The Bitterest of Fruit

So George Washington got a caning when he confessed to chopping down the cherry tree? Last Thursday in Guatemala City a boy was shot dead for climbing a guava tree.

He was Luis Antonio Sosa Valdez, aged ten years. His killer was a municipal policeman employed by the local government in Zona 4, a poor and densely populated part of the city.

The news made page six of Saturday’s El Periodico. It wasn’t something that scandalized the nation. The front page was taken up with sporting and political news relating to whether members of Congress can be prosecuted for criminal acts. The second page, ironically, was taken up with the news that four Nobel Peace Prize winners met in Guatemala – Guatemala’s own Rigoberta Menchu Túm, Óscar Arias, current President of Costa Rica, Jody Williams and Betty Williams. It had looked like a good news day.

But it was the page six story that should have been front page news.

The boy and two friends decided to climb the guava tree, presumably to steal some fruit, while waiting for a bus to take them to a school holiday program. The policeman approached the tree and demanded they come down immediately, or he’d shoot. They didn’t come down, and he did shoot Luis Antonio, right in the head. The others fled.

This was not a case of mistaken identity, or even acting in the heat of the moment, and it certainly doesn’t look like a warning shot gone wrong. It looks like the actions of someone trained to follow a drill and shoot to kill – except that this was not a war zone, and aside from the fact that they clearly posed no danger to anyone, the targets were children. Something has gone seriously wrong with the moral framework when a policeman thinks this is an appropriate response to a bunch of kids in a tree.

Perhaps there is an explanation, if not a reason. First of all, the municipal police are locally employed, little more than armed private security guards, and are notoriously under-trained and under-resourced. Even with the best-trained and resourced police forces, fatal accidents and mistakes happen when they are armed. But when you have armed but untrained police you are left only with the moral framework of those individuals as to how they conduct their duties properly. And if they happen to think it is appropriate to threaten children with a gun, whatever the children are doing, and then to carry out that threat, then what is there to stop them until it is too late?

As it happens, the policeman in question, Héctor Calel Bin, was a former Sergeant Major in the Guatemalan military. I don’t know the man’s age or personal background, but he may be one of the many ex-military who now work as municipal police and private security guards, since the military was downsized after the peace accords in the mid 1990s. In the two decades before the Peace Accords, and especially the late 1970s and 1980s, the Guatemalan military and paramilitaries massacred thousands of indigenous and poor ladino Guatemalans in the countryside – now known internationally as the Guatemalan Genocide. So perhaps this man’s training did little to engender any respect for the right to life?

The boy’s mother, when pleading for the capture of the guard, said, “There’s no justice in him being able to kill Luis Antonio. He wasn’t a street kid. He had a grandmother, and me. He was a boy, not just someone that could be killed like a dog.” It appears that even she, in her grief and desire to explain that her son was part of a loving family, thinks there are different degrees of worthiness when it comes to a child’s life.

There is a famous book, Bitter Fruit, about the US invasion of a democratic Guatemala in 1954. Those events spelled the end of a fledgling democracy and heralded in 40 years of military dictatorship and civil war, culminating in la violencia in the 1970s and 1980s.

Unfortunately it seems that the bitter fruit has fallen, re-seeded, and fallen again…


Mariposa Pesada