peers...
that we appreciated more... because we felt what it really is that helps us...
where we lived and where we slept..
...a government different to mine...
...but always, inspired by the October revolution...
...it is better than 20 years of fascist and bloody tyranny...
...under the power of the gangs that brought Castillo Armas to the country.
I always said that we would fight no matter what the cost...
but that cost, did not of course include the destruction of our country...
...nor the handing over of our riches abroad...
Guatemalan society, the dispossessed class
...were brought closer together by terror,
...by threat,
...by intimidation,
...by the repressive counter-insurgency policies...
...that the State developed.
So through the threat they tear us apart...
...even if you're ***,
...even if the economic situation is the worst.
250 thousand officially registered deaths...
...of which at least 89 percent...
...were due to the army.
That means that terror hit,
...and that terrorisation is viable.
The truth is that during the course of more than 36 years of armed flight,
...the Guatemalan army was acquiring...
...real powers within the state.
In other words, it was no longer a guardian dog, it was no longer a joke.
You will not find an officer in the army that is the son of a peasant.
And those are the landowners, of all of the North Cross
...most of them are the owners of all the land.
The North Cross Strip is the name given to a strip of land that cuts across the country...
...This entire strip is practically in the hands of the military that have been in the government.
There were people and entire populations that used to live in this area...
...that, until now, from 2010 to 2012,
they have been taking away the land of these people and stripping the territory...
...from the people who have lived there.
Understand, that to the populations that were in el Polochic, which consisted of more than 14 communities,
...more than 900 families...
36 years of terror is a lot.
And the people learnt to be afraid.
It could not have been any other way...
"DO NOT ***'
The other issue is that...
...colonization leaves in the minds of everyone,
...not only intransigence, that cultural apathy,
...but also the idea that brutality is the way to...
...order society.
KILL
ABUSED
WOUNDED
KIDNAP
STRANGPOE
VIOLENT DISPLACEMENT
STRAY BULLET
CORPSE
MASSACRE
***
GUNSHOTS
***
RIOT
BONES
SHOT SOLDIER
UNDER-CONTROL
CRIME
DEAD
POLICE EVICTIONS
IN-SE-CU-RI-TY
And if we speak of the historic enemy,
...which in this case it the Guatemalan oligarchy,
...they have not changed at all.
They continue exploiting, they continue being wretched.
The colonial legacy is that the lords, above all those of the land,
...are untouchable...
by definition...
...almost by divine destiny.
The truth is that most of the State projects...
...end up in the hands of the large estate owners, of the landlords...
...and never in the hands of the landless.
Related to genetically modified seeds, the government is quite interested in the topic...
but we have seen...
“AN ENTITY WILL DONATE IMPROVED SEEDS'
...of which they give away two bags...
...more like 50 kilos...
“A NGO WILL DELIVER 35 HUNDRED KILOGRAMS OF GRAIN REVITALISING FAMILIES OF SEVEN MUNICIPALITIES'
...but in fact is it to poison...the peasants...
and the land.
Because one has to be clear...
...once the land is poisoned with chemicals...
...even if you don't spread it...
...it won't give you anything.
The government uses a very specific strategy...
They say: “I have fertiliser...
...I am going to sell it to these people'.
But now you have to have 290 quetzales in order to buy it.
Now who sows? Only those that have money.
“IMPROVING PRODUCTION FOR FARMERS'
So, basically...
...at first it was supposedly a fee,
...that they said, "we will only charge for the cargo".
But now it turns out that they poisoned it...
...and now the land no longer works,
so the people say “this land no longer works,
...I can no longer harvest it'.
Why? First of all it does not produce because they did not put the fertiliser on it...
Now it come and they sell it...
Undersell it...
Now the landlords come by:
"I will buy your plot because now it does not give you anything".
"Yes, it really doesn't give me anything".
And one is already convinced.
As they say, that strategy also worked in order to be able to take the land.
The government feels as if it is the owner of the country,
...as if it were its farm Guatemala...
...as if it were its piece of land.
It is the one that decides if it grants,
the licensing of mining, oil or hydroelectric exploration.
We know very well that international companies...
...are our enemies.
Here the companies arrive and in addition destroy...
...for example, if there is a mountain where a company knows there is gold,
...and that they can extract it in a superficial way,
...they blow up the mountain, without caring if there is a sacred place,
...if it has historical or cultural value...
...they couldn't care less.
What are they doing in our lands?
We supply, we give our resources, such as our people,
for exploitation,
...and then come the excessive bills.
It's that they take...
...the natural resources, and what they leave for the community and the country...
...is really minimal.
The issue with the mining of metals, for example, surface mining,
...is closely linked to the issue of water usage.
It's not so much that we do not agree with the exploitation of gold or silver...
...in any of our lands.
The point is the way in which they use the water, and how this will...
...directly affect the quality of life of the population.
They are not interested in this, what interests them is money...
...and we as indigenous peoples don't want money...
...we want ...
...life.
And North American imperialism,
which is the historical enemy of the entire world,
...well, how can I can tell you about this when you know it well yourself.
You know that these *** have not changed at any point, but rather on the contrary,
...everyday they have better technology and using the silliest things...
...in order to continue to intervene in countries,
...such as in the case of Central America, whose story is...
...drug trafficking...
It is like their battle horse...
...in order to justify their counterinsurgent operations,
...or to control mass movements.
When we talk, for example, about these...
...loans, through the World Bank, through the Inter-American Development Bank,
...well I have felt that....
...they show us the money but they don't give it to us.
The moment our countries don't have the economic means to pay them...
...they will want to get their money back with natural resources.
Well they used to say that before,
...they brought mirrors,
...they gave us mirrors, and in return we would give them our belongings.
This is the same.
The tzité men...
...existed and bred.
They were wooden men, without a soul.
They didn't even believe in their creator anymore,
...and they were ungrateful towards Nature.
And they destroyed everything, they destroyed nature.
And animals turned against them.
They were annihilated and destroyed immediately.
A flood was produced by Heaven's Heart,
...a great downpour to punish them.
But the market is anonymous,
...it is the culmination of anonymous society.
It has nothing, it has no face, it has no mother...
...but it's strong, that's the issue.
And of course, it's volatile.
We found that from the '70s,
...many supportive people from other countries...
...started to connect with social movements and organised groups.
However, what started as a necessity to avoid militarised oligarchic States,
...slowly turned, without us even noticing,
...into a "NGO-isation" which started to penetrate the whole social movement.
From a class struggle, with popular and social organisations,
...which were willing to do anything,
...this phenomenon of "NGO-isation" started to take over, where people only mobilised...
...if there were payments, if there was money, etc.
And that starts to become the norm.
We find that by the '80s there were
...about four thousand NGOs all over the Guatemalan countryside and cities,
...and each one had turned...
...from a popular organisation into a manager.
And the process of development and social struggle started to be mediated...
...by the interests of those NGOs.
But I think the biggest enemy...
...we've had,
...and which has affected us, and we recognise this self-critically,
...we brought it into our homes ourselves...
...right? And that ***...
...is television.
The world has its eyes set on our country, Guatemala...
...with this change of era, 13 Baktún...
Everything is ready, but also many brands have joined this change.
And that's why Botrán Añejo rum has released a special edition so we can all celebrate together...
...this great change.
"ARE YOU READY FOR 2012?"
What we want to achieve with this...
...is for Guatemala to be seen by the world.
Ah well, I heard they were bringing...
...well they'd said that U2 and Elton John...
...Led Zeppelin, AC/DC I think...
It's a party, but it's Guatemala's party.
And this 13 B'ak'tun...
they're just mentioning it but deep down they don't believe anything.
They were just scared because some *** told them it was the end of the world.
For him it's not about celebrating Oxlajuj B'ak'tun,
...it's a business for him, and he will make a lot of money from it.
We are not allowed...
...to enter our sacred places. We've already heard that the State...
...or the government...
...only wants to take over...
...all the sacred spots.
For him, the ruins of Tikal,
for them, the ruins of Saqulew.
For us, they're not ruins!
They call them "ruins" because they ruined them themselves...
...they destroyed them.
Maybe the state will call in the army?
A show down? No, no, I don't expect that. I don't share those ideas.
I'm a peaceful man, that's why...
...I demand...I demand...
...unity...
...so we can achieve the peace us humans long for.
Mother Nature...
...is suffering many of the consequences...
...of man's actions.
Because it's not up to these human beings that live on this planet for a short period of time...
...to alter the natural order forever...
There are many disasters.
Natural, economic, political and social.
Not only nature, but also...
...through us.
And in the face of this global crisis, what we, then, stand for...
...is the strengthening of our identity,
...and the strengthening of our spirituality,
...and the strengthening of our values.
...which doesn't only mean the way we dress, but the way we live.
We don't think of it as a Mayan religion.
It's our people's own faith.
I think it's a series of actions that makes us...
...true Mayans,
...true spiritual guides...
...and keep us from losing our essence.
It's a practice, a way of life,
...not so much theory
And that's why it's different, at some point, to academia...
...because we come from analysis, which means to break everything up...
...in parts, really, where the expert is only...
...a person who knows a lot about so little.
So Mayan knowledge gives you...
...a global view of what is the actual purpose of our existence in this dimension.
So you really then try to look for the whole, rather than...
...getting stuck with the parts.
We're all one.
Which is why, unification.
That's the way in which we can...
...heal our Mother Earth.
The spiritual guides we have today,
...have centred their work...
...in the way of life.
How a human being can achieve...
...fulfilment in life.
What are the elements that make you happy,
...for you to lead a fulfilled life.
There is a science of life...
...which is still among us, and guides us.
Something that grows within us:
...we live it, we want it...
The nawal is...
...a spirit...
...that each person has...
...it's the angel that protects each person.
For example you already know what's your nawal, what's your destiny.
And if you cultivate that...
...ideas come to you.
It talks to you, it leaves you...
...in other words, like a treasure.
We're custodians of a memory...
...that goes beyond our being,
...and that's circulating through our existence,
...and our veins, our blood, our nerves, etc.
What is that? For the West it's the DNA.
They call it DNA.
I'm a part of this.
I'm part of the sacred tree,
...I'm part of the sacred stone.
I'm a part, I'm a child...
...of my Mother Earth.
Because fire is within me,
...water is within me,
...air is within me.
In all the elements that are part...
...of the body, that make up my body,
...there's energy, there's fire.
If I'm fully aware of what are the energies...
...that make it possible for me to coexist,
...then I develop my best qualities in that direction...
That's why always symbolically...
...through the sacred fire...
...we find the spirits of our grandparents,
...we find the spirit, the energy of each of the days,
...that make up...
...a Mayan calendar.
Therefore we're not that concerned about how many years our calendar has.
We're concerned about how we use it...
...and how it's going to serve us in life.
We are the flower of Mother Earth,
...because the knowledge of our ancestors,
...just like the nawal Aj,
...even if you kill it, you cut it off, it keeps growing.
Experience doesn't die...
...but it continues as life continues.
And which human...
...doesn't have an archive in their DNA for millions of years.
We always ask Heaven, Earth, Water, and Fire for permission.
Permission from Ajaw, the Creator...
Why did indigenous people say:
"Please don't alter the natural order"?
The fundamental base in respect.
The rivers, mountains, hills, they're very restless.
They're complaining.
But not just them...
...the people are complaining too.
On 4th October, here in the Totonicapan community,
...they staged a peaceful protest.
However, the army and the police moved in, and without saying a word...
...started shooting at us.
They're violating the rights of the people. That's what we're demanding today.
We don't want and we don't feel like.. ...being a militarised colony.
Governments always suppress... ...the opinion of the peasant, of the human being.
Because we are indigenous, they keep...
...shooting us o threatening us like this.
But talking, people can understand each other.
People express their feelings, their thoughts, their uneasiness.
What they see.
But, how did they respond?
"A SOLDIER IS NOT GOOD FOR TALKING AND GOVERNING. HE'S ONLY GOOD FOR KILLING"
This walk is to remember...
...to honour the memory of our 6 dead brothers.
"IF THEY DON'T OBEY, I WILL USE BULLETS TO SHUT PEOPLE UP"
We declare that the people of Totonicapan...
...will remain united, organised, supportive,
...and we will never cease demanding...
...that our rights be fulfilled.
Today more than ever...
...we're facing a struggle...
...and I respectfully want to ask the authorities to raise their rods...
...so that everyone can see this is the dignity of the people of Totonicapan...
...and as such, it has no price,
...just like the struggle we're carrying out has no limit.
We've had faced many struggles here in Totonicapan,
...and we have won many of them.
Most of them.
With a very important organisation at the community level, right?
Which has managed to revert national decisions since the '80s.
The base of the 48 cantons is...
...in the communities,
...in the authority councils in each of the communities...
A practical democracy,
...participative...
...active.
Every time something happens that affects our community,
the core of the 48 cantons, the board, the head...
They are the interlocutors...
...at the different levels.
With the areas of justice, education, health, the government itself.
There is a great respect,
...let's say, in the actors. For example,
...when the community authority talks...
...to people.
Each resident has the responsibility to serve its canton.
We do this for free, without any profits.
And that's why we talk about the concept of "service".
There is a connection...
...a cultural, political and ideological connection with the territory.
So you're being elected, you're being chosen...
...to continue with a process that spans generations.
So it's something that we also need to pass down to our children.
The specific forms of resource administration in Totonicapan...
...is how we preserve those goods, those resources...
...so that our generations can keep their livelihood.
That the fair requests we are demanding be granted.
There's three:
A reduction in electricity prices,
...a reform in the teaching degree,
...and another one is the constitutional reform.
A constitutional reform that doesn't benefit the people...
...but just the few that rule Guatemala.
Through respect we will achieve peace,
...through peace, we will achieve balance,
...and through that balance, we will achieve harmony...
...so that we can all live in peace.
No district has shown interest in the reform.
No municipality, no canton.
No one has asked the government...
...to get into the constitutional reform.
It's another trick,
...pretending to change some articles in the Constitution...
...because he's already noticed that there's a lot of unrest with the people.
The current Constitution says that: "the State...
...recognises and respects the forms of social organisation...
...of the Mayan ethnic groups", it says now.
Meaning that we have freedom...
...to organise ourselves, to have our indigenous authorities, our National Council.
We want that article to be expanded:
"the State recognises and respects...
...the Mayan, Garifuna and Xinca peoples", it needed to be expanded.
Ah, great! Just like we've been proposing for a long time.
So he obeys, we takes our proposal,
...he adorns it with this point...
...but if we realise:
"the State recognises, respects and...
-he adds the term-,
...and protects the Mayan, Garifuna and Xinca peoples.
What does he mean by "protect"?
What is the government to protect us from, if they can't protect the city...
...the capital city of so much crime?
In contract, over there in the towns there's not much crime.
His trick is...
...the re-militarisation of the towns!
He's going to be watching us, what are we doing,
...what do we want to do in our towns, in our communities.
And in these present times our organisations are strong and...
...we're on the right path.
And not only the village of Totonicapan, but all the others too...
...have risen, aaised their voices,
...but unanimously.
This has already been noticed.
Long live the struggle of the comrades of Totonicapan!
Long live!
Long live the death of our comrades!
Long live!
Unfortunately in this country...
...life is to fight.
At the point of dying isn't dying,
...it's living!
So there will be more...
...that will follow our path,
...that will understand why we fight.
It can't eradicate the villages from the map of Guatemala,
...neither linguistically,
...nor culturally.
What happens in the dialogue between government and organized communities is...
...the lack of mutual respect.
...because they don't know the essence, the roots of village cultures.
And who is suffering from it the most?
Who is living it most?
It is us the women,
...it is us the indigenous men,
...the peasant,
...those who work more with their lungs...
...from sun to sun.
When it has the utmost obligation...
...to consult with the villages before making a decision.
A popular referendum is obligatory.
Reaction we are going to have...
...to these struggles, to this sacrifice,
...to these efforts!
In the whole western part, in the most part of the West are being created...
...up to now I think there are just over 54 queries...
...against the dams,
...and it was a success.
...the “No' to mining was won.
“No' has won more than “Yes'.
The struggle has been permanent because the authorities...
...are the ones that have maintained it,
...with or without the support of external organisations...
Our strength is...
...that no one funds us.
These same communities give us support.
...and we will carry on fighting for our Mother Nature...
We are built...
...on a great legacy of resistance.
These western laws have their spirit too.
They have their life,
...that have to be given life, you have to interpret them.
Us the Mayans don't have laws.
We manage the principles:
Respect to Mother Nature,
...respect to Elder Sun, respect to Elder Moon,
respect to the Creator, to Ajaw...
...respect towards everything.
But them...
They don't even respect their own laws!
They make the laws but they don't respect them.
They themselves violate the laws of the State!
Those who have studied law,
...come and question the indigenous authorities,
...how do they do the application of justice.
And what I was thinking about was:
“What happens is that you analyse the practices...
...and the ways of practising justice in indigenous authorities...
...with the mental strcutures that academia have imposed on them'.
How are we going to do the analysis of our practise?
How do we reflect on what we do...
...but on the mental drawings of our grandfathers?
And if people are never respected,
...there will never be peace for the government.
And the Creator and Founder said:
“The time has come for the work to end,
...and to appear those who will sustain and feed us:
...the corn men.'
They met up, arrived and celebrated Council in the darkness and in the night,
...and in this way found and discovered what had to be done.
And this is how they found food,
...the white and yellow cobs.
And this is what entered the flesh of the created man, of the formed man.
This was his blood,
...of yellow corn and white corn was made his flesh,
...of corn dough the arms and legs of man.
If you could decode the writings of the Quirigua stone,
...the ten metre high stone, there it is...
...the countdown has begun until the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun.
But they didn't announce the end of the world, end of life, end of of existence,
Instead they announced, they left written:
“When the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun arrives, we are already getting closer,
...we will come again, we will come back¨, they said.
It is written in the stone of Quirigua.
But you will see neither today nor tomorrow...
...the Mayans coming, half-nude with feathers as they paint us, coming running...
...a thousand, two thousand Mayans, no!
The same beliefs,
...the same wisdoms,
...the same intellectual faculties,
...emotional... ...sentimental...
...the same energy they had,
...are already being seen now.
The return of the corn men.
We are all built from a sacred plant...
...that is corn.
What does made of corn mean?
Someone who is natural...
...that comes from the earth.
The corn seed...
... is the drop of the mother chicha,
...the seed that falls on the earth and we pick up,
...the one that feeds us steadily.
That's why red, black, white, yellow corn...
....is the symbol, that symbolizes us in our skin.
They are the 5 continents in the world, the different colour races.
That's the new man...
...the New Mayan Man that Popol Wuj spoke about.
This is the biggest wealth our ancestors have left us.
The one which us as Mayan...
...descendants are sharing our happiness.
This is our wealth...
...to the human world.
-What language do you talk?
-Spanish
-And the one who speaks English... Who speaks english?
But... Laugh in english, let's see...
...and now you laugh in your spanish
...I'm going to laugh now in quiche, what's the difference?
I don't think that indigenous people...
...are history's defeated.
If they had defeated us plain and simple today we would perhaps be speaking...
...maybe in a different way.
But if we are in tune...
...with what our ancestors left us, it is because there was no defeat,
...it is because there was no total flattening.
So, why wouldn't we think that we knew how to manage our power ...
...for more than 500 years?
We have managed our ideological power,
because without ideology it is impossible to resist...
...the attacks imposed by colonization.
We knew how to manage our spiritual power,
...and that is not born of us, it is born of the science of the earth.
So, I think that we have not only success...
...in reaching this Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...but also we can say to our ancestors that we have satisfied them.
But now...
...the restructuring of people is coming,
...the reconstruction of people.
In other words, the people are going to be given what they are claiming.
It will be seen in a concrete way.
Right now it is being seen in an abstract way,
but it will soon be seen in a more concrete way
the act, the way of living together,
...of sharing ...
...in a collective way the decisions properly of the people.
So we need to multiply, so say it like that,
...through the other communities.
Because we know that there are powers...
...that we should support them.
The point is that we are in tune,
...the point is a common front,
...the point is resistance,
...the point is having a common proposal.
The frontiers are dividing us all,
...and so, we have to love not frontiers, but human beings.
We are a species ...
...and our species is too plural,
...diverse, extraordinary...
...of all the planet.
The human being in its entirety.
We are a species that inhabits the planet ...
...as transcendental beings.
There is nothing more powerful than the unity...
...of any people in the world.
I have been a revolutionary...
...and my revolution ...
...is of conscience.
The Sun came out immediately,
the animals, young and old grew happy,
...and they got up in the banks of the river,
...on the canyons, and at the tops of the mountains.
All looked towards where the Sun was rising.
There were lots of joy...
...of all the communities that exist today.
And it was impossible to count the people.
And at the same time the aurora of the communities lit up.
Such a man was the Sun when it showed...
...and his face blazed.
The Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...the 13 B'ak'tun...
What is the Oxlajuj B'ak'tun?
December 21st is a new beginning,
...something ends, something begins...
...the end of a long 26,000 year cycle...
...it is a cycle of the calendar that... that arrives...
Commemorating this creation, this re-ordering that there was...
...in the year 3,114 before Christ.
Is a demonstration of the universal energy.
Oxlajuj are 13, One B'ak'tun has...
...20 katunes, 400 years, 144,000 days...
...it is Mayan mathematics.
Here there has been some government propaganda...
...it is not the end of the world, it is not the end of the Mayan calendar...
...with a catastrophic interpretation...
The problem is not that the world is ending, but that nothing changes in the world...
...there have been very difficult policies by the governments...
...we have been the object of so many cheats and lies...
...our people were practically massacred.
Those damned scourges of racism, of male chauvinism...
...this country needs deep structural changes...
...for so much blood-spill.
We have given much importance to our ignorance...
...we are damaging Mother Earth, we are killing ourselves.
We are not going to wait for miracles,
...it is time for us to call to attention human beings...
...call everyone...
...all of humanity...
...that no group be left behind...
The Oxlajuj B'ak'tun will be the starting point...
...reorganise certain things...
...the need for change...
...changes that are necessary.
Let's free our minds from ignorance!
We also need to begin at home...
...to start over again.
As the natives we are,
...as indigenous people...
...as women...
...as peasants...
...as Mayans...
...from our organisations...
...as much in community life, as in political and economic life...
...this is the moment in which we organise ...
...and not just the indigenous, but the whole world,
all those who would like to believe in a better world.
Unification is ancestral wisdom.
Women may begin to participate, collective participation...
...because this is what time is inviting for us: life quality.
Weapons must be left where they are, and, if possible, not use them anymore...
...let us be more sensitive and more tolerant...
...let us plunder this colonial thinking we have...
No longer damage Mother Earth...
...not as demagogy but as a fundamental need...
There is a lot to do, a lot to live.
Now a new era is coming.
We see it, we celebrate it with a lot of energy.
Go to a volcano, go to a hill, go to a source of water...
...also taking actions in the celebration of Oxlajuj B'ak'tun.
Revolution... as being an evolution.
Not only in this country but on a world scale...
Oxlajuj B'ak'tun...
...has a meaning far beyond counting time...
...time will go on after Oxlajuj B'ak'tun.
Brothers, rise up!
Because mind does many great things.
To be able to be a real human being.
May we all be unified.
Translated by:
The Argentina Independent
Alexandra Alli - Celina Andreassi - Kristie Robinson Mackenzie Bruce - Sophie Rawe - Sophie Roberts